LISA BERNHARD

BLISS

Euro 15,00

ISBN 978-88-96418-30-7

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Prologue

I have done all that you have asked of me, and still I am nowhere, actually, a place a bit worse than nowhere, for if I were nowhere, in the oblivion of such a location, it would not be quite as painful as this place I know presently, as home. I clearly am somewhere, somewhere I do not wish to be, somewhere I do not deserve to be, yet here I remain, farther, I fear, from bliss, than perhaps, ever before.
I want to be angry, but is such a thing allowed? Can you be mad at God, furious at the universe, especially inappropriate, I suspect, if I truly accept that I plotted this path, this journey, this road very long ago, long before this incarnation began. I presently know so little, however, when it started I thought I knew
everything, or at least everything that mattered most; my vast imagination, my eccentric mind, my enthusiastic intellect, my undeniable passion, now each seems individually misguided, and collectively, well, I can safely say, disastrously ill-managed, for lack of a better explanation.
I have loved every soul you led me to, and followed, despite proud and well-placed obstacles, my brave crimson heart; I never wavered, even in the face of the obvious partners, good sense and reality, both of which I set aside on occasions too numerous to count. I believed in my mission, my purpose, my cause, and once more, once again, I stand alone, having accom- plished nothing at all, maybe even less than no- thing, if such a thing is possible.
I have tried to make sense of this purgatory, pretending I am Dante, awaiting my Beatrice to lead me to the light. Much like his crossing, mine has been laden with beings, damned and other wise, who have imparted wisdom and insights to me, whether they intended to, or not.
The best I have been told thus far, the most prophetic I have gleaned, from the one man’s voice I believe in all its essential goodness, is to have “faith” and “trust”, and to endure this “dark night of the soul”. It has been my plan for a so- metime while, to embrace this occlusion with a love, a heat, that warms it so, that it cannot help but open, and turn itself into day.
But instead, and unlike Dante, I do not seem to be moving upward; my climb appears to have no northern dimension, and despite the steepness of each new step, it just feels dauntingly endless, leading, familiarly, to an unhappy ending from which I will, one more time, face the untenable choice of giving in, or fighting my way out. The difficulty therein, is that I do not know if my will is sufficient enough to take on another battle, as I am not clear, not concise in my comprehen- sion of the prize, and therefore, cannot fully understand what it is that I am to achieve with such a win.
Ah, there is the secret, the grand, the glorious conundrum, if you do not possess ample mo- tivation, all the skills within are useless, without vision, without drive, you cannot make use of your arsenal, and even if it contains every bit that you need to easily, and worthily defeat the evil enemy, you will be captured, and slaush tered whole, without recourse, with no will to survive the fall. It is exactly this moment though, that I always reach, battered, and worn, exhausted, and closer to surrender than I was after the skirmish that preceded the last one, and in this instant I consistently rise, I pull up, as if a baby, taking its first stance upright, and rally, with what little may be left, to lift my face to the sun, and let its glow redden my cheeks.
Even as I write, I feel it, the golden wonder, moving strongly behind grey clouds that are trying with their might to hold her covered, and cloistered, to keep her small, and stuck. Yet the sun and I are friends, soul mates, of a sort, and when one of us is troubled, the other comes to the line, and crosses it, despite whatever danger lurks, such unlikely courage, at least on my part, exists with a magnitude words cannot expound, it just is, it just is, and so I must assist the sun by ripping a seam in the clouds, and pulling it apart, far and wide enough for her elongated rays to peek through. I am contemplating my rescue, her rescue, our rescue, and in the midst of me preparing my armor, and my slicing sword, a hummingbird flies past, a rare miracle, as it is the symbol of the impossible becoming possible. Naturally I smile, the first one in days, and find myself slightly off guard, allowing my optimism, my naturally bred, and excessively exuberant optimism to overtake my circumstances, and as I do, the sun shines through the charging, moving cotton in the sky, and I am saved, for today, from believing it is over.