Muchness and Light

Blind faith, heartache, mind games, mistakes, my sweet fireball, my sweet rigmarole, I want it all.

I was watching something insipid on television a few nights ago.  (It's hard to remember which stupid thing I was clearing off the DVR between sessions of homework.)  But I remember watching these characters on a couple of shows, walking through their lives and hoping to fall in love.  They'd meet their currently-ideal love interest in some less-than-ideal situation and visibly fight the thought that just maybe that was the person for them.  They were all looking for magic but refused to admit when they found it. 

I want magic. 

I spent a glorious Saturday evening with Pandy (née Hot Pocket) this past weekend.  After hours of dancing and laughing and eating and a little too much whipped cream, we settled into the quiet while our babies slept down the hall.  Eventually the talk turned yet again to my love life, specifically about what I loved about each of the men who have impacted my life so dramatically.

"What do you want?" she asked.  "Not what qualities you want in a man—what things?  If you could make a wishlist, what would be on it?"

Pandy knows damn well I've written a couple of times about what I want—the affection, the attentiveness, the lack of addiction.  But I know Pandy, and this was her Practical Magic moment of daring me to put my wishlist out there where Fate might get ahold of it and take her chance at offering me exactly what I want.

I started to think about it in terms of these prior relationships—DH, Absolem, Bounder, Katniss, Rex—that had offered me something good in their way but had still not managed to be good enough.  Like thinking about what you want in your unborn child, I started to pick and choose from those men. 

From DH, I would want the care he could provide.  For all of his flaws, he was an exceptionally good, practical caregiver when I needed it.  Whether stopping at the grocery store while I was busy with a baby boy or carefully doling out medication and clean bandages after surgery, he took really good care of me.  Eventually I learned to care for myself, which was one of the many problems we were never able to resolve, but I would want that active, tangible concern.  (Check for both Bounder and Katniss for doing this, as well, in their own ways and times.)

From Absolem, I would want the clarity of vision.  He could peek readily through my façade and see me.  It was impossible to hide my truths from him, and he never failed to tell me exactly what he saw—even if I didn't like it.  Bounder was just as adept, though he often danced around sharing his thoughts.  I would also want the fearlessness, the adventure for life, that I have only ever found in Absolem.

From Bounder, there is so much.  He set the bar so high in so many ways, though he often let it clatter to the ground—sometimes abrading me with those collapsing expectations.  The depth of emotion, both his own and felt with me.  The strength and vulnerability that were intricately interdependent.  The mischievous, crinkling eyes every time he smiled when I told him I loved him.  The ease with which he could cry with me, for me, in front of me, and how he never, ever withheld my emotions even when they were more than he thought he could bear.  How he would patiently and without recrimination listen as I unleashed my crazy, circuitous head and heart, but how I never had to actually say what I was thinking because he always just knew.  And the kiss that could stop time and turn the seas to dust.  That kiss that may never be topped. 

From Katniss, the chivalry and the romance.  The single red rose the first time we met, and the choice of a perfect book for Christmas.  The stories he would weave for me.  The way he could calm me with a single word, dropped at the exact, magical moment when I needed it most.  The way he would watch me intently while I spoke, and the lullabies he would sing to me over the phone just before I fell asleep. 

From Rex, the largess.  Not just the physical size—though make no mistake that I loved the way his hugeness felt, wrapping me into a dainty package that didn't feel like it would break.  How his hands dwarfed mine.  But there was a largeness of character, of dynamic, that was simultaneously gentle and kind.  The way he could make me laugh at anything and everything, but also how he could shut down my humming brain and quiet my overthinking with a look.  In some ways he did outdo Bounder, and I was thankful to know the bars could be raised even further.  And I have never been so immediately comfortable with a man as I was with him. 

But my wishlist is missing the one trait that each of these men has in common: their ability to make me feel negligible.  The practical, magical one will be there, no matter what.  He will call me every day that he can, even if it's just to tell me he loves me and goodnight after a really long day.  He will text me random thoughts and pictures and be thrilled that I message him regular  love letters, equally romantic and raunchy.  He will lie with me in the floor and the firelight, letting me sing whatever song I feel that night, while he strokes my hair gently and whispers to me that I am beautiful. 

And he will be there in the middle of the night, when I wake cold and scared, afraid of what comes out of my dreams.  He will sleep comfortably, soundly next to me.  He will actively, happily love me, and he will fight Heaven and Hell to be with me.  He will do what no one has ever been willing to do for me before: he will value me, openly and honestly, and remind me every day that I am worth his fight. 

