Ghost Waterfalls

I realized something quite strange about myself and arose from my bed to write this just now. It is 0533 EST on March 22, 2025. I realized I often hear ghost rain that isn’t there – and I get very sad at the same time. It’s a form of auditory hallucination, I believe, that is tied with my own particular type of trauma which is tied to my own symptoms of cPTSD.

The rain sounds are not the rain sounds you would typically hear when it’s raining outside, on your storm shutters, per se. Auditorily they’re the kind that you would only hear when your head is actually right next to the ground.

And I am fighting back tears about this as I speak because these unnerving ghost waterfalls is the reason I am so hopelessly despondent about the state of the world and so angry about what I see happening personally, geopolitically, and meta culturally.

These are the sounds I heard during one of the most darkest periods of my life and in the harshest conditions I found myself in my adult life – attempting to keep myself warm to the best of my ability during an unseasonably cold and wet period – shivering curled up in a ball in a ragged, leaky, makeshift tent basically scotch-taped together in a rush – by myself, for days – outside a Whole Foods in Venice, California about 5 years ago.

In 1989 my immediate family, in the middle of the night, had gathered what my mother had prepared for us, and silently headed down stairs. I was 10 years old. We were in a rush that I had never experienced up until that point in my life. The night before I had looked for the last time at the eyes of my best friend in the world, looking down at me while I up at him, tears streaming through my eyes uncontrollably – same just as I write this (even though I’m “supposed to be a man” now) while walking through the snow in the very last harsh winter I would spend in Lithuania for the rest of my life. It was the week before Christmas.

The teacher had kicked me out of the 4th story rehearsal for a Christmas play because I hadn’t actually signed up for a role to play – I knew it was pointless to – even though I wanted to be an actor when the standard question was asked of me 5 years prior (I was supposed to answer something like “cosmonaut”, “farmer”, or “prime deputy of the socialist party at the local republic branch” – forgive me I don’t know what the Russian translation is since we were still under Soviet Occupation). All I wanted to do was to prolong the last few moments watching my best friend who was in the rehearsal play his role…

– – –

This is short cuz that’s all I can bear right now, just woke up in the middle of the night to put pen to paper – or more like clickity clack on this keyboard to write my thoughts about my experiences and how they interwine in and out of the story of my life. I think it’s important to record your own history the best you can, for future generations. This will probably be strung together in a book someday. I’d like to think I’ll have more time to write in the future. There’s far more context and details about the complexities of my experiences to share – I have done that peace-meal in the microblogging world, mostly on Twitter since 2009 – but I hope for all of us, we can sooner rather than later have the time for repose and reflection – collectively and individually – so we can make sense of what’s happening in the world and how to move together to not repeat the mistakes of our past and our ancestors, going all the way back to the ancient times.

Thank you for reading.