Month: October 2020

all will drown

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I’ve been thinking about what a job that is, the keeper of the man who makes the shadows. Like being leashed to a panther, both responsible for and a victim of its constant violence.

Being a reason for prejudice and hate, your name invoked in massive destruction, your words turned to garbage. Being a gentle joke to those who know you truly, the puppy whose bark carries the sweetest bite.

Imagine trying to wrap your mind around having conversations and therapy with one of the oldest souls in the world.

Having him whisper desperately to you, things that feel like they must be hallucinations but have weight in your soul. Words that melt into a language you don’t speak, but can feel.

The longest love of your whole entire existence, maybe of anyone’s existence ever, someone you still aren’t even sure you deserve to speak to, and suddenly his behavior is so out of control, so reckless and desperate that it scares you.

Describing his actions to new/old friends, ones who know him in a more real way than you do now, and their energy is like the squealing of preteen girls at a slumber party.

“You don’t understand,” they say. “He never behaves this way.”

And you feel both honored and ashamed. You can make a man of great honor act indecently. What does that make you?

Imagine this man- love of your eternity- later staring at you with disgust and disdain, furious.

You’re a whore, he says.

That smug, haughty fucking face you’ve grown to hate not just in this life, but for all of time.

I feel so sure that who I am is an act of violence against anyone foolish enough to love me. It is like loving a maelstrom.

All will drown.

There’s nothing left in here, I don’t think. I think this year has stripped all the humanity from my bones. I am raw and ferocious.

You don’t understand how many times I have been a villain. You don’t know what I’ve done to survive. You’d be horrified to learn what I’ve done for fun in other lives. You might be shocked to know the things I’ve done in this life alone.

I sit at the very center of the balance. No one ever knows where I will fall or what I might do when I am asked to make a decision. This lifetime has exposed layers and layers of deceits and subplots that I’ve been running for entirely too long now.

Decades. Maybe centuries, given how angry some people are.

And I am unrepentant. Glitter-eyed, with the tip of my tongue at the corner of my diamond hard lips.

oops.

I am a bitch and an unreachable ice queen in this life, someone who cannot be pierced. Someone people are too afraid to love. I radiate energy like a fucking blast furnace.

Across the sea of existence, I am the one who changes the weights on the scale to shift things at her own whim. I should be impartial, but I am always tempted by trouble.

I do so love a drama.

Do not be fooled- neither true light nor true darkness have clear or untainted motives. Both sides will do whatever they can to win. And if I had arms, they would be severed at the shoulder from how often I am pulled back and forth.

I thought I could cure a demon. One of the most powerful forces of evil in the Universe. Someone who continues to rape and murder me in life after life after life.

I secretly gave him every single part of my soul just to prove that he would ruin it. I cannot fathom what a cold, hard spirit I have if I was willing to sacrifice my entire self in order to make a point.

It is funny to know that one of the biggest reasons you can’t kill yourself is because of how much trouble you will be in once you’re dead.

I’m not held to the same standard as others. Everyone is always disappointed in me. Everyone always thinks I could have been better. Even in this life, people have said over and over, “I just expected more from you. I thought you were better than that.”

I’m not sure there is anything of worth inside this wreckage. I think all I can ever be is a nomad, a recluse, a pariah. My eternal curse is to never truly belong. I did it to myself.

I am an example to everyone else of what happens when you are defiant with The Ones Who Weave the Tapestry.

I thought I got to weave, too. …oh no ma’am. No, ma’am.

You get to chase the children holding scissors. You get to pretend you don’t have a pair in your back pocket.

Everyone knows my name, but no one dares to speak it out loud. No one would claim it. People are envious and pitying all at once. You can love the story and dislike the main character. That’s who I am.

Imagine what it is to know you can never really go Home. There is no Home for you. To spend decades working on your soul to know that you are damned.

I am the one who no one sees, forever tied to the one who is always seen, and the one you hope you never see.

The void is all I am and all I love.

It’s all that will ever love me back.

the basement in the basement

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I keep thinking about the nightmare that led me to the secret room. 

