past lives

shark swimming

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A few days ago, I was at the beach, leaping over waves. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do, maybe of all time- I run into the crest of a wave and leap over it at the last second so I fly off the back of it and plunge into the water. When it crests early or I mistime my leap, I have to duck under the foam so it doesn’t punch saltwater all the way into the back of my throat.

One of the times I went under and came back up, there was a three foot shark swimming approximately two or three feet away from me in the water. Close enough that I could see the black/white tip of its dorsal fin. Close enough that I saw its entire body flicking through the waves.

The lifeguard temporarily pulled all of us out of the water right after that, but the event stuck with me. It certainly felt like I was being sent a message.

As I had been packing to move, I’d found an iteration of this entire story that used Will, the teenager who “lived” in my childhood home, as the narrator. Will is the perfect person to be the narrator, because he successfully bridges both sides- first as a bitter, furious kid who is trapped in the grey area between worlds, and then as the betrayed and horrified man who discovers that “Alex” is a fraud, and he has been pulled into more than he ever bargained for.

I worry about Will, even now, but I can feel that he is lost to me and does not want to be found. He was so blindsided by who Alex really was, and the mess he was thrust into, and I hardly blame him for his hurt. We went from a cute little foursome who cackled over card games and laughed raucously over the Ouija board to a gross little cave of evil and surreptitious sex and sin-soaked abuse.

I still shudder when I think of living in that place, somewhere I was essentially kept as a hostage- or, to be more clear, as a spiritual battery- for four years. I know the key to so much of my healing lies in that place. I know that I have to face and confront what is going on with me internally in order to be able to move forward, to ever have any hope of a “normal” relationship with someone. I am so deeply traumatized and broken by events so strange I don’t even dare describe them to anyone.

I don’t have any specific spiritual practices, just that I listen to the Universe. I am- at all times- trying to do what it asks me to do. Even when after the other night, after an entire day of mulling over that period of time, I was told that I should go see Alex.

Which. …..okay. Sure.

I met him on the edge of the sand at the beach house. I’d never let him inside again- not after I finally took it back from all of the violence. That was actually the last time I saw him, the winter solstice of 2019.

That time, his neck was broken and his head hung limp on his shoulder, popping up like a puppet when he spoke. He was not just full demon, but something beyond that. Skeletal. Ghoulish. Devoured.

This time, he was more of a fully formed person, and much more human than he’s been in quite some time, but there is still so much visible darkness all over him. I think I saw him as he “truly” is. This is how he presents on the Other Side, for the most part. To be honest- it’s not much different than how he looked in his last life. I used to call them his “demon teeth” long before I ever saw who he really is.

His entire eye, even the pupils, are wholly black. In fact, even the area around his eyes is an ashen color, as if he hasn’t slept for centuries. His features were extremely sharp even in his life, and are even more pronounced now. Cheekbones like origami folds, a nose like the curve of a dagger, jaw like the edge of a cliff.

And those fucking teeth. There’s so many of them that his mouth appears to be swollen, like a kid with a bad overbite, hanging out from the underside of his lips. Greyblack, as if they are rotten, but they are also razor-sharp, glistening. Waiting.

Just saying his name with intention brought him here, just as easily as ever, and he could see through my eyes as I brushed my teeth and got ready to see him.

“Well look at you,” he said softly. His voice was a strange blend of the freshly baked bread softness he had in his life and that grinding gears/wounded animal demon voice that shreds straight to the base of my soul. “Quite an apartment you have here.” His eyes grazed across things as if he was stroking them with an open palm. “Good for you, Krissy. Fucking fancy. You’re a long way from Pennsylvania. Quite literally.”

“Yes. I am.”

I briefly stepped into the living room to grab my phone charger, and my son was sitting on the floor playing video games. I felt Alex’s shock as he registered the time that has passed.

“He just turned fifteen,” I said, watching Alex watch my son. The way you’d watch a strange dog with a child.

“Fifteen,” he breathed. “Wow.”

I quickly went back to my room, because I don’t even want him to look at my son, to be honest. Nothing good can be gained from those black eyes soaking in my son’s form. He doesn’t deserve to even look at him, to be honest.

