Conversations with the lady of the lake

“Be careful who you pretend to be because you are who you pretend to be.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

Couldn’t sleep again, this recurring dream has me awakening each night at 3 AM. It has become the new rhythm to my life. I feel the bindings tightening, like a slip knot that constricts further to your struggles, conditional to your movements. The knot only releases if you move slowly toward it. How do you move towards a life when you are not the architect? When you feel like the plasticized doll placed and modeled to some other person or construct’s standards and desires. Perhaps this explains why doll houses have always disturbed me. Growing up there were a few friends who were privileged enough to have been gifted with these beautiful works of art, small Victorian stylings, that were revered more that played with. It was meant to stay perfect, clean and untainted by dirt, ageless. I would look in the tiny windows and see the tiny doll people positioned to someone else’s expectations and needs. I suppose on some level, I recognized them as the tiny extravagant prisons they represented. A mirroring to life.

In spite of my awareness at such a young age, I have still managed to find my adult-self following the same path. I lost myself along the way. For until you fully know and accept yourself, love will remain conditional. The dead eyes staring at myself in the mirror speak to this loss, these moments stir the vitriolic acid deep inside, some awareness remains. Enslaved to the system and suckling the dried teats of external sources, gluttonous for validation. The taste of bitter pus remains, swilling spit doesn’t clear the palate. Awakening to the cage crafted by my own design, to the places where the cool-aid had poisoned. Repression like a silent assassin, on nimble feet slips past defenses as they keep to the shadows and slowly carve away. Harvesting slowly, with a sharp knife that drips numbing solutions until one day you take a step and realize your foot is missing. Only a bloody festering stump remains, searing pain shooting upward as the nub of exposed bone, nerves, and flesh grinds into the sharp earth. Awakening to the reality of cultivating relationships that do not fulfill or fully accept, to the conditional terms of my existence. I was bound to the proprietary obligation to serve others before myself. Increasing the magnetism to cliff’s edges, honed blades, and poisons wrapped in pretty bottles. I am conscious to these warning signs, but in my current and chronic sleep-deprived state I feel paralyzed. More observer than actual participant. When did I drop the reigns and how do I grasp them again?

These were the tangential cycles of my thoughts. Continually circumnavigating the same central point, when I found myself walking out my restlessness late one night. The night I caught a glimpse of her, briefly, and became a slave to witness her again. To know her fully. I could still feel the wormy webs of what awoke me crawling around in my mind, dark memories that haunt more than enlighten. The sinews of moldered memories that were buried so long ago. Muddy boots stepping and parka lifting to the cool night breeze, or should this be considered morning? It’s 3:30 AM and the cool breeze provides an invigorating caress to my cheek. Shirt chafing peaked breasts that canter and sway to the gait of my step, forging this muddy path to the dark waters that call my name at this hour. My skin pimples to the heavy, wet air as dew beads on my clothing and hair. The world so quiet, I can hear my pulse broken with the occasional screech of an owl or rustle in a bush.

I walk to the cove of a lake, commonly misted with fog at this hour. To the place where I first saw her. Dark silhouette of a woman, her arms raised above and torso elongated to sinewed curves as she wrings water from her hair. It was a brief glimpse before the loud crunch of a leaf ended that reverie. I have been coming back to these waters since. Finding liberation through obscurity in these nightly excursions. No longer on view, bound to expectations and beholden to others. I breathe deeply as I near the water’s edge. Tonight, I will find my voice. Shuffling through the scripted introductions I had prepared, grunting I throw them all to the wind. Speaking from the seat of my pants, warm pants that they were. Clearing my throat and buying time, I start with this.

“I keep coming to these waters each night because I keep thinking about this woman I saw, wringing her hair so beautifully into these gloomy waters so many nights ago and I have hoped to see her again. More than that, I have hoped to know her.” Silence ensues and I watch my breath vapors as they undulate in the meager moonlight. “My name is Greta.” I finally add as the moment wanes. I am about to leave when I hear a faint movement in the water and a clear velvety voice in response.

“I know who you are Greta.” My skin tingles to the sound of my name, a calling carried across these glassy waters. “We have known each other a long time, though you have not always been aware of my existence.” And then silence, long and hard that stayed with me until I returned the following night. Steaming breath vapors dancing before me, yet again. Breath after breath, feeling the cold creep in. Before leaving, I say “I’m sorry for not noticing you, for being blinded to you.” Silence again looms wetly and I finally turn in for the night.

Rhythmic crunching of boots walking a dirt path through the woods. My nightly ritual resumes. It’s been almost a week since I heard her voice. Looming at the water’s edge, I extend my arms upward into a stretch, lifting my face to the starlit sky. A long sigh escapes, and I return my gaze to the dark waters.

“I wrote a poem today, scratches in a note pad while hiding in the bathroom. I named is ‘Space’:

Space is needed to find my place

To find that secret space

To find my sacred face

It is in this space I learn to weave

All my selves into a fine lace”

Silence parades past like my breath. I was proud of my composition, though it was small and still hidden. Shame and concepts of scarcity had stolen my voice so many years ago. It felt like the ending and the beginning. Riding astraddle two worlds, my secret self that elusive enigma and the polished mask I show to others. A question begins brewing deep in my intestines, knots of twisting thoughts coiling. I work to bring it forth, my throat burning to utter it. My body shudders for this release. Mouth croaks, words not forming, tongue swollen with atrophy and laying useless. Anger slices, a hot iron to cauterize these wounds. Fingers curling into tight fists, nails biting into palms, skin splitting to the release of blood. Knees give way to the sucking wet mud, but no relief is found there, only seeping coldness. Only me. The fear of nothingness creeps in like a cancer, sticky tendrils working their way through my system, strangling that which is left of me. The open wounds to my palms sting as I try to hide the tortuous contortions of my face as the guttural noises of my grief echo across the water. Disgust sullies forth as I embody that which I feel. Face streaked with blood, mucus, and tears dripping to the wet earth below. Breath heaving in and out, I stare at the waters longing for its icy embrace. Until I realize I am staring into her eyes. An unflinching dark gaze holding mine, submerged to her chin. My breathing slows as I focus on her shadowy depths, her mouth not moving when she asks, “What is it that you seek?”

