grief & messy musings on the gong 07.02.2023 (Patreon)

Hell, y'all. This is a particularly griefy time of year. It's a long, strange, dilated window of time between when my mom died and when I made the call. It's the guilt of being a full-time support of somebody so lost and alone and poison with fear, and not being there when they needed you most, in a time of transition and passage, while peacefully believing they were respecting your boundaries, uncharacteristically. Believing you'd finally communicated successfully and made the progress you'd worked so hard to facilitate, because progress had been made, with communication and patience and forgiveness and so much work, it was working. Of letting their flesh ferment in stillness while you blissfully take a much needed break to gather the strength to love another day. Of learning so late that you neglected them in a real time of need, because every moment was so needy that you did not trust their thrashing and begging for your presence. I am like my mother in so many ways, like we are all like our mothers and our fathers in so many ways. Even the ones we did not know. It is no use wishing we were not. There is strength in the qualities our parents were not always brave enough to embody and accept. There is weakness in them too.

Big grief lives in your body in funny ways, and I find myself more sensitive and prone to isolation and anxiety during these stupidly beautiful weeks of summer. When my flowers are blooming, and it's light all of the time, and people all around are at their height of outreach and social exertion, I am a mess. I drink too much. I crumple to the floor and sob violently until I exhaust myself like a baby nobody wants to hold, without any build-up or obvious external cause. It just lives inside of me and bursts from me when my body remembers. Things need attention and I do everything I can to avoid them. Important things. Basic things. I like to warn the people who rely on me that I might be a little shitty around this time. Some understand, some don't believe me. Think it's some kind of dramatic overstatement, or a threat. I can almost always feel it coming. The pangs. They hit suddenly, and reverberate like a gong. That is the sound of trauma asking for your presence.
Another friend dies. Another home lost. Another lost job, close call, lied to, wrecked car nightmare. Threatening your existence. It always happens here, or adjacent via some golden mean. It always feels connected. It all shakes a main line to the core.

It is a place where art lives. Where demons and salvation coexist and yearn to be whole. Touching this hot hot core is what religious experiences are made from. Religion is just a logicians rationalization of the memory of knowing this place. The caging of empathy. A story to contain it. The desperation of reason over understanding. An attempt to systematize the liminal, expecting safe and sterile access to this sacred state. There is danger here, and there is peace, and the door only opens to those who accept the costs of wisdom. Of touching. Of surrender. Of dancing with demons and knowing their truths. We are all so desperately human and we wish to understand our existence in terms we can grasp. We have been trying for as long as we have been existing. You cannot learn what you think you already know.