By : Simon Sherr – The Gray Jedi
Requiem For Her Soul is the name of Simon’s published music, currently 37 songs available on every streaming platform. A collection of songs written by Simon for his one true love Shona. They are AI Produced, however, every song has original lyrics, melody, and pacing written by Simon inspired by “Word of the Day” – Which is comprised of over 300 love letters sent to Shona over the first year of their relationship (Many occupy this blog), Many of those in moments of fear and doubt. Many of those songs are in linked below. Word of the Day and Requiem For Her Soul – Can never be made un-true, The love is forever etched in history and can not be undone.
My best ideas come to me in a hot tub, a shower, or a dream.
When it happens in a dream I have a routine. Wake up, grab the phone, write as fast as I can before the meat machine finishes booting and erases everything. Sometimes I drift in and out of the idea and keep writing. In the morning when I’m fully awake I can usually piece it together. EA’s ANT engine — the game engine that powers EA Sports titles to this day — came to me exactly like that.
This morning I opened my phone and found:
“I need to write this down because in 20 minutes my soul is being shoved through the consciousness cheeseburger – Hydrochlorothiazide could help with the bonding issue that turns heartbreak into tears”
That’s it. The whole vision.
Now. This afternoon… I discovered I didn’t invent a word in my sleep. Hydrochlorothiazide is a real word. I have never owned it, prescribed it, or googled it in my life. I looked it up while writing this blog as a goof, like “if it was a drug what would it do”. It is a diuretic. A water pill. It makes your body expel excess fluid. I swear on everything that is holy, I have no idea how my brain pulled THAT word out of it.
My subconscious, at 2am, reached into a pharmaceutical cabinet it has never visited and pulled out the one drug on earth prescribed for “too much fluid leaking out of places.”
For my tears.
The vision was a joke. The joke was perfect. The consciousness cheeseburger delivered exactly one thing and it was a water pill for my feelings. It was something that today, would make me laugh. Out loud… The day my mother flies home and I find myself truly alone with the fact that 3 days ago, my soul mate said the words “I want a divorce”.
The Meat Machine’s Guide to Emotional Maintenance
Let’s talk about what’s actually happening when a human being experiences heartbreak, clinically speaking.
The covalent bonds between heartache and saline undergo a spontaneous debonding event. The resulting solution becomes unstable. Pressure builds in the ocular region. The excess fluid requires an exit strategy.
This is, medically, a drainage problem.
The meat machine — that magnificent, irrational, 2000-calorie-a-day biological computer strapped to a skeleton — has decided that the correct response to loss is to leak fluid and make a repeated sound similar to a singing cough. From the face. Repeatedly. Often at 2am. Often when reaching for the only side of a bed that matters, which is now cold and empty.
The medical community, to their credit, has noticed the leaking. Their solution is to make it stop appearing. Anti-psychotics. Mood stabilizers. The clinical equivalent of putting a bucket under a broken pipe and calling it plumbing.
The meat machine stops crying. It also stops most other things. It sits very still. It drools, sometimes. The soul is still in there, screaming into a void it can’t escape, but the body… the body has been converted into a very expensive waiting room. The leaking has stopped (from the eyes, not the corners of the mouth), the noises have stopped, and most importantly, the will to end the pain has stopped even though the pain is all that is left inside. Technically a success from a purely external observational vantage point. Most doctors call this state “stable”.
Hydrochlorothiazide — had my subconscious been in charge of psychiatric pharmacology — would have cut straight to it. Skip the waiting room. Just drain the fluid directly. Treat the symptom with the focused, no-nonsense efficiency of a water pill that prevents leaking in the first place. The agricultural equivalent of stopping a leaking sprinkler by shutting off the entire irrigation system… (which… anecdotally… our lawn guys actually did once, and we needed to re-sod by the time we figured it out)
I respect the audacity of that vision though. I really do. Not because it’s funny, but because it is pretty much a shortcut to what the entire Psycho-Pharmaceutical world thinks is a solution to the human condition of trauma-management. Treat the symptoms. Ignore the soul.
The Cheeseburger
Here is what the consciousness cheeseburger actually is.
Time doesn’t stop moving because you’re heartbroken. The universe is profoundly indifferent to the cold side of your bed. It keeps serving up futures whether you ordered them or not. Moment by moment, the sphere of possibility rotates in front of you and you are required — by the simple fact of being alive — to keep experiencing time. The way we do that is we select the next thing that is real. (We call this “quantum wave collapse” — you can dive into it, if you start to find it fascinating just come back in 40 years and finish the blog when you are done chasing it down the rabbit hole).
Back to the “Next impossible task”… which is also called “Depression” -> Shower. Coffee. Get dressed. Call someone. Try.
These are futures. Small ones. Each one requires you to look at the horizon and believe there is something on the other side worth moving toward.
Depression is not sadness. Sadness is appropriate. Sadness is the soul doing its job.
Depression is what happens when the targeting system goes dark. When every future you try to scan returns the same result: pain. More of it. Different flavor, same aftertaste. The horizon isn’t empty — it’s worse than empty. It’s visible and it’s wrong. Every road leads there.
Shower? Pain.
Coffee? Sitting alone with it.
Call someone? Explain it again.
And then there is one task that doesn’t scan as impossible.
This is the part nobody says out loud, so I will.
When depression reaches its full operating capacity, death starts to look like the only zero-cost path. Not because you want to die. Because you cannot imagine — genuinely cannot construct in your mind — a future that doesn’t hurt. And the meat machine, that relentless biological optimizer, keeps doing the math. Every option costs more than you have. Except one.
