When I was learning to meditate in 2003, I was told to create a scene for myself. Whatever I wanted. My happiest place.

I created a beach scene, of course.

Back then, I could barely hold onto it for more than a few minutes. It faded in and out of my “sight,” and when I could see it, things were tinny and false. Like paper cutouts on a matte landscape drawn by a child. It took a month of nightly work to even be able to see Alex’s face, and almost another year before I could really hear his voice.

A few years later, I would have to do similarly intense work to block him out. His influence on me was like smoke weaving in and out of my brain, impossible to discern which thoughts were his and which were mine. For awhile, I’m not sure I really had my own thoughts- everything in my brain was entirely his concoction.

It wasn’t until 2011 before I was finally able to purge myself and start the process of being truly alive again.

Six years of captivity.

In 2004, I was meditating for two or three hours a night, every night. By then, I had added a beach house to the stretch of empty sand that continued to become more tangible every time I was there. Details seemed to flesh themselves out almost on their own- a wicker chair in a corner, a clean crisp shine to the golden hardwood in the living room, a garden blooming behind the house.

At the same time, it was as if they’d always been there, which is how most spiritual things tend to go in general. Never an “aha!” but more of an “of course.”

It was late 2004/early 2005 when I had the surreal experience of walking across the bedroom at the beach house, realizing that I was really there. I could feel the curtains on my fingertips. I could feel the sheets on my skin. I could hear the burbling of the aquarium and the crashing of the waves. I was awestruck to the point of near terror. 

I didn’t know it could be like that. I had no idea that was possible.

It was real.

I got lost in that world, especially once I graduated college in 2005 and crash landed into reality. The “real” world was poverty and starvation and failure and overdue bills and shut off utilities and what seemed at the time like constant unexplainable misfortune.

I was also wildly in love with Alex- addicted to him, high on the power I believed it gave me, consumed by his obsession with me. I gave him access to absolutely every part of me, not having any idea what that meant or what I was doing. We were always giggling over some little secret, closed into our own private world where no one could reach us.

He also was forever creating a drama, starting a fight, pushing my boundaries out farther and farther. Taking more and more and more from both me and my husband.

After my son was born in 2006, he asked me to marry him. I said yes, swept up in the moment, but soon after felt sick and awful and guilty and backed out. He took it entirely too well.

Maybe a week or so later, I saw his other face. I had seen it once before, in early 2004 when I was still really new to meditation, but he reassured me that it was a part of myself that I saw and conquered.

“Alex is gone,” he said that night, as I fell endlessly into the blackness of his eyes. “It’s just us now.”

Can you convince yourself you didn’t see something when you’ve spent years becoming certain that you could? How do you reconcile seeing something so terrifying your mind can hardly hold it without breaking?

By 2008, the beach house was basically ruined. I felt afraid there all the time- every corner of that beach was a place where something horrifying and vile happened to me, most of which I hadn’t even begun to process or often avidly denied happened.

At that point though, I was afraid of Alex as well. For many of those years, he stood in deep shadows on the side of the house in full silhouette, smoking a cigarette. His voice would be somewhere between his normal soft smoky cookie batter sweetness and the sound of two dogs fighting to the death.

Even from that distance, you could see the dark burning in his eyes, like black flames. It’s as if his eyes were the last coals of a midnight bonfire- shimmering heat with only a hint of light. Sometimes I’d go to approach him and he’d put his hand up to warn me to stay back.

To this day, I am still obsessed with and terrified of his face. Attracted and repulsed. Fascinated and disgusted.

In 2010, I purged our souls of Alex at the insistence of the new spiritual crowd that had swooped in out of nowhere to intervene. He was banished to the beach house, trapped in the prison he’d created for me.

Inside the beach house was every horrible thing he’d done to me there, playing over and over and over again on a loop. The entire house was filled with broken glass and blood and the sounds of my gurgled pleas for mercy, layered with the his feral, metallic roaring.

Fourteen years later, and if I think too long about that voice or those eyes, my hand will unconsciously come up to clamp over the right side of my neck.

I still spoke to Jeff sporadically until 2011, when I finally went to see him to tell him I was done for good. By the end of that year, my ex was basically insisting that I not speak to any of the dead anymore, that I had to discard them to give our marriage a chance.

After months of off and on visits and big blowout arguments, I began to lose them anyway. By the end of 2012, they were all gone. No one would come when I called, or if they did, they’d stare at me with huge, doleful eyes and fade back into the ether.

It forced me back into the real world, which is what I needed at the time but couldn’t comprehend back then. My heart was shattered. What was the purpose of any of it? I was destroyed for no reason. I was left to rot in the sun until my bones bleached.

When I finally left my ex in the summer of 2013, he said, “You know, I see them all around you still. I don’t know if you realize that. They never left.” It was the first time he’d mentioned the dead in two years.

It wasn’t until I moved here in 2016 that I really began to dip back into my spirituality again. I finally lived in a fully clean and clear home, and once I found my footing here financially and professionally, I was free to start doing the kind of work I hadn’t had the strength or bravery for before.

It took me until winter solstice 2019 to finally fully reclaim the beach house. I spent this entire year rehabbing it, making it somewhere safe again, the cozy haven it had been for so long. It took months for the shadows to stop crawling across the walls, to stop feeling panicked and threatened, to stop seeing blood splashed onto everything.

I still struggle to see it in the dark without feeling anxious, but a golden pink endless sunset over turquoise water? I can live with that any day.

Yesterday was his birthday, and I hope he can see me now. Both how I have resurrected the beach house to its former glory, and also the love I have found there, that flourishes and grows daily.

Everything that he thought he could give me, everything he wanted to be for me, I have in spite of him and because of him. I have the deepest love and support and protection. I am never alone.

And I have my home back, the place that I now believe isn’t a place I created but a place that has always belonged to me.

He stole the home of my soul, but I reclaimed it. He burned my entire being to ash, and I wasn’t ever sure I’d be able to fully piece my shards back into something whole. But I did that, too.

It took me ten years to heal it all, but I feel like I have finally gotten to a place of true acceptance and grace.

I’m finally free.