And so...to sit in the glow of candlelight and write my story. The candles seem appropriate as I watch their light bounce mischievously upon the cave walls, casting shadows that move, that dart about as though escaping their very origin. For candlelight casts a light that is not day, and yet it is not night, but rather somewhere in between. And perhaps that metaphor as a description of myself is fitting and becoming, for I am neither living nor dead, but somewhere in between.
I exist.

A proper introduction includes a name, and my name is Mina. My father named me not creatively, but because it was a popular name just before the turn of the 20th century. I was born in Fort Mill, South Carolina in a house my father built for my mother. My cave, my home, is in walking proximity to my childhood house but I, for reasons that will be made clear, have let the house become overrun with weeds, with ghosts of the past. I have let it rot, its wood beams sag, its doors creak in an attempt to let it die. But still it doesn't die. It is a house that survives the Carolina hurricanes, a house that survives local teenagers who love to 'party' in abandoned buildings, (and before they leave find out that I too like to party, and am glad that they have brought hors d'oeuvres in the form of themselves and their ripe, alcohol and dope-filled veins), a house that survives the howling winds of Carolina winter and the hungry termites of the Carolina summer.

It is the house in which my father murdered my mother. And the house lives on, though they do not. It is a simple story: my father got drunk as some fathers will when things are not going their way and they don't know any better. He was a loan officer for one of the first banks in the city, a grand two-story complex on the corner of a gravel crossroads called Tryon and Trade.

One night, in a rage against the world at a money-making scheme gone bad in downtown Charlotte, he turned around too hurriedly, waving his bottle of imported whiskey in a frenzy of ranting. The bottle flew from his hand and into my mother's head. My mother was a ravishing woman, who my father had courted because he had loved her so deeply. Because she was perfect whether it be in our living room reading the Bible or hosting a cocktail party for his boss. My mother who wanted only the simplest of things - a happy husband, a happy child, and a happy life - fell against the stone hearth, her dress igniting in the cozy parlor fire that had been warming us. In shrieks of pain and the fetter of cooking flesh, she ran from the house incinerating in the wooded front yard as my father stood there, drunk, with an expression more of cruel curiosity than of any real concern. For the drink had taken him over, he was momentarily unaware of the tragic reality of that moment.

I was four, and my hands were too small to stamp out the flames. The scars are gone now. Time does such things.

By the time I was sixteen my father no longer had his job at the bank. He had become more or less a vagrant...and even using that word gives him a shading of grace that is not befitting of him. There were still more money-making schemes gone bad, just not at the same elevated level as the banking had allowed. I recall the day while I was quietly doing our dinner dishes and tip-toeing around him as I always did, while he complained about our poverty. He'd been downing moonshine bartered from a bearded man who lived even deeper in the woods than we did. He looked at me, a word on his lips that found no way to be spoken, and then getting up from his chair, he left.

So my days of tip-toeing around him ended, and my nights of tip-toeing after him began. Perhaps out of a sense of obligation I tried to make sure he was safe during his nights of bingeing, after all, he was my father. I would often find him intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness and being tired myself we often slept behind the buildings of the uptown. He, passed out drunk and me, shivering on an October night. I don't feel cold anymore, or hot, I just am.

I remember the night when the stranger approached us.
A refined man, impeccably dressed. He hovered over us, studying me. It was unseasonably cold and a breeze eased its way through my body leaving me numbed.

"Please don't awaken my father," I said to him. I feared this gentleman, I must confess. My father in a torpor and me - small me - absolutely defenseless.

His voice, a gentle rumble, "What is a defenseless young woman such as yourself doing out in an evening as chilly as this?" Almost conversational.

"Shhhh, please don't wake my father. He needs to sleep."

He squatted down before me, his elbows resting on his knees, my attention caught by his cuff-links, each one, two twisting pieces of silver - snakelike - ending with a diamond stud.

"Where did you get those? They are so lovely" I said timidly to him.

"New Orleans," he said.
"Come with me, let me get you something warm to drink."

"No, I mustn't, if he wakes up and I'm not here..." I faded off.

And I will forever associate the sound of blood filtering into a mouth with freedom. His name is not important, for it too may as well be freedom. Within a week I was sailing with him to London.

I was no longer Mina the down-hearted, I was just Mina. For my blood distilling into his mouth, and then his blood into mine, made me who I am today. He gave me the night, gave me a life on the edge of death, and death on the edge life. In 1939 a woman on a screen raised her fist to the sky and said, "Tomorrow is another day." She is only half-right, tomorrow is also another night. And the night is my time.

The candles burn, marking time, marking this night.
And as I aged, the man, my savior, left me. But I was ready to be left and abandoned. I traveled alone or with companions who I found and then made. Those I found worthy of the gift of timelessness, of sight, of a tenure between life and death, the skipped heartbeat, I gave it to them in return for companionship.

And soon, after having been around the world and played many parts, contained many identities, lived a thousand lives in one endless life, I came back to my childhood home, this Carolina land, to live. But still, a childhood nightmare returns even as I am supposed to be a dying lady in a rocking chair and yet still walk and see as a twenty six year-old.

The house is no good. And the cave beckoned, and to me the cave is better. The cave works dark miracles. And so the house sits as I wait for it to die knowing that I won't.

But this: the act of that man giving me this living death, this resolving dissolution, is nothing less than love.

And for me, if you are worthy, to give it to you would be the same.

For what is the difference between death and love? Do they not both speak of the eternal?

Walk through my forest, walk through my childhood home,
know me, love me,
Come and die for me,
MINA