New Installment today: Ghost Chapters From The Green Books #9 - Grief Is An Hallucinogen
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NEW INSTALLMENT TO READ HERE!
Ghost Chapter - Grief Is An Hallucinogen -5/8/20
“There is a parable about a man who loses his keys and is out searching for them under a streetlamp. Eventually people come to help, and someone asks where he thinks he lost his keys. He points to the dark alley around the corner. Then why on earth he is searching under the streetlamp? He says: Because this is where the light is!
It is just a few nights ago that I am crying so hard that I leave my senses. My body has taken over. I am hyperventilating and my stomach is palpating. Like a child spent from a tantrum whose body still performs the convulsive motions. I put my hot forehead against the cool mirror above the bathroom sink. Giving your old medicine cabinet all of my weight, I rest there. I could fall asleep in this position. I am too exhausted to resist anything.
With my head against the glass I open my eyes and look directly in. Something I may not have done since getting sober twenty-two years ago. At first it is very dark in there. And then there is something, maybe only a glint of light. But suddenly it’s clear. You are the eyes looking from behind the glass, Nick. I am watching you watching me back. I gasp. It is genius. To stow yourself away in such an unlikely place as my own gaze. The realization is too sudden. Now fear leaps directly into my stomach, scrambling my systems, telling me to run.
But I’m certain I must stay absolutely still no matter what. I resolve to let go and fall into the dark wells of my eyes, and through the looking glass. Grief is an hallucinogen. Forms shift. I let go even farther and our eyes switch places on the mirror face. One moment we are a cyclops. Then four eyes in a moving Picasso. And fear is waiting at the edges, like birds wanting to swoop. My head nearly explodes, but I keep myself from flying apart. Maybe what I do is fall together. Even when it is winging and dizzying I hold the gaze into the pupils, and I slide through. I see my eyes, cheeks, tears, skin, nose, lips, peripherally fuzzily. They are all pieces you love. All that urgent falling in love. It is happening again in the mirror.
Now I move my head slowly away from the mirror and look again. This is not abstract. There is no mistake. I know what I “see.” I am you from behind the glass looking directly into me. It hurts. It burns. I do not move away. I say a breathy “Wooooowww…” as I slide through the mirror. I have been looking in the light under the streetlamp, but you are inside. I have found you gazing straight back through me. You have been here all along, and it only takes a millimeter’s shift of the eye. But it is too big for me to hold for too long. Maybe it is too small and fleeting for you? I don’t know who lets go first.
It’s only later that I distill this down into words, which seems blasphemous to me, Nick. To put into words that it’s not my job to find you, but to carry you, like we all carry time, since we are made of it. That to recognize you I only have to make myself available to be found. That you’ll find me when you’re able. If only I can remember that this is everything. This is love. It is always here. There is nowhere else to look.
The battered stack of your Carlos Castaneda paperbacks sits on the cottage bookshelf now. The ones we read to each other out loud, in no particular oder, while we cooked, while you gardened. Lying head to head on the living room carpet at night. Passages you highlighted through the years - done once in yellow, very important parts gone over again in pink, and super ultimate pieces of information underscored a third time in orange - or have I got it backwards? I re-read them according to your colored maps. How wonderful of you to leave so many clues.
Just today in Castaneda’s The Art Of Dreaming I open randomly to a quote: “To seek freedom is the only driving force I know,” Don Juan tells Carlos. “Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.”
There you are - I’ll say each time that I discover you hidden, safe. That the flame of you is intact.”
Thank you!
This is so brilliantly engaging, Kara. I think I have an insight. Your incredibly visceral description of going through the mirror and feeling Nick there is very reminiscent of the description of a thin place experience. With one exception, you ARE the thin place. I think this is why you and I relate about thin places and Julian of Norwich's idea of oneness because, absolutely, you are still oneing with Nick. Wow! What an exciting ride you're giving us here, Kara. Thank you so much, friend!