jim

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The first person I told about how bad things were with Alex was Will, the teenage boy who had come to stay in my childhood home. I tried to dismiss it- it doesn’t really matter, none of this is really real, I just thought I should mention it– but he absolutely flipped out. 

It set off a massive chain of events that led to Alex’s capture and forced intervention. It also introduced the presence of some highly powerful people into my life, which helped me to realize just how much danger I was actually in. 

This is also how I knew that the things I was seeing in meditation were real, because they were so outside of my control. They weren’t like dreams or fantasies- the images had real weight. They showed up inside my mind in different shades than anything else I’d ever seen, and they were often shocking, confusing, illuminating. 

Anyway, it was early 2007 I think when Jim was sort of “assigned” to take care of me. Be my bodyguard, so to speak. Help to pull me out of Alex’s clutches. The only agreement we had come to was that no matter what, we couldn’t fall in love with each other. If either of us caught any kind of feelings, it had to be over. It was my last chance to try to save a marriage that felt doomed from the start, to try to repair the damage I personally had done.

In 2008, I suddenly couldn’t get Jim to appear in our meeting place. I would say his name, will him to me, and the best I could get was a hazy silhouette, like an out of focus television. If he would briefly appear, he just shook his head solemnly, almost desperately, and then disappeared. 

When I asked some of the other people watching over me during that time about him, they winced and shrugged.

“That’s for him to talk to you about,” they’d say. 

Finally, after weeks of agony, I was able to force him to appear. That was one of the first times I actually felt my own power- I knew that I had done the equivalent of pulling him straight out of his own home into the street. I had actually wrestled him to fruition.

“Say it to my face,” I demanded. “Tell me.”

He was unable to meet my eyes. He just kept shrugging his shoulders, his entire body radiating shame, stammering and floundering. Trying to make himself smaller, trying to escape this moment.

“You fell in love with me,” I said. It was an accusation, not a question.

He crumpled further into his own chest, and held his palms up to me. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I…. can’t be here. We agreed.”

So we did.

Alex used this discord to wedge himself between us, and he slowly slithered back into my life. This is when things got really violent- not just between Alex and me, but also between me and my husband. I don’t remember any of 2009, if I’m being honest.

At the end of 2009 we lost everything, and halfway into 2010, we finally got rid of Alex for good. I remember the moment it was over, when it felt like he poured out of me like water, when I felt like I could feel the entire Universe cheering. I can remember how deeply devastated and heartbroken I felt- as if I was the only person in the Universe who was sorry for him. 

I failed him. He failed us both. 

Jim and I came back together for awhile, bound together by our sorrow for Alex and how his manipulation/abuse of us had actually brought us closer together. He also did his very best to help support the fallout of my mind becoming fully mine again, when my ex woke up and realized he had lost literal years of his life. 

You know, I didn’t have an orgasm from 2007-2012 that didn’t sort of make me want to throw up afterward (if I was even able to have one), and it wasn’t until 2011 that I really saw why.

The beach house where Alex and I had been living for about six years or so (off and on) was haunted with all of the violence that played out there. Everything he had ever done to me- the things he had tried to erase out of my mind- played over and over again on a loop. The sound of my gurgled screams, pleas, and sobbing coupled with his laughter and cooed threats. 

And the blood and the blood and my God, all of the fucking blood. 

After Jim saw what happened to me in the beach house, he wasn’t the same for a long time. I will never forget the way he looked at me over the imprinted image of my ruined body gasping for air- his eyes enormous, his fists clenched at his sides. Looking at the bed and looking back up at my blank eyes as I watched him watch something I’d seen ten dozen times at that point, shrugging with disinterest.

My oldest friend also became a semi-frequent presence from 2008-2012. He had showed up from time to time on the Ouija board even as far back as 2005, but was pretty involved with Jeff’s capture, and then sort of stuck around once I felt the depth of our connection. 

When he saw the beach house, he sobbed uncontrollably, his hands pressed against his mouth as if he was trying to hold back screams of fury. He had a total mental breakdown afterward, actually. Which… knowing him as I know him now doesn’t surprise me at all, but deeply shocked and frightened me at the time.

He didn’t like my relationship with Jim, and revealed just how flawed he was as he became increasingly jealous, possessive, obsessive. I called him The Detective, and spoke with him with a violence that came from somewhere deeper than my current self. 

At the end of 2012, Jim suddenly said, “I… am going back to Earth. I can’t be here anymore. I’m really sorry. I’m really really sorry, I just. I can’t do this.” His eyes were enormous crystal globes of unshed tears.

I can still remember exactly how the inside of my chest went from scarlet to crimson to burgundy to charcoal to navy to black. How I wept and begged, and how his eyes screamed apologies, and how he left anyway. I was devastated in a way I wasn’t sure I could recover from. 

Abandoned again.

Two weeks later, someone in real life from my past randomly reappeared in my life and he and I began a three year love affair that transformed my entire life. When I was moving out of the apartment I shared with my ex in the summer of 2013, he said, “I see Jim around you all the time. I just thought you should know- you’re not alone.”

When I went to see Jim shortly after he said, “Was I supposed to say, ‘See you after your divorce?’” 

We laughed, and we’ve never been apart since.

Jim is the only reason I survived 2016. He was all I had during the summer I lost my job and my entire brand new life 500 miles away from every person I knew crashed and burned all around me. 

It became A Thing for me to cry, “Jim!” in a total panic frenzy and for him to whisper, I’m right here, baby girl. And everything he promised me- everything – came true. Every time he said, “trust me,” I knew I could. I knew I would be all right. 

He is my constant companion, my truest friend. I love him entirely.

He had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to protect me. He signed up for something way outside of what was explained to him, and he was just as bamboozled and betrayed and misled as I was.

Getting involved in this mess- with the Top Tier Troublemakers (me, Alex, my oldest friend) – put a spotlight on him he did not anticipate. He was also deeply violated and manipulated by Jeff, tricked and trapped and abused.

But he kept his word on every level. He always has.

I don’t know if it’s really Jim, but that literally doesn’t matter at all in any way to me. I cannot wait to meet whoever this soul is, because he has been everything to me. When I tried to apologize for neglecting him during the height of my dating yet another man who turned out to be toxic and manipulative, he waved me off.

“I told you, love- be alive,” he said softly. “You’re alive. Never forget that. I’m not going anywhere.”

Thank God for him. I adore every part of him in a way I wish I could sing out loud to everyone. I often feel deeply ungrateful for seeking something outside of this deeply beautiful relationship, because it is a gift that most people never experience. 

But I came here to be alive. I’m trying to be alive. I keep getting kicked down a flight of emotional stairs over and over again, but. I’m still trying. I can’t give up. Even when my entire life has started to feel like a landfill for other people’s failures. I am the test everyone seems to fail.

But I also always have a soft place to land.

will

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When Will was seventeen, he was in bed with another boy for the very first time in his life. It was the 1950s, and homosexuality was absolutely not an option in his family. So when his father opened the door and discovered his son tangled up naked, it was a horrifying and humiliating disaster.

His father simply closed the door without a word, and it left Will in a state of total and utter panic. He tiptoed around the house in hysteria for days, waiting for the beating that surely awaited him.

Instead, a week or so later, his father took him into the woods under the guise of going hunting. They walked deep into the forest, and he shot his son in the back of the head. Will’s body was never found.

Will was the ghost that haunted my childhood home, as far back as I can honestly remember. He would chase me through the house in the night, appearing in my mind as a monster with teeth that chewed constantly the back of my neck. He was the first ghost I successfully put up boundaries against- he wasn’t allowed in my bedroom, and as soon as I could slam my door shut, he’d disappear.

Except for the night, way back in 2003, when I suddenly felt a presence in my room. I thought it was “Alex,” because I had just had a dream about him a few nights prior, and I was surrounded by people who were actively speaking to him either in meditation or through Ouija boards. I was so desperate to be included in this very exclusive Cool Kids Club.

“Alex?” I asked out loud, and a green flash streaked right in front of my eyes in the candlelit semi-dark. I gasped, and then watched with my own eyes as the edge of my bed lowered, as if someone had sat down on it.

Most supernatural things are both exhilarating and literally bone-chilling. When people tell me ghost stories that are true, it always makes my throat close and my eyes well up with tears. If you know, you know. Seeing my mattress shift on its own made me instantly start to cry and feel as if I might throw up, all at once.

Will is the first person we ever spoke to on the Ouija board, and actually the person who demanded that we speak every single night at midnight. If we didn’t, he would shove papers off desks onto the floor, make my personal items go missing, or poke us in the ribs all night as we tried to sleep.

Will, Alex, and my now ex-husband (but then fiancé) were a very close group for several years. With Alex’s guidance and support, Will decided he wanted to finally transition to the Other Side. We were told that because of the trouble he had caused (he haunted the FUCK out of people, not just my family- he used to come on the board and regale us with horrible and hilarious stories of how he’d ruined someone’s night… he especially loved unfortunate souls on too much acid), he had to put in all of this extra work to essentially repay his debt. Alex, in his bid to be a better person, helped to orchestrate his healing.