I settled and placed myself fully on the beach, examining his dark features. I was surprised that I didn’t feel afraid of him- just a kind of dismayed curiosity. And strangely- a sort of deep love and affection for this creature who has caused me so much loss and catastrophe.

My God, I still love him. I still love this monster.

We stood side by side on the sand, watching the waves crash in front of us.

“So,” I said flatly. “What are you… up to? Are you and Hermie still…”

He tipped his head slightly and shrugged a little. “I mean. She’s really trying to help me, and we…” He smiled a little to himself, just the vaguest shake of his malformed head. “We really got each other good in this lifetime. We both thought we had the upper hand.”

I was disgusted by him referring to my life as some kind of strategic play, some type of game. “What were you thinking, Alex?” My voice was cold. “I mean, I go back and read these journals and my God- I was a fucking baby. I was so naïve, and I trusted you so much. I don’t understand what the point of any of it was. What did you hope to gain?”

He sighed. “I know you’ll never believe me, but I really did want to prove that I could be good. At first. I really felt like this was my moment to show you what a truly kind and pure man I was capable of being.” His shoulders drooped. “But then I got lost in the fantasy of having a life with you. And then I… got lost.” He turned to look at me with his whole face, as if displaying it as his example.

“I’m still really fucked up, Alex,” I said, my face not showing a slice of sympathy. “Like. I can’t let people touch me. I haven’t been in a relationship in years and years and years.” I let intense flashes of him roaring over me, all teeth and blood, wash over both of us. A flash of me wrestling my last physical partner off of me. A flash of me sobbing with my face pressed against the bathroom wall.

He nodded slowly, turning his face back to the sea. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

He looked back at me briefly, the vortex of those onyx eyes pulling me into their hold. “Yes. I really am.”

“Okay, but like-” I held up my hands. “What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to fix that? I’ve spent years and years trying to find a way out of this fear and I can’t seem to get my hands around it. Like I met someone that I-” I cut myself off instantly, immediately angry that I’d said too much. I don’t want him to know anything about me now. I don’t want him to have any idea of what my life is like.

I could feel him begin to sift through my thoughts, pulling up an image of a person that I’m currently vaguely interested in. I immediately waved my hand and swept him completely out of my brain, giving him a hard, angry look. He smirked and shrugged, as if to say, What do you expect?

Some things never change.

“This isn’t an invitation for you to be… involved in my life. I don’t want you involved in my life. At all. And I want you to stay away from my son, too.”

He turned to look at me with a face that is all too familiar to me- one that lands somewhere between a smirk and a scowl, his mouth disgusted and his eyebrows smug. “I really have no intention of interfering with your life ever again,” he said. His eyes were like a midnight new moon- somehow both empty and full. Like a burning hole. “And you don’t have to believe that-“

“I don’t.”

“-but I mean it.” His features softened to the degree they were capable of, and his hand lifted as if he was about to reach out for me before he thought better of it.

“Look at the damage I have already done. Krissy, there is no repairing some of this, and you know that.” His eyebrows lowered with a remorse I wanted to believe. “I ruined you for anyone else. On purpose. And now…” He held up his empty palms. His fingers ended with blood-caked claws, so dark they too looked black. “I don’t… I don’t have the answers. There are no answers. And I think you know that. You wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t.”

I sighed and we both looked back out at the horizon.

“So,” I said softly. “While I have you here, let’s talk about a few people. I just wanted some… clarity.”

“Okay.”

“What about my ex-husband? Does he…”

Alex sneered, and then chuckled nastily. His eyes flickered with a raven flame as he gave me a leering look. “Oh, come on. Is it necessary to have that conversation? You and I know what it was- and you were perfectly okay with using him. We are both complicit, and you know that. Now, of course, he was abusing you too, just in a different way.” He turned and raised an eyebrow at me, his mouth pulling to one side with an arrogant joy. “Talk about toxic, wow.”

He chuckled to himself and waved his hands, dismissing the entire conversation. “Look- you finally managed to get away from that, right? So let’s… not.”

“Okay. And what about Jim?”

