Entangled

The specialists would say I'm supposed to be over this--him--by now. Supposed to have moved on. Supposed to have gone and gotten myself a whole new revamped life sans abusive ex.

But every time I try to go and get myself another life I look at the black and white photos on the wall staring back at me. The big, brown eyed baby that used to say woo-ah, woo-ah, woo-ah, when he first learned to walk with the Winnie-the-Pooh walker looking out at me. And I remember the three babies I pushed out of my own body created with the evil one I'm supposed to now erase from my mind. And once again I feel torn apart. I feel torn in two. 

I am haunted by the beautiful pictures in my mind of these lovely person beings. 

How do I share the beautiful memories in my mind with a monster?

No, I never see him anymore. No, I never speak to him anymore. No, I go out of my way to be far from him--to keep him out in every way imaginable. But he is there in the memories. What the hell do I do with the memories entangled with him? What the hell do I do with the most significant pieces of my life buried in the same tomb with him?

 

Grief Again

I wonder how it can be that life can take such dramatic turns, with such massive overhauling change--divorce, death, moves, endings, and even beginnings so jarring that you feel displaced from your own self and life. Nothing is the same. It is as if you aren't you anymore. There is a strangeness, an unfamiliar that can make you want to latch on to the old, no matter how terrible it once was--to run back to something--to anything you once knew.

But that isn't the plan, if you want to heal. 

One of the more jarring pieces when you enter into this land of disturbed time where you sit with loss and change in this act of grieving, is that you feel separated, isolated from other people not currently in the midst of disturbed time. You see the fragile world. You see life's precariousness. You see through a different lens. It isn't even the same world you see. It is as if you have been sucked into the Upside Down with Will.     

And the rest of the world spins madly on.

Far off. The loss not only of what you grieve--but also the loss of connection to those still in the non Upside Down. The ones who don't know or haven't been here to this displaced world can't understand it. 

And so the world spins madly on.

On Grieving the What Mights

Sometimes the most tragic piece punches me unexpectedly in the gut. You'd think after all the abuse, all the hell in trying to escape the narcissist that in escape there would be only relief. But there is a hidden sadness that can sneak up behind you. You mistakenly think, if I can just get the hell out... If I can just survive and move on.... Why then I'll be fine.

And then there you go imagining like you've always done. Thinking of what might have been, if he'd only been able to choose something different. Just when you think you're finished with all the drama, all the death, all the grief and endings of dead relationships. There is a little spot that gets in.

Call it the what-might-have-been grief.

After you've invested so many years trying to love someone who for all intensive purposes can not ever love you back, you've come to intimately know the good friend of what-might-be. For many years, what-might-be has been one of your steadiest companions. What-might-be has been your hope, your citadel. And then what-might-be flies away into the air, evaporated just like everything else.

And this can be completely ungrounding. Cause who thinks of grieving the loss of the shared dreams, the future, the hopes of the growth, the butterfly transformation. But, you've lost so much. Why not this, too? After all, the snake goes on as perpetual death and life cycle.

Fare Thee Well, Ivory Girl

Technically, the ole girl has no monetary value whatsoever. Indeed, probabilities are high that she's the kind you'd stumble across discarded behind some smelly, old tires in the corner of a thrift store, her only companions "Chopsticks," clunking children, taunting their chasing parents with temporary locator spell melodies.

No one, is likely to pay money to take her home for the night.

But She was there, like the Giving Tree, waiting for me day after day to take a seat. She was there in so many of the moments of overload where the lump caught in the throat. She was there when the fingers longing to send the melancholy into her bowels, refused catharsis because the soul yolk was just too deep to spill all over her keys. She held the silence like stone for months between the notes in spite of this being the antithesis of the purpose of her being. She was there, waiting. She had my back, as friend of my soul.

But He was there too. He saw the creative connection we had and didn't understand it or like it. Maybe, he was jealous of her. Maybe somewhere in his traumatic past, the Dementors had sucked his soul away, because he didn't really understand soul anymore, perchance he ever did.

