I ponder, ponder, one step short of full-on obsession. Mulling over the world I grew up in and how suddenly and without fanfare, it ceased to exist. So unexpected and lightning-quick its flame burnt out that I don’t think most people understand that they are living in an extinct age. I wonder if they realize they are living remnants; someone’s archaic example of what life was like before the world moved on. These thoughts run circuitous paths wearing imaginable indentations on the surface of my over-wrought brain….searching for a solution that doesn’t exist to answer a problem no one acknowledges as fact. Fairy-tale supplication rides this mental mystery machine alongside undoubted fact, one cloaked in the shadow of the other to where in the distance they are interchangeable, two almost melding into one with the right squint of an eye.

This doubling is indicative of the larger topic at hand, eerie proof that truth is subjective, based more on perception and perspective than any of us feel comfortable admitting out loud.

My musings go far, covering as much of my personal truth as my mind can conjure. I ponder, ponder, and ponder some more, trying to pinpoint when this world began to evolve into the nightmare dreamscape that it has now become. I look at those around me, faces I know almost as well as my own, and wonder if their inner landscape mirrors their increasingly strange outerscape. I wonder if they are familiar strangers, awkward doppelgangers unsure how to act in the skin they’re posing in.

I compare the world I knew as a child, raised in the faith of my father’s, secure in the belief of a God that made me, a God that loved me, a God that never strayed far from me. I think of that child I was, of the fears I had to contend with, and I compare that to the children that have now come from me, of the dangers they have had to face, and of the fears, I, as a child, could not even fathom, much less comprehend. I wonder where my God went when I wasn’t looking …

I wonder when a child’s innocent fear of the dark was made to include whatever evils might accompany the darkness and it is beyond my ability to process.

I wonder when evil acts committed by evil men became commonplace in a now evil world, and why am I the only voice I hear, crying out against the darkness.

Is this how it ends for us, imperfect beings created and set loose to do as we would, an experiment has begun in the hope that we would embody the love that we were formed of, living representations of flawed incomplete souls striving to emulate the loving God whose image we were cast in, instead we have fallen further than the furthest fallen of the outcast. Will we be the abominations that so many of us have allowed ourselves to become?

I ponder, ponder, ponder about these things, to the point of full-blown obsession…





Brandie Whaley