Vol. 1 / Issue 1
A literary and cultural review journal
Vol. 3 / Issue 1 June, 2026
The Far Loving Wanderer
A lonely wanderer down and out in Los Angeles runs from the desert to the sea. The lonely wanderer finds herself a home in Venice Beach, old Jim Morrison town.
Love is rekindled easily.
In the midnight hour the canals glow. In the midnight hour the workers sleep. In the midnight hour the madness burns. While in the forever moonlight the sea gently comes to and fro, wading and weeping, bringing a harmony to all the mad happenings in this strange land of wandering souls.
A soul is lost, but it can be found in heaven and sea, sitting in between light and dark, forever lost and alone, yet there is always the chance and grace of being born to see the beautiful colors permeate and swirl through the air—alive you are there to see and feel, even withstanding how hard it is to bear at times.
The sky is blue and everyone at times is blue. One must save what one can of one’s life. The people must burn to the chime of the midnight lamp, on and on until there is no more light to be seen in the world, and no more matches to burn.
One great pink cloud floats on forever and more.
The wandering girl is alone in the present spirit of the times, but she feels her heart ache with olden times. She has been sick with a dark and all-consuming disease for over a year. During this time, she has almost wholly been confined to white rooms and egotistical doctors, who know nothing of her, and know nothing of empathy—who would rather offer an unfounded cure than take the time to find a true diagnosis—egoism running rampant in these circles, with the admission of being wrong a sin. It’s a horrible time to be born in a blue world that is full of bright white hospital lights—the true sun no longer illuminating you—these great artificial lights of the human world wanting to tell you that the environment is sterile and lifeless, and that everyone is fearful of anything new to happen or chance itself upon the world. Well, it is the time of another plague, but an endless coming plague of sterility and sadness.
A dark confusion is drunken and cold—and almost unsolvable in family matters and lives. Unforgiving, but the wandering girl always forgives, no matter how dark it is.
Her home in the valley is dry and sorrowful. It comes from the history of a secret life and drunken families, and brings the cold and unpleasant rituals of a good girl’s life, which torments the kind of girl who can feel the history of the air is no good, which is her merely assumed perception of what is there—dissipating into the feeling of what shouldn’t be there, but the heart of the girl is sharp in feeling.
To a tainted home and a tainted past she is born. She deeply wants to know the true beautiful light of darkness and nothing else—illuminating her mind forever. Perhaps, it is a distraction from other distant and unquiet things. She wants the evil to shine a light on her door one day and open everything up to blissful happenings and chance—and to have love pour out the door in the form of the darkest human happenings and misgivings, which is too much for most to bear and witness, but she doesn’t care, as she sees the light in all the darkness.
The darkness for her is shrouded in golden angel wings, existing in a field of sunflowers. The land of the angel flutters over roses and gold, and beyond it bluebirds are singing for care and hope. A tireless parade toward the light of truth in the darkness of the heart, mind, and soul.
The trinity: a darkness between the heart, mind, and soul must hold a light somewhere for one to find.
A philosophy founded upon love, care, and grace gives way to Jesus wanting to understand what he does not know, but that he knows somewhere it is to be the greatest and deepest expression of human care, prayer, and grace that is exhibited by the essence of people on this precious and terrible earth.
A loveless air and timeless feeling.
We care not for love, but we care for fun!
An understanding near to the heart.
The seekers of the dark heart and mind will find things the rest of us will never know, as they will live on another plane of awareness and have an insane capacity for seeking out the unknown and unfortunate.
Another similar mind of the matter is where there are no jacks of hearts and old hands of kings. It is to understand that humans are looking to worship more kings so there is no need to find the jack of hearts, unfortunately so, but that’s the way history goes.
The palm trees tell you anything is possible.
She is looking for the mind-matter of the purest of hearts existing within the universe. She believes in a world of light beyond the darkness.
The wandering girl comes to Venice Beach to escape the aridness of the valley. She is there to find contemplation in the cool beach air surrounded by a dark and loving history, and there to find a love for the people of the night who are shrouded in darkness, but who have an essence of life that is much more than their societally perceived darkness.
The girl is struggling to know what is real and unreal in herself, and thereby looks to transfigure herself to know and understand another way of being born and living in a desolate world.
She seeks to understand darkness and transfigure it into love and beauty.
The wanderer leaves everything behind. She gives up her possessions and money to wholly belong to her new way of life. A careless love takes her away from the bright white hospital rooms, from rooms of doctors who told her she’d soon die, and into the light of life where the sun shines beyond the night all year long. Here, she’ll be happy and free to grasp at chances, but with it will come the risk of terror and terrible things, well enough worries; she’s all right with it and made her danse macabre this special place—giving life one last chance to burn brightly. To spoil this chance would not come from her or from the world of Venice Beach, as that is the decision she has made, but what would truly spoil her would come from afar.
A backwards love fuels pride and insanity.