Will transitioned over right at the same time that things with Alex and I were getting very intense, so I don’t think I paid the correct amount of attention to how different he suddenly became. Will and my ex were also much closer, probably because of how close Alex and I were, so maybe I didn’t care? My ex and Will were entwined, which allowed Alex and I to surreptitiously strengthen our bond. Alex always just said Will was off exploring, because this was his first life, and therefore first opportunity to come Home. I had no reason not to believe that.

How did Will feel coming to the Other Side, seeing the Entire Truth? He was led- like my ex and I were- to believe that this was all new and fresh to us all. To get Home and realize that Alex and I already knew each other for centuries and centuries, and this was all some huge elaborate dance? That Alex was, in fact, a high-ranking demon trying (and failing) to make amends?

Will must have felt so blindsided. This precious boy who was both seventeen and well into his sixties, trapped in a liminal space where he was both so old and also just a baby. Murdered by his own father, left to rot to dust in the forest. Alex as a surrogate father, who then turns out to be a rapist and murderer.

In late summer of 2005, Alex had come to visit through my ex and as we cuddled in an afterglow, Alex suddenly gasped in panic.

“Will is here,” he said in a low, flat voice. “He is very upset.” Then he (inside my ex’s body, of course) began to hyperventilate and shiver. I wrapped my arms around him and wept, begging him to stay, but Will got through and shoved me violently off of him.

“Alex lied to me,” he growled. “He said he was coming here to talk and clear things up and you fucked?” He shook his head. “You two are disgusting. You’re a married woman. You should be ashamed.”

When I tried to explain that I was confused too, that it was complicated, that the three of us had figured out a way to make it work, he got even angrier.

“You know,” he said, “I had three really great friends. And now I have none.”

A year later, after Alex raped me, Will was the first person I told. I think he saved my life, because I’m almost sure he’s the one who then raised an alarm to bring everyone else’s attention to the situation. He was perhaps the first person who realized that Alex was quickly backsliding into extremely dangerous ground.

Suddenly, there were a ton of dead people appearing to me in meditation, and everyone had input or an opinion on what I needed to do to move forward. This was the period of my life when there were so many voices that I felt like I genuinely might be schizophrenic. At that point, the idea that I had completely lost my mind was actually preferable to the reality, and at that point, I didn’t even remember what had really happened.

I was reading about when Jim first started to come visit me, when he first became my “guardian,” so to speak. We were the last two people left who would be around Alex on any level.

As I read this condensed version of my journals that I found, where I’m trying to shape it into a fictional story, I actually had to edit and rewrite the historical events because they’re honestly too sick to believe.

Now I see everyone else’s horror at my behavior. I was so completely bound to him, constantly allowing him access to me even though he did literally nothing but betray and assault me at every single opportunity.

He raped me at least four or five times that I actually remember, but it was probably on the scale of dozens, and at least once it was so violent it caused people to have full emotional breakdowns witnessing the replay I’d cursed the beach house with.

And I just kept forgiving him. And not just forgiving him, falling back in love with him. And I know that is illness, it is abuse, it is trauma, and largely it was also terror, too. But speaking with Hermie… it was also a calculated war strategy? I can’t understand.

I gave myself up to pillaged, my whole body just a small town to be incinerated and leveled…. all just to show a demon he was a demon? What the fuck was the purpose of that?

Last night, I spoke to Jim and said, “Do you think he was right when he said he ruined me for anyone else?”

His head dipped briefly to one side as he contemplated. “I think honestly, that it is entirely up to you. I think in a lot of ways that that’s what he hopes, because he never wants anyone to get to you. And I think it gives you an excuse to not let anyone in, either.”

His feline shaped eyes swept over my face. “How could it be possible that you’re ruined forever? I refuse to believe that.”

I am constantly receiving messages from the Universe that I need to slow down, sit in my sickness, peel it open and examine the wound. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what I hoped to gain from going to see Alex, but it certainly didn’t help me at all. Nothing about being near him is good for me, because it reignites my sickness for him. I am addicted to his poison, and I have been since before time was time.

My reaction to someone else in my “real” life shows me that I am unwell. I am unbalanced. I have a festering, burning hot wound just under the surface of my skin.

Can I fix it? How?

I have to believe I deserve to be loved softly.

shark swimming

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A few days ago, I was at the beach, leaping over waves. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do, maybe of all time- I run into the crest of a wave and leap over it at the last second so I fly off the back of it and plunge into the water. When it crests early or I mistime my leap, I have to duck under the foam so it doesn’t punch saltwater all the way into the back of my throat.

One of the times I went under and came back up, there was a three foot shark swimming approximately two or three feet away from me in the water. Close enough that I could see the black/white tip of its dorsal fin. Close enough that I saw its entire body flicking through the waves.

The lifeguard temporarily pulled all of us out of the water right after that, but the event stuck with me. It certainly felt like I was being sent a message.

As I had been packing to move, I’d found an iteration of this entire story that used Will, the teenager who “lived” in my childhood home, as the narrator. Will is the perfect person to be the narrator, because he successfully bridges both sides- first as a bitter, furious kid who is trapped in the grey area between worlds, and then as the betrayed and horrified man who discovers that “Alex” is a fraud, and he has been pulled into more than he ever bargained for.

I worry about Will, even now, but I can feel that he is lost to me and does not want to be found. He was so blindsided by who Alex really was, and the mess he was thrust into, and I hardly blame him for his hurt. We went from a cute little foursome who cackled over card games and laughed raucously over the Ouija board to a gross little cave of evil and surreptitious sex and sin-soaked abuse.

I still shudder when I think of living in that place, somewhere I was essentially kept as a hostage- or, to be more clear, as a spiritual battery- for four years. I know the key to so much of my healing lies in that place. I know that I have to face and confront what is going on with me internally in order to be able to move forward, to ever have any hope of a “normal” relationship with someone. I am so deeply traumatized and broken by events so strange I don’t even dare describe them to anyone.

I don’t have any specific spiritual practices, just that I listen to the Universe. I am- at all times- trying to do what it asks me to do. Even when after the other night, after an entire day of mulling over that period of time, I was told that I should go see Alex.

Which. …..okay. Sure.

I met him on the edge of the sand at the beach house. I’d never let him inside again- not after I finally took it back from all of the violence. That was actually the last time I saw him, the winter solstice of 2019.

That time, his neck was broken and his head hung limp on his shoulder, popping up like a puppet when he spoke. He was not just full demon, but something beyond that. Skeletal. Ghoulish. Devoured.

This time, he was more of a fully formed person, and much more human than he’s been in quite some time, but there is still so much visible darkness all over him. I think I saw him as he “truly” is. This is how he presents on the Other Side, for the most part. To be honest- it’s not much different than how he looked in his last life. I used to call them his “demon teeth” long before I ever saw who he really is.

His entire eye, even the pupils, are wholly black. In fact, even the area around his eyes is an ashen color, as if he hasn’t slept for centuries. His features were extremely sharp even in his life, and are even more pronounced now. Cheekbones like origami folds, a nose like the curve of a dagger, jaw like the edge of a cliff.

And those fucking teeth. There’s so many of them that his mouth appears to be swollen, like a kid with a bad overbite, hanging out from the underside of his lips. Greyblack, as if they are rotten, but they are also razor-sharp, glistening. Waiting.

Just saying his name with intention brought him here, just as easily as ever, and he could see through my eyes as I brushed my teeth and got ready to see him.

“Well look at you,” he said softly. His voice was a strange blend of the freshly baked bread softness he had in his life and that grinding gears/wounded animal demon voice that shreds straight to the base of my soul. “Quite an apartment you have here.” His eyes grazed across things as if he was stroking them with an open palm. “Good for you, Krissy. Fucking fancy. You’re a long way from Pennsylvania. Quite literally.”

“Yes. I am.”

I briefly stepped into the living room to grab my phone charger, and my son was sitting on the floor playing video games. I felt Alex’s shock as he registered the time that has passed.

“He just turned fifteen,” I said, watching Alex watch my son. The way you’d watch a strange dog with a child.

“Fifteen,” he breathed. “Wow.”

I quickly went back to my room, because I don’t even want him to look at my son, to be honest. Nothing good can be gained from those black eyes soaking in my son’s form. He doesn’t deserve to even look at him, to be honest.

I settled and placed myself fully on the beach, examining his dark features. I was surprised that I didn’t feel afraid of him- just a kind of dismayed curiosity. And strangely- a sort of deep love and affection for this creature who has caused me so much loss and catastrophe.

My God, I still love him. I still love this monster.

We stood side by side on the sand, watching the waves crash in front of us.

“So,” I said flatly. “What are you… up to? Are you and Hermie still…”

He tipped his head slightly and shrugged a little. “I mean. She’s really trying to help me, and we…” He smiled a little to himself, just the vaguest shake of his malformed head. “We really got each other good in this lifetime. We both thought we had the upper hand.”

I was disgusted by him referring to my life as some kind of strategic play, some type of game. “What were you thinking, Alex?” My voice was cold. “I mean, I go back and read these journals and my God- I was a fucking baby. I was so naïve, and I trusted you so much. I don’t understand what the point of any of it was. What did you hope to gain?”