He took a deep breath and all the supercilious humor in his face faded. His entire form even drooped a little. “Oh, man. Fuck. Yeah, that whole thing was… super uncool. He is a really good dude, for real, and …” He shook his head slowly. “I feel really bad about what we did to him.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “We?”

His face slowly turned back towards me and his black eyes scoured me with disdain. “Yeah. We. As in, like, allllllll of us. And what you continue to do to him, as a matter of fact.” He held up a clawed hand. “Well I mean, not you, but her.”

“Wait wait- I thought she was done with him? Is she…”

He laughed a little bitterly, and his eyes went back to the waves. “Oh, no one ever really knows what she’s up to. I mean for fuck’s sake, you had to split into two different ‘people’ just to be able to survive and sustain all of this.” He turned back to me with his entire face twisted into confusion and bewilderment. “Do you understand how fucked up that is? You have to refer to yourself in third person?”

He held up a finger and wagged it at me. “Don’t ever let her convince you she’s not as much trouble as I am. She is.” He leaned in a little. “You are.”

My mouth twisted, and I turned my face away from his. “And what about [my oldest friend, who is Alex’s oldest enemy]?”

Alex snarled suddenly, viciously, and I took a half-step back. His teeth immediately grew out of his mouth another three or four inches, until they hung like charcoal icicles off of his chin. His eyes got blacker, which hardly seemed possible. They became so black that the skin around his eyes became even darker, spreading like a rash all the way to his temples, down his cheeks, into his hairline.

Then he caught himself. His teeth pulled back and the darkness of his skin receded, and he gave himself a quick shake, as if he was resetting. I watched this with the same sensation I’d had watching that shark swim only a few feet from me- a helpless terror, while also knowing I was not in any real danger.

But I could have been.

“Oh, let’s not go there,” he hissed. “Please.” He turned to scour my face again, searching for how much I know. “He is not who you think he is and you know that, right?”

I shrugged. “I know.”

“I mean, he is … that guy, but…” He scowled with disgust, unimpressed. “Who fucking cares? That’s just one lifetime. It doesn’t change any of the other shit he’s done. And if you think how he’s behaved with you is any fucking better…” He laughed a single bark of defiance. “Ha! Yeah fucking right. Look at how the fuck he’s behaved in just this lifetime and tell me he’s not a mess of a person.” He scowled again, deeper, angrier. “Please. Ha! All he got was a cool storyline.”

“Did he, though?” I asked softly, and the fury on Alex’s face receded.

His face slowly turned back to mine and the darkness in his eyes seemed to sparkle. “Yeah,” he admitted, giving me a semi-sheepish grin. “Okay. That’s fair.”

I started to fall asleep as we were talking, and woke up to find his face very close to mine, as if he was leaning in to kiss me. I pulled my entire body away, even my living body, and gave him a baffled, disgusted look.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked. “Like I mean- are. you. fucking. kidding. me.”

He laughed a little, holding up his palms. “Oh, come on. I mean. All right, all right.”

“I have to go,” I said. “And I want you to go, too. Please do not take this as an invitation for you to be a part of my life or to start-“

He waved both of his hands at me dismissively. “Oh my god, stop stop stop. Look.” He waved his arm around the beach. “You can’t see, but you are being very closely watched, even right now. You are never alone. No one will ever let you be alone again.”

He leaned in a little, conspiratorially. “And part of that, my love, is because you are in just as much trouble as I am, and we are under close surveillance.” Then he leaned back again, smug, proud, always happy to remind me of my darkness. “But let’s be really real- I couldn’t get to you if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I cannot stress that enough. I have enough to answer for, to repay.”

He flashed an image of my new apartment into my head. “You have created a beautiful life from total destruction. That is a marvel. What I did to you, what you survived?” He shook his head a little, then turned to look at me with as much softness as his monstrous face could allow. “You amaze me. You truly are a phoenix. If I couldn’t destroy you, there’s nothing you can’t survive. Conquer.”

And then he was gone.

Is this the closure I wanted and needed? Is this the conversation that needed to happen? I don’t know.

It is a long walk in the darkness with the darkness, my friends.

onion skin

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I have had strange, fleeting thoughts lately.

