Wave of Modulation_old

choices

I've been so full no words will come out. When I feel like this, I don't write. I only see.

I'm tongue-tied but seeing and producing many images. Image-ination is a more structural part of me than words.

I spent most of my girlhood playing the role of the invisible, the observer. I used to think I'd rather be deaf than blind. It was just safer to imagine wakeful silence. Vigilance.

The idea of being blind used to panic me. I imagined being trapped in nothingness, with no way out.

Comforting, like Noria said in the comments from the last post.

My best ability has been my power of imagination. If I was a superhero, I would imagine escapes for those in danger, paths out of darkness, paths of light and color. I would envision nirvanas, project sanctuary that would become tangible. Just as I used to, before I felt real.

Vision is my power. Hopefulness. I am confident I cannot lose it. (One BIG benefit of the life I've lived. Hey, if I haven't become petty and bitter by now, I know I never will.)

Music is my love. Like the kind of wonder and appreciation that I cannot manufacture or realize for myself. People infatuated often say that another person completes them, or that they like who they are when they are with a person. I think it is more likely that the other person draws some feeling or quality out into the open.

Music is the key that unlocks all my locks.

I cannot make music or imagine sounds with as much beauty  and mystery and wholeness as others can. The mystery builds and builds. I cannot imagine life without music. Music is the thing I most look forward to. My excitement an yearning to hear old music, and new has never waned. Ever.

With my ears I can only receive the gift. Music is my spirit. My eyes rule my own world, my own mind. My eyes are my legs., my champion. My eyes will always save me. I have never doubted that I could visualize new wonders, to infinity.

Music, makes me go, makes me grow.

I would rather be blind than deaf.

It strikes me that I would rather be blind than deaf because I feel so much safer in the world. I could trust others to lead me, hold me, encourage me.  I trust others to see me, to speak to me.

I am visible now, I am real.

So, this is what it feels like. To allow providence.

To choose providence.

I grew up thinking that love was a life or death proposition

your existence gives me hope

I was fearful, fretful.

A year ago tonight I was lying in bed staring at the whorl on tv, biting my nails, calling one number on re-dial. I prayed. I did something I used to do when I was a kid: I tried to put a force field on houses, on earth, on people, on animals. Imagining them protected.

I meditated on the baby trees in Amanda's and Scott's yard and imagined them protected. "Katrina, you will not harm one leaf...!"

My forcefields used to work when I was a kid. I swear. I promise.

When I think of how many prayers and meditations and forcefields were created that night, mine multiplied by millions...and yet.

- - - -

Tonight, I'm lying here, breathing deep. I'm thinking about grace, and hope.

I am thinking about breath, about life, about voice, about connection. This time I am meditating on the positive.

I am repeating these words over and over, rubbing them smooth like prayer beads against my soul.

the more you try to erase me, the more, the more, the more that I appear

the more I try to erase you, the more, the more, the more that you appear

- Thom Yorke, from The Eraser

bullseye in my soul

Feelings in my head,
Bullet full of led,
You shot a hole,
Bullseye in my soul

On August 11th, we had visitors from out of Beantown and hot tickets to see Kristen Hersh's bands, Fifty Foot Wave and Throwing Muses at the legendary Middle East in Cambridge.

If you're a fan of Fifty Foot Wave, you know how raw and fast and intricate, and LOUD, their music is.

I was feeling pretty raw myself before heading to the show, due to some recent losses. I was ready to be surrounded by music. I was ready to jump up and down. I was ready to scream along with Kristen, which I did. Their music was the perfect vehicle for me to really feel the anger and pain that had been ebbing in me. It was the perfect release. I was sad to see them leaving the stage after their set.

And then came something unexpected.

A band I had never heard of was coming on second. As some kids entered the stage and began helping to set up the equipment, I wondered if any of them were Kristen's kids. I admit, I thought it was pretty cute but I also wanted them to get on with it. I was ready to be surrounded by music again.

