i watch myself in this video, from time to time.
it is the end of 2016, a few days before christmas. i am thirty years old.
it is a piece i wrote in the bath at one of my ex’s houses; “reliquary: the body.”
i wonder if my stomach will ever look or feel like that again; i am wondering about the trading of mental and emotional pain, for physical pain. i remember how much Pain i was in. i remember where it would lead me, then only one year and a few months into the underworld.
i just listened to my telling of ivan and the gray wolf for sharon blackie’s soon to be closed/completed mythic imagination network, from may 2022-- feels like thousands of years ago; all the miles and all the pain and let’s be honest-- all the joy and revelation and bewilderment under my feet and in my soul, since.
for whatever reason today i am thinking about this emotional/spiritual/mythic/metaphoric kind of dismemberment-- how shockingly that part of the story landed with me, the first time i heard it now 3 years ago.
i am thinking of the words i myself wrote, and spoke, in “reliquary: the body.” it was the first time i publicly named that i had been pregnant at 18 and had an abortion; my daughter fleur sauvage still had not reemerged to me from the otherworld, and i was still referring to her as an ‘it.’
i wonder sometimes if the pain in my abdomen is still tracing those days, even as so much healing has come Through and With it. i end that piece mentioning my angry, balled up fist. the rough initiation, as they say, into my adulthood; the first time i found out, personally, that the things you think can’t happen to you-- they Do.
i write in “reliquary”:
“i have no desire to scour the landscape, the way isis pieced osiris back together-- there is no holiness in resurrection for me, there is no holiness in return.”
it’s a lot for me to sit with, as part of my own evolving mythology. i gave up my angry, balled up fists. my mortal body. i end the piece saying, i will become the fire instead.
it has been so many years since then. only 7. only 7, how could that possibly be?
to have lived and died a thousand times. to sometimes still feel Lost, So Lost; i need only turn back around behind me and see the miles and miles travelled.
what would that girl think of us now?
[…]
my child self was with me today; i’m typing this in the graying blue light seeping through the front windows, my sword against the wall and the big green gym ball sitting next to my pillow on the carpet. i Remembered. in this space of exploration of My Digestive Story, how is she Here? uncovering another piece-- how much i loved to make up games, to climb things, to be physical, to Feel Strong. sometimes she is so far from me i ascribe it all to typical leonine arrogance, first-child dramatism, an always wanting to be the best, the fastest, the one who could jump furthest.
maybe it felt good to Feel Strong. to be physically Able. this word that is now so twisted up with my mythos, i don’t even know what that means.
i find myself often, i realize, in the cracked open mandorla of-- do i just accept myself As Is, Here, and leave everything alone; or do i try to ‘heal this,’ ‘make this better’?
i wrote to myself on stray pieces of white paper, from inside the night that would become a thunderstorm, some-things like-- what happens if this never ‘gets better’? what happens if i have to cancel everything? what happens if i ‘just can’t’?
i think about dear friends, family members, mentors. who couldn’t or can’t change their physical life situation. my nana who gradually lost the ability to walk but was still The fucking spitfire, As Ever.
i have a map for transforming a mental health landscape. i have Survived this. but what of This journey, This inquiry, Now? how the ‘credit card debt’ i racked after 4 months of not working while prioritizing my health is still weighing on me. while i sweat here with the computer on my lap (yes, i know that’s ‘bad for you’) writing to myself. how there are landscapes that unfurl and ones that constrict. and some, like the ocean, that seem dark and bottomless-- yet Teeming with life. movement. sounding.
i write this for the girl holding the candle up back in 2016, saying-- swear to me that love doesn’t end, it just transforms. swear to me the girl doesn’t die, she just becomes something else.
what is Here, for me, in Both of these questions.
like prince ivan, after the great grey wolf pours both the elixir of death and elixir of life over the pieces of his body, reconstituted and returned to life-- i am myself and More than myself. the one ready to ride the wolf back, full circle, receive his beloved fair elana, set the truth-telling in motion with his father the king, and his betraying brothers (who committed the dismemberment) down into the deepest dungeon.
I Am A Human Body, now. and not a fire. (i still remember the grief that came over me in finally giving up that name, audrey wildfire dimola).
many of the same ghosts of loves and loves-lost still visit me but i am Not Only a container for their relics and ruins, my ribs “scrawled with names.”
there is a Me, who Exists. who re-emerged from that Holy Fire i became. There Are Stories, Here, now-- old stories alongside My stories. one of them is a daughter who existed, who Exists. who is a Being and not an ‘it.’
i find, i have found-- i Am the one doing the collecting. the scouring. isis to my own osiris. great grey wolf to my ivan. future echo of the legend i had just begun living into, that loving desert Ancient One, La Loba.
stories, stories, stories for Another Day.
*last two fotos from a recent visit to the metropolitan museum of art.