Time elongates, vapors form and recede before I am able to respond, “How do I stop feeling dead inside?” I whisper, heart pounding as I await an answer. Slowly her words issue forth, and I feel them like stripes on my back.

“Sacrificing self for love, kills it at its source.”

My past untwining and weaving in front of me, as a vision appears, a woman at the center. I watch as they slice pieces from their body, rolling them out to create another thread pulsating outward. Building this lattice of flesh. I look into hazel eyes that shift like the tides and recognize my own haunted gaze. My flayed body in the middle deformed and barely recognizable, running out of flesh to sacrifice. Extremities splayed outward in a meaty webbing of memories that drip pulp and sinew. I howl at this visage, at myself, at being groomed into becoming my worst abuser. A wielder of the knife that routinely flayed flesh, until I almost disappeared. Burying head into bloodied hands, the sting of salt, pain like a blanket grounding me into my body. I hear the splash of water followed by dripping movements that are getting closer. Wiping hands across face, further smearing the bloodied mucosal face paint. Wearing my soul on my skin, I look up. She has risen from the water, her torso exposed, naked breasts dripping. With long dark hair cascading like wet silk clinging to her shoulders and chest. Dark eyes hold mine, silver skin glowing in the moon’s ethereal light. Her head tilts slightly as she observes me.

I run my forearm across my nose to stay the dripping there and sigh loudly, exhausted and barren. Breaking the silence I ask softly, “How do I become whole again?”

I watch as she raises her arms, an invitation to her dark, cold embrace. I remain seated on my heels, as I watch droplets fall from per pale and graceful invitation. I place palms to the ground, mud grating into the wounds there. The scent of earth strengthening as I stand and find my balance. Stepping forward slowly, my feet at the water’s edge. A curved dagger rises from the water to her left hand, the hilt inscribed with markings of our ancestors. She slowly lifts the blade to her chest and slices from the top of her sternum to diaphragm. Reaching to the center, she begins pulling away the skin and fascia attached to her rib cage, wet sucking noises as the flesh separates from bone. Still clutching the blade, she turns the hilt toward her sternum and fits it into a keyhole there. Rotational clicking of turning gears as she turns the key. Her breast plate opens slowly like a double door, red light shining outward as the opening widens to reveal a glowing heart beating to a rhythm that matches my own. I near her embrace, mesmerized by her glowing viscera. I lower my knees into the cool water and they sink into the muddy earth as I enter her embrace. She leans down and kisses my forehead; a humming begins there and I observe as she lifts the blade and slices a vertical line in that same place. My skin splits and a new space for vision is opened. The blade falls back to the watery depths and she gathers me into her embrace. My head enters her thoracic cavern until my forehead rests on her warm beating heart. I close my eyes and fuse, iron-rich vapors of organ meat comforting, my third eye open and peering through the iridescent and glowing muscle fibers. Terror visions play out beneath the transparent tissue, like a horror movie marathon. No longer feeling the sinking isolation of emptiness. A glimpse of the collective, my pain becomes our pain. I surrender to this knowledge.

The sharp snap of a belt heard from the other room disintegrates the spell, they are coming for me, a threat and an invitation into their circus of shadows. Fear slices through my tender belly like a frosted blade twisting as it burrows deeper into my guts. Running or fighting only makes it worse, left shoulder spasms as they firmly hold me in place. I sink into the insulated box inside myself as their screams of shaming obscenities spew saliva while the barrage of burning stripes mark me from shoulder to thigh, like a branding iron imprinting these messages on my soul. Whimpering as this reel ends and a new one begins. I feel my face pressed into the cold earth, their strangling weight pressing the breath out of my tiny body. The skin of my face and neck raw from the grating of their greasy stubble. Choking on the nauseating smell of stale tobacco and beer. The years of grooming imprinted memories like maggots wriggling across the soft skin of my legs. Crawling into my nightly closing thoughts as I seek slumber’s reprieve. Sucked into a new vision, with the bowel churning clicks of a shot gun being loaded and cocked for action outside my bedroom door. Pulse thundering in ears as I push the window sash open, slowly lowering my younger siblings to the dewy grass below before clambering down. Shivering children, socks soaked with dew, we run when we hear the pounding on my barricaded door. The coercive control of weaponized words begin a funeral procession as my suffering comes to life, until I am purged and raw.

Peace takes root and sprouts from my chest as the song of morning birds filter into my consciousness. Swollen eyes slowly flit open, stinging to the early breeze. The sky pink with the dawning sun. A movement in the water catches my eye as the dark rippling body of a water moccasin swims past. My body shivers as hypothermia sets in and I am challenged with eliciting response from my limbs. Sluggishly I crawl onto the muddy bank. Body wants to sink into cold slumber, but mind pushing like a juggernaut fed by the sun’s rays and determined to witness another day. Born from trauma and rebirthed ad infinitum. Each step propels me forward, pain no longer binding through definition, but building. Nourished in knowledge that I hold the key to weaving my selves whole again, to become creator instead of destroyer. Survivor born, victim no more, I am the keeper of my door.