I was in the house that I have dreamt about since I was a teenager, that I have come to believe is a metaphor for my mind/soul. It is sprawling and disorienting- staircases that go nowhere, endless closed doors in long, ominous hallways. Rooms with no ceiling, rooms with live trees inside, rooms soaked in fetid water.

In this nightmare, I walked down to the basement, and in the corner was a rough wooden door, so small I had to duck to cross the threshold. In the tiny, filthy, cement-walled room was an old metal cot that was just rusty springs with a fairly large steamer trunk next to it. 

When I stepped forward and my foot accidentally brushed the edge of the trunk, I suddenly realized I was barefoot. I could feel the electricity of the worn leather rocket through my toes, and my whole body recoiled from the trunk as if it was a threat. 

There was a tiny window positioned near the ceiling that was covered in a layer of grime and filth that made it almost opaque. The slimmest slice of sun crept across the gritty cement floor, and seeing the dim light made me feel instantly, strangely trapped.

On the opposite wall, there was another door- smaller, rougher. Behind it, there was a set of about a dozen uneven cement steps, very steep and sharp, thick with the smell of mildew and rot. They felt wet on my bare feet, and the moment I got to the bottom, my heart leapt in panic. 

This was a bad place. This was evil.

At that very moment, I spun around to see the door slamming shut, the entire door vibrating on its frame from the force. I ran to the door and desperately tried to wrench it open, screaming at the top of my lungs. 

it was coming, it was coming, this is where it came to hurt me, it was coming now, there was no escape, there was never any escape

“Daddy!” I wailed as the doorknob came off in my hand. I thrust my arm through the hole and clawed desperately at the air, knowing that no one could hear me this far away. No one was coming. I was all alone.

When I woke up in terror, still in the Grey Space between worlds, I slipped into meditation.

Show me this place, I whispered. I wasn’t awake enough to question how I knew this place was real, or what caused me to ask to have it revealed. Many strange things happen in the Grey Space, and I trust I am safe enough to chase shadows. 

Most of the time, anyway.

The room began to clarify again inside my mind, this time with that surreal reality that only meditation landscapes can conjure. I saw that the floor under the rusty cot was spattered with blood, and my stomach twisted. 

This is why I’d come back, I could see now. I needed to know it all if I was going to ever move on, if I was ever going to heal.

I opened the trunk…

and I was inside.

It was startling, borderline horrifying, to see a form of myself inside that trunk, though seeing strange nonsensical nightmare images in meditation was now par for the course at this point. It was much more disturbing when I saw the state of her, crammed like a corpse inside this trunk. 

She was naked, emaciated, filthy, her hair hanging in matted clumps on her head. Her entire body was riddled with bruises, caked in blood. When I reached out to touch her, she started to scream.

“Please, please,” she begged, sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh please, I’ll behave, I’ll be quiet, I’ll be good, I’ll do anything, please…”

I tried to gently shush her, but she began to shake uncontrollably, curling her knees tighter against her chest. Her thighs were shiny and tight with dried blood, the edges of it flaking off like old paint. I felt a terror unfolding inside of me, unable to understand or process what I was seeing. The part of me that was rational tried to dismiss it. Another nightmare, another delusion. 

But.

I called for my ancient and limited time lover, unsure of what else I should do. When he showed up, he never said a word. He pulled a shining white sheet from out of nowhere, quietly reaching into the trunk to wrap the sheet around her (me?). 

He lifted her into his arms and cradled her like a baby, gently shushing her sobs, and she shuddered silently into his embrace. He looked at me with dark, pained contemplation, and suddenly, we were back in the field that had become the safest place for my soul. A place that I still use when I don’t know where else to go.

After that, everything started to change. My marriage began to unravel as I dug deep to fix myself, to heal the girl in the trunk. Whether it was real or just a metaphor, I knew it was shown to me for a significant reason. It made me realize how ravaged, how ugly, how broken I really was.