The wandering girl spends her time talking to all the peoples of Venice Beach. She talks to figures who played for the Grateful Dead, who sang at The Whisky a Go Go, from the east coast high on drugs and shame after long standing family disputes, and those who committed much more heinous acts that have little to do with drugs. She seeks to understand the way their hearts took them to the choices they made, so she asks psychologically revealing questions while showing a great deal of empathy and boldness, and essentially playing the transient role of the town psychoanalyst for the downtrodden of society in this place. This is for those who’ve come from far and lost everything—those who’ve come from close and stayed near to everything—and those who are mad and know nothing about anything at all.
The people are from everywhere and nowhere they say.
There are drugs everywhere. The many peyote and acid heads crowd the streets at night and day, but you have to know what you’re looking for, as you’re not just looking for a hippie, but someone with a much deeper heart and soul that comes from a deep place of truth.
She plays the charming and enchanting priestess fool to the point of madness, playing and playing, until her old childhood friends from the valley decide to collude with her parents and take her away from this place for the sake of her perceived rich future.
The people stand on pedestals of nonsense.
It all happens very fast, but that is the way of this life. No slowdowns and fuck tomorrows happen—a massacre occurs! and who comes out alive from yesterday?
Well, no one cares about a thing as we all have to continue to move and there’s little room to protest, unless it is extremely close to you—meaning blood, family, and childhood, otherwise all is lost in the pink clouds.
We are constantly coming and going like clouds and birds.
And we despise the nature of being born no less.
The wandering girl has a deep fascination with the birds of this world, most especially the dear finch and black phoebe who parade around the green yards of the valley, and who provided her with the original vision of the great escapist dream.
The path we’re going down is a drag. We look to ridicule those who are bred well enough to keep ignorant to these games at hand, and to play them well like a beggar on the bandstand.
The wandering girl plays in the sand on Venice Beach for a while more, attending drum circles, sex in motel rooms, and more careless adventures of hedonistic acts—heading toward the night of all nights forever and more. She avoids the past she left behind, as she feels this is her last chance at living before she is back to the white rooms where they’ll sterilize her forever and more.
The greatest of fears for her is sickness, not darkness, and that comes with the acceptance of death, but not the acceptance of suffering and stagnation, which is acceptable and understandable.
Is the end of the night ever really the end?
When do you stop your goings and slow down?
You think, where did I go wrong—and what happened to me? I am damned because I am—and because life is set up to be damning.
And what can you do when these existential thoughts of a sick youth come along again—return to the normalcy of your age—dare to try to combine the two lives—or to just live on in the burning midnight lamp of a new life? Well, what becomes of you is a terrible monstrosity in your heart and mind, as you’ve gone too far to turn back, gone too weird as some may say, and soon enough the lights will go out.
One must accept the chaos or become ash and dust.
The problem is no one understands, so you either suffer the stagnation and lack of acceptance of the disease with family, or you run out to try and find the light of strength in yourself in an ephemeral burning season of time. You want to forget, so you can finally move on from the terror of the matter, and sometimes the mind provides you with that kind of care.
The wandering girl forgets the dust and heads to Great Britain to live the life of a wandering folky girl as a new spirit. She wants to live around the mind of a beautiful quiet nature. And there she finds her boy and they rearrange their solitude around the joy of a lemonade love.
She wants to be near to quiet trees and quiet times. The North Sea bellows and quiets your being.
You’re probably wondering how the mad wandering girl got to be in such a lovely place. Well, she listened and read from the singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan. In Vashti she discovered a dream like the phoebe and finch who paraded around the green spaces of the valley. She found the love songs, pink clouds, and the beauty of a girl in a blue winter. She’s ready to be alone to find her heart all over again. To know the child inside of her in a wintry place she’s never known. So she went to Britain to start her life all over, leaving everything of the darkness and madness behind her.
And she is no longer disturbed. It is the coldest night in the year in Scotland. The wandering girl is cold, but she’s happy to be wandering alone in the strange and quiet land. She awaits dawn happily and peacefully, knowing she feels soft and warm here with her sweet poet boy.
The boy and her walk around the countryside from town to town, heading from northern England to northern Scotland. The wind bellows and the northern sea roars onto the cliff sides. A peace comes and the air is quieted with longing and pleasures of the pastures to come ahead of them. She sits in the green and wet space for a while, and comes to find what the little moments in her life mean. She’s there forever and more in the blue winter where all is lovely and cold. She lies under an old tree with her boy and his long black hair. It is a happy place across the pond far away from everything she ever knew.
The white rooms are no more, and the pink clouds remain in her mind forever and more.
She thinks she’ll stay here a while, well long enough until the golden light of California comes calling again, but it’ll all be different then.
The boy loves the red cardinal that stays near to the trickling fountain of a remembered youth.
Frederick Schardt is a writer and poet from North Carolina. He studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His work has appeared in The Closed Eye Open, Blood + Honey, and Maudlin House. You can find more of his work at frederickschardt.com.