After a few minutes, the kids strapped in and I finally realized. This was a band of 10, 11 and 12 year olds. I'm talkin 4th, 5th and 6th graders, people.

I didn't know what to expect. I sure as heck didn't know they were about to BLOW ME EFFIN AWAY.

Their song, Mick Jagger's Birthday Bash, was tongue-in-cheeky and cool. Their cover of the Kinks' I'm Not Like Everybody Else impressed and charmed me. !Duck Taped Shut! rocked me.

But it was their song, Lost Cause, that had me shouting along with them

FEELINGS IN MY HEAD
BULLET FULL OF LED
YOU SHOT A HOLE
BULLSEYE IN MY SOUL

It was like the old days, man. Like when we used to scream along to Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name Of or The Sonics garage band classic Strychnine. They held their own, playing between two powerful live bands.

And the kid voice anthem just added to our gusto. By the time they left the stage I was sweaty, hoarse... and free again.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

I'm settled in on the cross-country flight.

I see the baby next to me.

He is very very cute.

He is only 6 months old.

From time to time, I gaze over at his sweet face, his gossamer eyelashes.

I see how he responds to his mother's kisses on the small of his back, his neck, his cheeks.

He smiles the most infectious smile.

I smile back at his cheeky baby smile.

I watch his face carefully, he resonates with pleased contentment as he nurses.

I observe him and I think "He feels loved. He feels safe."

I know I am projecting.

I know I have selfish reasons for wanting to believe.

But having selfish reasons doesn't mean it's not true. 

His mother feels needed.

She feels strong for her baby.

She would do anything to protect him from harm.

That little baby feels loved and safe.

Seeing this... heals me a little more each time.

I'm gonna love you anyway

I'm gonna take my time.

- - - -

Love does not equal ownership.

I want to own my own feelings, if nothing else.

Today.

And every day.

ownership

In 1978, my stepfather tracked us to the single wide broken down trailer in the backwoods of Oregon we'd been living in, brought us back and moved us into a townhouse in Redondo Beach. The house was so large and clean and modern. My brother and sister and I had our own rooms with our own televisions. My stepfather was hardly ever home; he worked round the clock. He knew my mother was slipping deeper and deeper into insanity but still, he left us alone in the new house. Looking back, I see the bribe.

One of my only fond memories of living in this house was my discovery of disco. Every week, I watched Dance Fever alone in my room. I loved the colorful spinning lights. I loved making up my own dance routines and repeating them over and over.

I once snuck into my parent's room to admire their floor to ceiling windows and to see the marble in the bathrooms up close. That's when I noticed the mirror. I touched one of the petals in the floral pattern that curved along its edges. I was surprised to feel the petal was smooth inside, scooped out. I put my fingertips inside the depressions. They fit perfectly.

In May, I turned eleven. And a great boil grew on my cheek. I still have a small scar where it was. The thing is, I don’t remember the boil. I remember my mother looking at me, saying “Satan, I will remove thine evil from thee.” That was one I hadn’t heard before, and I hoped it didn’t mean she wanted to exorcise me again. I found out quickly that she had seen the boil growing under my skin. It was an omen of some kind. She pulled me into her room, across the expansive floor of the master bedroom, to the open bathroom. There were steps up to the bathroom, kind of like an altar in church, and two sinks, with a wide marble countertop. I thought it was a beautiful place.

My stepfather happened to be in the house at that moment, and my mother quickly got his help. He said they would need to lance my boil. I had no idea what they meant. She lifted me up in the center of the counter, between the two sinks, and pressed my back against the mirror. My stepfather forced my head to one side and told me to “Hold still! This is for your own good!” And then she began cutting. Digging.

I know I cried. After it was over, my mother showed me a very small jagged greenish stone, on the tip of her bloodied finger. “See! See?” I felt all the blood rush to my ears, and I couldn’t hear anymore.

I don’t remember anything else about that day.

