Got Nothin' To Say

It's the last day of 2024, and after a difficult year of many changes, I only have the strength to offer this. 

Goddess willing, though, with a little luck, maybe the new year will bring something to say. 

Salt-Free / The Fourth Dimension of Time

[Later, when I was in the hospital, I would have a recurring nightmare that blocks of sunlight were being hammered into my head. The blocks were meant to contain insight, but when I looked, the sunlight was empty. That's when I would wake up in a panic, remembering that I did not remember. 

It's funny, what the unconscious mind gets up to when we aren't there.]

1. 

On the second Sunday in May, my housemate and I were in the kitchen, leaning over a boiling pot of ramen. "This changes everything" he said, adding a handful of Costco dried mushrooms with a flourish. "Gives it an entirely different flavor." 

Suddenly my vision wavered. I thought at first it was steam from the pot. No, I thought. I remember.  This has happened before. Deja vu? No, a memory I had once, of something that had never happened. It was as vivid as something so nebulous could be. 

It had happened back in 2007, during that time of year when the weather was trying and failing to get properly warm. I was living in Victoria then, in the gold house, and on that day, I'd found myself pacing the floorboards, feeling haunted. A memory had come to me - it felt like a memory, anyway - very short, but distinct, of living somewhere else, another town, in another house, with someone I couldn't place. We were leaning over the stove in a steamy white kitchen. There was an impression of spindly space-age furnishings, table and chairs. We laughed, but there was a heaviness in the air, a sorrow, a sense of endings. The sort of regret that can follow you through time.   

I'd fretted restlessly for an entire afternoon, wondering where such a mental image had come from. I couldn't relate it to anything I'd done, or any place I'd been. Yet the melancholy tugged at my heart as if had all been real. For what? For whom? 

17 years later, I looked into the present and finally knew.

 

2.

The morning of the last Friday before I left Ohio, we were driving back from Perrysburg. I sat in the passenger seat, flipping through a copy of the Tao Te Ching. Anxiously, I closed my eyes and put my finger on a page at random. When I looked where my finger had landed, it was a phrase that said, "the fourth dimension of time." 

Just as we arrived home, where Tricky the cat sat at the kitchen threshold awaiting our return, we felt something pass through the room. It passed through us, too. Tricky raised her head, alert to the invisible motion. A sort of convulsive shudder, difficult to describe. I said, "Did you feel that?" My housemate replied, "a ripple in time."

It was a little while before I remembered the phrase I'd picked out of the Tao Te Ching.

3.

At the end of May, after I'd flown back to Texas with Tricky in tow, I stayed in a motel - the name escapes me now, but it hardly matters - while I waited for some plan to evolve. I knew this motel, because barely a year before, my friend and now-former housemate had come to stay. I was meant to be thinking of the future, but the sweltering heat made it nigh impossible. Since I'd arrived in Austin, everything had seemed blinding - too loud, too hot, too psychically polluted to bear contemplating at all. Already I was harboring the germ that would nearly kill me, but of course I didn't know it then. Instead, I sat on the balcony that by chance overlooked the path that we'd taken a year before, my friend and me, traipsing along, winding toward a future - now passed - that had seemed so bright. If I looked hard enough, I could swear I saw the air shimmer as our shades passed by. Look closely and you might see. 

...

In the hospital, these things came back slowly from the void where sepsis had left me. Time measured by the light out my window and salt-free meals brought three times a day. For a while it seemed I could let it drift away, all those memories, illness like a crossroads that time could not follow. I knew it would if I let it. I knew maybe I should. And yet I did not. And yet, and yet. 

...

We did make it back to Ohio, Tricky and me, worse for wear, eventually. But the ripple in time I'd somehow escaped took her away. She died soon after, near that same kitchen threshold, and I cried and cried and cried. She's buried at the corner of the house where the wind catches the leaves, but sometimes I hear her pattering around at night, somewhere, I imagine, in the fourth dimension of time. 

Speaking in Thorns

The hardest thing, maybe, is having lost your direction. All the things you wanted don't want you anymore.

The road dead-ends in a tangle of thorns. 

In The Track of the Moon's Shadow

There was no glimpse of the direction of my future during the eclipse, only the knowledge of what is being eclipsed from my life. 

Whirlwind in Retrograde

"Don't go far off" he used to say, but in the end, he only wanted me to go.  

Some days, I walk out onto my doorstep and it's like a dream I had once, long ago. Chalky blue-white midwestern light and curiously elongated shadows. There is some solace in the way the wind and the trees aren't bothered about me; I just am, if I'm anything at all. 

