as love crowns you he crucifies you

For the past year I've been building a sort of mythology based off of my interactions with the opposite sex.

It was brutal time, and it both dragged me down into the depths of a painful depth, and raised me back up into heavenly perfection.

(this is where everyone rolls their eyes, i know.)

This entire time, a sort of fantasy figure sort of grew from it.

I wrote a little bit about her (and her, and her. Maybe a little about this one other chick...), inspired by a woman I got to know. But I was kinda projecting at the same time I was trying to be objective.

Somewhere I felt I needed to separate who I felt about everything by imagining someone else doing it.

This woman started building itself inside of my head. Starting off as a phantom, and slowly gaining flesh and momentum as I dove deeper into despair and pain.

At some point I once said to someone "I think my feminine side is a bitter rape victim". It wasn't really a complete thought, mind you, but it was a concept I started to roll around in my head.

I started balling up all of the misery I was choking down from both my own experiences, and some of the experiences of my friends, and extruding it into some sort of objective character.

At the same time I was looking for god, she was the razor blade on the communion plate.

I guess at the end of it all, I gave birth to this sort of myth. She was both a reward and a curse. It felt like she would punish me for my trespasses... which would absolve me of all of my crimes.

Then recently I started to think about it objectively. Maybe this woman wasn't the embodiment of just my crimes. Maybe she was the embodiment of all crimes of men against women. At some point I was more interested in seeing what I could do with this character then really trying to figure out my own drama. Or I just gave up on trying to figure things out. That happens as well.

Images started to come to my head, snippets of lines. Finally I started to see a sort of tone and style that fit in well with this character I've had in my head for years. I figured I finally had something to work with. I wanted to character to have depth.

This reminded me a little of my story I wrote a long time ago about a high rise building built on the soil of a woman who was raped and killed.

(This was the fourth story that wasn't included in my first graphic novel. I really need to get into that story some time. I don't think ANY of my current friends remember any of this. At this point my memory about the whole experience has caused me to block most of it out. Was it a dream? Am I dead? wait... nevermind.)

At this point I think I've really taken myself out of this entirely.

The rest is just lots of hyperbole that might also make for really interesting copy.

So this Dead Alexis, who was borne of a sense of agony, she was also some sort of twisted myth of perfect justice. Also a woman who not only embodied the spirit of frontier justice, but was able to just flat out overlook the concept of justice, laugh at it, and just drill down for some serious judgement.

She felt like she was the avatar of the sort of feeling you get in your head about imaginary crimes, about vigilantism. I felt like she started becoming some sort of attempt at saying "I'm sorry". But this was one guy, saying this to a hundred generations of misogynist (and misanthropist) bullshit.

Is it ever going to be enough? Can one guy really apologize for the generations of serious love crimes handed down through so many generations?

How brutal can justice get before it becomes a crime in itself?

And this is how this woman was born...

"...this is the burning hot drowning pool of vengeance vomits up a heretic avatar of anger and vengeance.

Sometimes apologies are not enough, and sometimes forgiveness is not enough.

Sometimes you need to accept the fact that this avenging angel is not about being fair, or being just, or being right.

Sometimes we need to know that for every criminal trespass we create... someone is going to come back around and show us we're not only doing it wrong, but we're a bunch of weepy children playing an empty stupid game.

Somewhere in the pit of this horrible desire of justice pushed up against a few decades of thoughtless hate, something horrific is going to come back up, and it's going to show us something.

It's going to show us that we're pure amateurs. We're going to be blown out of the water and out of our skulls. We'll be taught about right and wrong and vengeance and justice so hard we will be destroyed in the process.

You will not only be killed. You will be destroyed. And you will not only pay for your crimes, but you will pay for the crimes of your fathers and the fathers before you. It will not be fair, but life is never fair.

You will know how unfair life is, once justice wraps her perfectly manicured nails around your cowardly little throat.

Dead Alexis. She comes for you. And you cannot escape. Her vengeance is just, no matter how innocent you are.

Dead Alexis. Angel of Vengeance. Thrown from heaven because she wasn't listen to God when he told her "enough". She is not just justice. She is not just vengeance. She is the brutal fist of a God that will smote an entire world just to give justice to a slight betrayal.

She is punishment. She is NOT justice."

...and I'm back where I'm supposed to be.

I'm walking barefoot along the straight yellow line of a hot black highway, a thick angry black line cleaving straight down the heart of a brutal and pained desert.

Surrounded by a legion of dry and bitter dust. Sharp and deadly mountains on every horizon. The barest of life struggling and failing under a heavy bright sun.

I walk, barefoot, the soles of my feet scorching and burning. I'm leaving foot prints. They're not just impressions in a soft asphalt... they're thin layers of skin. Left behind and forgotten as I'm walking this straight and stupid line.

I breathe in, heavy and hot into my lungs. Flesh burns, a slight sent of the weak and feeble bushes and trees as they die under a blinding white light. The sort of light that bleaches out everything to the colour of forgotten and scavenger-ravaged bones.

"Everything around me is dead", i whisper. I pray. I command.

My heart turns cruel, dark, dead.

My soul and heart screams. I am only a man. I can only do so much. And all I can do right now is echo the world around me.

...

I walk, I walk, I walk.

...

I feel it before I hear it. I hear it before I see it. Prime American muscle car. A big block. Wide wheels and a thick and angry grill. Black, chrome. A tarpit coloured cape, stiffened by a foul wind.

She passes me, this car. The grim reaper has 4 thick and street slick tires. She swerves past me, just barely touching me. No, I touched her. Her rear view mirrors lightly and gently grazed my hand as she went by. A sharp glint of chrome stabs me straight between the eyes as she flies past.

She slides to a stop, sideways, straight and black and evil in front of me.

For the first time in a hundred years, I stop walking. I stand still. Feeling my charbroiled flesh sink slightly into the road.

She sits. Angry. Seething. Motor revving, thrumming and thumping.

The engine dies.

Silence fills our universe. I can hear the ticking of her engine cooling down.

The driver's door swings open. She steps out.
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