And in return, I will love him like no other.  Every fiber of my being, every moment of soul and joy and heartache, every laugh and every tear, every angry word and every whisper of adulation in the dark.  To fill in every crack, to give him strength to be vulnerable, safety to be dangerous, acceptance to be who he was meant to be.   

Maybe it's foolish to wish these things.  Maybe it's childish or naive to hope that I find what I want most, what I seek as doggedly as I have ever done anything. 

And maybe it's magic. 

She's super-freaky, yow.

I am deviant. 

I don't mean in the connoted sense of criminal or sexually degenerate—though there's certainly a story or two about that.  What I mean is, I violate social norms. 

What is "normal" is determined by every society, big and small, for that culture in that time.  I am generally law-abiding and productive, but my personality—the persona of Stephanie—is often camped firmly in the fringe of normal. 

Pretty much everything falls onto a bell curve.  If you classify virtually anything and rank and sort it, then graph it in that mathematical way that has eluded me for years, it makes a pretty, curvy shape, in which the majority of "stuff" is in the high center and the extremes are on the low sides. 

I'm almost always on one of those tapered ends.   

Doing my neverending homework this week, I was reading about social deviance.  My textbook was talking about different sociological viewpoints of deviance.  Emile Durkheim's structural-functional analysis says that deviance is a necessary function of society.  What is unnormal is defined by what is normal and vice versa—there can be no evil without good.  How a society responds to deviance clarifies its moral boundaries and brings people together in the process, sometimes encouraging social change. 

Robert Merton goes on to purport his strain theory, which basically says that some deviance may be necessary for society to function but that too much, especially when caused by a lack of means to help members of a society achieve cultural goals, places a strain on that society.  Conforming to cultural goals through approved means can become difficult, if not impossible, when there are no opportunities to do so.  This points to why street crime is so prevalent in poor neighborhoods, where people don't have the educational and socioeconomic means to provide for themselves or further lives outside of the poverty and circumstance they've been socialized in. 

Eventually, deviant subcultures can form: criminal, conflict, or retreatist. 

Walter B. Miller adds that subcultures have certain characteristics, no matter their underlying cause:

• trouble – frequent conflicts with authority figures
• toughness – especially value of physical size, strength, and agility
• smartness – ability to outthink others
• need for excitement
• belief in fate
• desire for freedom

I am a deviant subculture unto myself.

I've always been at odds with authority figures.  I've never been inclined to listen to someone just because they were in charge or I was supposed to do so; if they could give me a reason to respect them, I would.  If not, I would question it and fight back.  I am certainly taller and bigger and larger, both physically and mentally, than most people.  All that testing when I was a kid proved I was smarter than even the above-average bear.  I'm easily bored and constantly shifting gears to the next adventure.  I have a strong belief in both fate and Fate.  And I want nothing more than to be free to live my life as I see is best for me. 

As ridiculous as it sounds to say I rebelled and formed my own subculture, that's kind of exactly what happened over the last four years.  I was unhappy—fat, in a crumbling marriage, unfulfilled in most aspects of my life, seeing no way out—and I fought back.  I had everything everyone says they want, and I was miserable.  I bucked the norm and started to live as Stephanie, more than Wife and Mom and Daughter. 

I am finding more opportunity now, because I am making more opportunity for myself.  Working three part-time jobs and being in school full time, plus being a full-time mom, is hard as hell, but it was my choice.  More than a couple of people have suggested I should find another husband to support me and pay for my life.  Fuck that.  If I can't rely on my own talents and worth, no one else should be able to, either.  (Conflict subculture.)

There are days I want to run away and leave it all behind.  (Retreatist subculture.)  I often talk about living on Glamazon Island, where men aren't allowed to live—unless they're a Hooha and only then until they grow up.  (Hoohas are the general name for children of inhabitants of Glamazon Island, 'cause that's where they came from.)  Eventually Glamazon Island will just be me and my girls, having tea parties and craft time on the beach every afternoon, before our daily walk. 

(There are all kinds of secondary plans, involving whose daughter is in charge of defenses and ninja skills to protect us from the ousted Hooha forces that invade on giant, flying Death Chickens.)  (This is also why someone recently told me that my mind is like a playground for adults.) 

Look: I am as batshit as they come.  And it's not that I strive to be substantially different from everyone else.  I am not like other girls because I'm just made that way.  I don't live in the middle of the bell curve because I'm not happy in the medium.  My place of comfort is pretty far removed from most other people's.

