the Burning Bush

I remember it all so well.

He takes my face in his hands and stares into my eyes. I become self-conscious and I begin to envision what he is looking at but in that moment I cannot even remember my own eye color. I cannot imagine what he sees, I am so lost in his gaze. This is love at its purest: not romantic, not sweet; desperate and pathetic and inexcusable. His eyes are an incredibly fresh, intoxicating green, as brilliantly green as a young blade of grass in the sun. They radiate light from within; the light of his soul is greater than any light he could ever take in, and so I drink and I drink of the fountain of his youth long after my stream he has drank dry. I think: he gives so much, he must open himself for even more, his longing must be unquenchable. I shutter at the deep, communal sadness I see in his sight. I study the lines of black and white emanating from the pupil; they are dancing and swirling, a soft spring stream pooling, flowing about an island of infinitely dense blackness that holds the entire emptiness of the universe; in his eyes I find the black hole that created the Big Bang that created Earth from whose bosom sprung man who created God in an effort to explain one's infinite love of oneself.

I wonder if it is the drugs or the pure life of we together there then, or both. I am so lost I cannot remember where I began. I cannot remember who I am: Ari Karmichael, Mitch the Cat, or sad and simple Leo. I don't care.

My face is cradled in his soft hands. He is shorter than I, so I look down. It's like being held by Mother Teresa, or by Ghandi, or by God. I want to melt into his unabashed, unrestricted, careless love. He begins caressing my temples with his forefingers. I wonder if it is the drugs. I wonder if I am imagining all this. I wonder if any of this is real, if I am real. I hope not.

I haven't noticed the tears yet, but I do when he says:

"Don't you want to escape? Isn't that what we all want? Can I give that to you?"

Who says God doesn't cry? I would, if I were Him: so much power, but unable to utilize it due to His own inherent goodness. Unable or unwilling? I wonder nowadays. Silly me, I believe that Mitch the Cat is good for the sake of being good. Silly, simple Leo. Mitch the Cat has no choice really, for it is a simple and terrible one: suffer or wither; make love to Death or cower from Life.

I say yes just to please Him, just so He doesn't pull away, just so He will love me for another eternal moment. Yes! I cry aloud, You can save me, I love You! I don't know if it is what I think, I cannot risk the time to think.

"Think! Think, damn you!" He is whispering but it sounds like a bellow; into my heart it penetrates like the avalanche-summoning, deity-humbling, zealot-breeding Command. The Word: he speaks it.

"With almost everyone else that anticipating will work," he whispers urgently and I imagine him as Moses, with a scruffy brown beard and stained pits and smelling of scorched skin, with madness in his eyes and conviction in his heart, stumbling about and chattering at the burning bush and thinking he is hearing the voice of God in the silence of the universe.

He says: "You will gain appreciation and approval and acceptance and devotion (but not love) by agreeing with people and anticipating what they want. Not with me. You don't know what I want, you never will, and I don't care if you did. I don't care if people love me or hate me, crucify me or sanctify me. I love myself enough that I don't need any more love. All I want..."

He doesn't know then. He thinks that he wants to suffer, for so it seems. But it is a deeper part of him, an aspect of his being wise beyond comprehension, knowing that he wants release from his suffering, and the only way to be freed is to embrace it unreservedly.

Taking on my suffering, everyone's suffering, is better than seeing the almighty weight of it in our eyes. Poor thing, he cannot help himself.

About him not caring if I loved him: I wonder if that is true. The spell had faded at some stage: I remember who I am. I am not him. Ari Karmichael, who calls himself Mitch the Cat, was and is and ever shall be gloriously, divinely mad. I am not.

Mitch the Cat is pure and free in his own mind and his own insane world. Poor Leo here is trapped in the sad world of fear and distrust and empathy and pity. The real world where everybody tries to secretly please everybody else because they believe they need to be needed.

Mitch the Cat transcends all this.

We are on Mont Royal, and it is bitingly cold. I look around. My breath comes out boiling and fierce. I watch the night kill it heartlessly and swiftly.

Mitch the Cat is squatted in the snow, rocking.

He says: "What is all of this doing to us? All this unrest and sadness and yearning for escape and all this unappreciative forgetful dissatisfaction? All this lack of integrity and faith? Is this our test?" He is sobbing. "Is this our Great Depression? Is this our Apocalypse? Is this the end of the world? Is this the descent into the hell of distraction? Is this the Reckoning? The Rapture? Is this the great fucking sleep? The global mental hibernation? Is this the calm before the storm? Is this the dark before the dawn? Is this the end of humanity or the end of the beginning before something... something great? Must we pass through hell to get to heaven? Is this the great escape? Is there anywhere to escape to?"

I have no answer. Even now, after everything that has happened, I don't.

We stand and squat in the dark snow for some time. I feel myself create life in my body and I watch the cold world kill it softly and mercilessly. Mitch thinks about the fate of the world in the hum of a city's silence.

He doesn't speak again for three days.

We go to class together. He goes through the motions of life, but he isn't living, he isn't there or here or anywhere really.

At that time, I don't know why I stay with him, because he makes me feel so abominably sad and unredeemable. I know now, if you care: it's because I love him. Just like everybody else he has ever met. Through the long years, I don't know why he tolerates my company. I assume he loves me, but I don't assume that anymore since I know it to be a bitter and poisoned truth. Mitch the Cat loves me simply because he loves everything, he can't help it. I am nothing special to him. And if I am nothing special to him, I am nothing special to Him, and I am nothing special to myself either.

I have always hated how much I love him and his ethereal, uncompromising love; how much I wish for his life and he doesn't even care for it. It's not a lack of appreciation so much as boredom. His life doesn't fulfill his addictive need, so he finds sadness and he creates his own suffering.

"We're all addicts," he tells me after the third day. "It's easier to be addicted to something that you understand, something you know will kill.