Thoughts of the very first time I successfully meditated alone without getting any side-guidance through my ex.

For at least a month back in 2013, every single night, he had been reading instructions off of the Ouija board to me from “Alex.” Helping me lean into my intuition, showing me how to See.

I still think of that tiny hidden lake, deep in a forest, with a waterfall cascading at the edge. This was the place I had been going to to practice meditation via the board, before I even imagined (or discovered) a beach house.

Up until that moment, Alex himself had appeared as a fuzzy, out of focus image- like a faulty hologram, or a picture on an old television, back when staticky channels still existed. Just the night before, I’d finally been able to conjure his face on my own, and it was the greatest success I’d ever felt.

The waterfall scene was nothing more than the equivalent of a painted backdrop inside my mind, but it was still mine. I created it, totally alone.

And more than that, Alex was there waiting for me. I couldn’t hear him speak- it would be another year or so before that happened. But just to really see him standing there, to be able to believe and know for certain that I saw him, was monumental.

Alex and I sat side by side on the edge of the water for awhile, when I suddenly pushed him into the water. To see if I could. To see what would happen.

When he emerged from the surface, spluttering and shocked, I could see in his face that he was both surprised and impressed. Before I could say anything, he grabbed my wrist and dragged me into the water with him.

As we swam lazy circles around each other, there was a different look in his eyes. A smoldering desire that held me in his gaze like startled prey. Which, as we all know now, is exactly what I was.

If prey can be grateful at being devoured.

///

I have also been thinking of the time when Alex had been exposed and was on the worst part of his rampage, one that would last for weeks before he was finally captured. When I became the trap that finally tripped him up. 

I was like a ragdoll at the beach house during that time, being dragged there in my mind to be violently assaulted day after day after day. It could happen at any time, for any reason. For no reason.

My oldest friend, someone I had just met at that time, showed up to protect me.

“What is the purpose of these theatrics?” he asked, gesturing to Alex’s hand clamped around my upper arm, my entire spirit slumped in humiliation and defeat next to him. His sweeping arm widened to include the rough seas and furious skies, direct opposition to the normally idyllic scene.

“Oh I am so glad you are here to save the day!” Alex sneered rabidly, his eyes wild with fury.

“Isn’t he your boyfriend now?” he said to me, shaking me by the arm to bring me back out of my (his) trance. “Go on, then. Do what you do best.” With a wave of his hand, he ripped my dress completely off my body.

I stood there, helplessly fumbling with scraps, before I remembered I could create one just as easily as he had destroyed it.

My oldest friend’s gaze never left Alex’s face. “Is this how you treat people you claim to love?” His eyebrow arched in a way I would eventually come to loathe. “Impressive. Why don’t you let her go? If she is so enamored with you, surely there is no reason to hold her.”

His grip on my arm tightened, and he drew me closer to his thin frame. “Why don’t you do something about it? I would love to see that.”

“I think you know that I can.” My oldest friend’s voice was calm, but his amber eyes flared with golden flame. “I think you know what will happen if I do.”

Alex threw me to the ground as if I was a pair of uncomfortable shoes, and surged forward to bring his face into the face of someone I was now realizing he knew very well. They were nearly the same height, and their faces together had so much energy it must have been flammable.

“You want to make this about our shit now?” he hissed through his teeth.

That was the beginning.

///

I have been thinking about the time that I found the basement in the basement because of a nightmare I’d had. How I went there in meditation and found myself crammed inside a steamer trunk. Soaked in dried blood, covered in bruises, emaciated, filthy, matted. Naked. Screaming.

Please, please, she wept in a high, thin voice, her eyes not even able to see me. I’ll do anything I’ll do anything. Please please I can’t please don’t please

How my oldest friend showed up without me speaking his name, sweeping her up into a crisp white sheet, pulling her tiny body against his chest. The way his eyes flicked over to mine, searching my face briefly before taking the three of us away from there.

And then, maybe a year later, when it was he and I that were face to face.

“You are a whore,” he snarled in a voice I’d never heard before. “This is what you do. Another little project. And you don’t care about anybody but yourself, as always. Oh no, you claim that you love us, you really promise you do, but…” His mouth tasted lemon. “How can you? How can you love anyone but yourself and the power you hold over us?”