And I am happy that way.  It can make for some pretty extravagant turmoil sometimes.  It can be hard, being able to understand emotional extremes so readily because I have lived them.  But I can't imagine being normal.  Maybe if I were, I wouldn't really know the difference.  What I do know is that my pretending to be normal did no damn good for anyone.   

So I embrace my differences and live them as fully as I can.  As Queen Frostine joked yesterday, "The standard deviation is not enough for a kinky statistician." 

But that gives me hope that somewhere there's a 6'4, 240-pound, dark-haired, blue-eyed, Irish statistician who might be able to keep up with me.

 

With one breath, with one flow, you will know.

I have ludicrous amounts of coincidence in my life. 

It's far beyond thinking of someone and then they call.  I have quit being surprised when I dream of someone and hear from them the next day, or even when I dream very detailed, seemingly random events that later come true. 

It's really more a matter of synchronicity.  In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed the term to explain "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be causally related."  It's meaningful coincidence, though the events do not have to happen simultaneously and there doesn't have to be explanation of their meaning in terms of cause and effect. 

For Jung, synchronicity gave a basis to his concepts of "archetype" and "the collective unconscious".

For me, it means a whole bunch of batshit. 

It happens so often that it's become a fucking joke within the Castration Committee.  But what also regularly happens is that these patterns of synchronistic events precede the most poignant and profound moments in my life.  They are like omens for what's coming, both good and bad.

When my crying jag started last week, it took about two days to run its course.  In addition to all of the stress I've been under, Friday brought a series of events that were both unexpected and unsurprising.  Unrelated to each other, but these two currents in my life that should be skew—meaning they are not parallel and do not intersect—began to curve toward each other and resulted in a momentary traversion. 

That continuum of crisscross marked yet another landmark event in my life, specifically with Bounder—the person with whom I am most synchronous.

Days before it happened, I told Hot Pocket and Growler that something was brewing.  ("Something penis this way comes," I said.)  I could feel it, the shift in energy around me.  I'm very sensitive to such things; Absolem once told me I was like some kind of freaky, voodoo static magnet.  I just feel other people's energies.  With the people I'm closest to, I can do it from a distance.  I just know when something is wrong or happening.

The synchronicity often comes in waves, and inundations of it often herald the approaching crazy.

Right now, and especially tonight, I am swimming in portent. 

I don't know what this will be.  I almost never do.  I just know that it is coming.  It doesn't feel bad, though it does feel colossal.  Based on what happened in the past week and what I know is supposed to happen over the next month, I could take a guess as to what (and whom) in involves, but the details won't be revealed until the actual time.

Part of it is that I am open to the idea.  I am willing to see signs and meaning in the strangest of things.  I do actively look for it in my life, though I try very hard not to see more into something than is actually there.  Sometimes when I call something out and name it for being important, the person on the receiving end of the prognostication will tell me I'm full of shit.  All too often, I get to tell them I told you so.

Four hundred years ago, I would've been burned at the stake. 

I pay attention to these things, because my life has consistently shown me that there's reason for me to do so.  I get these vibes, for lack of a better term, and they almost always happen just before my path shifts dramatically. 

In the past, when it's been this strong, Fate has stepped in and forced me to come face-to-face with my next step, the impact so strong that it leaves me figuratively bruised and shaken.  She's a bitch, for sure, but I know better than to fuck with her.  There's a reason for it, every time, although I don't always see it until it's too late to even beg her to let me turn back. 

Whatever it is this time... okay.  I can rail against it and be a petulant, ungrateful little brat about it, or I can just accept that something crucial is about to happen and conserve my energy for when it actually plays out.  Someone important is going to need those energy stores, and I have the feeling that it's someone very, very important to me. 

It feels like a test, of everything that has come before, of everything I have learned over the last three years.  And I hope I'm up to the challenge.  I hope I have the skills to fight this battle—and maybe even the Vorpal sword one of us will need to slay that Jabberwocky. 

 

NOTE:

Just as I was finishing this piece, getting ready to post it, my phone popped up with a push notification from my Facebook fan page.  Earlier in the evening, I posted asking for suggestions for what to write about for a new blog post.  This is what I see when my phone got my attention:

THAT is how my life works. 

 

Someday when my crying is done, I'm gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun.

For months I've been toying with what to write next. 

I always knew I wanted to do something else from the Junkture stories.  I went to Mardi gras and Mobile earlier this year to do research for the next book, Mantissa.  (That's Alex Wheeler's first wife's backstory, if you're interested.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, read my first novel Persona Non Grata.)  Most of it would be totally fiction with bits and pieces of my youth and stories from friends' lives as well. 

