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.