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.