He sighed. “I know you’ll never believe me, but I really did want to prove that I could be good. At first. I really felt like this was my moment to show you what a truly kind and pure man I was capable of being.” His shoulders drooped. “But then I got lost in the fantasy of having a life with you. And then I… got lost.” He turned to look at me with his whole face, as if displaying it as his example.

“I’m still really fucked up, Alex,” I said, my face not showing a slice of sympathy. “Like. I can’t let people touch me. I haven’t been in a relationship in years and years and years.” I let intense flashes of him roaring over me, all teeth and blood, wash over both of us. A flash of me wrestling my last physical partner off of me. A flash of me sobbing with my face pressed against the bathroom wall.

He nodded slowly, turning his face back to the sea. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

He looked back at me briefly, the vortex of those onyx eyes pulling me into their hold. “Yes. I really am.”

“Okay, but like-” I held up my hands. “What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to fix that? I’ve spent years and years trying to find a way out of this fear and I can’t seem to get my hands around it. Like I met someone that I-” I cut myself off instantly, immediately angry that I’d said too much. I don’t want him to know anything about me now. I don’t want him to have any idea of what my life is like.

I could feel him begin to sift through my thoughts, pulling up an image of a person that I’m currently vaguely interested in. I immediately waved my hand and swept him completely out of my brain, giving him a hard, angry look. He smirked and shrugged, as if to say, What do you expect?

Some things never change.

“This isn’t an invitation for you to be… involved in my life. I don’t want you involved in my life. At all. And I want you to stay away from my son, too.”

He turned to look at me with a face that is all too familiar to me- one that lands somewhere between a smirk and a scowl, his mouth disgusted and his eyebrows smug. “I really have no intention of interfering with your life ever again,” he said. His eyes were like a midnight new moon- somehow both empty and full. Like a burning hole. “And you don’t have to believe that-“

“I don’t.”

“-but I mean it.” His features softened to the degree they were capable of, and his hand lifted as if he was about to reach out for me before he thought better of it.

“Look at the damage I have already done. Krissy, there is no repairing some of this, and you know that.” His eyebrows lowered with a remorse I wanted to believe. “I ruined you for anyone else. On purpose. And now…” He held up his empty palms. His fingers ended with blood-caked claws, so dark they too looked black. “I don’t… I don’t have the answers. There are no answers. And I think you know that. You wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t.”

I sighed and we both looked back out at the horizon.

“So,” I said softly. “While I have you here, let’s talk about a few people. I just wanted some… clarity.”

“Okay.”

“What about my ex-husband? Does he…”

Alex sneered, and then chuckled nastily. His eyes flickered with a raven flame as he gave me a leering look. “Oh, come on. Is it necessary to have that conversation? You and I know what it was- and you were perfectly okay with using him. We are both complicit, and you know that. Now, of course, he was abusing you too, just in a different way.” He turned and raised an eyebrow at me, his mouth pulling to one side with an arrogant joy. “Talk about toxic, wow.”

He chuckled to himself and waved his hands, dismissing the entire conversation. “Look- you finally managed to get away from that, right? So let’s… not.”

“Okay. And what about Jim?”

He took a deep breath and all the supercilious humor in his face faded. His entire form even drooped a little. “Oh, man. Fuck. Yeah, that whole thing was… super uncool. He is a really good dude, for real, and …” He shook his head slowly. “I feel really bad about what we did to him.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “We?”

His face slowly turned back towards me and his black eyes scoured me with disdain. “Yeah. We. As in, like, allllllll of us. And what you continue to do to him, as a matter of fact.” He held up a clawed hand. “Well I mean, not you, but her.”

“Wait wait- I thought she was done with him? Is she…”

He laughed a little bitterly, and his eyes went back to the waves. “Oh, no one ever really knows what she’s up to. I mean for fuck’s sake, you had to split into two different ‘people’ just to be able to survive and sustain all of this.” He turned back to me with his entire face twisted into confusion and bewilderment. “Do you understand how fucked up that is? You have to refer to yourself in third person?”

He held up a finger and wagged it at me. “Don’t ever let her convince you she’s not as much trouble as I am. She is.” He leaned in a little. “You are.”

My mouth twisted, and I turned my face away from his. “And what about [my oldest friend, who is Alex’s oldest enemy]?”

Alex snarled suddenly, viciously, and I took a half-step back. His teeth immediately grew out of his mouth another three or four inches, until they hung like charcoal icicles off of his chin. His eyes got blacker, which hardly seemed possible. They became so black that the skin around his eyes became even darker, spreading like a rash all the way to his temples, down his cheeks, into his hairline.

Then he caught himself. His teeth pulled back and the darkness of his skin receded, and he gave himself a quick shake, as if he was resetting. I watched this with the same sensation I’d had watching that shark swim only a few feet from me- a helpless terror, while also knowing I was not in any real danger.

But I could have been.

“Oh, let’s not go there,” he hissed. “Please.” He turned to scour my face again, searching for how much I know. “He is not who you think he is and you know that, right?”

I shrugged. “I know.”

“I mean, he is … that guy, but…” He scowled with disgust, unimpressed. “Who fucking cares? That’s just one lifetime. It doesn’t change any of the other shit he’s done. And if you think how he’s behaved with you is any fucking better…” He laughed a single bark of defiance. “Ha! Yeah fucking right. Look at how the fuck he’s behaved in just this lifetime and tell me he’s not a mess of a person.” He scowled again, deeper, angrier. “Please. Ha! All he got was a cool storyline.”

“Did he, though?” I asked softly, and the fury on Alex’s face receded.

His face slowly turned back to mine and the darkness in his eyes seemed to sparkle. “Yeah,” he admitted, giving me a semi-sheepish grin. “Okay. That’s fair.”

I started to fall asleep as we were talking, and woke up to find his face very close to mine, as if he was leaning in to kiss me. I pulled my entire body away, even my living body, and gave him a baffled, disgusted look.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked. “Like I mean- are. you. fucking. kidding. me.”

He laughed a little, holding up his palms. “Oh, come on. I mean. All right, all right.”

“I have to go,” I said. “And I want you to go, too. Please do not take this as an invitation for you to be a part of my life or to start-“

He waved both of his hands at me dismissively. “Oh my god, stop stop stop. Look.” He waved his arm around the beach. “You can’t see, but you are being very closely watched, even right now. You are never alone. No one will ever let you be alone again.”

He leaned in a little, conspiratorially. “And part of that, my love, is because you are in just as much trouble as I am, and we are under close surveillance.” Then he leaned back again, smug, proud, always happy to remind me of my darkness. “But let’s be really real- I couldn’t get to you if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I cannot stress that enough. I have enough to answer for, to repay.”

He flashed an image of my new apartment into my head. “You have created a beautiful life from total destruction. That is a marvel. What I did to you, what you survived?” He shook his head a little, then turned to look at me with as much softness as his monstrous face could allow. “You amaze me. You truly are a phoenix. If I couldn’t destroy you, there’s nothing you can’t survive. Conquer.”

And then he was gone.

Is this the closure I wanted and needed? Is this the conversation that needed to happen? I don’t know.

It is a long walk in the darkness with the darkness, my friends.

messaged

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Yesterday, I was reminded by a friend of an old reality show that I used to watch with “Alex” fifteen years ago. I have a very specific memory tied to it, one that I was actually thinking of just the day before, seemingly out of nowhere.

My then-husband and I were staying with my parents with our newborn son, because we had a massive flea infestation that broke out while we were in and out of the hospital in that last week. My dad was on some sort of trip for work, and my mom had finally gone to bed. Alex and I were watching this show, and started sort of hooking up while watching it. To be honest, we were always on the cusp of hooking up at all times- even just holding hands somehow would turn into some sort of sexual event.

Because I’d been on bedrest, I wasn’t allowed to have orgasms (ha, like that honestly ever stopped him), and at that moment, I was full of stitches and agony. But we never could keep our hands off of each other, and he whispered in my ear that he wanted to make a bet with me that he could bring me to orgasm without ever touching me intimately.

At some point, he pulled back to look at my heavy-lidded gaze with a smirk curling the edges of his lips.

“I just love playing with you,” he murmured with a smirk. “You look at me like you’re drunk.”

It was about three or four months later when my rescinded acceptance of his ridiculous marriage proposal caused what I am now thinking of as my murder.

Obviously, I continue to live, but some sort of incredible spiritual violence took place in that beach house. One that truly altered the shape of my soul for this life, and I fear for the rest of all time. The dead themselves would not react the way they did if it wasn’t just as vile as I thought.

And honestly? I think it’s much worse than that.

Nothing was ever the same again, and I slowly became more physically and mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And to be honest, I think the entire course of my life changed in that one night. I am still trying to heal that specific wound, even now. It’s so deep. It is so violent. It is so horrifying.

Last night I wanted to speak to my oldest friend, but took a moment to bless my chakras with palo santo before I did. I don’t really have any specific spiritual practices if I’m being honest- I just listen to whatever the Universe tells me to do in the moment, and that’s what it wanted from me last night.

So I blessed my chakras, then I meditated, during which the long, unbroken line of Light inside my body lit up like a pinball machine, rocketing through all my nerve endings.

