possession | The Constant Pursuit of Ghosts

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.

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?