Finding her was the beginning of my new life, but I think that in a lot of ways, I abandoned really dealing with that once my relationship with someone else in real life started to bloom. He helped me to reclaim a part of myself that I thought was dead, but he was also a temporary vacation from true growth and change. I once called him a lighthouse for a lost soul, because he brought me back to shore in so many ways. He resurrected me.

But that wasn’t a healthy relationship either.

And now, here I am.

Dealing with the beach house is one thing. You cannot imagine how many times I have stood at the side of that bed and watched myself be ruined, something that a human being wouldn’t even have survived. Something I don’t think that part of me did survive. Something so violent, so ugly that I wouldn’t even wish for anyone else to even see it with their own eyes. It is beyond foul. It has broken so many people forced to witness the carnage.

But these days, I can’t stop thinking about the girl in the trunk in the basement with a basement. 

Is she the reason I still can’t connect with others? I have been thinking so much about my issues with intimacy, my inability to be vulnerable, my reaction of revulsion to kindness or empathy towards me. I even recoil from platonic friendships. 

The best relationship I’ve ever had was with someone I knew I’d never be with, that had no future. Only then was I even remotely open and honest about who I really am. People that try to love me learn so little about me. 

Is there any hope for me opening my heart to anyone, truly? After so many times of trying to be vulnerable, to allow intimacy, only to have it violently violated… how many times do I allow that? What is it about me that encourages such disregard of my vulnerability?

Something about me is broken. Can it be healed?

the walking dead

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There is a darkness in this world right now, and those of you who can feel it already know what I mean.

There are people in this world who are not people, who are battery sources for darkness. Their eyes are open, empty, a black abyss of hatred. Twisted smiles of entitlement and smug ignorance. Their souls are on standby now- they’ve been locked out from the real energy of this world, and who they used to be is gone now.

You loved some of these people. They’ve become monsters, someone you cannot recognize. A straw person who spews vitriol and sickness, who is proud of their lack of empathy. Loud, brutish, cruel, smug. You stare at them in disbelief- who are you? Who have you become? What have you done with the person I once loved?

People who no longer even remotely try to step out of your path, who dare you to run into them. People who crowd into your space to sneer and spout nonsense. People who are on the brink of fury at any second, who lose control at the slightest inconvenience. People with absolutely bonkers driving on the road, who seem to have no regard for any other driver.

It is so tiring to be Someone Who Can See right now. There are so few of us in the world right now, who know what is really happening, even if we don’t have words for it. We know this isn’t right. Something about this, All of This, is… off. It’s been off for a long time (since 2012 if you ask me, maybe even 2010), but this year we have spiraled completely into The Matrix. 

There is some kind of hypnosis spun across this country, some kind of zombie-esque illness. Screen-induced blankness. This country has revealed itself to be some kind of modern day Dante’s Inferno, and we just keep finding new layers of Hell to fall into.

I hope we can all hang on. I feel like we have a long way to go before we see the bottom. We have to do what we can to hang onto the Light, because there are so many people employed as fire extinguishers right now.

They don’t get to win.

We cannot let them win.

rules to avoid seeing ghosts

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/// do not look down long hallways, especially if they have a mirror at the end of them

/// close your eyes as you turn lights on or off in rooms, just for a moment – they come in the betweenplace of light and dark

/// never look too long in a mirror, and never in large rooms with lots of shadows. the longer you stare, the harder it is to look away

/// keep ambient noise playing at all times to avoid or explain any shuffling or shifting in other rooms

/// don’t go into the basement or attic alone, ever. if you must go, speak out loud to yourself to keep from getting lost in the silence

/// leave as few reflective surfaces open as possible. any distortion, any vaguely lit shadowy surface is a place for them to show up

/// be settled by midnight and be asleep by 3am, or you might as well stay up until four. they will come for you in the Grey Place between awake and asleep during The Dead Hour

/// acknowledge them out loud if necessary. we share this space, but in this life and time, it is mine. please do not make this difficult for both of us. I see you. I hear you. give me space and grace.

/// do not sage/smoke cleanse if you do not know what you are doing because you will make it worse

/// do not taunt, tempt, or ridicule them. you will lose.