My mouth let out a string of horrible, vicious, crude obscenities. I wanted to be as foul, as disrespectful, as blasphemous as possible. It was all I could think to do- the rest of my entire soul felt like it was falling down, down, down into some kind of putrid abyss.

These days, I am starting to see he may be right.

We didn’t truly speak again for maybe four years. He was never far away, and as he promised me in 2010, if I ever called for him out of fear or desperation, he always showed up and was kind and respectful. But I’d fall asleep instantly, sucked into a charybdis of emptiness.

He couldn’t wait to get away from me.

///

I think about him as well. My biggest secret, the one I’ll probably never speak out loud. The first time I realized the truth from the way I caught him looking at me, when he didn’t think I could see.

Up until that point he had been another guardian, a point of counsel, and a source of extremely raw and brutal feedback. The kind of truth that cuts like a scalpel on your ego.

It is hard to reconcile that as well. Someone who should be a stable force, a truly exceptional example, suddenly becomes erratic, furious, demanding, desperate.

There is an intensity between us that feels like profound love and electric anger and a heavy, wistful melancholy. It is ancient. We have loved each other so many ways, and it has never been enough.

When he laughs, his head tips back and you can see all of his teeth. It feels like a rare jewel to see it- he is so serious, solemn, austere. To be able to give him joy, rest from his burden, feels like the greatest success one can achieve. But to be wholly seen by him feels like being stripped nude on livestream. Bleeding. Raw.

Whenever we have lives together, one of us gets murdered. Usually while the other watches. Our love is eternally doomed. It is searing with fire and soaked in blood. It is clandestine and forbidden.

I am capable of intimacy, I am certain.

I just have to find the ability. The soft, fleshy place I keep revealing to others, only to have them try to plunge their white hot brands into it.

I want to be loved and not possessed. Just once. Just once.

And so… we peel.

enabler

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Two nights ago, I spent the night with my oldest friend at the beach house. It was one of those times where I honestly wished I was able to write down our conversation in the moment, because I really got so much out of what we were talking about, and I only remember the things we discuss when I’m there. As soon as I am fully “awake” again, it all slips away.

The hardest lesson to learn in meditation- once you get past just learning how to go to the Silence and allow your thoughts become a stream- is how to accept visuals as they come to you. I’m not sure that everyone who is deep in the mystic world has the same elaborate second life that I do, but I don’t see why you couldn’t if you wanted to.

Then again, most people are not as actively pursued as I am. Most people do not have this much interference. Most people have dead lovers who stay dead, and don’t try to bleed into your current living life.

Anyway, he and I were in bed together and suddenly, I became Hermie (my Entire Self, the person I primarily present as on The Other Side). I think some part of our conversation triggered this transition, but I can’t recall what led up to it, except for the moment when I suddenly blended into her.

She’s beautiful like the freshly polished edge of a knife. Like the ripple of muscle across a panther’s back as it paces. Like the delicate fracture on the side of a building after an earthquake. Like the vivid depth inside the shade of newly spilled blood.

I am her, and I’m afraid of her.

He pulled back suspiciously, narrowing his eyes at the sudden appearance of her face. “What is this?”

She reached up to lay her hand on his cheek. “I just wanted to see you. I wanted to see how you looked at her. How you used to look at me.” Her thumb stroked across his cheek, her hand sliding around the back of his neck, pulling his mouth down to hers.

He kissed her back for a moment, then pulled away again, his eyes scouring hers. “What’s going on, though? What did he do? Are you in trouble? Did something happen? What is…”

“No! It’s nothing,” she insisted, reaching up to pull him close again. “I just wanted to see you.” Her eyes burned into his for a heavy, desperate moment before she leaned her lips up to his again.

The moment their mouths even briefly brushed together, she started inexplicably sobbing. So did I, in fact. The weight of it was so abruptly enormous that I was crying before I even realized it. It was like a brief thunderstorm, bone deep sobs that shook my entire body for about thirty seconds, then it passed back to blue skies, pulling hands, an aching mouth.