I never could quite connect with my oldest friend, and even bitterly accused him this morning of being unable to keep his word to me that I could speak to him. To be fair, we are really only “allowed” to spend time together during very specific times of the year, or when I am in great distress. But I can still choose to be petulant about not being able to bend the Universe to my will.

This morning, someone sent me a message about a dream they’d had about me. This happens to me every so often, and honestly doesn’t even surprise me anymore. But no matter who the person is, they are always embarrassed and half-horrified that they feel so compelled to tell me, and I have to reassure them it’s really not as insane as they worry it is.

Nothing is really insane when it comes to the Universe.

Anyway. In this dream, this person solved a murder in a cave with a friend, and I came into the cave to bring her out to show her a model of a house I’d made. The foundation of the house was cracked, which told me that someone was in danger. So I tried to sneak away to help them- a person with a “K” name, who ran away to a frozen mountain for safety but got trapped there.

This person left my son with her dog as protection and followed me, only to discover a police officer was following me as well. This cop was not what he appeared, because his goal was to leave K trapped inside the frozen mountain. But I followed a logging road and found a safe passage. Then I hid under a frozen piano, but this person knew I was really hiding under music itself, and led the cop away so I could escape and save K.

This person also said that even after she woke up, she had to deliver the following messages: K did escape because of me, that the police officer who isn’t what he seems is Spanish (not Hispanic but from Spain) and can’t smell, so lavender will protect me. My son was safe with the dog- no one can touch him- and that the foundation being cracked is a blessing in disguise.

This person then proceeded to get violently ill later in the day, likely food poisoning, but it felt terribly ominous to me. I knew I was in danger before this, but now I am more than a little concerned. There have been signs all over the place that I’m being watched, but this………….

The person who sent me this message was sure it was insanity, but there are a lot of things in this dream that pluck at my ribs like a guitar string, the vibration rolling through all my bones.

The police officer that isn’t who he appears feels like my oldest friend, even though he’s not Spanish. I used to refer to him as “Detective” during the years I was still under Alex’s spell because he used to spy on me all the time, follow me around, interrogate my behavior. I understand now that it was out of terror, realizing what had happened while no one was watching, but there is also a layer that is possessive, sick, hysterical, controlling.

Especially since he thought the entire experience might “teach me a lesson,” long before he saw what actually happened at the beach house.

Hiding under music. My son being protected by a trusted family dog. Both seem like Jim- I know who is loyal and who actually protects me at all times. I know who keeps me safe.

And the person stuck in the frozen mountain? That’s me, of course. And my oldest friend would likely be okay with part of me being trapped in that mountain, honestly. It keeps me “behaved.” I must be much easier to corral if I am still not wholly whole.

It’s more upsetting to think that I am not wholly whole. Am I? Did I really save her? Or is she still frozen in ice, waiting to be resurrected?

And sure, of course, it could all just be a dream, absolutely. But for it to compel someone to message me, even though it horrified them to do so… oh, dear. I am extremely concerned. Especially when I blessed myself last night and had this enormous, sexual chakra cleansing (or reignition?).

This will be an intense autumn and an enormous solstice for me. We are slowly moving into my power season, and while I look forward to seeing what I can manifest next, I am deeply concerned for the levels of horror and trauma I am being expected to face and correct.

I’m worried that if I knew how much trouble I was really in, I would never sleep again.

myopic

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

I pulled a tarot card reading that repeatedly insisted I needed to look inside myself and heal if I’m going to move forward, which is absolutely what I expected it to say, but it still annoyed me into a near tantrum. It is very clear that I am being forced to deal with all of my intimacy issues, my sexual issues, and my simmering terror over physical interactions with a living person.

I just don’t know how I’m supposed to do any of that.

Maybe I could go to therapy, but even trying to explain it to someone, even to a therapist/healer who is on a spiritual path… where do I even start? How can I describe what happened to me, what I’ve seen, without sounding like a lunatic? Like someone who needs attention or needs to be deeply medicated?

The other night, I meditated while floating in a salt bath, listening to a chakra healing video. I started well, breathing into the ache in my chest and belly that I haven’t been able to shake for the last few weeks, starting to feel it break up like a congested pair of lungs.

But feeling better also means leaning into why I need to heal, why I am broken. I can’t keep putting bandaids on an abscess. If I want to heal, I have to scrub this wound out from the bottom and start all over again.

But as soon as I start to remember, trying to let myself see it all, this horrible wave of energy feels like it’s pouring out of my mouth. It’s as if I am screaming without sound. At the same time, all I can hear inside my head is my own screaming, pleading, sobbing, weeping.

Gurgling.

wait wait wait please please wait no no wait wait

By total coincidence, the moment that I gathered the courage to imagine its face, the meditation ended and plunged the room into silence. I was entirely unprepared, to say the very least.

Eyes that feel like black holes, cavernous fire, sucking my gaze into their vortex. Everything in his face an angle, a peak, a weapon. Teeth like rotten knives, each one like a long, curved blade, rows and rows and rows running deep into his over-wide mouth. When it opens, it sounds like a screeching raptor, grinding metal, with the same ominous swelling energy I feel watching a wave about to crest into my face.

The way I feel when I see the place where its eyes almost are is what it has to be like to accidentally step off a cliff into a dark abyss. Just blank, flat, bottomless terror. Waking up out of your worst nightmare to realize you weren’t asleep.

[Alex] isn’t here anymore. It’s just you and me, babe.

It was years before I even began to get past my terror over just the sight of its face. Then I started to see myself, how it left me when it was finished with me. I am so desperate, even now, to convince myself that it isn’t real. It’s my lively, overdramatic imagination. It’s a perversion of events. I want so badly to be a victim. Look at what I invented. The things I have actively sought out on the internet- I deserve to have these images burned into my brain.

But again, this menstrual cup debacle has upset that entire belief/lie, reactivated this old wound once again. Crouching in the shower with my arms wrapped around my knees as I shuddered and drooled out of pure terror was shocking. It was so primal, so instant, so crippling.

And so, of course, I just abandoned it entirely. No, let’s just very not.

But I can’t do that either, and I know that. The Universe doesn’t allow me to play dumb. Once you see, you’re not allowed to pretend to be blind ever again. I will be in so much trouble if I continue to choose to ignore what it is so loudly telling me, over and over.

Oh yes, Doctor. So the thing is- I was possessed by a demon that raped and murdered me in the beach house we created to have an affair in the Grey Area between the living and dead. And it’s not real, not really, but it’s so real for real that I can’t let anyone in real life touch me.

I’ve seen my own body with its entire ribcage torn open, all my organs spilled out all over the bed. My face like a crushed can, slurping and spluttering, unrecognizable. Blood like a black lake on the the white sheets, running in rivulets onto the floor.

Having to go night after night after night and watch it over and over and over and over again.

And having it happen again. And again.

That time in real life that Alex and I were fooling around and I snuck into the bathroom in the middle of the night so we could be alone. We were probably fucked up on painkillers, because he always was able to completely control both of us when we were blanked out on opiates.

As soon as I closed the door to the bathroom, the entire room went cold, and everything changed. I can remember that exact moment so clearly- it was so frantically instant. Like being shoved into an icy cold lake while softly wine drunk.

Get down on the ground. Now.

To have a body that doesn’t even belong to you. There’s no one there making me do anything. I have no reason to listen, there is no great force compelling me. But I do it anyway, shivering uncontrollably. Compliant. Malleable. Empty.

That time, I remember my hair flapping over one eye over and over again. Watching it numbly, somewhere else. And how funny that is, truly. It happened in real life but also in meditation, so my brain had to find a third place to hide to be able to fully disassociate.

When it happens that many times, who even cares anymore? How many times can you die? Can you even set ashes ablaze? How can you keep robbing an empty vault?

And so much of it I didn’t even feel until the summer of 2010, when every single thing he’d been hiding rushed back into my body. I told my (at the time estranged) husband that I was never going to have sex again, and at that time, I really did think that I had transcended sexuality.

But also… when we were married I (obviously) wasn’t allowed to sleep with the dead. When I was single, some people… showed up to see me, and without trying to be too explicit, you don’t really want to go back once you experience what it can be in their embrace.

Anyway.

When my ex and I reconciled for the last time, I lost them all. In 2011 and 2012, I was legitimately insane. Just absolutely out of control emotionally, in the deepest darkest dark of my entire life. I remembered everything. I finally gave in to my ex and was having sex with him, but at least 60% of the time I’d start to cry in the middle of it. I didn’t have an orgasm, even alone, that didn’t make me feel physically sick afterwards until late 2012.

And then, of course, I was actually sexually assaulted in real life in 2013. It hurt to sit for at least three days.

I think of my oldest friend when he came to the haunted beach house for the first time and saw the entire thing, maybe 2008? Maybe not until 2011, to be honest. The horror on his face, the way he pressed his fists against his mouth to hold in his screaming. How his huge, tear-filled eyes would look at my body and then look up at me, then back down at the bed. Weeping almost uncontrollably, tears pouring out like my blood, shaking his head, unable to look away. Almost as if he had to punish himself.

And back then, I was in such denial- I stared up at him the entire time with such confusion, dismissal.