Her fate was sealed by my deep love and soul connection to Her. If only I'd known to hide my love for Her a little bit better. A Michigander we'd rescued, She'd ridden the bumpy road to us on the back of a pickup truck when homelessness had threatened as some church decluttered. But the truth of the matter is that She was the one who rescued me.

She held me close many the dark night of the soul when the light in my thread bare heart nearly disappeared behind the veil. She offered shelter from the emotional abuse and gaslighting swirling in the living room air like desert dirt devils. She soaked up my tears like a sponge when there was no shoulder to cry upon, as I held my breath hoping the thin walls did not betray me, telling Him of my fear in the dark.

During the divorce proceedings, He held her as ransom. She unwillingly became his pawn. He could never understand her creative capacity for space holding. He could never understand Her soul holding. He could never really see Her true value, She was just a decorative piece of furniture to Him that mattered to me.

She was no Bosendorfer, no Steinway & Son, no Fazioli, but she mattered all the same.

He needed Her only for the sake of my isolation. He needed to have Her only to destroy me. He needed to separate us like a teacher keeps the young school girls apart to keep them from giggling in the corner of class too much. He needed Her to crush the good and kill anything soulful, anything foreign to him--that which He will never understand. He will never get the realm of soul. You can't if you have none.

But, he didn't count on this: you can't kill something that has sporified into something more. If He'd even understood the ethereal realm one bit, he'd know from the Velveteen Rabbit that you can't destroy something that has transformed itself by the act of love and sacrificial space holding.  

.....................................................................................

And so I let go of you, dear friend of my soul, ethereal Ivory Girl. I bid thee farewell. May you find your way to another in need of your musical healing. May you continue on in your work. And though mere spinet melody holder to some--to Him, somehow, you were and always will be so much more to me. Somehow, like the Velveteen Rabbit, you crossed thresholds. You became something more real. You came to inhabit the immaterial, invisible land of soul. And I suppose once you inhabit this land, no one, not even a narcissist who knows nothing of real, nothing of soul, nothing of the beautiful, creative invisible realm, can ever rob you of this bit. Farewell my beautiful dancing Ivory Girl.

on Death Stamps

Sometimes I wonder at the course death may have taken if the guy dumping the coal, had looked away? What if the twenty two year old boy had just seeped away into the void of nothingness? No detectives dawning the door at half past 11. No phone calls to Africa beckoning the parents homeward in a hurry. No lonely buglers haunting the silence of a gathering with the presence of the minor keys of sadness.

Death and grief. Such strangeness and yet, such odd familiarity.

I remember playing Hide-n-Seek amidst the headstones in the South as a young child. After sitting still for far too long, we'd dart out of the country church where the old ladies still donned over-sized hats and gloves to shake the hand of Gran the Preacher. Escaping to the cemetery we'd irreverently jump and climb the dead's makeshift jungle gym until the old ladies would shame us with their scolding eyes. Retreating to the long stone tables under the shelter we'd await the lecture from the preacher himself. The lecture never happened. Instead, his wild eyes merely suggested hiding near the back of the cemetery, where our sacrilegious play wouldn't ruffle the feathers of the little ole prim-and-proper ladies.

The death rituals didn't seem any sort of different from the living rituals, then. No, rather there were giant stones with dates stamped on them marking the basic details and sometimes a quote or a little lamb which seemed fair climbing material. It didn't seem to us that the dead would actually care about the traipsing all over their space.

But, the death rituals were handled differently in Arlington. I remember the hypnotic rhythm of the marching, the clicking of the shoes, the gun cocking, the endless back and forth and the non-flinching-in-the-face-of-a-bead-of-sweat-dripping-down-your-nose in the middle of the summer humidity. These rituals communicated a different rendition of death, contrasted starkly against the graves turned jungle gym. Twenty four seven, rain or shine, timed paces back and forth for years in front of the Unknown Soldier imparted a special heaviness and honor to the idea of death and all its enshrouded acknowledgments. These rituals almost seemed more important in the face of the unknown details.