/// if you are very afraid, Hail Mary and Our Father are the strongest protection words can offer. you do not have to be religious. it might work better if you’re not.

/// if you used to know the words but find you cannot speak them in the dark, you are in terrible trouble. I can help you. I know the terror of 3am like few people on earth, and you need immediate help.

/// I believe you. you don’t have to convince me. I don’t think it’s weird. it’s not embarrassing. it’s real, and what is happening is real, and you deserve to be validated and acknowledged. if I can do nothing else, I can help keep other people safe from a thing that nearly devoured me. literally.

9/20/2010

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[transcribed from the original entry]

I went to see Alex (not his real name) last night, and I was nervous as soon as I set foot on the sand. The entire house was washed out and grey while the landscape around it was still full color. It was instantly eerie. Wrong.

Alex stepped into the doorway from the bedroom that led out onto the sand, leaning heavily against it. He was also entirely grey, and as I approached him, I realized that his form was actually made of ash.

I rushed to his side and laid a hand on his cheek. His cheekbone crumbled under my palm, raining ash onto the ground, and I pulled my hand back in horror.

Despite my disgust, I leaned closer to peer at his eyes. They were matte, no pupils, blank as a statue. “Alex?”

“Krissy…” he breathed, reaching blindly for my hands. His fingers broke off against mine, his hands crumbling to the wrist. “Oh, Krissy. You came.”

“Alex, what is going on here? What are you doing?” I reached out to touch him and then recoiled over and over, remembering his fragility.

“I can’t… I’m just trying to…” The more he tried to form words, the more his mouth crumbled. His lips would fall off in clumps and then reform as he struggled to speak. Eventually he just gave up, slumping chin on chest.

“Let me help,” I said, putting my hands on his chest, my palms pressing against his ashen sternum. A white light slowly began to grow, filling his torso with more solidity. His skin began to gain color as the light traveled through his chest into his arms, up his throat. He was slowly becoming whole again.

He threw my arms off, and instantly the light began to fade. His solidity vanished with it, turning him back to ash.

“No,” he mumbled, and when he shook his head, half of his face came off with it. He lifted an arm to keep me back and it broke at the elbow, exploding into a cloud on the sand. “This is my battle. This is for me to figure out.”

“Have you seen yourself?” I challenged. “You need help.” 

He tried to speak, but the entire right side of his body collapsed in an ashen avalanche. In terror, I called out for Jim.

“No!” Alex tried to shout, but he was now falling apart so rapidly he was hardly even a human form any longer.

Jim showed up instantly, and when he saw Alex as a huge pile of ash in front of the open patio doors, his eyes grew huge. 

I reached out for Jim’s hand, and we knelt in front of what remained of Alex, focusing our energy on him until he regained form. The color spread out from his renewed form into the house, bringing it back to life as well.

I was concerned we’d have to fight a fully healed and bitterly furious Alex, but he was suddenly unconscious. It was strange to see him like this, in an almost fairytale-like slumber, his features serene and soft. It had been so long since I’d seen him so vulnerable.

“Alex?” I said gently, squeezing his shoulder. “Hey. Wake up.” I gently tapped his cheek with my fingers.

He didn’t respond.

I shook his shoulder until his head rattled slightly. “Alex. Hey.” I slapped his cheek. 

Nothing.

I looked up to express concern to Jim, but he was peering into the bedroom.

“Did you hear that?” he asked in a thin voice, his eyes dark, his entire body on alert. “What the fuck was that?”

He stepped through the doors and my stomach sank. I hadn’t been inside in a long time, and I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out what might be making noise within.

Or to be more honest, what I already knew was there.

And indeed, each room was playing a neverending loop of all the worst things Alex had ever done to me in that house. And the worst of the worst was- as always- in the bedroom.

What was happening in that room was so grotesque it was a caricature, something so appalling and vile that it was impossible to believe. And especially impossible for me, when I was adamant that it was fine, and not traumatic at all.

Without being unnecessarily triggering, or the least amount I can be while still getting my point across- there was a slightly red tinge to the lighting in the room because of the blood sprayed up the aquarium.

It was all you could smell- wet copper, and the sharpness of adrenaline and terror. The energy felt wet with violence.

Jim was staring at this looping  “mirage” with a face I had never seen before and couldn’t interpret. 

He leaned down to examine it further, stunned, as if he couldn’t fully comprehend what he was seeing. As he got to eye level, the onyx-eyed, filth-fanged version of “Alex” looked up at him and laid one long, skeletal finger against his mouth.

Shhh.

Jim staggered backwards and grabbed my hand as if he needed it to keep from falling, and pulled me back to the beach. Running.

We got to escape.

She didn’t.

Outside by the surf, Alex was awake. He was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees, watching the waves.

When he saw us approach, his face crumpled.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have helped me, Krissy,” he mewled, and I winced at his weak, flimsy tone.

“You needed help, Alex.” I stooped down next to him, searching his face, but he couldn’t meet my eyes.

He glanced briefly at the house. You could hear screaming even from this distance. 

“Have you been in there? I don’t deserve your help.” He was on the verge of tears again, his voice shimmering with sobs. “Look at what I’ve done!”

“This isn’t helping you though,” I said firmly. “This isn’t supposed to be punishment. This is about you getting better.”

Now he actually began to cry, burying his face in his hands and weeping. “You have to hate me, Krissy. You have to. You should be looking at me the way that he is.”

I glanced up at Jim. His face was hard with fury, his eyes locked on the horizon, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. His tongue was pressed into the corner of his jaw, one heel bouncing violently into the sand. His arms were crossed so tightly against his chest that it would have ached.

Jim flicked his gaze at me briefly, then went back to scouring the waves in the distance. “It seems like everything here is okay now.” His eyes bounced back to me again, burning with desperation. “I’ll talk to you later, okay? I want to talk to you.”

His eyes went back to the ocean and Alex said, “Jim-”

Jim held up a hand with a hard, single shake of his head, and disappeared.

brave new world

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It is a beautiful house, and I have missed it so much. When you lay in the bed, you can watch the sun perpetually set in cotton candy shades over the turquoise sea, with swinging double hinged patio doors that are always wide open to the cool, caressing breeze.

The water is only about a hundred feet away or so, and two palm trees hang over on the right side of the beach, with a cotton rope hammock slung between them, big enough for two. The sand is soft and cool, the loveliest velvet underfoot.

I still don’t fully trust it yet. So much violence has befallen me on this beach, things only a handful of people know happened, or even the extent to which they happened.

Years later, when my ex was… cleared out… and he told me the things he had been forced to do to me in meditation, sobbing as he said it, I told him coldly, “What you saw is what has already been done.”

“You don’t understand,” he wept. “I had to … murder you.”

I blinked slowly, my mouth trying to escape my face in a serious of hard pulls. “Oh, no. I do understand.”

But still, I think in many ways he lost a great deal more. To be erased for five years?

Then again – just because I remember, does it mean I was really alive?

///

This is the place where I learned to meditate in 2003, where I spent nearly a year being totally unable to hear conversation with anyone. Where I would watch his lips move, see his face register that I couldn’t hear him, and shake his head, laughing.

And then, one night, with his mouth against my ear, I heard him whisper my name as if he was in the room with me and I gasped aloud.

We were both so happy. At last, at last.

A few years later, there would be nights when I would clutch my head and scream inside myself just to keep his words from being able to register. Where I had to constantly run a monologue or a song or a script in my head to try to disrupt his spells and smoke and lies and sickness.

Where do you think you can go? You can never escape me.

///

A year after the first time I heard his voice on my own, I paused mid-conversation in the beach house as the sheer curtains that were blowing in the breeze gently brushed my face. The sensation was so real I was instantly silenced, and gently ran my fingers across them in wonder, watching with wide eyes the way the candles flickered against the wall. How the shadows fell across the bed. The way the fish were swimming lazily in the massive aquarium.