There is a house on the next block with a row of temple bells out front. They chime with a most delicate sound. 

Once upon a time - that is to say, three or four years ago - I used to gaze out toward a point on the horizon, northeast beyond the cliffs, gaze at it until I could imagine seeing the traces of my attention there, a phantom signal against the sky. 

What was I signaling? Something desperately important, it seemed. A longed-for future. A magical elsewhere. A certain place where I was not. At night I gazed at the stars and dreamed. Twice I watched the earth's shadow cross the face of the moon and felt my destiny coming into being. My goddess is a goddess of eclipses, after all. 

Now I look out my southwestern window and understand so clearly that what I was signaling was my own self, looking back from where I came.

I think a lot about that place between what was then the future and the past. There was so much I did not see. Ohio like apple-raspberry candies from the dime store. Gingerbread, cloves and chamomile. Soft Sounds of the 70's. Cold grue and aquarium sky. From my limestone perch in Texas, I did not see this, nor hear it, nor feel it. What I sensed, on the other side of my prickly pear reality, was something golden and glimmering, reaching into the beyond. The glow of manifestation, maybe. I wonder now how much of it belonged to me. 

...

One night not long ago, I was at the library, a building that looks like it was designed by Escher on a bender. We sat in the atrium and listened to astronomers talk. Through the pointed panes of glass, a slow twilight was descending. My attention drifted upward until I could see the first stars. 

Far away, I sensed a faint blip on my inner radar, that signal trace of who I used to be. I signal back, a pinprick of light with the density of heartache. I tell her that I am here, looking at the sky 1353 miles away, and if you hurt, it's because the future hurts. But you did make it out, even if it wasn't like you imagined. You managed to do what you were supposed to do. You did make it there, eventually, and for a little while your wish was true. 

I already knew she heard me, because I'd heard it all those years ago. 

...

Now the solar eclipse is coming, and there is nothing to do but wait. We traveled here by the path of totality last summer, without knowing. The direction of the signal in the sky. It seems somehow significant now. 

For the moment I bide my time here in the track of the moon's shadow, among the flat fields and whirling leaves, searching the horizon for a signal from my next future. Perhaps, in the afternoon darkness - if I'm lucky - it will shine. 

The Opposite of Presence

It's late mid-winter in northwest Ohio, and the wind is achingly cold. The fields are empty even though they are not empty. The silence is a deafening roar.

What is this absence that screams so loud without a sound? I keep asking but there is never an answer. 

Muddy sun sets in grey sky. Cell towers blink on the horizon. At dusk, the belt of Venus appears in the east, but close, so close that it feels that the edge of the earth is near.

The pain in my bones signals my own existence. 

I step into the field to pose for a picture, but already I am disappearing from the landscape. It doesn't know me and won't miss me. My greatest value now is in being gone.

Inside, invisible to see, I recall that it was only a year ago that I watched the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter from the end of my street. Every night the planets drew closer and closer. It seemed to mean something then, it must have meant something; even if I can't remember the way it felt now. I watched and waited and was happy then, until the planets moved apart, the way they always do.

Crescent Moon in the Window, Crescent Moon in the Sky

Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong). 

On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.

Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie. 

One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere. 

Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.

My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."

The Blue Hour

Outside the window, it was the blue hour. 

Sometimes when I walk down the road in the evening, the world goes fuzzy at the edges. Like a carefully controlled hallucination just beginning to break apart. 

How is it that I am here in this place? In those moments, it feels like the real me is somewhere else. 

9 crows roost in the sycamore tree. I don't know what it means, only that it makes me shiver. 

My tarot cards show nothing but swords and empty cups. 

Cold

Pluto, 29° 59'

It's the time of endings, and even the birds are restless. Footprints in the snow, walking away. I see (to my surprise, though it really shouldn't be) that I wrote this exactly 2 years ago, and this nearly 3 years ago, and wouldn't you know it's all to do again, because submission to Fate is a constant process, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you are so very tired now.

You're Not Existing In Your World At All

It was the 26th of July, and we were at the storage unit by the side of the highway, loading my belongings into a truck. By then, it was near dusk.

He said, "well, if you choose not to go, imagine what you will be doing at this time tomorrow. If you do go, imagine you're not existing in your world at all." 

...

It's late October, and I'm somewhere else, more alone than I've ever been. If there is a sun anywhere in the overcast sky, I can't see it. Twilight birds flit through leafless branches. I wonder now if there is any world out there where I might exist at all.