Love in an Elevator

There are many things in life I swore I’d never do, and pick up chicks on the Internet was one of them. Being on CPP Disability was a drag and led to the stigma of my mental illness that I just couldn’t overcome. I felt useless to our society and full of hatred for the God that created me this way. Being forty-four and still single, I’d all but given up on women in my life, but I had a pet cat who kept me company. I joked with my parents she was my cat-wife and I even had a virtual marriage with her. It was a wonderful fantasy, but still not as fulfilling as a genuine relationship with my dream woman. Like all other single men in our province, I wanted to find my soulmate and against all odds raise a family. To me that meant kids, a house, cars, family trips, and being wanted, loved and maybe even cherished by a special somebody… yes, a somebody. That would make me somebody again, a whole being, a proper man, a loved one.

Still, I felt like a nobody, undervalued, underappreciated, the scum of our society, and much worse sometimes. I could barely make ends meet but lasted payday to payday and I was still grateful to the country, Canada, and the province, Manitoba, that provided for me as the alternatives to disability seemed to be understated. I could fall to a life of homelessness like other mentally ill people or I could rely on a life of crime. Neither of those options seemed to be appealing to me but being an honest citizen and not wanting to hurt society, as I valued the services I have received and cherished the homes that the government funded for my cat and I, I would have chosen homelessness. I would rather rely on the last resort handouts of society and live in shelters when I could, use the city’s warming areas in the winter, enjoy a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and Christmas with others who were down and out, and even dream of one day getting a new apartment through the Siloam Mission like many others had, but I still was a have, through CPP Disability and Rent-Aid, and hadn’t fallen to being a have not yet.

When I was much more fortunate and able to attend classes at the University of Winnipeg, I attended an English class where the professor lectured on dumpster diving and stated that it was becoming more prevalent. You know the saying, ‘One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.’ really has meaning all to its own when you dreamed of finding treasures in the dumpsters like old furniture that I could make new again, broken electronics to fix, even new things that rich people threw out because the colour wasn’t matching the new decor, and then I wondered if there was a broken woman out there, just like me, wandering aimlessly through life, cast away by society. I wondered if together we could fix our lives and make ourselves whole again, the matching piece found in the junk shop of life that completed the set. Then I remembered the old Disney cartoon, The Lady and the Tramp and so wanted to find that lady before she fell, before she was just another disposable person to our society. I needed a plan, some way for a complete introvert to approach women without getting involved, at least at first.

I had become Isolated and detached from our culture and lived through the internet as a blogger and a webmaster. I was in the process of trying to build a website dedicated to the city I lived in, Winnipeg, but the voices seemed to interrupt every time I tried to make something of it as they always had better ideas and knew everything. It was frustrating and infuriating all at once, but I tried to cope when they tried to lead me to what they wanted and tried to take over what I set out to accomplish. The voices were the most frustrating when I was trying to research local history as they said it would never catch on and was irrelevant to society. I tried to use affirmations and many distraction techniques, but then they would threaten my cat and suggest that she needed a pencil pushed up her bottom if I didn’t cooperate. It was as if people had access to my apartment, as if they knew the door code to get in and would come and go through my stuff when I wasn’t here and would brag when I was out. I knew this couldn’t be real, just the voices insisting that they had some kind of control over me, but I further isolated myself from society and only went out to shop for groceries and to go to my parent’s house for the odd meal. In the back of my head I knew things had to change and I finally gave in and got the help of a mental health worker.

I tried three times to get to the appointment, but my spiritual foes fought against me and finally he agreed to come to my house to meet me. After two sessions he introduced me to a video called Knowing You, Knowing You and it turned out to be about a woman who had voices as well. She inspired me to take myself over and become my own voices, to be my own detriment and my own gained intentions, to become what I always should have been, myself. She talked of her struggles and the more she talked the more my struggles became her struggles and the more she would help me through them to overcome. The more she helped me overcome, the more I wanted to help her overcome.

The mental health worker also showed me a short video analogy about a bus and being the driver of the bus and how to deal with passengers who were unruly. Each of the passengers were a voice that I heard and It showed me how to assert myself over them, to accept them, and to live with them as omnipresent in my life. Still in the back of my mind was the thought of the Lady who awaited me, another of my so-called voices. She wasn’t the worst or the best at times, but she would have had a life of her own and had to live it the way she wanted, all I wanted was a chance to meet her and I knew somehow that would one day come to pass.

