“Alex”

/ thehourofthedead / 1 Comment

So last night when I got sucked into an “Alex” hole and was picking my way through his discography, his voice blew out my speakers. That’s never happened before, and was fixed by a restart. However, in the interim, his voice became distorted and- let’s just say it- downright demonic.

I get a lot of displeased faces that invisibly surround me when I decide I’m going to listen to his music, and that sucks because I still really deeply love his music and wish it wasn’t like playing a pungi in front of a cobra. But I know it’s not wise, and that just makes me more indignant.

I can do whatever I want. Don’t try to warn me. Don’t try to be the boss of me.

I can’t really describe what it’s like when the veil between worlds gets sketchy, but I suddenly realized I’d done a foolish thing by listening to his music after midnight, in the dark, in my bed, slightly intoxicated (IMAGINE THAT, says absolutely no one). It’s almost like the sides of my vision rupture slightly, and shadows and tiny flashes of light like sequins on a dress burst all around me. I start hearing things that aren’t real. I start to feel a bit like plastic wrap has been draped over my mouth.

When I was brushing my teeth, rushing myself to bed, an oily little voice appeared in the back of my mind. That voice only has one source, the shadowy little confidence man that may or may not have greasily convinced people to cause trouble since literally the beginning of time. I haven’t heard that voice in at least seven years and immediately had a visceral response. But as always, after a moment or two, I started to get lulled into a kind of sedated confusion, and suddenly, my triumvirate protection system appeared.

Before I could say anything, they each sat on an edge of my mattress and said, “Just go to sleep. Go to sleep. Now. Go to sleep.”

This morning, I decided I should listen to him some more, because this is what I do, and also watched an interview with him I’d never seen before. Every time he looked into the camera I felt like I’d been pierced with a knife, but I think his eyes do that to everyone. His speaking voice also has the strangest effect on me. It’s not the same as the oily voice I heard last night, but it still brings out such interesting reactions from deep in my rib cage. Certain inflections and phrases, ways he flips his hands or twists his mouth…

I think I want to believe that there is a separation somewhere, that the man I loved and the one that tried to kill me are not the same. Is that Stockholm Syndrome? I don’t know. Is that the part of me that still loves him and is still actively trying to rehabilitate him? I guess we’ll find out.

Oh, I know it doesn’t matter, and maybe it’s not even real, but I forget sometimes how close I am to trouble, and no matter what anyone else believes, I have to protect myself at all times.

It’s never over.

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I read my journals from 2010-2012 for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen hours.  I couldn’t stop, devouring page after page after page like it was something I’d never seen before.

I never talk about what my life was like in 2012.  I’ve never written about it, nor was my ex-husband involved in any part of it.   (Related/unrelated: I left my husband in 2013.)

There’s another entire person I was very involved with during this time that I never talk about. He makes no appearance in anything I’ve ever written, but he consumed almost two years of my life.

Ha.  He has consumed a great deal more than that.

I read about things yesterday that made me actually gasp out loud, hold my hand over my heart, slap the pages with disgust.  Some of it is a little choppy because I talk in code that I only sometimes understand now, and because I was beginning to realize my ex was reading my journal behind my back so I stopped being as open as I had been.  It’s incredible what you can forget when your life has been so tumultuous.

I learned the following interesting things.

First of all, I was still going to see “Alex” up until the end of 2012.  I mean, it was really infrequent, maybe once a year, once every six months, but.  I’m surprised that I had forgotten this development.  He has never stopped trying to pull me into seeing him.

2/21/12: Today, Max and I danced to Jason Mraz and he said, “Raise your hand if you like Jason Mraz.”  So we both raised our hands.  Then he said, “Raise your hand if you like [Alex].”  We raised our hands again, and he said, “But I can’t want to be like [Alex] because he’s bad, right?”

The unliving companion I have now was given a lot of grief for being involved with me.  For two or three years, our relationship was tumultuous… to be totally honest, he was almost never around. I spent much of that time mourning yet another new and unexplained absence by him.  I see now that the only way my marriage was ever going to end was to be completely abandoned by the dead.  I had to face the real world, and realize how much potential I had within myself.

There seems to be a certain hierarchy or status attached to living a lot of lifetimes, or achieving a great deal while living them.  I don’t necessarily mean fame, but rather how much you evolve.  This disappearing friend of mine has been around a long time but actively chooses not to live many lifetimes (because he doesn’t like to suffer).

Allegedly, people were telling him that there was really no way once I get back over there that my entire self will want to be around him.  In one entry he says, “I mean someone who’s like a Level 25 doesn’t want to be around a Level 3.” It’s why he continued to leave- at times, to try to “become better,” getting very serious about changing and evolving, and because he was being shamed out of seeing me.

It was partially how deeply I suffered in his absence that convinced him he was wrong.  Considering the fact that he alone kept me alive through the nightmare of last summer, I’m glad he didn’t give up on himself.  I’m glad we stopped listening to everyone else.

Who I used to be, and what she was/is doing while I sleep is still a mystery to this day.  I never felt rested, even though I slept almost constantly from 2011-2013.  My entire self was also extraordinarily fractured during this time, operating with two entirely separate agendas.  I am both fascinated and horrified to read about a time where I easily talk about who I once was as if she is not who I currently am.  And in many ways, she isn’t, I suppose.

