Journal - October 12th, 2003

Womb

I never realized what a womb I lived in, in Vegas, with the Twilight Circus...we traveled the globe, and for each performance in each city, we existed in our own right. Even in Miami, we were given leeway, perhaps because the Ravnos being independent, were made allowances, as long as we did our thing....we existed. But all that changed.

It changed in a whirlwind of blood and chaos. I still feel it, and live it over and over in nightmares. We couldn't have done anything, we couldn't have stopped it. Destined to be, Khalil would have said, but its hard to imagine that anything that horrid was destined at all...brother against brother. There, where I learned to fly....I also learned what it meant to die. I would have followed them all to wherever it was they went, whatever destiny they were meant to fulfill in that carnage, was not mine. I would have bared my throat to the snarling maw of the thing that was once Khalil, my guardian, my leader, my purpose, but when it came to to prove my faith, I ran. He fell on Triste, on Nikolai....and others. I ran, and I kept running.

Now and then it comes to mind....drawing upon that long lost time....what it meant to fly, to be a part of something greater than yourself, to be comforted in the faith of your own beliefs. The womb is gone, and my faith a shadow of what it once was.

Exposed, in St Louis, how I long for the days of my sheltered ambiguity, the dreams of childhood and a great optimism that seldom follows you into adulthood. I think I was drug, kicking and screaming from the womb, and in some ways I'm still kicking and screaming. I was not ready to die, I was not ready to grow up, and I was not ready to be alone. But these are the trials we endure, on the wheel, to realize that great elusive truth, to fulfill a destiny unknown.

St Louis is like a raw wound, one that's been infected and seeping for some time. Something that should be excised, cauterized, and amputed. Nothing against the city, I've felt the same about every place I've visited, like each one doomed to suffer the same fate as the one I suffered, like I'd been through the trial run. This time I won't run, there won't be any place to run to.

I came to the city on the eve of an execution. Rob Rose, the Primogen of the Malkavian, executed by a newly crowned Prince for consorting with the Sabbat. I think I won't mention my tours in Miami, Detroit, and Toronto. Though in truth, we were so isolated from everything, I'm not sure I ever even met a Sabbat, Khalil had always handled those details. So, I arrived on the eve of a death, and have since been mired in that same gangrene that affects all of us. We do not age and we do not die, but there is decay. Even Murdoch, our proclaimed leader of the clan, has been casting accusations at others, he's a sabbat she's a sabbat, wouldn't you like to be a sabbat too. Meanwhile, the Camarilla as a whole is spending most of its energy trying to decide who is an anarch and who isn't, though such a state is ill-defined. There is no working definition for an anarch, seems to be a state you achieve when someone just says that's what you are. The word may have had power once, but overused and overdone, it means nothing.

If Murdoch is the leader of sorts, the Peter Malcolm is definitely the rock. A cornerstone for this institution of mine, bearing the brunt of many of the slings and arrows cast his way, a fate suffered for being marginally accepted in the rank and file of the so-called normal Camarilla. Peter holds the clan as assuredly as Murdoch though, with a grace that belies his own unrealized purpose. Where Murdoch must twist and pull for each small victory gained, for his hold and his respect, Peter seems to achieve it with little effort, casting his strength and his purpose behind Murdoch, who has purpose but little strength.

Then there is Julius, who will go the way of Rob and soon. Not that he will be the traitor Rob was purported to be, Rob didn't give in, he didn't give out, he quite simply gave up. His cycle, his dharma complete, he rests now. Julius is too angry to rest, though he carries that sense of doom about him, a sense that he too has given up at least on one side, while he kicks and scratches on the other.

I've spent this month establishing myself within the circles needed to continue my work. A job here and performance there, though I have no delusions that I am truly no longer in the womb.