There was a funeral. And then there was a performance. And the two ran together in some goopy mess. Singing at the funeral. Crying at the performance.
A great man was buried.
A mystical scene was performed.
I thought I'd be ok at the performance which was after the funeral. But there was a bathroom passing. An intermission where I distinctly knew her in passing as she paused after speaking with him, the performer and his man bun, (which by the way kind of repulses me) but that, my friends, is beside the point. I saw her for the first time. She is pretty. She seems kind. Good. All the same, I had this weird flash of wanting to help her with tips--to make it work, you know. Cause I kind of need for it to work. I need for him to be stable. I need for him to be grounded and taken care of by her. I realize this sounds kind of fucked up--that I actual think about managing his narcissism in some sort of clinical way like some sort of pet to be looked after for the weekend get-away, but I do. I do as part of the get-the-hell-out exit strategy. I think I do it selfishly. And while its practical, it isn't altruistic.
And I feel guilty for such. I feel awful thinking of her as a means to escape in a cost-benefit analysis sort of way, as if she is not a human being. And believe me the irony is not lost upon me. Because this is exactly what he does. Sees people as things to use and abuse for whatever pressing needs he has. And I ask myself if I'm becoming like him? Are we attending the funeral of my own soul?
And then I wander elsewhere to the awful imagining of the future and what is likely to happen to her and her soul with him.
He is likely to crush her soul.
Because that is exactly what he does.
He is likely to suck the life blood out of her, like a vampire, leaving her a shell of the woman she is now. It is almost as if I can predict the future--magical seer that I now am.
And in the split second on the way to the bathroom, it was as if the future and the past and present congealed in the intermission. Her look of disguised recognition and avoidance, where she seemed to dramatically drop out of the bathroom line to avoid standing near my presumed wrath, anger, and hatred. None of which seem to be on the list of emotions I was able to conjure out of the air and actually feel. All I could feel in that coagulated moment was guilt and sadness and the ripping pain of knowing the future hole in the space where her soul once was. I felt the imagined grief of her future pressing in on us as my own dark past with him pressed in from the other side. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand with some sort of nod to the sacred feminine spirit and tell her how sorry I am in advance for not warning her. She is part of the sisterhood, after all.
Instead, I stood in line, no acknowledgment of recognition, trying to be true to myself, neither feeding the resting bitch image she needs to see me as, nor firing off the SOS flares into the dark sky. I acted the part of the clueless woman visiting the bathroom during the intermission of a performance.
The performance--but that is the sticking point. Act 2, scene 4. The scene I get stuck in is the one where I desperately try to be the powerless actress that surrenders to the ending of the play, ok with the knowledge of autonomous human beings fucking up their own lives, yet desperately driven by a seemingly magical healing force inside that wants to help, even those that want not my help. The guilt in the wake of healing potential or not. Preventing harm. Futures that while not set in stone, still seem ominous. I feel the weight of Merlin, in just trying to be faithful to who I am, and whom I'm meant to be, and whom I'm meant to heal in life. Of all people, she is not my responsibility. This I know. All the same it's complicated. And the healing always bleeds over into every corner of my life. It is not meant to be contained in some sort of healing box.
The healing piece shows up at funerals and performances alike and in brief moments in passing your ex husband's new girlfriend in the bathroom who wants to hate you and it is probably best if she does, anyway. And the healing dresses those wounds in tears.
This is the weight of being in the healing arts. The weight of being in proximity to something you don't really control, you only facilitate it, and sometimes see the pathway to help someone, even your ex's new GF; all of this married to the knowledge that you can only heal when someone wants healing and of course she doesn't--not from you anyway--antichrist that you most obviously are...
The specific tragedy this time is intimately knowing the two extreme poles. Knowing both the real sorrow she might find herself in down the road with him and the joy of authentic living in walking the wounded down the healing pilgrimage. Two counterfactual worlds adjacent one another.
And the tragic powerlessness is overwhelming, in watching her standing on the edge of the Dementor's vortex, being readied for the soul chewing up and spitting out into the void. I know this sorrow, this grief, this monster that lies in the murky waters. I know the countless days of praying for death, just to escape, yet hanging on by a thread.
And so there I was. Caught in the interim between a performance and a funeral. What was the performance? Was it mine? Was it hers? Or was it something else altogether? And who's death was being mourned? It was all too blurry and too looped together, intertwined like the caduceus.
I suppose that is why I found myself sobbing at a performance and singing at a funeral. The funeral felt more beautiful with a healer soul flying into the collective unconscious finally being a bit more free.
While the performance was overwhelmingly sad and heavy with the weight of seeing another soul begin her walk down the suffering path. I wept at the seeming endlessness and loneliness of the narcissistic journey on repeat. I wept at my own healing loneliness and powerlessness in carrying the weight of the world and nobody really giving a damn about it, my own journey doomed to repeat. It was only then that the loss of the great Scott gone hit me. And I began to feel the looming heaviness of the absence of a fellow soul carrier gone elsewhere. And I wished he could weigh in on the goopy mess of it all and still just be a part of the sorting out of all the snakes.