Instead of being sympathetic, my oldest friend appeared even more suspicious. He stared at her, me, her/me with his mouth drawn in a mix of empathy and exhaustion. But he stopped asking questions, and it wasn’t much longer afterwards that I fell asleep wound tight around all my pillows, crushing them against me as if I might mine warmth from their centers.

Yesterday morning, especially after binging all of Euphoria, I realized that he looks at me like I’m an addict. Like he expects me to ask him for money. Sell him on a hustle. Weave him a desperate fable. The exhaustion of my constant, unpredictable swings of behavior was easily visible in his eyes.

But certainly, if I am an addict, he is my enabler. The quiet defeat when he looks at me sometimes tells me I have wrung him dry more than once. Everything about me is a strategic move, it seems, and lately I worry genuinely that I have never loved anyone since I’ve existed. Not the kind of love other people talk about.

I really worry about it a lot, actually.

Even in this life, loving me is like trying to hold smoke. Like trying to catch a feral cat. I’m not someone you go to for softness or gentle encouragement. In fact, as soon as I feel like someone cares about me, I get extremely uncomfortable, anxious, suffocated. My eyes start searching for the exit. Oh no, you don’t want this. No… really.

And the harder part is seeing in the eyes of people who have known me longest that I am not entirely wrong to feel that way.

My two favorite words that people often use to describe me are “honest” and “loyal.” That is an enormous compliment to me, but I am also aware, as I have been for many years, that honesty is not a trait that most people value, and loyalty isn’t really the same as love.

The kind of healing I need to do in this life is a sort of ancestral healing, in the sense of my soul being its own ancestor. I have layers of my own personal identity that I desperately need to heal, especially if I am serious about not coming back here again.

There is something about my Entire Self that is treacherous, manipulative, duplicitous, and I have to find a way to repair some of this damage. If I can. Which is why this entire lifetime has been about being made smaller, conquered, disrespected, discarded. Why what I’ve needed to learn is humility, grace, asking for help.

Well. …I’m still learning.

her/me

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In 2010, I developed the ability to see myself in third person in meditation. I’m not sure if it’s a skill others have, or would even want to have. Mine came about because of the degree of violation and trauma I had to deal with that only I knew about or could explain… and also because I was being held accountable for her behavior in those years, things I didn’t even know were happening.

Once Alex was gone completely, pulled out of me (by myself) that summer, I met her for the first time. I was separated from my ex, and she gently tried to get me to be brave enough to leave him.

I wasn’t strong enough. I wish I had listened to myself that summer, that I had been able to stand on my own two feet. In fact, it would take three more years to finally have a spine again.

The way I see her- and what I think is her/our Home form- is of a slender, lithe woman with olive skin and a shining mane of dark hair. Her eyes are wild, glittering with violence, like Villanelle in Killing Eve. She stares at you as if she is weighing your flesh. She looks tired of your life, like your breath is a burden on her.

Our eyes are the same color. They always are, from what I understand.

After what I saw in meditation the last time- she and Alex (not his real name, as I feel occasionally compelled to express) together in their little love nest- I needed to speak to her.

Her. Me. Her/me. Hermie. I dealt with her a great deal in 2011 and 2012, but not much since then. To be honest, I spent the following years trying to pretend none of that happened, desperate to believe I was never that “insane.”

But we all know I’m insane now, so.

We met at The Midpoint, my neutral place- a field full of lush green grass, sometimes filled with some flowers, but always with a shallow, crystal clear stream burbling through the center.

With our feet in the water, I turned to stare at her in disbelief.

“So you’re like… with him?”

She sighed. “I mean. It’s hard to explain. First of all, it keeps him away from you, which is what you have said you want. Secondly, I’m not just going to give up on him, okay? We are working hard to try to make him better. And you understand and accept that this is part of our plan.” Her tone was annoyed, not comprehending or allowing my admonishment.

“But like… how can you just… sacrifice me? Do you understand what you did to my life?”

Her emerald eyes looked flat, blank, and she regarded me like a puddle of waste dripping from a summer dumpster. “I don’t understand. Are you fine now or…?”

My eyebrows bounced in shock. “Oh. Okay. Wow.”

