transmogrification

life is full of simple if entirely bizarre solutions. my brain knows more than i do, and has decided that, for the moment, i've done enough with the memory stuff. i have had an incredibly dark two weeks, and, working together, my brain and i have gone to the limit of what i'm prepared to deal with--we now back off, and i do some odd visualizing about the shoot working itself out to the capacity of the new-laid roots.

it's easy to confuse the ends and the means, because they're really the same thing. but for my own reference, the end, for now, and maybe for always, is singing better, and the means are these growth processes. which involve everything but the kitchen sink, apparently. proust attempted to attain a simple end, that of explaining the meaning of an incident, and ended up with recherche (which i haven't finished)--he pulled the entire world into his pursuit of the end he was after. i would say the same for shakespeare, possibly. i'm no proust and i'm certainly no shakespeare, but i see how these things happen: you want something, you are willing to do just about anything in order to attain that thing, and, boom, there are voices and images and tongues of fire, apocrypha, impossible visualizations, symbols that come out of nowhere...understanding of all the things you thought you understood but were too afraid to believe you understood...

and there are answers. i don't know. and they're simple. they're just weird. like, in order to move on, for the moment, i have to acknowledge that that other me, the one who repressed the thing in order to go on surviving, is dead. it's terrible, but it's true. she would have made a better me than i do, i'm pretty sure, but it doesn't matter--the thing's impossible. what happened to her killed her, and i turned up in her place.

i wish that either, a., i were overstating the case, or, b., the case wasn't quite so cliched. but i'm speaking more literally even than one would about something fairly literal, like a mountain of homework. a mountain of homework is a lot of homework; the idea that an earlier version of me died when she was repressed from necessity is slightly more of a fact than a crapload of homework that gets turned into a mountain. it's embarrassing in its literalness, in fact, because, if i could, i would go with some other metaphor. how many times do we read about someone rising from the ashes of a former life, or, more specifically, some lady character in a graphic novel who deals with her own violation by cutting off her hair, dressing as a man, and gaining magic and/or kicking-ass powers? i mean, it's a whole genre i'm channeling, not just an isolated rhetorical conceit. but it's the case. i died, and was reborn or something, and now here i am.

why is this helpful? distance, first of all. not that i want to embrace distance from anything, really, but, yeah, i'm far away from the person that it happened to. the things that kept her safe won't keep me safe; the things that healed her won't heal me. but i cling to them, secondly, because it's what i know. if she's dead, i can talk about her ghost, and her ghost has been possessing me for something like twenty two years. another cliche--another unfortunately apt cliche. i keep acting like she would have acted, seeing things as she would have seen them...she doesn't exist anymore, though. acting like her doesn't bring her back. acting like her doesn't give her back her life; it just takes mine away. i am safe in a way that she wasn't--i'm safe from the thing that killed her.

maybe. this is an interesting point. i'm not sure what i'm safe from. i just know i'm safe from something--i'm safe. not from...death or pain or attack--i'm just safe, safe within myself. i'm okay. it's not easy to explain that, but it is a pretty interesting thing to feel, for the first time in, well, forever. there is ground in which to plant myself. i can't be ripped up at the roots ever again. i don't know why--i just know it's true.

i mean, thank god, right?