A Month to Perihelion

Yesterday something interesting happened. April 14th 2021. I remembered the name of the god of my childhood. I had forgotten it, while never forgetting the circumstances of its invention. I had given myself the Understanding that I was reaching a point of reversal in my life. Of moving towards my inner light instead of away. And I see it as no coincidence that in the last few months of turmoil, angst, and despair as that Perihelion approaches. . . I rediscovered something that I thought was gone completely.

I had always been inclined to mystical thinking, in a sort of half-play. I would try my best to convince other kids that the neighborhood held signs of alien contact, or I would talk to the wind, walk around the playground doing it, half-hoping someone saw me and asked what I was doing, so I could mysteriously brush them off, nothing you would understand. But I did have an intimate relationship with the wind. We talked seriously. And there are points in my life when I felt a gust, or a calm, and had the urge to say out loud ”Is that you? I’m sorry, I know I haven’t been all that good with keeping up, how are you doing?” In the seventh grade, I was in an English class that I really enjoyed, maybe one of the only classes I ever put my full effort into. One of our subjects was mythology and mysticism. I remember doing a project on Nostradamus, and my teacher liked it so much she wrote about it in her rec letter to LFA when I asked her for one. I also did a project on greek mythology, in which I invented several of my own Deities. The main one being Xepikoros, who I considered a patron of travelers, of hospitality, and of wisdom. He was my personal god, because he represented the ways in which I saw myselfL: a nomad, a non-follower, but a lover of people rather than a misanthrope. I started reading Paulo Coelho the following summer, and furthered my ideas of what it spirituality meant to me, personally. I went to the bookstore and started picking up every religion text I could find. I never read through any of them completely, but I would read passages of the Quran, the foreword to the Upanishads, and really loved the Tibetan Book of the Dead, though I didn’t understand any of what I was reading, I loved the almost melodic descriptions of monsters, lights, and bodhisattvas. I was also reading Philip Pullman, and Christopher Hitchens, and became completely disillusioned, even aggressive, about how modern Christianity had corrupted the font of human understanding. I was a bit too zealous about pulling away from religion, when I was also feeling so drawn to it, and unfortunately, I didn’t have any strong guides onto the right path until years later, when I encountered Joseph Campbell’s work, at 23. In the eighth grade, after reading the Pilgrimage by Coelho, I decided to give my own name to my personal deity, who I already had some association with via my friendship with the wind. I learned, in that book, about the three greek words for love: Eros, Philia, and Agape. Of these, Agape is the word that is the “highest” form of love. It is unconditional, rapturous love. It is the love that man has for god, and that god has for man. It was therefore my choice for a name, in addition to the name I had already given my patron. For a few years, I would pray every night to Xepikoros Agape, and meditate on myself as a nomad, a being of permanent transience, in both thought and action, and worshipped the love I had for the world, and that the world had for me. My god was that love. And I never forgot that love. I forgot the name. I stopped praying. But I always knew that Agape was a part of it. And I never forgot making the name of Xepikoros. Which is why it is so strange that I forgot they were together, synthesized. In recent years, when thinking back to that time, I always remembered it was “__ Agape” and thought shoot! Why can’t I remember! The love was always with me, but the presence of me, of my sense of self, and the confidence in that self image, was what went missing.

In a similar reflection I had recently. I found some reasons why I was in such a pit in college. I was unhappy, obviously. But why? I had given up, a bit, in high school, lost my way, and it took years for me to find my way again. I’m still recovering, to be quite honest. But the truth is that I couldn’t face the fact that I was bored. I was angry with myself at the situation I had put myself in: going to school for nothing in particular, on my parents’ dime, at a school in the middle of nowhere. I had lost. I had not lived up to what I thought I needed to live a worthwhile life, and I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t even want to admit to myself that I was unhappy about my life prospects, I just whittled away my time, drank, smoked, covered it with weekend after weekend spent at home with my brothers, and friends—Regressing. But even during this time, you could see that I still had the same urges, I was just too scared to pursue them. I wanted to work on creative projects, mostly with Matt N. And some of them went well! Brainsick was at least a finished product, which is not much I can say about most of the other things I try to work on. I feel intense sorrow when I imagine how much of my life I have wasted thinking that I had no chance of recovery. Of course I can recover! Of course I can do the things I want to! I just need to trust myself, and do them.

My Grandfather on my dad’s side passed away a few weeks ago. It still feels unreal. But something happened in my dad. I remember going to see Tata with him, only a few days before he died. And All he could do was be boisterous and annoying, joking around, in a way I don’t even think was nostalgic for him, with his father, Tata, was a jokey guy, but not really in the same way. And it was palpable how my dad knew he was not acting in the way he wished he could. Almost immediately after sitting down, he excused himself, and I could see him squatting on the ground, crying on their porch. When He gave the eulogy, I learned something about him I had never known about. He described his career with regret. He had never mentioned anything of the sort to me, nor had I heard my mom talk about it. But here, reflecting on his father’s death, he was telling me for the first time about how he felt he had, through all those years of grabbing and shoving himself up the ladder, he had felt something was missing. And then he went on to say he had found it when he reconnected with Tata, playing chess online. The things he left unsaid were the troubles we were going through at home. He had been fired. From a job he thought he was great at. He had struggled to find a replacement position. He was having problems at home, a wife stricken with depression and addiction, and three mentally ill sons, all variously dropping out of school, transferring, and performing poorly. I honestly, at the time, thought he was completely inhuman, for not reflecting on himself, on what was wrong with his approach to these issues. But he did reflect. I was shocked. I immediately felt I had done him a massive disservice in these past years. And attributed to him much less intelligence and empathy than he deserved. He may not be particularly articulate, he certainly wasn’t in the eulogy, but now as an adult this endears me to him. I love him, and want to help him to find his voice, to understand his feelings. In my own life, I think I have seen him for the first time, truly, as someone other than just a father. ' I feel like I’m rambling a bit now, so I’ll try to wrap this up. Two days after my birthday, in a month, I will be the age my mom was when she gave birth to me. I am a different person to my parents, and living in a different time. I feel close to them both, right now, and hope only that I can tell my own story, the way I want to tell it. Before it really is too late. My velocity in life is reaching its highest point. After the long drought, out in the Oort Cloud, I’ve come back into the habitable zone, and It is only through my own action that I can change course.

I will be assertive.

I will be disciplined.

I will write every day, if not every week.

I will finish a best selling narrative based video game by the time I’m 29.

I will have stories set in my own World, set and published.

I will quit being a commercial engineer, and will start my own studio.

I will live in Japan.

These things will come true, and I will never again forget what my inner light looks like, even if I have to get so close that the heat boils my eyes out of my skull.