There's also the story of Talia Wheeler, Alex's current wife.  Sequentially it happens just after Persona Non Grata but is told from Talia's point of view.  I knew a lot of it would reflect my real life in the aftermath of separation and the process of divorce.  I haven't had enough closure or distance to be able to delve into it quite yet.

I had a dream in the spring that was the catalyst for an entirely new story.  The details were swirling in my head, and I did hours and hours of research.  While utterly fiction and having nothing to do with Junkture, the tempest that is Sass and Bounder was strongly influencing how these characters were evolving.  This was true the first time we were together and even moreso the second time. 

I was stuck, though.  I couldn't quite see these new characters.  Queen Frostine was asking me regularly where this book was—she knew the gist of the story and wanted to see it come to fruition.  Even Hammer was intrigued by the idea. 

"It's all in my head," I would answer.

When Bounder and I broke up in July, I was on my way to Mobile again.  I needed time to think and wrap my head around what was happening.  The day after it finally happened, I drove out to Dauphin Island.  I sat on a mostly-deserted beach in the rain, listened to music, and cried.  I purged a lot of emotion that day, giving it to the wind and the rain and the withdrawing tide. 

And somehow over that tempest, I heard the names of the new characters.  Layla and Michael. 

From that point, they had identities.  I could hear and see them, knew how they acted and moved.  I borrowed Lady Hammer's laptop and wrote what would become the first draft of the first chapter on Sunday.  It took a few days, but I eventually got into the groove and the energy needed to write this story.

Like all writers do, I'm writing what I know.  Even though the story itself borders on paranormal romance (but is as about as genre-specific as PNG—which is to say, not at all), the emotions of Michael and Layla are effectively Bounder and me.  Like I did for the first book, and like I do for Muchness and Light, I am drawing upon my very real life to drive my writing. 

But just once I would like to not have to live a traumatic relationship just to get a book out of me. 

"Most women gain twenty-five pounds when they break up," my editor said.  "I'd say emotional writing is much more productive."

I agree, but it's hard to relive the good and the bad just to reframe the sense of emotion.  It's hard to see the texts and emails and then remember what was occurring in the midst of that.  It's as difficult to the middle-of-the-night "I miss and love you" messages as it is to see the "This is too hard, I don't think I can do it" ones.  It breaks my heart all over again to see all the times we were messaging simultaneously that we were listening to the same song, or to see when he'd text me that he was on his way to come and kiss his girl. 

In some ways, it leaves me even more confused about what happened.  He was there, plainly and constantly, and then suddenly not.  I knew when and why I think it happened, but I don't know how.  It seems like there was literally one moment in time when something shifted and everything fell apart.  If I mapped it out on a storyline, I can see the day that's pinpointed as the climactic turning point.  But there are still details I'm missing. 

I have to accept that I may never have that insight.  Writing Original Sin is kind of my way of making sense of it all, though our specifics are differently complicated than Michael and Layla's.  I get to build the monument to this as I see fit. 

"This is what your lightning strike was for," Hot Pocket said. 

She's probably right.  And I will take the lessons I learned from writing Persona Non Grata—step out of chronology, limit the emotional punch, break down the specifics to only what you need—and write this story as best I can.  The energy for it is abundant right now, and I'm let it flow openly and unabashedly.  If it's anything like my actual relationship with Bounder, it will come quickly and then be gone, leaving something entirely new in its wake. 

Such a multitude of masculinity could only be found in one place... and that place was O'Malley's Alley.

I have a thing for cats. 

Dogs are okay.  I like other people's dogs.  It's kind of the same way some people feel about kids or grandchildren—you can play with them and enjoy them but can also give them back when you're done, without having to clean up after them. 

My real attraction, though, is to what I commonly call The Fragile Cat.

Fragile cats are beautiful and strong, quiet in their complications, and they respond to my affections readily.  They know I'll pet them and care for them, feed and affect them at their whim.  But they're skittish and easily spooked.  If I'm too attentive, they arch their backs and puff up defensively, backing away with darting, slanted eyes and an occasional hiss.

In case you don't get it, I'm not talking about actual cats.