She arched hers back at me and said nothing. Defiant. Uninterested.

After a long moment of silence, I said, “So nothing that I am experiencing now matters to you? What about [our oldest friend, the one who took me to the house to show me this foolishness]?”

She chuckled with a sharp edge of bitterness. “It’s all fresh to you. He is…” She laughed again, almost to herself, shaking her head. “Look. You’re a person, so I get it. You’re swept away in the fable. Ooh, ahh.” She waved her hands as if she was casting a spell, then laughed one more time, darker. Nastier.

“He’s not the person you imagine he is. I mean, look at how he’s behaved with you in this life.” She gave me a hard side-eye, and I acknowledged her with a small nod.

“So… what about Jim?” I asked, tentatively.

She sighed and wouldn’t meet my eyes, offering a half-hearted shrug.

“Oh man,” I snapped. “Seriously?”

“He’s nice, okay?” she replied irritably, her eyes arcing electricity. “And I’m grateful for what he’s done for you. I have a great deal of tenderness for him. He’s doing a lot of really great work right now, and …” she held her palms out. “I mean, we’ll see what happens. It’s just…”

“‘It’s not like what WE have,‘” I sneered at her. “Yeah. I’ve heard that before.”

“You don’t get it,” she said dismissively. “And I know you’ve heard that before too, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Do I love Jim? Sure. But am I also involved with real work with the person you know as Alex? Absolutely. And I am very committed to that right now.”

I threw my hands up, baffled. “So why come here to Earth? Why now?”

She shrugged. “I mean… I didn’t know he’d die. I wanted a chance to live a ‘clean’ life, one without his interruptions. For once.”

“So did you know … like, when he died?”

She arched her brow at me again, observing me with amused irritation. “Did we not find out immediately, and have an enormous, bizarrely deep reaction to it? To the degree that we stopped listening to his music for years?”

Then she held up her hands defensively- a brief moment of concession. “Listen- what has happened here is… not normal. Obviously. Most people don’t have to split in half just to be able to work through something this vile. You’re lucky to not remember most of what happened.” She shook her head gently, like a weary parent. “Stop trying. There’s nothing you will gain from seeing any of what your brain allowed you to lose.”

“And again… you’re okay with that?” I was grazing the edge of appalled, and I could tell my face showed it.

Her mouth pulled hard into a sneer. Furious, even more defiant than before. “And again.. you are fine, right? You lived? You are recovered? You are the most powerful and confident you’ve ever been, living what I see is a lovely, successful, content life?”

I put my hand up and gave her a hard glare. “Hang on. I can’t have intimacy with anyone but the dead, I either sabotage or back away from all friendships, and I’m a fucking retail manager. Of all fucking things.”

Now her entire face twisted into an ugly, disgusted expression. She waved both hands at me dismissively, as if I was a foul scent she could push off. “Oh, please. Give me a break. Don’t pretend you don’t know who you are. Retail manager.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have seen who you are and what you can do. Two of the most powerful souls in this Universe are obsessed with you to the point of ruining your life, and to be honest? We treat them like fuckboys.” She shrugged dismissively. “So don’t be foolish.”

“So you’d rather fuck around with a demon than the other one?” I barked. “I just don’t understand.”

“He’s not a demon, okay?” she snapped. “That’s fucking crude. Demons are worthless. They’re pawns. That was all for show, okay? It was part of his strategy, and it was successful.” Her mouth turned again. “But we were much more successful, and though he exposed a great deal, we have exposed him even more.”

She pressed her palms together, as if trying to hold her patience together. “You don’t understand. You will. Please just worry about yourself.”

“Really? The teeth, the eyes, the cheekbones…”

“Oh my God,” she growled. Her eyes were practically black. “Everyone makes it more serious than it is. It was a charade, okay? You’re fine. You survived. It proved a point to him. It’s a catalyst for his change.”

My eyes were huge. “Oh… kay? Wow. You’re really… invested in this, I see.”

She shrugged dismissively, and I fell asleep.

How do you forgive your own soul when it sacrifices you and isn’t sorry?

ruthless

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

A few nights ago, I got pressured into meditating. It’s been a long while since that’s happened, this pushpushpush to see something. It’s also been awhile since I’ve been sober enough at the end of the night that I can even hear anyone.