- - - -

In June, the month after I turned eleven, during one of his infrequent visits home, my stepfather sat with my brother and me in the living room and watched Spanish tv. He reached toward me when I put my bare feet on the couch. I instinctively put my feet on the floor, as quickly as I could.

But he wasn’t going to punish me. My stepfather had seen that I had hundreds of tiny seed warts embedded in both of the balls of my feet. They itched, sure, but I hadn’t noticed the little bubbles under my skin. He said I must have got them from the park or the public pool. The next day, he drove me to the doctor, who treated them by applying acid to each wart. This tickled at first, but then it itched. A lot. And then it burned, and burned. And burned.

When we got home, my stepfather carried me into the house and laid me on my bed. And he left. I willed myself to sleep. In the morning, there was a bloody crater every place there had been a wart. I couldn’t walk for a few days or do my dance routines. After they healed a little they felt smooth like the hollow petals in my mother's mirror. My fingertips fit in them perfectly.

My brother said the biggest ones looked like constellations.

In July, some of the warts returned. I decided to cut them off myself. I took sterilized a razor blade from my mother’s medicine cabinet, one she used for her ‘cutting’. I sterilized it well by boiling it in a pot of water and then soaking it in rubbing alcohol.

And then I cut the warts out of the pads of my feet.

- - - -

In August, my mother cut up everything she owned in small pieces, including a 15 x 20 foot patchwork rug. Which alone would have taken her a week, if she’d been eating or sleeping. Which she wasn't.

She spent several days destroying all her things: cutting every piece of clothing, hammering every perfume bottle, tearing every picture, burning every book, severing every necklace, sawing every piece of furniture, every possession, every scrap of anything she had ever cared about. At the end of it all, she called me into her room and demanded that I help her remove the massive mirror in her bathroom, the beautiful one, etched with a delicate floral pattern. She made me help her rip it down. We wrestled with it. We pulled, we groaned. I tried my best. But it didn’t move.

We were sweaty and breathless as we both knelt over opposite sinks. I stared into the mirror, now covered with our finger prints, our oily hand, arm and face prints like ghosts hovering on the surface. Our eyes met.

My mother reached for the hammer and smashed the mirror to shards. I fell backward onto the carpet and scrambled across the room toward a pile of sheets and ripped up clothes. I covered my head and shoulders and held still until it was over.

After a few minutes, I could hear her whisper-shouting scriptures again, repeating, repeating. Finally, she grew quieter and quieter. Finally, I uncovered myself and stood up, tiptoed to the bathroom. The mirror was shooting rays of light across me like a disco ball as I moved, reflecting the light from sundown outside. I looked at her, crouched on the counter. The glue had done its job, suspended the mirror in place, all those thousands of tiny pieces.

She was reflected there in the mirror, in pieces, a mosaic of my mother. Then I looked at her face, her flesh twisted and weeping. As she moved, dots of golden light danced across her face. I wondered if they made a pattern like the constellations.

In her hushed fury, she was digging at the pieces, she was trying to remove her face from view. Her fingertips were already blood red. By then, she didn’t even know I was standing there.

- - - -

Whatever compelled her to destruction, to tearing and picking, the cutting, the nervous habits, I'll never know. Nature or nurture. I think it's both. We come from the same source. She made me from her body, and watching her changed me.

I’ve never been able to stop biting my fingernails. But I forgive myself.

I want to forgive her.

yellow

I remember wiping the yellow tablecloth after dinner. It was my turn to do dishes, and I was embarrassed about stumbling on the table leg. My uncle reached over and pulled me onto his lap, and hugged me tight. He and my aunt had recently decided they were going to "keep" my brother and sister and I. They had recently asked us to call them "Mom" and "Dad". And I had.

I wanted to forget everything that had come before; my dad, my mom, my step dad. I believed having new parents would help me forget.