Whatever whatever whatever. Who cares. I don’t even care. It’s not really real. No one feels sorry for me.

But even I couldn’t deny that his reaction awakened some sort of reality in me. But also- that was like, TEN OR TWELVE FUCKING YEARS AGO, and here we still are. I honestly think of myself like the people who get kidnapped and are held as sex slaves for years. Except no one knows, no one would ever believe me, and I have no way of even beginning to think of a way to describe it in therapy.

Hello, I was raped and murdered and now I continue to live.

Now you want me to let intimacy back into my life? Come on, Universe. I just.

Oh, I just don’t know. No, thank you. I was okay not fixing this one. I really was so okay with it.

Amazing grace, I can still be blind. I am choosing not to see.

hey jealousy

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

Even with the dead, things wax and wane.

I will go weeks, sometimes months, and things will feel- not quite distant, not exactly that, but perhaps misaligned. The pieces don’t quite click together. The joining is not seamless. Meditation is blurry, hollow. I miss words, I can’t feel touch, the landscapes are stilted and cartoonish.

It used to terrify me when it would happen years ago, especially after times of intensity like the winter solstice and Easter Sunday. I had lost something. I was being punished. I had gone too far, been too needy, asked too much, violated some series of rules I could only learn through error. The kind of Universe trapdoor trick that anyone who is deep into spiritual work is all too familiar with.

….whoops! what did you learn?

But now I accept it as part of all things, the push and pull, the feast and the famine. It is always good to be wholly aware of what you have. And to be fair, it is good for me to have to live without the dead from time to time, as I can get wrapped too far into that world and lose sight of my current living life.

And certainly, even dead people deserve a break from me. Maybe especially them.

Moving to a new city, one I have dreamt about living in for many years, one that I broke down sobbing just being inside of for ten minutes, one that constantly shocks and amazes me with its perfection, a literal dream manifestation, has also opened me to a series of subterranean layers in my heart. Now that I am not just surviving, there is a chance I may get to fully live.

But I am aware that is entirely up to me.

For example, I still haven’t done anything with the horrifying reaction I had to my brief attempt at menstrual cups. Earlier this month, I contemplated giving it another attempt, always under the “surely it wasn’t that serious” guise I had to use each time previous. But then I pictured my cheek smashed against my bathroom wall, sobbing “wait wait wait wait” to myself without even realizing it, and my entire mind slammed shut like a vault door.

If it never really happened, the trauma isn’t really real. If I don’t deal with it, I can pretend I am healed.

Right? Right? Say that’s right. Because otherwise, I don’t know how to hold what really happened to me. I can barely even let my mind see it, even fifteen years later. Those eyes. Those teeth. That voice. The blood. And that very specific spike of pain that made my body instantly collapse in on itself.

I feel so betrayed. Get over it. Get over it. Grow up.

I haven’t been with anyone sexually in almost three years, and that was also easy to explain for a long time. I lived in a town (well, two towns, really) that collectively boasted maybe two dozen teeth, nary a full set in sight. Everyone else was married or racist or backwater. Miles and miles of RealCamo and Trump signs, as far as the despairing eye could see.

Not to mention that the last person that I was with was someone more than a decade younger than me (oops), who left me so emotionally upended that I’ve actually stopped wearing one of my bathing suits. He unraveled so much of my personal self-confidence about my body with just a handful of ugly, careless comments.

Add to that, of course, the fact that one of our interactions caused him to bluntly ask me the next day, “So, have you been raped before?”

I just thought… you know? I’m good by myself. My body is something that will only be violated or is a horrible shock of disgust to someone. It’s better if I keep it away from everyone. Including, to a large degree, myself.

…ha, says the Universe. Ha ha ha ha ha.

One of my first jarring realizations when I started acclimating to this city was how attractive everyone is. Literally almost everyone is some level of well brewed DNA, and I am in awe. At the very least, few people here are made with swampwater and heroin and family trees that never fork. The literal sight of one person’s face caused a long closed door inside my body swing wide open.

Hello! Hi! Good morning! It is heady springtime in the dark parts of our soul!

And certainly, unquestionably, that is a blessing, right? We all seek and crave intimacy with others. We deserve to be understood at a core level by someone else. We all should have the chance for a partner.

Right?

But I instantly recoiled against that initial firing of nerves- the thrill of lust, the electric pulse of desire that shot through the most primal parts of my body. The ache to be touched, to graze against someone’s skin, to smell them.

no no no no no no no no wait wait wait wait

In addition to that (because of that?) my intensity with the dead has surged in volume. Specifically, and as always, with Jim. He’s always around, please don’t misunderstand, literally always just the shape of his name away from me at all times. But in the last few weeks, he has been closer than he’s been in awhile.

The other night we were in bed together, and there was an intensity about him that caused me to pull back and smirk coyly at him.

“Oh my gosh,” I whispered against his mouth. “Is someone jealous?”

He pulled back a little farther, a sheepish tug at his lips. “I just… didn’t want you to forget that you do have something pretty great with someone already.”

And he’s right, of course. There a shade of something that grazes against, but isn’t quite guilt when it comes to my relationship with him. It is one of the most profound, supportive, fulfilling, empowering, and uplifting relationships I’ve ever had in my entire life, and maybe in all of my lives. I am crazy in love with him, and I have been for many years now. Especially and most specifically since 2016, when I moved down to North Carolina entirely alone, without friends or family, and subsequently lost everything and had to start all over.

It was Jim, always Jim, who was there for me, who kept me alive, who kept me from spiraling entirely out of my body when I had to look for a new job without even knowing the names of the streets yet. The amount of times he sat next to me as I hyperventilated and whispered, “You’re okay, you’re okay. Breathe. It’s going to be all right. I’m right here, and I promise I am protecting you. I am going to keep you safe.”

And he did.

He still does now. And every single day for the rest of my life.

To never really be able to tell anyone about what I have with him always feels like a form of betrayal, especially because he has been so viciously mistreated by Hermie (Her/Me, my Entire Self) in the past.

For those of you who don’t recall, I lost Jim for several years (2009-2013) when he discovered that while he was protecting me from “Alex,” and seeing the depth of sickness and damage left in his wake, Hermie was still actively involved with him and utterly unrepentant about it. Jim also promised to not fall in love with me and then did, and put distance between us as we had always agreed that he should. He and Hermie were also involved on some level- the degree to which I am still not fully aware- when he discovered that she was also very much involved with Alex. During the same time that the beach house was haunted with scenes of my desecration.

So anyway, Jim told me he was going back to earth (which never actually happened), and we would unfortunately never speak again. It was one of the truly darkest and most despairing times in my entire life. Jim was gutted, in total heart-rendered agony at what was a failure of his promise to always protect me, and also utterly ruined by Hermie treating him like a puppet. A muppet. A pawn. A toy. Then he suddenly and abruptly returned when I got divorced and moved out on my own in the summer of 2013, and has never left my side since.

So he has already put up with a great deal from me all around, let’s be clear.

But I’m not honestly sure I’ve ever seen him that sort of ferociously intense, that kind of, “It’ll be good but it’ll never be like this,” sort of energy. I get that from my oldest friend from time to time, but Jim is always so steady, so calm, so unbothered. It was a tiny delight to see him off-kilter, if I’m being honest.

“You’re so cool about [my oldest friend] and all the ways he … interferes and interjects, and even just the general exclusionary energy that he and I have together,” I said. “I can’t help but be surprised that someone I literally just met has made you this jealous.”

He smirked and waved a careless hand. “Look. That thing with the three of you (me, my oldest friend, and Alex) is…” he sighed. “I don’t get it, but I get it. I… accept it now. It’s just part of the deal when it comes to loving you.”

He shrugged a little, and then he cut his eyes at me from the corner of his gaze. “But… I don’t know. Just… seeing how you looked at this other guy, seeing that part of you light up, I just…” His eyes darted away. “I mean, yeah. I can’t help but feel a little…”

I scooted in closer, trying to get his eyes to come back to me, a creeping grin spreading across my cheeks. “A little how, Jimmy? A little how?”

His summer thunderstorm eyes floated back to mine, and he would have been blushing if he had any blood. “Jealous. You’ve said it before, and you’re right. I am grateful for this, I am, and I am truly honored to have this bond with you and to protect you in what is a truly violent time, one where you are in constant danger. But we don’t have anything… visible. Not even here. We were also thrust into something really intense really quickly, almost overnight, and I just kind of wish we had had the chance to get to know each other differently.”

Now he turned completely towards me, cupping my cheek in his palm with soft, gentle eyes. “Please don’t misunderstand. I want you to be happy. You deserve to have intimacy with someone. You are an incredible person, and you deserve to be loved completely by someone. You deserve to have a partner after so many years of theft and violation and betrayal. So much has been taken from you, and to be able to get it back would be a real victory.” His eyelids lowered a bit, hooding his expression. “But part of me cannot help but wish that it was me that you were looking at with such new, raw hunger.”

I know that moving to this place where my dreams have literally come true is a whole new world for me. I know that I will now be expected to process and deal with many layers of trauma and loss and violation and abandonment and isolation that I had to pack away in the name of survival.