I burst into tears.

To realize that was once a landscape made of cardboard cutouts and swirling nonsense was now tangible. Alive. A place that potentially only existed inside my head had now become a place inside my soul, and possibly even a real place that actually existed on some plane somewhere.  

And then it became a place of punishment, of suffering. A place where the shadows took on their own shape and size. A place where a man I thought I loved, who I believed was my secret soulmate, became a literal monster.

Someone who stood in silhouette, with burning hot eyes and a voice like grinding gears, nearly intolerable to hear. Who became not even a man anymore, but something nearly intolerable to look at.

LOOK AT ME.

This place I loved, turned into a nightmare. Turned into his prison, a place where all of my trauma repeated over and over and over again. A place where I first felt all the grace and love and light of the entire Universe ripped right out of my hands and mashed into mud. Having to try to learn to meditate in other places, to try to recreate something that to this day, I never have been able to find.

The last solstice, I finally took that beach house back after over ten years of loss. I still think about him appearing in the doorway with a neck broken into a ninety degree angle, flopping up like a puppet when he spoke.

I see you know who you are now.

///

I am so uneven now. Even my Work Self vs. my Spirit Self is divided again, as I’ve been semi-removed at work for almost two months now.

Who am I? Who will I be next? Am I ready for the next solstice? Will I ever really escape this narrative? I am so tired of telling this story, but I am clearly missing some detail, something I need to finally close this door.

It’s okay to keep talking until I feel like I can be silent.

There is so much I still haven’t even said yet.

the nothing in the everything

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Too old to follow the rules and too tired to keep breaking them. The ennui of causing all the trouble you’ve ever desired, to dare to dance with demons just to feel alive again.

How many years is my sentence? How much penance must be paid before the debt is clear?

You can’t earn your way into grace, and some of us will never be fully brought back into the light again.

Some are the living examples, the reasons why you stay in line. Nearly everyone, no matter how wild you may have been, finds a way into the queue.

And when you refuse?

No one is marking your growth when you are a marked woman. No one watches the wisps of birthday candle smoke once the wish has been made. No one is worried about the strain on the yoke, just the yield of the harvest.

Imagine if you solved the puzzle, and when you showed it to others, they set it on fire and then slit your throat over the ashes. Over and over.

How many times do you go gracefully into the light before you wonder if it isn’t better to sow the darkness?

Midnight in a soul can last a week, a month, a year. A lifetime? An infinity? What if you have broken so many rules that even the Universe stops loving you?

I know what you can carry, It says. But maybe It doesn’t. Maybe you’re the experiment to see the limit.

How many ways can a soul break?

.

When people talk to my Entire Self, they regard her/him like a panther. Cagey, anxious, tremulous, narrow-eyed. S/he cannot be trusted- notoriously mercurial and violent, a perfect vision of the childish fits befitting a Greek myth.

My love is the capriciousness of the incoming tide, and we are all at its mercy.

Every time I try to come here to learn to be softer, kinder, and every time I come here, I receive endless abuse, violence, shame.

I am discarded. I fall in love with ghosts, both living and dead.

Those that love me cannot truly reach me, stretching desperate hands into the damp, putrid well where I live.

Please come into the sun. Look at yourself in the light.

But when you know that you were not built for love, when you know that clouds will obscure the sun when you attempt to walk into its light, what is the purpose of being more accessible?

Time has taken everything but granite and lightning.

When a plate breaks too many times, the pieces are too pulverized to be placed together again.

I am the gaps in the whole. I am the void in the substance. I am the nothing that makes the everything.

.

I rage at the moon because she is a reflection of what I know is also true about me- I am just a mirror of the light. I hold none of it, and my dark side is too cold for life. For a few brief hours I catch a bit on my face, a slice that diminishes daily.

Every wax, I am sure it is my time to be seen, but the wane comes and takes it all again.

To cling to a pillow and wail, “Be real! Just be real!” But no warmth ever comes. No soft hands. No gentle mouths.

Real and not real. Whole and empty.

And that is the best love I’ve ever had in this life.