My uncle hugged me tight around my waist, and though I felt too big and awkward for his lap, I felt a little bit happy, too. I felt an involuntary smile creep across my face but it disappeared as soon as my aunt came in. She glared at both of us, hard. "Sherri, go clean the kitchen! I'll finish clearing the table."

I looked back and saw my aunt reprimanding my uncle, almost in a whisper, her floppy jowls and double chin quivering with anger as she spoke. He was spreading his napkin over his lap. I felt confused, and somehow bad.

- - - -

There was a stretch of years, from eleven to fifteen, when I was almost too shy to speak, too unsure to fight for myself. Yes, I had always been a girl of few words up to that point. But, for a wide variety of reasons, the power and sureness I had felt in myself at five years old had slowly diminished and was completely gone by the time I grew breasts.

I had been a five year old who retaliated against doctors for taking control of my body against my wishes. I wanted to negotiate where and when I would get a shot. I wanted to pose for a picture on my own terms. Smile when I felt like it. I understood that I couldn't always have my way, but if I was ignored or lied to, I got revenge.

Later, I was a child who believed I could make myself disappear simply by holding very still. I believed that I could kill myself by holding my breath. I was committed enough to make myself pass out that way on several occasions. So, at ten years old, my first suicide attempts were fruitless.

I gradually lost my natural self protectiveness. Or rather, my self preservation changed. It went underground, beneath my skin. In my heart I wanted to trust people, to believe in them. But I was skeptical, and timid. Accidentally I developed a method to test how trustworthy someone was: when I found myself in a situation where I felt powerless or unsafe or afraid, I would hold very still. I would be passive.

Accidentally, I learned how to detect that critical moment. The moment when someone realized my vulnerability and felt their power. I learned about whether I could trust people by what they did in that moment.

- - - -

It was dark. I knocked on my cousin's closed bedroom door. My uncle answered. I told him I just needed to get my pajamas.  This was their special time, the time every night when he sat with his youngest daughter and talked about her day and tucked her into bed. My aunt and uncle had asked me to respect this time they had together, that it might be tough at first for their girls to get used to sharing their home and their parents with us. He opened the door a little and I quickly walked to the dresser and slipped out.

It was nearly spring, nearly warm, but not quite.

In the privacy of the bathroom, I took off my new bra and, not knowing how to fold the darned thing, rolled it into a ball on top of my clothes on the bathroom counter. While I brushed my teeth, I saw something shiny inside the part with the hooks and eyes. The satin label read "32C" and "Angel Soft". I didn't really know what the numbers meant, but "Ha!, I thought, "Not Angel Soft!" I had never had a bra before. In fact, I didn't even know I needed one. But that was one of the first things my aunt brought me after we had arrived at their house. As she handed it to me wrapped tightly in a plastic bag, she whispered that it wasn't "proper for a young lady to go without a bra."

My cousins, C and L, were very curious about my bra. The one who was nine had whined that she was jealous of my bra and wanted one, too, but her mom shushed her and told her that she didn't need a bra yet. The cousin who was fourteen had gigantic breasts; she was very heavy. Just like her mom.

I didn't like wearing the bra. It felt strange. I was twelve and didn't want to have breasts and my period already. I didn't know any other kid who had theirs.

I felt happy and relieved to pull on my new favorite pajamas: the stretchy-soft baby yellow terry cloth ones from the Salvation Army. They were already snagged and pilly when I got them, but I didn't mind because they were so soft, somehow. I got dressed in the bathroom, zipping them up from my foot, right up to my neck. I was twelve but had hit puberty two years before, and these were little kid pajamas. But remembering now, maybe that was what I liked about them, the feeling of safety, of going back in time. Going back to a time that maybe never belonged to me, but I wrapped myself in the feeling anyway.

I knocked on the bedroom door. My uncle opened the door. As I crawled into bed, he kissed my cousin on the forehead and walked out into the hall. Ever since my grandmother had left us with these relatives, my cousin and I had shared her room, and a double bed. I didn't mind sharing; I'd never had my own anything anyway.