It’s not a decision. It’s a targeting system failure.
The cruelty is that it looks like a decision from the outside. It looks like a choice. It looks like something that could be interrupted by the right words, the right medication, the right intervention. Sometimes it can. But what’s actually broken is the part that selects futures. The part that says: yes, that one, walk toward that.
You can’t fix a compass with a bucket.
Hydrochlorothiazide will not help.
What Actually Helps
A glimpse. That’s all.
Not a solution. Not a plan. Not a reason. Just one future, anywhere on the horizon, that doesn’t immediately return pain when you look at it.
I wrote a song about this before I understood the physics of why it was true. The line was:
“A glimpse of happiness at the peak on that horizon, on the other side I just fall down a slope.”
I climb anyway. Broken bones, shattered hope, armor that has seen better days. I climb because I can see something out there. Because the direction exists. Because the horizon has someone on it.
That’s the whole mechanism. The targeting system needs one valid future to lock onto. One. Just enough to restart the engine. One hope. In the song, it’s the Horizon. “How can I catch that Horizon”. The idea itself is impossible. The vision of it is called “hope”. When we say the word “hopelessness” we literally mean, on that Horizon is pain worse than where I am. The slope into the void is the end, there is no more hope.
The meat machine can carry on. It is, whatever else you say about it, remarkably good at carrying on.
It just needs something to carry on toward.
What is New
Hope that shows you a new Horizon, when that hope is “I love one person”… Well that’s not hard if you treat it like a dog that died. “I lost my dog Myron… I am going to go get a new dog”. We do that all the time, we replace the thing on the Horizon.
I used to be amazing at that. When I saw a path end — my ex wife, my ex girlfriend — the love was very real, but every path forward to that horizon they vanished from. Simple… There are a million women on that horizon. Ones who would love me differently, love me more… Shape me into a new and better version of myself. Of course it was easy to look up — especially when you were someone who knew they could pick anyone they wanted and just go get her. So I did. My wife Roni left, I took out the most attractive woman I knew, that night, and kept her for two and a half years.
When she left, I got on Match.com, put deal breaker on every question, matched 3 women. Found the meanest, most badass, most independent, most free-willed one… And chased that horizon.
But here is the problem. THAT ONE, turned out to be my Soul Mate. Something I didn’t even REMOTELY believe in before I spoke to her. I knew something the night before we met in person. She was different. So much so I called her at 2am and told her “I am the Goblin King”… Said I know I have believed if women would “Just love me, worship me, do as I say and I will be your slave”… Knowing that I fool myself into thinking that being a slave IF she worships me, is actually love. I knew it wasn’t, I knew it was a system of control that was so ingrained into who I was it was going to take the power of a goddess to end it.
“I always thought Sarah was dumb for not staying with Jared”… Shona WANTED the Goblin King. (Granted who wouldn’t want Bowie).
So here is what changed. Without her there is no horizon, there is only the void. There is no moving on. There is no “finding the next great love”… She is my last dance… For months I have known one thing -> I would rather sit in the void, in total darkness, in agony, in pain… than see a Horizon with some other person on it. There is no future that doesn’t look like hell, if she isn’t in it. That is new. It’s the most pain I have ever felt. But it proves one thing. I love her like I have never loved anything before. I love her so completely that there is only the void without her. I love her so completely that I would rather BE HERE in the Void, than imagine a future she isn’t in. So the impossible task becomes death, because she definitely won’t be there. Slowly the other impossible tasks become necessary anyway, the will power returns, power enough to know I can bend reality until the infinite mass of my love for her pulls her soul back into orbit.
My will cannot be broken… neither can hers… Unstoppable force, Immovable object. If that is my eternity and I never see a horizon again. So be it. When you only have one road, you can sit… or you can walk… and either way there is only one road.
A Note to My Mom
I promised you a bran muffin.
Here it is. Packed with the unfulfilled dreams of a fruit. Golden raisins. Pretty nutty… Side of humble.
You came when it was bad. You stayed when it got worse. You didn’t fix anything because nothing was broken that could be fixed with fixing. You just sat there, warm, until the targeting system found one future, valid or not, and locked on.
That’s the whole trick. That’s all it ever was.
The consciousness cheeseburger will keep arriving at 2am. Time doesn’t ask permission. The sphere keeps rotating.
There is only one person on my horizon. There has only ever been one, in every life, until I find her again – HER, not “one of her” not “a woman like her”… what her name actually means in the Native-American name she shares with her grandfather… Sho-Na, “The Only One”.
The targeting system isn’t broken — it’s the most precise it has ever been. It locked. It held. It isn’t letting go. It’s not stealing her autonomy or her free will or controlling her, or forcing her… It is just angled to where she will be. Hoping that one day she looks back from the Horizon and sees the Goblin King is still worth opening the door for, and letting him come home.
When you only have one road, you can sit. Or you can walk.
I’m walking.
Pick up the Phone
When the cheeseburger calls — you pick up the phone. You write down the words. You look them up in the morning.
And sometimes it turns out your subconscious invented a diuretic for your feelings because it knew you needed to do something impossible and realize you could. Because if you can do one impossible thing today… there is hope for a miracle waiting for you on a horizon you can’t yet see.
And that’s enough to stand up, even broken, even hurting, and walk the road.
The Gray Jedi
TheGrayJedi 