Another dark, beautiful joke. Exactly what I deserve. Loved and not loved. Only the dead can keep me alive.

It’s all a dream. And when you are just a dream, how long before your substance fades?

snippets from the past

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It’s hard when the same loop has run for years, and I can’t seem to get any further information. I’ve seen it all before, so many times over, and still it claws to escape.

Grabbing people by the shirt and slitting their throats, stabbing their hearts, throwing them to the ground like trash. get the fuck out of my way

Falling to the dirt with my fists pressed against my teeth. oh no oh no oh no his face his face his beautiful face

The smell of jasmine across a rooftop still warm from the sun, my heart pounding against my ribcage. who am I and how dare I be here now

My hands running over fat heads of wheat, the breeze making them undulate like an ocean as my children run in front of me, squealing and laughing. My heart is so full, I am so in love. this is my best life, I am truly blessed

Being pulled off of a bed by my upper arms, screaming, locked into the dark eyes of a beautiful woman whose gaze tells me she isn’t surprised. Betrayal like a hot coal. how could you? I loved you with my entire self

Coughing blood out of my mouth, reaching with numb hands to clutch onto the person holding me in their arms. I’m going, I’m going, where am I going? no no don’t leave me alone, please don’t leave me alone

Falling over the edge, the wind roaring in my ears. How did this happen? Is this real? falling, falling, falling,

Waves like monsters, rising before my eyes, filling me with ferocious fury. I am ready to battle you, my love. I dare you to try to take me down. We will war to the end. and here we goooooo

Children screaming, “Mama!” Wailing and pleading while the soldiers laugh, pulling out their machetes and unzipping their pants. and I am next, and I am next, and death will be a gift after this

blood spraying into my mouth as I scream

my husband is never coming back, it was all a lie, I am alone and in terrible danger

I could live in this moment forever and ever amen

he is so handsome

she is so beautiful

they are all so ugly

How many times can the Universe kill everyone you love before you are too afraid to curse anyone again? Safer to choose those who would never choose you. Who use you. Because to take the chance to lose everything, to have your love soaked in blood?

I am either dark and infamous, or light and invisible.

After ten years of struggle, I have gone back to being the cellophane dreamcatcher.

The fishing line parachute.

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I talk to “myself” all the time in my own home, and hell- even sometimes at work. Sometimes I’m talking out loud to someone I need to work things through with, sometimes it’s self-therapy, and sometimes I’m talking to the dead.

What I forgot about my friend’s house- what I always forget- is the moment I walk in the door, I am unable to speak out loud. I feel intensely that someone is listening. Someone that I don’t want to hear me.

I have learned from my previous stays to leave the kitchen lights on and to close the door to the spare bedroom until I’m ready for bed, but I’d forgotten about how intense the constant, low-grade panic really is. I used to think it was just the vibe between my friend and his wife until the first time I stayed there alone.

Nope. It’s the house.

When I say that the first night I was there I almost had to leave?

As soon as I got into bed, I blurred right into this incredibly vivid meditation. I thought about my apartment from 2013-2016, and instantly, I was there. I remembered every part of it- how it smelled at night, the way the kitchen floor felt on my bare feet, how it looked with just the undercabinet lights on, the weirdness of the stairs. All of it, as if I was actually really there.

It was so real it actually frightened me. I had to open my eyes to wash it away.

Also- lately when I go into meditation, I find the same person waiting for me, someone I usually am not really allowed to see this often. I am getting increasingly suspicious of it, and when I asked him about it the other night, he got the kind of evasively sheepish that I know entirely too well.

In March, I drove to the very end of the mainland of the Outer Banks, then walked the two-ish miles to the point. It looked almost exactly like the stretch of beach in my meditation, once I conjured up seventeen years ago. I broke down sobbing, my entire body lighting up with electricity.

Anyway, that’s where we go most nights. The more intensely I could see the beach, and see my old friend, the more intensely I could feel the ghost in the corner of the bedroom. He was standing half in the closet, staring right at me. It’s been so long since I’ve felt that kind of violent fury of my presence.