It seems that we all probably live two lives- this waking one, and the complex, confusing puzzle world of the unconscious mind.  Where everything seems like a mystery until you learn the answer and realize you’ve known it all along.

Once, while going through a deep period of depression and suicidal dreams, one of my friends said to me, “Trust me, you do not want to be here.  I would be surprised if you didn’t come back here and immediately request a bounceback.  You’re walking into a mess.  You were set up in such a nasty and destructive way, and you’re going to have to face a ton of criticism when you return.”

I was constantly under investigation or being watched or lectured or judged or chastised for years at a time.  I didn’t remember how long I struggled with my sexuality, how sick I really was, how many times I relapsed.  I didn’t remember how hard people had worked to make me better.  I didn’t remember how involved I’d gotten with the person I don’t speak of here.  His name feels like it weighs a hundred thousand pounds.  I can’t recall the last time I said it out loud.

And I miss my old beach house.  I made several attempts to reclaim it, to have Alex moved elsewhere so I could return to it, but it’s been ruined.  Every single time I write about it in my private journals, I cannot stop marveling over how real and how beautiful and how powerful this place is in my mind.  Every time I would go there, I’d walk in a shuffling, wide-eyed wonder from room to room, running my hands over counters and peering into the enormous fish tank with delight and awe.

I feel very different lately.  This may be my new place to sort it all out, because I can’t stop thinking that I probably need to.  Quickly.

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way things used to be, the life I used to live.

For the first time in my entire life, I am what I would consider to be successful.  I live in a town I love, close to the ocean, and I don’t worry about money even a little.  I am luckier than I feel I’ve ever been in my life at this very moment.

It took me three years just to get over what happened to me, and I am very cautious to let anything that is “overly” supernatural back into my life.  I nearly lost my entire mind, and maybe even my soul, and the idea of even putting myself that close to risk again is too much to bear.

With that being said, I lost a part of myself I deeply loved.  The little homes I lived in on the other side were all so valuable to me.  I miss my beach house most of all, but of course, he is still there.  Every time I even try to think about it, it’s from very very far away, and I don’t attempt to get any closer.  He still tries to find ways to lure me in, and I imagine he always will.

I guess the thing that feels difficult is that so much of my life is a secret.  I live in an entirely new area with people who don’t know me or my family or people I went to high school with, so I don’t talk about my past.  I don’t say much about who I am at all, to be honest.  There is no one left on this earth who knows who I am right now.

And yet, this part of me feels like the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do.

I have all of these questions about that period of time that no one can really answer, because my ex-husband’s experience was so much different.  The other day I wondered if I only stayed with him because I knew that he was my plug to the other side.  He was my channel.  In some ways, it feels like he owed me a debt that I collected on in this lifetime.  Not to mention that we know that my ex is much closer to “Alex’s” crew than he is to mine.

I never get over the irony of Alex having this ‘angelic’ legacy, of having a voice like a church choir, of having a personality like a slightly wounded but enthusiastic puppy dog.  And then you look at his face, really look at it, and you can see the truth about who he is.  Razor sharp teeth, overly pronounced cheekbones, dark black eyes deep in the socket.  When things were good, before they ever got ugly, I used to joke he had demon teeth.  Now when I see pictures of him, the darkness is all I can see.

I worry that he’s not just after me, but that he’s after many people in the world.  Empaths and healers.  I know that he cannot leave the island but he also likely can be reached by his followers and cronies.  I worry about what he’s having them do.  I wonder if I should be the one who goes to see him and asks what the fuck he’s up to.  I’m the only person he ever listens to, apparently, but I don’t want to put myself in a position of that level of danger ever again.  I have spent centuries of work on him and I am so internally and privately furious at how much I have lost and sacrificed for him.

From what I understand, given my position over there, the work I do, the associates I have, I may have destroyed my reputation by being so heavily involved with him.  Furthermore, it’s evident to me that people think I’ve been brainwashed or manipulated or sickened by him, and it’s hard for me to know if that’s true or not.  The more the me I am now feels that may be the case, the more my inner selves feel adamant that it’s not.

I remember in the depths of my sickness, when I was first realizing what had happened to me, when the flashbacks of the assaults and rapes were first surfacing, when I meditated and found a part of myself locked inside a box in a basement, the other part of me, the part I refer to as Her/Me or Hermie, was utterly dismissive.  Uninterested.  Part of the cost of admission, she seemed to say.  This is what happens to girls who dance across the line.  And she was the one who looked all of these people in the face and shrugged coldly when they accused her, who raged and flared when they would dig inside my head to get answers.

She is monstrously powerful, and when I make jokes about being a witch, I don’t necessarily mean myself.  Whatever power she has is borderline terrifying.  I don’t say that as a boast about myself, because I continue to be bewildered by it.  I don’t think I’ve even begun to see exactly what she can do, because Alex stole so much from me in this lifetime.  Over and over I was told that the power he showed me, the things he could do, those were all things that he siphoned from my soul.  He attempted to quite literally drain me dry.  I remember the night we exorcised him, banished him to the island, how much energy I felt rushing back into my body.  I had no idea how much I had lost until I got it all back.  And I still feel like I have not utilized it properly.

Lately I can’t help but wonder if that’s exactly the type of power I should be attempting to harness.  Whatever is coming next- and so many of us feel it right now- we will need all the power we can get.  Especially if it has anything to do with him.