A Timeline, In Brief, For My Own Porpoises...
1994: Suicide, strange experience with death, resulting in temporary paralysis and haunting lucid dreams of a beautiful blonde woman in a cabin somewhere in unknown woods asking me to find her. Go where there is no snow, you will know it when you see her, you will have no doubt and the sky will turn to gold
1997: In March I travel to Orlando, Florida to meet up with a woman I met up north in Massachusetts, where I had been living. The first night in Orlando I meet the woman from the dreams waitressing in the restaurant we go to. Upon returning north I am haunted by new dreams. These lucid dreams involve and old man dealing me cards on a table, always three queens in the same order. He tells me this is the pattern I must follow. It is the pattern that has always existed in my life and the one that threw me into such misery that I took my own life. I am now supposed to learn from this pattern and to understand why I always fucked it up in the past.
Later in 1997 I agree to move to Orlando after encountering a woman from New Hampshire I fall madly in love with, and who becomes a temptation not to follow this path to the dream woman. She is a Two Queen. My life's history has always followed this path, a One Queen, who unearths deep and uncharted feelings and inspires me while being unobtainable is given up on as a Two Queen appears and offers me an easy road to what is essentially meaningful physical love. It doesn't last and leaves me lamenting the decision to give up on the quest to reach the One Queen, which prompts a Three Queen to appear and become a true friend who believes in me and ignites my fire to go on.
1998: I discover the restaurant the waitress works in is located on "Golden Sky Lane" and that they broke ground to begin building on the site the day I came back from my death experience. All this works into telling this waitress, now a bartender, the story of how I came to be there. It is clear that she desires my presence, absorbs all that I talk to her about, and I decide to take the story of her own life and try to inspire her to succeed in her quest to finish nursing school and become a nurse.
1999: A Two Queen appears and over time comes to offer herself to me. A love develops that is primarily physical and does not last. She leaves me stating she has too much in her life to be concerned with having someone else in it, telling me she is not going to live to be thirty and must do certain things before then. Around this time my life comes apart and I am not certain there is any reason to go on. A Three Queen appears and reminds me, "If you give up then what are the rest of us supposed to do?" and brings me back to myself. She designates me as "The Dead Guy" and also as "The Jack of Hearts" as her way of interpreting my relationships with the Three Queens.
2001: I get married to a woman who fits no pattern and designate her the only existing Four Queen. For the next two or three years I live a fairly normal life and begin writing about my experiences and expanding upon what they all mean.
2004: A woman I considered my muse, gone from my life completely for a decade, resurfaces and calls me back north, claiming she is now ready to act upon long hidden desires and love. This begins a long down cycle of my life that lasts for seven years, but starts me on a new career track working with teenagers who are mentally ill, emotionally afflicted or developmentally disabled. This becomes my calling and my purpose.
2009: Somehow believing myself invincible I take on more and more responsibility at work and refuse to give up on working with a client who completely frustrates and emotionally unbalances me. I eventually lose it completely and suffer an emotional breakdown that limits my functionality for more than a year. I have considered 2007-2010 to be "The Age of The Monk" as I closed myself off from intimate contact with humans and devote myself to work and to educating myself in a variety of areas.
2010: Moved to North Carolina and started a new job working with psych kids. I continued The Age of The Monk but with a close eye on my own mental health. I seem to be well liked at work, but people are generally curious as to why I avoid any and all involvement with co-workers on a personal level. After a year on the job I start to open myself to certain individuals but maintain my distance. I am determined to avoid the entire Three Queens dynamic.
2011: I cannot resist a beautiful woman with a broken heart. Seeing a co-worker whose life has somehow come crashing down on her I decide I cannot stand by. Almost entirely randomly I ask her if she would like it if I wrote her a passionate love letter each night. She is leaving for another shift in two weeks so I figure for two weeks I can write her something each night that will make her smile or laugh. She says she would like it if I wrote these letters, so I do, and then find myself at a loss for words. How can I write "passionate love letters" to a random person?
I decide to study her and then to write about her kind and giving heart, her great beauty and her sorrow. I pour my heart and soul into the letters, always mixing in some ridiculous humor to take the edge off. She enjoys the letters and looks forward to them every night. I study her more closely, talk with her, come to understand her better as I look into her eyes as she talks and each letter becomes easier to write and also more intense.
I realize something is happening and it is happening to me. The more I study her, the more I come to truly care about her and the more I truly begin to feel something, and the more I write the more of myself I open up. She has done something to me in a way it has never been done before. Tina, the greatest of all past One Queens, appeared in dreams for years and I spent time trying to understand why after I met her. This woman did not appear in dreams and when I first met her she was nothing special to me, especially considering that I had closed myself off to that sort of thing. It became clear what was happening when I woke up in a sweat from sleep before her last night working on our shift, "She's a One."
I'm troubled that she is leaving, although she isn't going very far. Perhaps it is better I will not see her all night long because I am tripping over myself trying to sort out the emotions she is bringing up from deep inside of me. She is unlike any One Queen of the past. It was getting to know her that turned her into a queen, not the appearance of what I thought she might be. And yet like all One Queens she was emotionally unavailable, at times distant, locked in a battle with her own mythology and her own life's miracles and disappointments. I continued to write her occasional letters, including one where I wrote in terrible seriousness about how I felt about her and how I did not want to be another weight in her life. She would say nothing, but continued to seek me out, acting like a giggling schoolgirl when she encountered me, and the dance went on.
I then looked around and saw the pattern. I identified the Two Queen in my midst and the Three Queen as well. I defused the Two Queen situation and then asked the Three to promise to pick me up when I fell and to remind me of who I was. At first she thought I was crazy, but now she understands, as I expected she would as her name is a bizarre misspelling of Tina.
I have regenerated. From 1994-1999 I was known as Magick. From 1999-2007 I was The Dead Guy. From 2007-2011 I was The Monk. And now I am The Doctor, reassigned by the angels of Rancho Nuevo, no longer the Patron Saint of Waitresses and Female Bartenders, but instead the Patron Saint of Cute Nurses. I think Tina would smile at that. Somehow I got her through nursing school, gave her faith, and helped her to overcome her fear of death.
I am restored. The path has returned. This time I will surely screw it up again. And that's okay.