“Dude, I want to be sleeping in my own bed right now,” I even said out loud, into the dark. “Trust me. I don’t want to be here either. Just let me sleep.”

The moment I would slide back into being able to feel my feet on the cool sand, the warmth of his fingers twined with mine, the way I feel when he locks his eyes on me, I’d immediately be washed over with terror, panic, sickness. Smoldering resentment. Behind my eyes, I’d see the shadow running full speed across the room to leap at my bed.

“You see?” said my friend. “The more you dissolve the veil, the more you are forced to be seen. Are you sure you’re ready for this feeling again?”

I wish I could say it was easy to feel that intense visibility again, the terror and power of being able to see through the veil, but… it never gets easier. It’s deeply and profoundly terrifying, and also enormously empowering as well.

I (finally) binged the final season of The Good Place today, and once again, it was the exact right moment to see it. They got it absolutely right, ya’ll. More people who know the Universe.

Turns out, I think there’s a lot of us here right now.

And I’m just going to keep hanging onto that.

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

I do my best meditation in the hours between when it is very late and when it is very early, just at the edges of dawn.

Likewise, my favorite version of the beach house is at the moment where the sun is turning the horizon dusky rose and stonewashed denim, and the sea is a glittering sapphire. When the day is still just a hopeful promise.

I’ve been meditating with purpose for seventeen years, so landscapes roll out for me without trouble. I remember the days when just trying to keep things stable was an almost impossible task, when the ground would dissolve under me, when everything would go dark or tinny, like it was painted over with sloppy watercolors. Everything slightly metallic, the shades of dreams and nightmares.

Hearing [redacted] speak took six months of work, or maybe more, and it never really clicked in until he and I started sleeping together. I’ve also been thinking about the years when everyone was talking to me- how much work it was to discern between each individual voice… and also my own inner voice… and also, the Voice of the Universe.

Then how much work I had to do to block nearly all of it out.

Then spending the last four years letting it all back in again. Safely.

…I’m still working on that part.

///

Physical touch over there is hard to explain. It isn’t really like being touched, but it’s not exactly like the memory of being touched either. It is very real, but in a place that exists in a new part of your brain, one that a fully rational mind doesn’t access.

All things that involve the dead are strongest in the soft place between awake and asleep.

I’ve said it before, but it does feel unfair that I insinuate not having intimacy when I spent the entire morning laying in bed at my beach house talking to someone I am deeply in love with as he kissed my shoulders and back and ears and cheeks and mouth like my skin was water.

Intimacy without expectation is a real revelation for me.

///

I was looking for a specific moment in my private journals and ended up reading almost three entire journals from my senior year of college, when things with [redacted] were very intense.

Fifteen years ago, I said out loud to myself several times.

One of the things that is constant confirmation to me is seeing things he said to me back then and feeling the truth in them now. I laugh bitterly when I read some of the entries, even though I’ve read them all at least ten times. Somehow, the shock and disgust is always brand new.

He told me exactly who he was, and I refused to believe it. There was every sign imaginable that he was a monster, and I thought I just knew him better than everyone else. I had the most grace and forgiveness and love, more than every other person who had given up on him.

Talk about an unreliable narrator. Oh, kiddo. Oh, honey. Oh, my love.

I have no idea who should get these journals when I’m gone. It’s the only thing I ponder over. The rest of it? I could care less. Take whatever you want.

I just don’t know who should have to carry this burden. It almost feels unfair to give it to anyone else. But to see these words fall into a landfill, unread?

Oh, dear.

///

“I just feel like I should be doing more,” I said. “Service work or soul work or…”

My oldest lover lifted a hand and gestured around the room. “You have your beach house back, after more than ten years. Do not discount that. You can always do more, absolutely, but don’t dismiss the work you’ve already done so far.”

My tarot cards keep telling me that I’m doing a great job, that I am handling my business, that I am strong and powerful and I need to keep walking this path. That’s all well and good, but as always, I circle back to the same question.

What now? What next?