“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
– Soren Kierkegaard
On my way through the bathroom I notice myself in the orange string lights that dangle down from the vanity. I see the bruise-y bags under my eyes. Even though it’s only a little after 5 in the morning, I look beat up, like some old time Serbian street fighter way past his prime.
A stroll down the predawn city street. A small bun and a little cup of strong coffee. Three cigarettes before I even cross the bridge on my way to work. Horse hooves clacking on cobblestones the way things were meant to sound. A couple black eyes on the man drifting through shadows. Two ashy black lungs waistcoating his heart.
How many times have I awoken to the smell of foreign scents? How many people have seen my silhouette shadowed on high alley walls? How can I tell if I have lived before this, wrapped in other in skins, hung off other bones?
There is a sense of other things.
Unseen lights in foreign windows that I have passed under before. Nicotine in the cracks of my teeth. The warm thick liquor of pigs blood from a solid glass; runaway droplets on my chin. Immense heavings of grief smash up inside of me/ plaster the wall/ as I hit the landing outside the kids’ bedrooms and turn to take the stairs in the dark. I sense my trivial presence being swallowed whole by infinity. As I descend the steps down into the Christmas lights I hang for vibe, it occurs to me that someone driving up Penn Street right now might catch a glimpse of me floating across my front door glass.
And what do they see?
Is it really the same person I see in the mirror?
Or is it someone else entirely?
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. There are no cars on the road. Just a milk truck that rumbles by on its way to some farm out there in the dark. The driver is probably listening to music, looking at his phone, rambling through this torn-open night in the fleeting moments before another day comes barreling up over the ridge line.
I open the front door, step out into the cold in my boxers. I gasp from the shock. The boards under my feet are ragged with chipped paint, the wood is worn and needs fixing. I take my Suit Made of Stranded Moonlight off the rusted nail tapped into one of the posts. I slip it on as the stars watch me from light years away. The dogs are behind me in the house now, scratching at the paint on the metal door, trying to figure out what I’m doing out there, why they can’t be part of it.
I reach up and take a bag from under my eye. I hold it up, flat in my hand, aim it at the sky. It flutters off, a Wintering Moth, wings decorated with tiny skulls inside snowflakes. I snicker as it heads starward.
It shits a speck of moth shit in the streetlight glow.
When that shit dot hits the ground the entire planet explodes and is gone forever.
All hope is lost.
What is the purpose of any of this? Why write weekly about my own life and times when I’m neither famous or infamous or even relatively well known as far as those things go? What sense does it make for a grown man to commemorate his own existence when little of note sets him apart from the next person down the line?
In a way, I suppose the key questions that ought to be aimed at me (for writing this) and you (for reading it) is this one.
Lined up end to end, what story was I even telling?
And why?
Is creative non-fiction from a half-decent writer with no published books even a thing? And if it is, well, then what the hell is it?
Is it a blog?
Is it a memoir?
Is it something in between the two, but bashed in the head by all of the loose parameters for art that the internet has allowed us (even if we never asked for them)?
What was I thinking when I started writing the first piece?
I was high on coffee. I was a little hungover even though it was a Tuesday. I was tired but giddy, if I remember correctly. The act of writing itself was hot dope cooking in my blood. I needed to put myself into a great tale before I died or all hope was lost. My dreams, my desires, my endless blues, and my penchant for looking at the world directly around me and in front of my face as the setting for something extraordinary. I set out upon this road, I do believe, with the purest intention, albeit slightly selfish by nature. If I could write honestly about myself, I would have done more in a lifetime than most ever would.
This I believed then. And believe now.
If I could create a long running work in which a seemingly common man accomplishes very little in the way of success by modern society’s standards: and yet: leaves behind a long and detailed account of middle age coming and going/ heartsong sung/ a sense of finding some kind of sublime glory down in the disappearing mud prints of a modern peasant’s wanderings/ then perhaps/ just perhaps/ I would be able to achieve some kind of exalted everyman acclaim across years and years of writing, almost entirely undiscovered, under a radar that shot its tracking signal so far above my daily head that even a thousand years of me standing on my piled-up pages wouldn’t have brought me within a country mile of the sweeping searchers.
A small man’s voice in the vast endless wilderness.
This is what Thunder Pie was supposed to be about.
And this is what I still think it is.
My heart lives behind hoodies and T-shirts. None of them fit right. Sometimes I tuck my knees up in the shirt and stretch with all I’ve got so that I can widen the space inside of the cloth. It is magical thinking, I’ve come to realize. It is the equivalent to opening and re-opening the refrigerator with the somewhat inexplicable belief that upon the sixth opening, or perhaps upon the eleventh, that there will suddenly be something wonderful in the place where, up until now, there was nothing at all.
Open. Nothing. Close.
An hour later.
Open. Nothing. Close.
Ten minutes later.
Open. Nothing. Close.
On and on and on until.
Open.
A plate of divine mezeh is staring back at you from the previously empty shelf. Olives, stuffed grape leaves, little feta apartment blocks/ the whole thing looks like a city from above. A Greek coast and you’re a seagull. Miracle of miracles. Tiny glasses of white wine tucked in amongst the small plates of calamari. The anchovies. I don’t know. The fresh lamb chop just laying there like the devil’s dick. Flopped on white pristine. Everything seems unbelievable because it is all the sudden.
Then what?
I look at myself in the mirror and the neck of the shirt is all fucked up now. I stretched it out so it’s all white trashy and sags. I pull it from my chest, try to free some of my flesh from inside of my clothes/ let it float up away from my bones/ watch it rise up off of me like steam from sweat after shoveling snow on a winter day.
I want so badly to be someone other than myself sometimes. A lot of times. And I guess I ought to write that down. So I do.
Then I open the fridge and I see myself sitting there/ tucked in there like a goddamn dead body. Except I’m fine. I’m having a good time. I’m back there in the fridge eating a cop car made out of feta and I’m dragging pita chips through hummus with my Godzilla hands and I feel so alive just watching me there, seeing me doing that in the middle of a regular stupid day. It’s beautiful.
There was nothing in the fridge a half hour ago.
Then I saw things differently.
And now this, I guess.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
