The Red “Heading Home”

“I taste it upon my lips, lingering there the way wine would, the coppery, silken texture settling in ways that I can scarcely describe. I have woken to the taste for the last three days, ever since I found myself in the throws of revelation.

It started...well it started long before now, but you wouldn't say that a wound was not the cause of death if a life was lived before, even with proceeding events in consideration.

“Cain overo Il primo omicidio” by Alessandro Scarlatti. It been sitting in my ears, a hollow buzzing in my brain, like the cradling of my heart. It is my musci...I have found my music.

There was blood on my bed when I woke this morning. There has been blood on my bed every morning for the last few weeks. I quickly gathered things up and took them downstairs, and I got to work getting the red out before it stains the sheets. Therre is no desire in me to worry them more than I have to, and I wish only to let them sit in pleasure when at last I pass through the threshold and find my way home.

Mi familia...my family is waiting for me on the wother side, and for the last few days my body has been readying itself for the crossing. I know that it will not be easy....not true...that is a lie. I want to lie and say it will be hard, so that you will not think me weak for giving in...no...for the crossing...

I am not weak. I thought I was, but as the days have passed and the blood has bubbled up in my mouth, running from my nose and my ears...my eyes swimming with red...I know I have done the right thing. What I do I do because that is the way to life, and where I am going lkife sits in abunance.

I see the world of red all the time now, and as I look upon my family, I see them looking upopn my mom and dad. They linger upon them, waiting for them, the way that they waited for me. They do not understand that they will not be coming. They do not think of things in terms of want or desire, of decision and fate. Things either are red....or they want t obe red.

My mom and dad...they aren'

t really my parents...they cannot be if I am this distanced from them. They loved me and trewasured me and lived for me, but they were not of me, and I know that I cannot make them understand how dfifficult it has been for me to linger like this, to sit like this dauy in and day out and see the truth behind the “world” and know that I do not belonbg …

I am gouing home.

The pain has left me...my finger neails are falling off, the space underneath swimming with beautiful crimson...I am living scarlet...my breathing ...I am not breathing. I am flowing. Flowing through veins...In these sdpaces.

THeste spaces.

This world of red...where IU look and I feel warm emulsions lingering in and over my form.

I ma red. You are not red...

I am red

Scarlet.

I am not home yet, but soon I will be./

Yoiu love...you try to breing me back to the rieals world.

But tyou are not there. You are istting in the false space where things falla apoart and the fardakr is so very long and dakr .,and I anm and ma am jklhailK,.jmakl'j'kjlasd['poiu

HELP ME JOIN THE FASMILY>

I AM heading

Home

I've left you something.

Something red.

You will see it

It's all that's left.”

The artist...

Max...

She has gone missing.

She has disappeared. According to the report I saw, it was initially assumed to be a suicide after the note was found, but with the body missing and the amount of blood that was found on the scene, it is assumed to be a homicide, especially when it was found that on the bedspread, soaked in blood, was the blood of not only Max, but also three other missing persons.

The Officer called me with the news, and we decided to meet in person to discuss the details. I feel...disconnected from it. I would have imagined with all the ways I have been experiencing protectiveness, in my endless need to determine what it is that connects all of us, that this would be affecting me more.

The Officer says that I am likely in shock, and that it will likely come in time.

But I think that the truth was that there was so much more that was said at the time. So much that she had discovered that occupied my thoughts and distracted me from anything else.

She start3ed crying while we were talking, and though she tried to fight throu8gh it, I could tell that there was something wrong other than Max. I tried to work her up to sharing it, letting her come to it, then backing away as I asked other questions. Eventually she broke down, telling me that there was something that she had come upon that was making all of it worse, that had been eating at her...

Making her have trouble focusing or thinking of anything else.

She said that she had found her music. “Haunted Sea” by Max Richter, performed by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic. And when she heard it, it made her think of the beach, made her think of the smell of the water.

Made her feel like she was submerged.

And then she started to weep, too cry in cold, empty sobs while I tried my best to comfort her, even though in my heart I could feel the familiar feeling of numbness rising up to compete for my attention. I know I get this way when I am upset. It is how I keep going when everything feels like it is wrong.

And it feels like that.

You would think that those two pieces of news would be enough to make me feel off, but the thing is, I haven't been the only one of us investigating how we connect to one another. The Officer has been looking into it too, and in the process of looking at it, she ended up investigating my mother's murder. Such a trauma...

Who knows what connects us.

She said that the information had been sealed, and she couldn’t figure out why. Eventually she made headway, and found out what the police wouldn't want me to know about it.

Three days after my mom was murdered, her body went missing from the morgue.

And they were never able to figure out where it went.