I had long ago agreed to do my best to stay single, hoping to meet her and hitting it off to start a relationship. I wasn’t desperate, like I said the cat was fine for me, at least for the short term, but I had an internet connection and had heard of meeting new people over social media. I had been a longtime user of services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but it was meant to keep connected to family, in a detached way that I had grown fond of, and accepted as the only way that I would ever live knowing them as I had abandoned all hopes of being normal, or at least what society had considered normal. I hear voices all the time and am easily distracted, hence the fact that I cannot work.

I started approaching complete strangers on the Internet on Facebook and befriended them left, right, and center. Soon my friend list grew to 300, then 500, then a 1000 people and it was apparent that they had a lot to say and seemed to accept my comments on their posts when I replied. Then the ladies approached me on Messenger and I was on to something. I often wondered if they were real, if they had substance, or if they were just pictures of other people. Some would ask what I was after on Messenger and I would say friends to chat with, but then a stranger approached me and it inspired me to flirt for the first time.

She was a neat sort with a funny African style name, odd for a white chick. I felt a connection to this strange girl, as if I’d known her before, as if she was something important in another life like maybe a mayor or something, I felt as if she was the kind of girl I could bond with even if she was faking her identity with a false name. The photo seemed genuine and maybe she Photoshopped the pics to alter her identity, but there was a genuine connection there. I felt something and flirted in a big way. I wanted her to know that she as a faker was still special… a weird sort of thing to do, but still I felt it necessary. I made comments about how there was no other woman in the world worth flirting with and how she was an angel in her own time, how God has made her and broke the casting because there would never be another like her, I told her many things and then I thought It through, but I don’t think I put my foot in my mouth just yet.

I’ve contacted her a couple of times since and had small talk. I feel as if her persona has changed, and she has been other people on the other end. She sent me a few photos and I feel that they were photos of her mother and her sister. I still feel like I want to meet this woman and fantasize about getting stuck in an elevator with her. For a VERY LONG TIME, so it will seem as the elevator car lurches and seems to fall for a fleeting moment before God’s hand reaches out and holds us up, suspended above our impending deaths. Then we hear the maintenance man on duty say he will have us out in a bit, that he’s working on rescuing us. It turns out that she’s moving into the building and seems to carry the air of authority with her, whatever that means. I think enormous things and make a pass at her, trying to seal the deal, with fate, with destiny…. or stupidity?!?

I can’t help but think she is the woman from social media even though she looks different, and acts different, at least at times… then it happened she sent me her contact info and I sent her mine, still suspended eight stories over our combined fates. Twisted together, or rather in a gentle embrace as she had leaped over piled boxes to get to me when the elevator malfunctioned. I couldn’t help but grab hold of the beautiful woman… my dreams… my crazy self…. my helplessness defined at that moment, and then my life flashed before my eyes. I thought if we survived I could convince this babe to a date, but what?

I had no money… I had little else that the government had not provided, just the school I was attending, the one class, ‘the everything’, the all-in I had made, the anything that could become of my life, and then I had it. I could cook her dinner. A meal, something special, but she had gone out with friends. My heart sank, but I helped her haul boxes to the SAME floor, to the OPPOSITE end of the hall and every time she looked my way my heart would flutter… I felt it even if I couldn’t admit it to myself… yes… that word… that tricky word… that hurtful word… that.. that word I stumbled with all my life… I felt it… I REALLY FELT IT. L-O-V-E.

But why now? Aren’t the social media pariah there to prey on girls and naive kids? Then I remembered the first encounter on Messenger… perhaps she was investigating, a good person, a light in the sea of darkness that could sometimes be the Internet, the Muskellunge that preyed on the bad ills of society in a legal way and I secretly smiled. Maybe there was hope… Maybe there would be a future, but what of it? What could this encounter lead to? And again, why now? What had I done to deserve a Goddess sent my way? A Valkyrie in the form of a human woman… maybe ‘The Valkyrie’ of them all… their leader Frigg. Was she after me for some reason? I was not a bad person was I? Had I done wrong and Odin was to punish me, or even the secret police of our combined societies… had they sent her? Perhaps my secret was out, I blew my camouflage and cowboy ways… They had discovered me, but not without purpose or intended timing.

It began long ago as a small child when I woke up spiritually, as all children do, and had a vision of grandeur…. I, myself was a great being, someone special to the earth, someone that had been long awaited for and for whom generations of prophecy had predicted arrival… the God we all knew. I knew one girl… and one alone, and to meet her I used ancient magic and drew a finger through the air to create a portal, then stepped through. I was in a foreign land, not off the Continent I was born on but in a foreign land. I met with her and sat on her front porch in a swing, Just a Swingin’.