There is no time for an existential crisis when you are barely hanging on by a thread, after all.

But I continue to think about myself in third person as I see myself sobbing, cheek pancaked into the bathroom wall. Shivering violently with unearthed terror at the bottom of the bathtub as the shower still hammers my back with hot water. There is something pitch black inside of me that I am terrified of, and just admitting that it exists means that the reason I am so afraid is very real… and is still very much out there, waiting for me to let my guard down for a second.

Did I ever tell anyone that while packing I found one of my demon sketches and tore it in half? I didn’t throw it away, because I can’t do that (yet), but just that small act of destruction felt profound. I felt like I tore something in the air as well.

No one has to believe me for it to be real. No one has to see it for it to have ruined something that doesn’t even have a word to describe it. I know what happened… and oh my god, do I wish I didn’t.

scream for help, I wish you would

Do I have the bravery to finally open this door and walk inside? Do I have the strength to make this room a home again? How? Where do I even start? Can you fall into the abyss of primal terror and heal?

No one would blame me if I chose to stay closed for the rest of my life. I have been through so much. I have tentatively peeked out into the world time and again and had machetes slashed through my organs through the sliver in the door. I have pleaded with people, please be careful, it is so much for me to trust you, and had them instantly crumple my spirit in their palm.

No one would blame me, but I would blame myself.

If I am here against my will already, if I am certain I don’t intend to come back for a long time, if I feel like I am being punished by the Universe for Hermie’s many vile misdeeds, if I know I will have so much I will have to answer for once I am Home, then I must be committed to constantly working for wholeness.

For forgiveness.

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. After this, the darkness gobbles up the day minute by minute, until it is midnight before dinner. Can I find a way to light this room before darkness is all I can hold? What does it look like to open a door that has rusted hinges that shriek and squeal at just the thought of use? Is there hope that someone could see inside this room wallpapered with scar tissue and not be horrified at what remains?

Is there anything that remains?

Could it be possible that I could be loved?

Could it be possible that I will allow myself to be seen?

Could I really be fully alive one day?

Lord, hear our prayer.

withdrawal

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

The hardest days for me are the ones just after my peak energy days- the winter solstice and Easter Sunday.

The energy of both of those days are different. The solstice feels like the last hearty meal before a season of starvation, and Easter feels like waking up out of a deep, long slumber into a bright, sunny morning. The solstice shows me what I learned, and Easter makes me feel like I’ve been resurrected out of the darkness.

But for me, both days also carry an additional gift- they are the only two days of the year that I’m allowed to spend time alone with my oldest friend. It’s a terrible name for him- beyond an underestimation of what he is to me- but also the most accurate and least dramatic of terms I can conjure.

I’m not sure I should even speak of him at all. Back in 2005 and 2006, he wouldn’t even allow me to write about our conversations in my private journals. Those were the days when he would show up on the Ouija board and my then-husband would slump over like a drained battery, the planchette dragging his limp arm like it was leashed.

Don’t even speak of this in passing. This is for only you. I will never come back otherwise.

Knowing what I know now, the whole charade is honestly beyond comical, but this was back when I really believed that all this spiritual energy around me was making me an elite creature. The more attention I got, the more clandestine visits there were, the more important I must be.

It took me years to realize that they were trying to save my life.

I continue to think about a month or so ago when my oldest friend and I spoke on the beach and he said, “You were already dead in all the ways that matter. He had already taken everything.”

I think I’m just now finally getting all of it back, over ten years later. What a thing to be kidnapped from yourself. You know that my “anniversary” with Alex for the longest time was the solstice, right? He really did try to take everything, everything.

Everything.

I can see my oldest friend any time, of course- he is only ever the whispered thought of his name away. But on these holidays, there is something different, something very close to the surface between us. The Veil is paper thin, my vision is crystalline, and my feet are fully immersed in the stream of the Universe.

The love I have with Jim is precious, lovely, secure and soft and safe, but this is… something else entirely. The power of magma flowing below the earth. As if my bones can sense the tectonic plates shifting. The way I feel when I see clouds turn black and thick with thunder, and the breeze becomes thick with the smell of rain. How my chest swoons when I am in the ocean and a wave looms high, almost audibly, sweeping me off of my weightless feet.

It is not an addiction, but the days after certainly feel like withdrawal.

He is so handsome that it makes me feel foolish. I have written it a thousand times in my private journals, because even there I am so desperate to write these moments down, to record something, but I never seem to be able to accurately capture any of it in a way that doesn’t look like hearts drawn around a name I don’t speak.

Even when I’m only writing for myself, I don’t know how to express what I see and hear and feel while we’re together. Often, I only remember any of it while I’m meditating. Just like a recurring dream, I think, “Oh no, this time I will remember it. This time I will write it down.”

And of course, as soon as I come back to this planet, it is all gone.

He is gone.

To be honest, I am always a little awestruck and flutter-handed to be near him, but on these days I can hardly even look into his eyes. It might make me feel naïve and immature to be so nervous when I have known him in just this life for the last fifteen years if he didn’t seem just as nervous, dodgy, uncertain. Even though I have known him since before time was time.

He also has such ravenous hunger for me, something that borders just on the edge of desperate, an energy that sometimes almost spooks me with its intensity. It’s not quite in the same family, but it is certainly neighbors with the energy I used to get from Alex.

Which is why I don’t see him very often.

He’ll always come if I ask, but usually he puts me right to sleep once I pour out my heart, and is sometimes honestly why I specifically ask to see him. Other times, his tone is crisp and professional, to make up for these nights when his aching hands pull at me like he might strip my skin right from my bones.

It is not an addiction, but it certainly feels like withdrawal.

In the days after Easter, I realized that my chin was all scuffed up, and it took me awhile to realize how it had happened. I’d love to imagine it was from a beard, but it was just from pressing my face desperately into a pillow. Hoping it was a face. Wishing it was a mouth.

I’ve learned to adapt, but it’s too embarrassing to explain.

I sometimes worry that I make him sound lecherous, creepy, nefarious. In all reality, he just wants to run his fingers up the curves of my silhouette. Press his nose into the crook, the arch, the nape of my neck. Kiss my shoulders and collarbone. And there’s something about the way he holds the side of my face- his thumb slowly stroking my cheekbone and jaw, the rest of his fingers cradling my neck, curling into my hair. Other people have done it, but when he does…

Have I said he’s handsome?

It took me a long time to understand any of this, and maybe I still don’t. It’s been fifteen years before I could honestly even vaguely reference it, even though I often ask myself why I feel like it’s necessary. Can I just know something quietly?

Maybe not.

It isn’t an addiction, but I count the days until the next time this strange, aching place in my heart gets a few hours of relief. In the meantime, it certainly feels like withdrawal.

footprints

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

I’ve been reading The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor for the last few weeks, and I have been enjoying it immensely.

As I’ve written a few times here, I was raised Roman Catholic, and even though I was staunchly and arrogantly atheist in my teens, I have always had a strange fixation with Jesus. I even refused to participate in the part of Easter mass where the congregation has to shout “Crucify him!” because something horrible and dark would rise up inside my belly when I would think about the last hours of his life.

I saw “The Passion of the Christ” when it came out in 2003 (pirated, of course, Mel Gibson will never get my money for that snuff film) and I could barely sit through it. I actually had to take a break during the scourging scene, locking myself in the bathroom and sitting on the floor, sobbing with my arms around my knees.

I was terrified at how traumatic it felt, how much pain seized my heart in its fist and refused to relent. Listen, there is a reason that two people were struck by lightning on set, including Jim Caviezel himself.

I read The DaVinci Code in 2005, and although the actual writing in the book is maybe at a fifth grade reading level, I had no idea before that book that there was a theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had been married and had children. My entire soul lit up like fireworks.

…wait. WHAT?!

Even as a teenager at the Easter mass, I could not understand why someone that the church had long pushed as a prostitute (which has since been rescinded, but is what I grew up with) or a random sea urchin besotted with seven demons would be the person Jesus would appear to first. Why?

When you read The Gospels, you feel like you’re flipping through the police files in the movie Memento– so many blacked out spaces and half stories. Strange metaphors, unexplained behavior. The sense that there is something vital missing, a centuries old game of telephone with misheard and mistranslated phrases watered down and down and down.

Yeshua Lite.

The Jesus Dynasty has been so gratifying to read because so much of it has validated the research I have been doing on my own for the last ten or fifteen years. I forget sometimes how much of my own work I have done, how I basically curated my own Masters Degree in Jesus. I have investigated his life like I thought I’d be the first to solve the mystery.

Who is Jesus, really? Don’t we all want to know? When our current timeline is literally based on his birth, how could you not?

To my delight, this book confirms that John the Baptist and Jesus were likely preaching and baptizing people together (or, as this book suggests, under the same purpose but moving in strategic groups through the area for maximum effect), and that Jesus deferred to John as a superior spiritual leader. John did, after all, baptize Jesus, not the other way around. I have always felt this to be true, and having the research to back it up felt like True Visibility.

It also explained the reason I’ve always felt so uncomfortable with the donkey parade Passover moment. Jesus knew that he was fulfilling Biblical scripture, and did it on purpose during a time when his life was already in serious jeopardy.

