Standing On the Edge of You

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Now as I go upon my way
So let me go upon my way
Born of a light
Born of a light 
The wind rushing round my open heart
An open ravine
In my spirit white
Totally alive
In my spirit light 
Through an open doorway
Across a street
To another life
And catching my reflection in a window
Switching on a light
One I didn't know
Totally alive
Totally released 
Waking, waking up from shutdown
From a thousand years of sleep
Yeah you, you know what I mean
You know what I mean
You know what I mean 
Standing on the edge of you - Radiohead


It was said before that there are some ideas so wrong that only the intelligent can believe in. I never did necessarily believe in that quote or even knew what it meant, but when around Rita that saying became so blatantly clear. Some notions that she would spout at times were so warped and outside of regular thought that it would come of as the ramblings of a crazy person. Don't get me wrong it wasn't exactly on the level some lunatic like GG Allin or even Peter Sotos, but it was unnerving nonetheless. While all her black metal friends would listen to her and nod along like what she was saying was almost normal, average, and regular the guys and I (even though we thought it was just her sense of humor) it clearly made us at the very least extremely uncomfortable.

I felt as though I existed outside of myself while in Norway. Nothing truly seemed normal there to be quite honest. I felt as though I was stuck in a daze of some sort. Like I was just waiting for Rod Serling to jump out and tell me the spiel about being trapped in the Twilight Zone. It was so unusually uptight and conservative there. Everyone looked perfect, or at the very least portrayed themselves as perfect. Yet, on the other end of the spectrum you had people like Varg, Pelle, and Gaahl that were so anti-establishment and nihilistic that they made people like William Powell look tame and almost conformist by comparison. 

Rita would never explicitly say that she would go out and commit a crime or anything of that caliber, but I knew she wasn't necessarily the good actor that the media would like to portray her as. In all honesty she was much more heavily involved in the whole black metal scene than what outsiders would say. Again she wasn't going around burning down churches, but she would gladly use intimidation tactics that wouldn't be seen as... 'mentally ensuring' to say the least.

I knew that she also engaged in her share of illicit activities, especially when she was younger but as far as I or anyone knew she never had a record or anything of the sort. I just assume that her reputation and 'notoriety' spread based on rumors and her rather 'unique' mannerisms and onstage appearances. But now wasn't the time for what she portrayed herself to be. The her that she made herself out to be died along time ago. It went before the rest of her mind and body did.

Once I traveled deeper into the woods, away from the comfort of the city you truly got to see the scope of what Rita's life was like. It was cold dense and isolated from the rest of society. They seemed to be going on forever and never seemed to end, and in all of this no one person was in the forest. It was like going in here was a death threat or was something akin to the Manson house, at least that's house all the civilians back in the town reacted to this place.

When I got to her house I wasn't necessarily surprised in the least. It was a small insignificant house in the middle of the woods completely isolated from the rest of the world. On the outside it wasn't exactly worn down, but it seemed rather out of place for the time they lived in nowadays. In all fairness it showed that it was from the past millennia instead of the current one. 

Once I grasped the door in my hand and fished the key out of my pocket to open the door an ominous yet almost soft creeping filled my ears, yet once inside the smell of fresh pines flooded my senses. The house was completely disheveled and trashed. It was messy, but in it's own strange way it was neatly organized with books in one corner, papers and schooling materials in another, and an old outdated television set from the eighties and this was just the living room. To the left was a small kitchen and to the right was assumedly the master bedroom. While there was memorabilia of what I guessed to be Rita's mother and father no sign of Rita was seen in the house. No pictures, juvenile drawings or doodlings; just nothing. Yet right in front of me where the house would split into to adjacent to the wall was what looked like a small cupboard or hatch that was closed shut and nearly completely rusted. Yet, if you weren't paying attention you would never see this place among the rest of the mess in the household.

I stepped closer to it and peaked my head down inside only to see an old, rickety, wooden staircase directly below. I sighed in both fear and interest as I knew for sure I was going to have to go down there. It was dark, cold, and damp. The living conditions down there were akin to some prison. It was like something you'd read about the description or Alcatraz or Guantanamo, but not what I assumed to be a child's bedroom; especially a girl's nonetheless. 

I pulled out my phone's light to illuminate the room around me once I reached the final stair. All around me were books, stray papers, a small pile of clothes, and wild writings that littered the walls. The 'bed' in her room could even be properly constituted as a bed. It was a filthy dirty mattress upon the hard concrete floors which a had a thin stray blanket, and a deflated grimy now off-white pillow.

"The hell?" I muttered to myself. "What parent would allow their kid to sleep down here?" I thought aloud to myself. For christ sake's it was already cold down here and it wasn't even night time yet, nor was it even winter. This disturbed me to no end, however as I backed up from the bed I stumbled over myself only to find a worn down, bleak, brown journal that seemed to be falling apart at the seams. This was it. And now there was nothing left for you to hide. This was an open doorway to another life; your life. This was my way of feeling totally alive. I could now feel totally released from the prison you've made for me. I could finally wake up from my thousands year sleep. I was finally standing on the edge of you.

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