These days, I usually show up and I’m already inside the bedroom of the beach house. This time (again for the first time in a long time), it wouldn’t “load.” The images kept stalling out, stuttering as if they were on a broken reel of film.

I closed my eyes and took a breath, letting whatever I was supposed to see wash over my eyes. When I opened them, I saw myself outside the beach house, looking in.

“Oh no,” I said out loud on the sand, knowing I could be heard. “It’s never good news when I start outside the house.” I used to see it like this so often when things were hard, broken, ruined.

As I approached, the house appeared to be up a slope that slowly turned from sand to grass. When I stood in the glass patio doorway that led into the bedroom, I saw that the inside wasn’t the same either. The golden beachy hardwoods were dark oak, teak. The whites and turquoises were hunter green and charcoal grey. Beautiful, but alien.

I was so baffled by how the house was the same and different at the same time that at first, I didn’t notice the people in the bed.

Tangled between the sheets were a beautiful, olive-skinned woman with a long, thick jungle of dark hair, and a soft, thin man with a highly angular face- two people I immediately recognized, but didn’t want to.

Instead, I stared blankly at it, confused. Why was I seeing this? Why was I here? Where was this?

I walked into the open plan living room/kitchen and saw other scenes- the two of them laughing and cooking together, dancing in the living room, kissing on the couch. I watched it all suspiciously, my mood bordering on annoyed, disgusted.

I spun around, back towards the bedroom, and my oldest friend was standing in the doorway. He had That Look on his face- weary and disappointed, struggling for grace. A look I have unfortunately have grown used to seeing over the last fourteen years.

This time, though, it didn’t seem to be directed at me.

Well. Not me.

He looked different too- his features were sharper, his skin slightly darker. He glanced at the bed, pointedly, and then turned his searing golden eyes back to me.

“You wanted to know where he was,” he said softly. “You kept asking and asking, worried that he might be out in the world. Well.” He swept his arm wide, as if unveiling a grand prize. “Here he is.”

I was still baffled, holding my palms out helplessly at the bed that contained Alex and my Entire Self. “Okay, but this is…”

“This is now. Well.” His head dipped to one side. “Whenever now is. I have no idea what day it even is there. But like… this is currently happening. This is recent, not a memory.”

I still couldn’t understand, looking back and forth between him and them. “Okay, no but. Like. She’s with him?”

His eyebrows raised with a bit of sadness, a commiseration with my lack of comprehension. “Yes.” Then he shrugged, sighing deeply. “Maybe. I don’t know. She’s… sequestered with him, at the very least. I can’t tell if it’s to keep him away from you, or because…”

His mouth twisted bitterly, his eyes trying not to look at them. “Because this is what she actually wants.”

“Can’t you just ask-“

“She won’t speak to anyone.” He shrugged again, this time with a touch more anger, a mouth of lemon. “So maybe that’s why it seems like I am trying to soak up as much time with you as I can. I guess it’s selfish, greedy maybe. But I don’t honestly know what her motives are. And neither do you. Everything may change once you come Home.”

I peeked back at the bed again, turning slowly to watch the series of images in the living room and kitchen. “But I mean, who I am now doesn’t matter? The connection we have in this life is… meaningless?”

He sighed from the bottom of his soul, and I saw real pain cross over his face, an expression I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.

He looked so real- nothing like a dream, or a memory, or a figment of my imagination. If you’ve never really seen people in meditation, you can’t understand. His face is so familiar to me. I have known him since before time was time.

“She’s… ruthless, Kristyn. You’re the best version of her so far, by far, but you don’t understand how she can be. She does whatever she wants to accomplish her end goal. Nothing and no one else matters. It is highly effective, but it is…”

He smiled, wan and thin, centuries of heartbreak. “It is hard on the people who love her. And whatever she has with him… it consumes everything else.”

This last shrug was helpless. “We don’t have to understand it for it to be true. I just have to have faith that she knows what she’s doing.”

Does she?

Do I?

the nothing in the everything

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

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

/ thehourofthedead / Leave a comment

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.