I thought about school the next day, seventh grade english, The Red Pony by Steinbeck. Art class. Papier mache. My locker combination. We lay there in her quiet suburban room, falling asleep side by side.

I woke up to her hand creeping across my stomach. But for some reason, I didn't know why, I held my breath. And I held still.

She reached for the zipper on my pajamas and slowly dragged it open from my neck, unzipping it down to my belly. Even though my cousin was three years younger than me, I felt afraid, unsure, wondering. I was embarrassed.

Her little hand reached inside my pajamas and barely cupped my right breast. She rested her hand lightly, and left it there for a long time. Finally I couldn't hold my breath anymore. I breathed as slowly as I could, as motionlessly as I could, hoping she wouldn't realize I was awake. Hoping she would take her hand away soon.

Eventually, she did take her hand away. And she carefully zipped my pajamas up. I waited a long while, counting by twenties up to a thousand and then back down. This was my way of getting through scary moments. Then I rolled over, away from her. I tried to think about school the next day but couldn't. I tried to empty my mind.

We lay silent, side by side in the shadows. Watching the patterns of tree branches moving in the wind outside, the street lights glowing yellow across the wall.

- - - -

One cold sunny morning a few weeks later, as we got dressed for the day, I could feel her watching my back while I was putting on my bra. I flushed.

My nine year old cousin said, "I knew you were awake."

I knew she was referring to that night. I froze. I didn't speak.

"My dad says you can tell if a person is asleep or faking it. If they're asleep, you can hear them breathing. If they're faking it, they hold their breath."

where to begin

When I was a teenager, my younger brother and I used to joke about anything and everything. We would start small and then build and gradually work ourselves into gasping laughter. Especially the summer we were living alone in the acres and acres of walnut groves outside Red Bluff, CA. There was no tv, no radio, no furniture…no one else around for a week at a time.

We’d been growing and changing, and our skin had broken out in pimples which annoyed us very much. We used to wonder what would happen if you could choose to have all the pimples you would ever have in your life, but have them all at once. If you could bear all the pimples of your life in one week. A kind of forced purge, taking control of those ugly things. Magnifying something tiny into something on epic scale.

We imagined a person deciding to undergo this exact sort of process. We imagined this person, taking a pill and then gradually turning into a swollen festering bubbling popping oozing monster. We laughed so hard our bellies ached, our cheek muscles stuck into laughing shapes. Even though we imagined,from that state of devastation, they would never recover.

We joked about someone coughing all the coughs of their lifetime. Their throat erupting from their mouth and hanging down to their feet. I imagined someone sneezing all their sneezes in a day, their lungs exploding through their nostrils in a bloody bits and snotty mist, their eyeballs popping out onto their cheeks. We joked about someone having all the burps of their lifetime at once, all the farts of their lifetime extended into one huge fart. Or what if you could yawn all your yawns at once? Get them over with. All your hiccups? Over in just one week of miserable, torturous spasms and seizures. The more disgusting or morbid the idea, the better.

We joked that in the year 2000, scientists would invent a way to do make this process available to people.

On my own, I imagined what would happen if you could cry all your tears at once. And never cry again. Or love all your love at once, and never need to love again. Or never want to be loved again.

- - - -

I started therapy in the year 2000, attending a weekly individual session and a group therapy session for nearly five years. I couldn't feel my own feelings, but I found empathizing with others to be helpful, healing. I remember describing my emotional blankness to my therapist and my group. I didn't know where it came from. My feelings were stuck somewhere, or missing. I was afraid of discovering them. I likened my situation to the cartoons I saw as a child: like yelling into a jar and securing the lid. And if you opened the jar it came out, just as intense and clear as when you first put it away.

But it's not like that at all. It's different. I am different. Discovery is not possible to experience all at once. Feeling alive doesn't always kill you or turn you ugly. It doesn't even hurt sometimes.