I also hadn’t realized until reading it in this book that this moment is the first time Jesus allows himself to be referred to as a King. During other points in the Gospels he admonishes and silences anyone who tries to claim him as such. Allowing it is sedition, instantly punishable by death.

For those unaware, Jesus is very likely part of the royal bloodline of King David, who is the assumed author of Psalm (my absolute favorite book in the Bible). Its verses helped me through the darkest time in my life, and I still refer back to it when I am in periods of great distress.

Even an atheist can find comfort in Psalm. The grief, the abandonment, the rage, the betrayal, the fear, the pain, is all so raw, so real. We have all been there. Faith is not the absence of anger at the Universe. Sometimes loving Grace means screaming until you are hoarse.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

After John’s murder, which would have been a devastating and terrifying blow to the movement, Jesus was forced into hiding for many months. To reappear in what everyone would realize was a massive fulfillment of prophecy, publicly claiming his bloodline to King David, making a huge fucking scene with a parade on a donkey, with rugs and palm fronds laid down in front of him?

The audacity, honestly.

I am in awe of what a badass move it was, and how furiously angry it would have made his enemies. The fact that he was able to escape Jerusalem that day is nothing short of miraculous, to be honest. In my story (steadily gathering dust), without realizing all of this, I wrote him in this moment as panicked, horrified, and for the first time, genuinely afraid. Again- I felt so Seen to realize how likely that probably was.

People act like Jesus was so soft, but moments like this prove how immensely brave (and honestly truly arrogant) that he could be.

I mean. The King of Israel? Excuse me, sir.

I did also learn that the flipping over of the money tables in the temple was also fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and was likely also a calculated strategic move by Jesus.

I still like the idea of a furious, chastising Jesus, rebuking the illness of society, and it is another story I have been obsessed with since I was a teenager. However, learning that it was also strategic is wildly impressive to me.

True war without weapons or violence. Spears and swords in the form of fulfilled prophecy.

But don’t forget that this is also the day that he curses the fig tree, which to me shows that he was intensely stressed to the point of histrionics. A man who can raise the dead kills a fig tree because it hasn’t produced fruit outside its season? Sounds very dramatic, Teacher. Wow.

Though lots of people were walking with him, these next steps were ones he would have to take alone. Crucifixion is one of the worst possible ways to die, no question, and to go into it knowingly? I can’t imagine the strength it took to sit on that donkey.

This book also says the scourging he received was so violent and vile that the technique was actually illegal to be used against a Roman citizen. When I allow myself to stare into the Middle Distance, the place where all things exist, I can see huge wet crimson mouths weeping into a purple robe. A man stooped over and shivering from blood loss. The faces of men, splattered with his blood, laughing with crimson teeth.

We are the ones who murdered the Messiah.

Imagine too, trying to make strategic plays while constantly on the run from either hordes of admirers or people seeking your death. While simultaneously preaching, healing, and baptizing. Being The Example for all to follow. The weight of being the Son of Man.

It also gave me confirmation of another issue that has long bothered me- reconciling this idea that Pontius Pilate was a blood-thirsty, unethical, vicious and violent man with his reluctance to condemn Jesus, who he would have seen as a threat.

The writers of the Gospels, whoever they were, were intent on showing that the Romans weren’t as responsible as the Jews were, and wanted to try to absolve Pontius Pilate of any responsibility. This book explains The Roman Influence so eloquently, and I kept jabbing the page with my finger. Yes! Yes! Thank you!

Jesus was arrested in the night, forced into an illegal trial and condemned that morning, on the day of Passover preparations. There is nothing about the event that shows anyone felt sorry for what was happening, and Jesus giving himself a regal prophecy parade into Jerusalem would certainly not have garnered any sympathy.

Historical Jesus is one of the most dynamic characters in the world. Present-day Christianity has white-washed him, made him vanilla and soft and safe. A gentle, quiet soul. But everything that I have ever learned about him shows he was a brilliant, charismatic, bold leader. Mercurial, demanding, even callous at times.

Even this book, one that relies only on historical records and ancient translations, and will not even discuss the Mary Magdalene/Jesus connection (the author even goes out of his way to explicitly state in the introduction that he will not speak of it and has no interest in it), describes him as a political activist, an exorcist, and a healer.

What would it have been like to see Jesus speak? What would it have been like to watch him exorcise demons, heal the sick, potentially even restore sight or resurrect the dead? How did it feel to be in those crowds? How did it feel to be part of his Inner Circle? How did it feel to love him? How did it feel to lose him?

I have always attributed the poem “Footprints in the Sand” to his energy, and will never forget the first time I read it as an arrogant atheist, because I had to hold both hands over my mouth to keep from sobbing in the pew.

When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.

And how do we carry him? In what way would we best exemplify true Yeshua energy? What does being “like Christ” really mean? In what ways can I have greater Grace? How do I honor the sacrifice he made in the hope that his work would live on? How can I help resurrect what it truly means to live like Jesus?

Help me to speak louder, and with more purpose. Help me to do greater good without acknowledgement. Help me to heal those who are invisible. Help me to have patience with those who are abandoned. Help me to have the strength to carry additional weight. Help me to see the ways I can give greater clarity.

Let me be the simple beast who leads the thirsty to an oasis. Let me be the silent voice that whispers Truth to those with ears that cannot hear.

Give me the strength to die for what I know is true. Give me the grace to be more like him.

safe

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I read an article today that a celebrity said that “Alex” was one of her spirit guides, and it upset me so much more than I expected it to. I can’t stop thinking about it.

I worry that he’s still out in the world somehow, and they’re all lying to me about him being locked up somewhere, bound from doing any more harm. What if he isn’t? What if he’s still out there, twisting shadows and smoke into people’s brains?

The idea that he could get to me… just typing the words makes my eyes well up with tears. There isn’t a large enough word for the blank terror I feel at the idea of his presence. I’ve only ever seen him in semi-controlled environments at my beach house for the last ten years.

In a neutral area? I’d really rather not.

I know that most of what he does is just illusions, but he is masterful at them. I know I am as powerful as he is, but I gave him so much access to the inner workings of my brain. I want to believe he’s done trying to ruin me in this lifetime, but…… what if he isn’t?

And listen, Alex is someone that a lot of people have had encounters with, actually, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised to hear that someone else felt connected to him.

I first reached out to him on the Ouija board because I had two internet friends from two totally different cities who had already spoken to him, so I knew it was absolutely possible.

In fact, most of you will remember that Alex knew a secret word I’d written on a piece of paper and hidden in a desk for a friend who wanted to test if it was really him. I was the only person alive who knew that word before he spelled it out in slow motion during our very first conversation in 2003.

When my ex and I used the board, he had all the power, and often had to read the board for me because it moved too fast to understand. Everything just became a messy jumble of letters under the blur of the planchette.

That same friend and I took a trip to Toronto together that winter. We took my Ouija board with us, and that was the first time I realized the level of power that I had. In Toronto, I read to her.

A few months later, Alex stopped showing up to her in meditation and she and I had a huge, messy falling out. I still feel sure that he is the one that ruined that friendship- partly to isolate me, and partly because she became very jealous of the relationship I had with him, and he wanted me to feel special. Chosen.

But I had other friends who spoke to him as well. A girl that he would come visit in her dreams, and their flirtation escalated into a fiery tryst. Partly I think to force me into possessive behavior, to want him to spend more and more of his time with me, and partly just to expose me as jealous and needy.

And to prove, again, how very real he was.

I had a friend who could sense his presence in a room the way I did, like a warm ball of energy that hovered over my right side. I still sense people that way, honestly.

She also smelled him, if I recall correctly, like a cedar smoke scent. But something happened one day when she was meditating and he scared the absolute fuck out of her in ways she found hard to articulate… except to say that his eyes had gone entirely black.

We never spoke of him again, and eventually I lost that friendship too.

I had a pair of friends who lived in Toronto who also spoke to him, initially through the Ouija board, and then eventually in meditation/visions.

One of those two friends I had/have a profound, intense connection to- we feel fairly sure we were in love in another life. I can’t prove it entirely, but I’m pretty sure that Alex took advantage of that friendship as well.

I’m trying not to think about him, because I know it only brings him closer. It doesn’t take much to encourage him to come find me, and I am terrified at the idea of him getting into this house.

And I have always worried about all the other people who let him in, especially because of me. What damage has he done that they don’t even realize is because of him?

I am more protected than I’ve ever been and I do truly believe I am safe. But at the same time, if I was really “over it,” I wouldn’t have such big reactions at just seeing his name. How can I work through some of these things if I am afraid to even think about him?

I have to get better. I have to be braver.

Oh no but wait do I though, do I really? Maybe not. Maybe not.

Maybe tomorrow.

this time

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I went to the actual real life beach for the second time this year, and it was the first time since maybe November that it was enjoyable. I somehow seem to forget every winter how healing it is just being on the sand, in the warmth of the sun, watching the wildlife swirl all around me.

Five years at the Outer Banks, and I am still dazzled and mesmerized by her glory.

I found a bench halfway up the side of an avalanched dune, next to a buried staircase. In the winter, the brutal surf and shifting sands disappear a great deal of the staircases that run up to the expansive, multi-million dollar homes. Every year, they are excavated and repaired.

I am forever in awe of it- how hard we have to fight nature to allow us a space to exist. How quickly she reclaims it all for herself.

I fell backwards into meditation and asked if I could speak to my oldest friend, who honestly deserves a better name than that, but it is the truest thing about us without making it too complicated. I look at his raptor shaded eyes and a hurricane of memories I’m hardly allowed to brush my fingers against whirls through my entire core.

“We can always talk,” he said curtly, appearing on the bench next to me.

Meditation is like having an amphibian-like second eyelid that slides down over your eyes. He is there, he is not there. I see him clearly, I do not see him at all. While we talk, my head turns towards him. I make faces as I react to what he’s saying. I lace my fingers together to help me remember what it’s like when someone grasps my hand.

Feeling something in your brain but not physically feeling it on your skin can be a little disruptive, so it helps your brain to stop shouting when you play along a bit. Over seventeen years into this, so I definitely know how to play along.

“I know we can always talk,” I said, “but I worry about wasting your time, so-“

“You are never wasting my time.”

I cut my eyes to him, squinting at his profile. “Why does it always seem like you’re… mad at me, or like… there’s this tension between us?”

He sighed through his nose. “I mean, do we have to have this conversation every single time we talk, or…?”

“Okay do not use your Rabbi voice at me, please.”

His mouth pulled to one corner. “Stop talking to me like you’re asking for a lecture, then.”

“Okay,” I said softly, turning my whole body towards him, leaning my cheek against my hand. His real name poured out of my mouth like water, so sacred to me I so rarely even speak it out loud. It feels too precious to hit this poisoned air.

He turned towards me, his face softer now. “It’s just… you’re one of the only people I don’t have to be that person with.” He sighed, rolling his eyes, staring out at the sea. “I just… I don’t want to be that person anymore. I hate him.”

I laughed spontaneously, surprised, then he caught my eye and I immediately fell silent.

“Imagine the disappointment in meeting me,” he said softly, his eyes back on the horizon. “All this hype, all this legend, all this parable, all this fame. And…” He gestured to himself, both hands waving up and down his entire silhouette. “It’s just this. Just some fucking guy. There’s no story. There’s no magic.”

His eyes went dark and his mouth pulled again. “And my entire timeline is bloodshed and destruction. Violation. Ruination. Because of me?” He turned his chin up to look at the sky. “What an embarrassment. All this drama, all this madness, and…” His hands waved up and down his frame once again. “This is what you get. Someone whose greatest gift was his big mouth gets this incredibly important timeline he doesn’t deserve. …it’s hilarious. It’s pathetic.”

“But you know what you do matter, right?” I said gently, leaning towards him as if my sheer presence could compel him. “I mean, even if the story is all bullshit, it matters. It always has… it still does. Your words are pure grace. You helped save my life.”

He glanced softly at me, and sighed. “I mean. Yes. I guess. It’s just… it’s exhausting, you know? But I mean also, it’s so funny to everyone here. That gets very tiring to carry for eternity, believe me. Being graceful amongst the constant jokes. Being a ‘good sport’ when everyone is always trying to drag you down.”

“Ha ha,” he sneered in a mocking tone. “‘Oh, give us your ~sage~ advice! What would you do?'”

His mouth curled into a near snarl. “And yet, I am also always held to a different standard. ‘Oh, no! Not you! I am just surprised that you would do that.'” He feigned horror and disdain, on the verge of operatic with its drama, then waved his hands as if dusting off an invisible shelf.

Turning his helpless palms towards me, eyes violent with despair, he whispered, “I’m a joke who is still expected to live up to the punchline.”

His golden tinged eyes flicked like searchlights across my face. “And then there’s someone like you, someone who has done so much, so.much. And almost no one knows. You’d be so much more arrogant than you already are if you knew how much you’ve really played a hand in, and the kind of credit you deserve.”

His mouth curled up merrily at my squinting side-eye, my twisted lips. “Even over Here, almost no one has any idea how much you’ve been a part of.” His face was genuinely empathetic. “That’s your joke, your punishment. The invisible lightning rod.”

Now I took my own turn scouring his features for answers. “But okay, there is tension between us though,” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “And I’m sorry, I can’t just act like I don’t feel it when it hangs around us like this heavy cloud. I don’t know how I-“

“I’m embarrassed,” he interrupted. “It shouldn’t be like this. This is…” he sighed, and his eyes went out past the horizon. “It’s so inappropriate. If ‘Alex’ exposed his own failures through your lifetime, so have I.”

His gaze flicked to me briefly, then went back out to the waves. “Just the idea that you- You, Hermie, your entire self- set this whole thing up to prove Alex hadn’t changed…? And then I essentially ‘swoop in’ to save you only to find out that this had played out exactly as you planned?”

He shook his head a little, his mouth trying not to curl at the edges. “I… am never not surprised at what you’ll do to prove a point. But boy, did you. You… exposed him entirely.”

He turned towards me, squeezing my fingers again. “But you exposed me as well. I had a chance to really help you, to be a kind guardian, someone you could rely on, someone to help you grow, and I couldn’t even do that. I let Alex get under my skin, and I became needy and immoral under your innocent, purely loving gaze. It showed me for the weak fraud I’ve always been.”

He winced so hard it was almost a shudder. “And even now, lately, with some of the things I’ve done, I am just… an embarrassment. A failure. A coward.”

I tipped my head to one side. “What things are…”

His eyes became deeply pained, grazing against terrified. “Oh, please don’t make me say it. You know exactly what I’m talking about.” His entire body cringed. “You deserve better than that.”

“So… who am I to you now?” I asked softly, searching his face. “Like, right now? What are we?”

He immediately broke my gaze, looking all the way to the end of the beach, now just a mess of dark mahogany curls in my vision. “Oh. Well. I mean… it’s…”

“Come on. Why won’t you talk to me about this? I can feel this energy between us, and I understand that I’m not supposed to know about it. But I do. And it bothers me. It physically hurts me. How do you think it makes me feel that you’re you and we have such a weird vibe?”

“Some fucking guy.”

“Shut up,” I snapped dismissively, but without malice. “Tell me what this is. Who am I to you now? Before I came here this last time, what was our situation?”

He took a deep, slow breath, pulling his hand from mine to rub both of his palms together. “Well… to be honest, I haven’t talked to you in awhile. No matter what the reality is, I have a consuming job here, and it doesn’t leave me a lot of time for anything else. I’m forever trying to repair the damage that… ‘I’ did.” His smile was terribly sad.

“And when you’re involved with Alex, I honestly can’t stand you, so it’s better to stay away. So I… didn’t know what was going on for too long.” He cringed again. “Until honestly… you were already dead. Do you realize that? In 2010, you didn’t even exist anymore. Everything about you was vacuumed entirely clean.”

My mouth twisted as if it was forming its own question mark. “Okay okay, but why was this such A Situation with Alex this time? Have he and I never… been together before?”

His eyebrow lifted into a sharp angle, and a small smirk breezed briefly across his mouth. “Oh, you two are always involved in some sort of tryst. How did you phrase it? ‘Fighting or fucking?'” Now both eyebrows went up for a moment, but his mouth stayed a thin line. “That’s extremely accurate. You two are…”

His face turned back to the end of the beach, my vision all rich dark waves of hair. “It just never ends. You can never stay away from each other, no matter what happens. To know you’d let this happen to you, essentially take away this huge portion of this current life through trauma and abuse, and you’re angry that I interfered?” He laughed bitterly.

“Well,” I said softly, “not to mention Jim, who she seems totally fine with sacrificing.”

He turned his face back to me, his eyes soft and shimmering golden light again. “Ah, well. I think you may end up surprising yourself when it comes to Jim. In fact, I think you will end up surprising a lot of people.”

“Maybe even you?”

His eyes slowly lingered on my features, one corner of his mouth gently tugging to the edge of his jaw as if caught by a fish hook. “Maybe even me,” he murmured. “But to be honest… I’ve given up on thinking you will ever choose me. That’s not what we have. It’s… not something that any one of the three of us is allowed. We are all so in love, we all will never truly be in love.” He shrugged a little, deflated.

“But this time. Why were you so angry this time?”

“This time?” This time his laughter was genuine, his face chagrined. “Oh, my love, I am this angry every time. And so are you. And so is he. You’d think we’d be over it by this point- this tug of war, this constant bickering, this ferocious need to be together, but… we still aren’t.” He shrugged. “We never will be. It’s tedious. The entire Universe is sick of us.”

It’s too much to know. This is the one thing I wish I hadn’t learned. Knowing all of this, trying to process it for the last fifteen years or so has fucked up too much of my heart. This is disgusting foolishness. I hate this.

Ignorance is bliss. Spiritual work can be its own trauma. Knowledge can be violence.

I am alone in ways lately that terrifies me. I am tired of being so bizarre. Please… help me. This is sick, and extreme, and pathetic. I am so embarrassed. I am so proud. I am so disgusted. I am so smug. I am so repellent.

I don’t want to exist like this anymore.