And then there was the day the detectives knocked and we planned and stewed over the most minute details in the going about of the burying of the twenty-two year old boy in the frozen January earth, the day before his 23rd birthday. It seemed pertinent to avoid having the funeral on his birthday.

A thousand people drove in. The folks hopped a plane out of Africa and a people did what they do at funerals.

The rituals seemed inept. Not enough wrappings to dress the body of loss.

And then the day came and went when a relationship a few years shy of being as old as the almost 23 yr old, was declared dead.

And nothing happened. Nothing was different. The passing in all its finality was just dumped into the vat of void. No corduroy suit or Stone to climb on or march in front of for this death. No funeral pyre, no flower arrangements, no freshly disturbed dirt, no place tethering the grieving and keeping the feet on the ground. Instead the death and change of life's trajectory warranted a stamp from a robed stranger and an email from an expensive lawyer the day after the anniversary.

And nothing was the same.

the Funeral and the Performance

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.  

Loss

At least more days than not, it feels as though you have lost everything. The rhythm of the waves of loss can crash you down, dragging you out to sea in the undertow.

Intermittently interspersed on other days, you chart a little progress. A sense of doing a bit better seeps in. Mild hints of a new rhythm take shape—like the faintest shadow of a six pack emerging on the abdomen of an obsessive gym rat. The new habit of passing the kids off through school numbs the pain in your heart, a little bit. Somehow, it is easy to imagine them merely spending a few nights at a friend’s house away from you. Until the dog looks around, whining for the children that play with her and all the kid chores remain undone—little post-it note reminders call your bluff in your pretensions--your life is not the same, and never will be.

You live in a small apartment, now.

You look out the patio door at an apartment advertising sign.

You share your kids with someone who doesn't love you anymore and maybe never did.

You sleep alone without somebody next to you snoring or talking in his sleep.

And while the sleeping alone part might be an improvement over the nights of hearing him talk out loud while he dreamed of their lovemaking, as he moaned her name again and again, you still miss the comfort of lying in another's arms. You miss having your Other--your someone.

Being forsaken is hard. Difficult.   

And moving forward, of course, the predictables are hard—the anniversaries, the birthdays, the Christmases, and the Thanksgivings—all the events and celebrations, sometimes with the children, or without, sometimes alone—now you relate in your grief to the presence of an absence.

The predictables are difficult, but the unpredictables pummel, blindsiding you, catching you off guard at just the wrong time.

Taking your 13 yr old son to the Symphony—it’s not the Symphony, but rather the drop off at evening’s end, where the strangeness of it all punches you in the gut. You pull up to your house and your boy scrambles out of the van to run inside as you fight the same inclination, the automatic default habit of turning off the engine and walking inside to tuck him into bed like you’ve always done. Instead, the boy you pushed out of your own body is walking away from you and the air is catching in your throat and the drive home is fostering the need for tiny windshield wipers on your eyes.

Even the house--your own home--seems to mock you. Looking at the trim--that you begged him to help you paint--that you spent weekends painting alone for months, you are struck by the fact that it remains unfinished. Mimicry of your unfinished relationship. The house seems to stare back at you, looking into your soul. The windows clearly, wondering what-the-hell you are doing in backing up the van and driving off.  Even the burgundy Bougainvillea—that he would not let you have for so long—that he always resented because its flowers might drop into the pool—that you fought so hard to have—feels traitorous as it cloaks the house in beauty and continues to grow skyward, as if there could be something, anything, not entirely dead in the world in all of this loss.     

Feast on Your Life

Most days, I forget to eat.

Not that I have some sort of underlying, anorexic aspirations of being a waifish, Kate-Moss type. No rather, food has just fallen off the To-Do list, beat out by all the other overwhelming tasks.

Until, I look in the mirror and wonder why the woman looks gaunt and skeletal. And the clothes hang strangely and I am reminded that I have no money to buy clothes and my pants are once again falling off. I used to be pleasantly plump—a little extra padding around my organs.

Now I wonder at the stranger staring out at me from that world behind the mirror. Who is she? Will she survive this? How do I nourish her?  And the lovely words of Derek Walcott float out…

Love after Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door,

in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread.

Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott