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.

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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?

cleansed

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“So the reason that you always disappear is because of how I feel now, isn’t it?” I asked gently.

He smiled gently. “Yes.”

I bumped my knee against his. “But don’t go yet, okay?”

“Okay.” He bumped me back. “Do you want to work, then?”

We went to the beach and I saw what I’ve seen for too long now- black smoke rising out of the palm trees, laughter like high-pitched birds cackling, the sound of alien legs and feet shuffling on the sand.

I walked through the house and pulsed white light through every room. Creatures appeared like a video game and I sliced them with a sword, battered them with an axe, and they dissolved into ash. Creatures with black, slimy skin. Creatures with no head. Creatures with a face of fangs. Creatures that ran at me like deformed dogs, on uneven and unsteady limbs.

Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. Maybe I was screaming the whole time. I don’t even know for sure. It seemed I could feel their oily thick blood all over my skin, in my bared teeth, clumping in my loose, wild hair.

There was a silence and I ran my hand over the countertops in the kitchen, slowly walked through the living room, and then he was there. In the doorway. The way he’d been so many times, when it meant I was about to be torn apart, sliced open, organs spilling out, so many empty holes to be ruined.

His neck looked broken, his head dangling loosely to one side, occasionally popping up like a puppet as he spoke. His eyes were black, black, black. His voice sounded like shrieking metal. His arms hung rotten and limp at his sides.

I was terrified beyond words, but approached him anyway, and this is when Fisher came to lay on my chest.

“You aren’t welcome here,” I said.

His broken neck waggled slightly, and his foul fangs slid from behind his lips. “I see that you know who you are now.”

“Yes. I do.”

He began to talk nonstop, telling me what was real, what wasn’t, and I felt an old, familiar feeling. Smoky sickness, weeping into my brain, making my logic surreal and confused. Fisher laid his little foot on my hand and flexed his claws gently into my fingers.

“Get out,” I sneered, lifting my hands and pushing him backwards with pure energy. “You don’t belong here.”

He kept trying to speak, but I continued to blast him backwards with my hands, until he was at the edge of the sea. My entire body was shaking.

“You are not welcome here,” I announced. He began to shrink as I screamed, smaller and smaller, until he was the size of the tiny, piggish little demon that first attacked me in 2005. How silly and small and pathetic he was now, how he’d always been. Nothing magnificent or awe-inspiring… just another bag of garbage energy, a tiny little charger that tried to suck from the innocent.

And I told him so. How dare you steal from a little girl. How dare you take something she had no idea she was giving. How could you betray a love so pure, so generous, so naive.

But of course, he had no smoky words for that.

I spun around to face the island, and light rose from the sand. “None of you are welcome here. This. Is. My. Home.

“All. Of. You. Are. Banished.”

A blinding light seared through the entire landscape, and there was the sound of shrieking and screaming and tearing of flesh. I felt severe, searing pain roar through my third eye, and my entire body convulsed through one strong shudder.

And then all was still.

clarity

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There have been a lot of important figures in history, to be sure, but imagine being so famous some people don’t believe you ever existed. Your life changed how we have chosen to count the passing years for two millennia. People turned you into a demigod, but your loudest followers are so far from your original message that on the other side, your name is now a side smirk for all sorts of snide jokes.

Well, what would Jesus do?

Grabbing hands and screaming pleas for your time and love and healing and grace from every corner of the world, from now to probably the End of All Time. Your name invoked in hate and violence and destruction and murder.

Having two selves- the person everyone expects you to be, the path that cannot ever be deviated, the Living Example, and the actual man, full of passion and rage and sensuality and grace and laughter.

///

I used to be so smug, one of those people who couldn’t wait to tell people that Christmas wasn’t really Jesus’s birthday. That the whole immaculate conception story was a centuries old Egyptian ripoff. Like that proved something, like it invalidated anything.

Yeshua will get to you, though. His energy is like a wildfire. Even as an atheist, “Footprints in the Sand” made me sob uncontrollably. There is something about that level of Divine Energy that if you embrace it with no arrogance, no pretense, no jaded overeducation or smug skepticism, it will change your entire soul.

I’ve studied a lot of the Bible but not all, because let’s be honest- it’s painful to wade through at times. I prefer the KJV to the NIV because I think the NIV is too watered down, yet another translation of a translation of a translation.

But KJV is dense, archaic. Like swimming in mud. It gets tiresome.

Also: is it not interesting that Aramaic no longer exists? Of all the languages to lose.

I actually really like Psalm, too- there is so much agonized wailing at what a sadist the Universe is, and it’s so comforting. Spiritual journeys are so lonely and soul-rending at times, and it is a salve to hear someone say the words you’ve been wrestling with in the dark.

///

I believe The Crusades weren’t just about converting the heathens- it was also about destroying anyone who wasn’t on Peter’s side of history. Peter the rock, the fool, the loudmouth, the bully, the coward. Jesus is so over Peter’s shit sooo often in the Bible, which is why it is such a tragedy that he’s the one who got to control the narrative after his murder.

Peter is much more evil to me than Judas ever was. I agree with the historical theory that Judas was making a power play when he gave up Jesus’s location, thinking it would start a holy war. He was sure it would finally show publicly the things they’d all seen privately, that it would give greater glory to the teacher he was so proud of.

This is a man who had just recently witnessed his mentor braiding a whip by hand, then using it to attack an entire temple of people in a blind rage. He had no reason to believe that Jesus would just give up, agree to suffer a death of unimaginable terror, humiliation, and agony.

I don’t know what any of you know about crucifixion, but it’s a nasty, vile, brutal death. Not only are you nailed to the wood, the position of your body causes you to slowly suffocate. The Romans added a few extra inches in the give of the nails so people could wriggle up to gasp for air for hours, for days. To prolong the agony.

No one in their right mind would assume a person who they believed could easily get himself out of trouble would willingly sacrifice himself to this kind of death.

On the other hand, Peter is a backwoods, bitter, short-tempered, illiterate fisherman, later in his years than some of the others, and very set in his misogynistic, closed off, judgmental ways. He hates Mary and doesn’t make a secret of it, and is the one that caused her to flee for her life. He can’t even admit he knows Jesus in a moment when owning his faith was of paramount importance. When he was told to his face that he’d be the neutered bull he always had been.

And then he asked to be crucified upside down like a groveling ass bitch, too, because he wasn’t worthy of the same death as his teacher.

And he wasn’t.

Peter is the worst because he is insidious, secret, harmful with the pretense of helping. Popular Christianity as it is today is Peter’s church, to be sure. Joel Osteen and Billy Graham are Peter’s perfect preachers.

///

I love but am not sure of the theory that Pontius Pilate had Jesus drugged and faked his death so he could escape with his wife. So they could start a resurrection rumor, something else to be stolen from an older faith, from a place Jesus likely visited and studied in.

But I also believe that Jesus is one of the oldest souls of all time, and that lifetime was to show people what can be possible when you have gratitude and grace. I believe he has the brightest soul in the Universe, and wanted people to understand that there is life after death. What true nirvana looks like.

A simple political martyr, son of a carpenter from Nazareth, does not change the entire line of time. Something happened.

I also think his life also had larger Universal implications through his relationship with Mary Magdalene, one of the secret power players of spirituality, who I am absolutely obsessed with on every level, like a sickness.

I am a fan of the generally accepted theory that Mary Magdalene is actually Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who you may recall is the one who made Jesus cry the one of only two times mentioned in the gospels, when he didn’t come to heal her brother and she fell to his knees to ask why.

The same woman who anointed his feet with spikenard oil and took down her hair in front of him, which was an enormous scandal considering the fact that women of that time shielded their hair from any man but their husband. Some still do.

The same woman who was the first person to see his (possibly) resurrected self. Or perhaps the self that was coming to insist that they run for their lives. Start all over as ghosts.

It certainly doesn’t seem to be fitting with what I know about Jesus that he would suddenly just give up, die so willingly. Yeshua is very much like the element of air- invisible power. A unseen force that can tear the roof off of someone’s house. And if you ever can see the rage in the air headed towards you, you will be lucky to live through the leveling.

To quit? It seems strange.

How many secrets are buried in the Bible? Newton (yes, that one) spent the last years of his life obsessively trying to decode it, sure there was a hidden message.

When you read it deeply and with reverence, it’s hard not to feel like you are reading a cipher full of misdirection. All the most important women in the New Testament named Mary. All the shady characters called Simon. The Lost Years of Jesus. (He wasn’t really lost, just being found elsewhere, but.)

I cannot stop this obsession, and I don’t want to. Once I take a break from constantly spending money, I’m going to buy some more Biblical research books.

Clarity.

I am who I am, entirely.

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

There’s the one who is So Good, the Chaste and the Pure, the one with standards unreachable by anyone, even himself. His whole existence is grabbing hands and blame and pleas and disgraceful acts in his name. No one ever wants to meet the real person.

And there is the one who is So Bad, the Manipulative and Destructive, the one who will pull anyone to his depths, who delights in proving we are all ruined like him. He is the whisper in the ear of every monster that has devoured a soul. His words can poison the mind of any person on this earth with the correct invitation. There is no real person. We all think we’re the one to finally see it. No. There is no redemption song for the truly wicked.

And then there is the Neutral Party, the Fulcrum, neither Good Enough nor Too Evil, who skates on the edges of all trouble, whose mouth talks her out of much punishment, whose ferocity makes her too terrifying to confront or fully control. She does what she wants at all times, and constantly faces the consequences of it. Never accepted by the Good Kids, too much of a tryhard to be allowed to hang with the Bad Ones. Too real, too honest. Cast aside, isolating and isolated. The shepherd of the lost lambs- no one really wants the truth, and will forever punish the messenger.

Not just one person was banished from Paradise, in truth. There were three: fire, air, and water, all sent to earth to suffer. They never get to be fully loved. They never are allowed to belong. They murder and have been murdered. Tortured. Torturer. They have never let each other have a full life, always interfering and meddling and destroying.

Love and hate and love and hate, and the entire world suffers because of it.

They are the Universe’s longest eyeroll.

Powerful and powerless.

The living example

the filthy whisper

the wraith in the mist.

The most favorite and the most hated and the most invisible. The example of how love can be a punishment, a violence, a mistake. How it can be both right and wrong.

Eternity’s lesson. Ancient babies. Too extra for the Universe. The keepers of the flesh. The guardians of the forgotten.

The divine rejects.

/ 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.