We talked and I told her about the future and wondered if she believed me. She said she did, and then I told her the dire news. My brother the Devil was to trick my family and all the earth and put me under his spell. He reasoned it that he wasn’t prepared and he should have a few years more to prepare now that the Second Coming was imminent… I STRONGLY disagreed, but only through worldly reassurance that I wouldn’t be held accountable to the strongest degree of the things that may happen through me as I lay dormant, I agreed to fall back asleep and slumber like Snow White under the evil witch’s spell.

For thirty-two years I had no actual identity but what the surrounding society gave. I behaved differently then I would have liked to. I was more naïve than I should have been and that led to me doing stupid things that I didn’t necessarily want to do but seen fit to do now. I was half-Devil, half-God, and all boy… I had little thought that was mine… It was as if society thought for me and I was to be put into bondage to the Devil’s will for all that time. I’m sure glad looking back that society is mostly good, but maybe that is fault of my own and a little trickery of my own as I found myself being hung when I was a child.

I don’t know if this was an attempt by the Devil to get rid of me… Perhaps an apparent suicide… A blue little boy… A depressed child deciding to end it all, but I kept coming back to life and the plot failed. The only downside was that the Devil got a hold of these deaths and got above me…. Gained my strength and use for evil. When it was apparent that he wouldn’t stop and wanted me to give in to death, I tricked him and he allowed me to move my hanging boy’s body. I tied myself to the Life Tree, the Tree of Yaggsdarill and died hundreds of thousands of times more for good than I had for evil, hence I have a nasty streak but am generally an altruistic person.

Next he put me back into a slumber and lived a sleepwalking existence, not knowing actual life as it stood for all else. I knew nothing of spirits, barely believed in the great Jesus, never mind in Buddha, Mohammed, Odin, Zeus, or any of the other Great Gods. I never knew there should have been a Goddess… The female side of the Tree of Life. Then I was awakened at the age of twenty-eight and suddenly it was crazy-town…. Life turned upside down. I could hardly believe that I was to be a God… I believed there was no such human… Just a giant entity that floated around in space and granted miracles. I believed we were to believe in Jesus as my parents had raised me a Christian, but then we stopped going to church… It was my Grandmother’s determination to get me Baptized, and she did. I Confirmed later as an Anglican…. Something I still hold on to today… A belief in the Church of England or the Church of Jesus. I knew nothing of where the great Goddess came from or what she meant, beyond the Virgin Mary as there is little in the scriptures dealing with women other than Jezebel, The Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and a couple others, like Ruth.

Then Mother Goddess talked to me… She was PISSED!!! She was mad that I had lived such a FUCKED UP life. She was disappointed in me, and I disappointed in myself for letting her down… maybe even the whole of society through my naughty actions, but she was to forgive me if I followed the path she wanted for me, and I agreed. Now sixteen years later I find myself still fucked up mentally and still single, waiting for the dream to come true. The whole earth has stood on end fighting a war we didn’t want, fighting ourselves and our families from other lands, and now it was happening… I was stuck in an elevator with her, but will she accept me?

Would the world forgive me for just being a boy and having no choice to commit to stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise, but for the brutality I faced, the sexual abuse I faced, the endurance I thought I had eroded through time and the evil climbed a great big hill. The misunderstandings had built and I was mad with rage that I had to take the shit and enact the people I had… through me two World Wars had been fought and they had put Hundreds of Thousands of Jews to death…. Hitler was a FUCKING enactment! Stalin was a FUCKING enactment…. I was blamed and my Society treated me like shit!!!

I turned on them and started gangs… gangs upon gangs upon gangs upon gangs upon gangs…. I was a FUCKING killing machine built with hatred because of this… I thought I could even the score… Created Ghost Riders for the Hells Angels, and others like them to fight the underworld corruption within themselves… To control the hatred I had spawned by being mistreated. Yet again there I was in an elevator with her… In the flesh… Mother Earth… The other half of Oxygenating Blue-Green Algae. Without her there would be no life on earth… NOTHING!!! More to the point the universe would be nothing.

We had once tried and could only come up with somewhat of a life-form… nothing special, but this woman also gave birth to the universe… She laid an egg and I fertilized it as a Dragon. And again…. there she was stuck in an almost falling elevator with me…. I hope she had forgiven me… At least might after I had my say and could think things through with my own thoughts. Maybe she was here to see if we could get along, or she was on an undercover mission. What would the purpose be? I guess time would tell.