Some women have a thing for bad boys.  Not me.  Granted, some of the fragile cats I've known have also been dangerous and bad-tempered, but most of them have been sweet if a bit mischievous.  They're aloof.  I am especially adept at coaxing them out of their hiding places, whether with treat or a gentle scratch behind their ears.  Growler deemed me to be a fragile cat hunter, and we agreed that my autobiography will likely be called Fragile Cats in the Mist.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish them from other cats, and sometimes dogs, but there are certain characteristics they all have in common:

complex, complicated histories with some substantial damage, usually involving their mothers

history of sometimes-addictive behaviors, whether alcohol or drugs or sex or love

craving of quality affection that they've missed out on

deep need to share their own truths, whether or not they feel safe enough in their regular environment to do so

intriguing, enigmatic personalities with a craving to experience their lives

They're deliciously funny and dangerously charming.  They're generally wry and self-deprecating, and they will deliver to my doorstep the most scrumptious of morsels, often stalked and hunted in my own backyard.

I can recognize them almost immediately, in part because I've had lots of experience with them.  Even the ones who know they're fragile cats and try to hide it catch my attention and draw me in, because I am a fragile cat.  My intuitive heart feels the kindred spirit, sometimes on sight. 

I spent so much time and energy to understand my own history and damage, and I fought like hell to move past it and rebuild from a place of utter deconstruction.  I know the road that is offered before them by the time our paths cross, but I also acknowledge that no one can be forced to take on their issues.  Everyone must come to it in their own time and place, at a pace that is suitable for them. 

So I know better than to try to fix the fragile cat, to try to repair their damage or bandage it for them before they skitter back into a dark alley in the middle of the night.  That's not my job.  What I am, consistently, is a place for them to bring that damage into the light of day without recrimination, without judgment, without fear of being abandoned on the side of the road. 

Sometimes they let me.  Sometimes they don't.  I've known fragile cats for years or months or sometimes only days.  That's their prerogative, to come and go as they need.  But the most fragile ones almost always come back, no matter how long it may be between their visits, because they know I won't hurt them. 

I don't seek them out; they are just the kind of personality that is utterly magnetic to me.  They are the ones who cause me to peer again into the darkness, searching twice for the glint of their glowing eyes.  Every single time I swear I'm not doing it again, that I promise myself I won't go hunting for the feral, some stray caterwauls nearby and then swishes its tail, weaving between my legs.  They seek me out because they know I can't turn them away. 

And what do I get from them?  I get their softness.  I get the undeniable surprise of their appearing when I least expect it, often when I'm at my lowest, and rubbing their heads against mine while they purr, just to make me smile and sigh.  When those cats are self-aware enough to see my catness, they feed me and pet me and remind me that sometimes it's okay to curl up in a safe lap and nap in the sun. 

 

You may think at first I'm mad as a hatter....

It started a year or two ago, the Nicknaming of the Inner Circle. 

I received a message from a friend, Amanda, who relayed the tale of a dream she'd had the night before, in which I was some kind of superheroine, fighting some crazy criminal villain while wearing a witchy purple dress and kickass black boots.  She was my sidekick. 

"We need names," I said.

As I thought about it all day, I kept going back to something she'd been calling me for days: sassy. 

"Sassafras," I decided. 

But Sass needed a last name.  Something Irish.  Something poignant. 

One of the songs I constantly go back to—even though one friend (Pickle) will ridicule me ad infinitum for this—is "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes.  It's tied to my childhood and my later youth and even my adulthood.  I have a Bucket List goal to get different, incredibly varied musicians to record an album that's nothing but covers of that song.  Adam Taylor and Wesley Cook have both agreed, in principle.  I'd love to get Les Claypool, Greg Dulli, and maybe In This Moment to record it, too.  I'd even happily donate all the proceeds to charity, though I have no idea what charity would want money from a song about two people trying to cheat on their spouses.  (Again, I argue, it's not about adultery; it's about serendipity!)

The bar where the two meet to plan their escape is O'Malley's.  Perfect.

So now Sassafras O'Malley needed a sidekick. 

I wracked my brain but could think of nothing.  She became Mandypants for lack of a better option.  And it stuck for a long while.  Recently after posting about a surgical procedure in which she was effectively microwaving her lady parts, I deemed her Hot Pocket.  And it suits her beautifully.

So Sassafras O'Malley and Mandypants (now Hot Pocket) were the first two of the nicknamed.  That list has grown and grown and grown since this began.  It seems silly, yes, but these nicknames are like our true names.  These are the second names, the names that are particular, peculiar, and more dignified, to help us keep our tails perpendicular.

Growler – who is sweet like a little kitten but will turn beastly in a moment if you cross her

Hammer – the Hammer of Honesty who can tell the truth like no one else

Moonshine – blue and bright and glowing, can always make you a little drunk with her beauty

Queen Frostine – the coolest chick you'll ever meet

Cookie – never a Tagalong and never a Thin Mint, but sweet and crunchy nonetheless

Lady Hammer – a strange female reflection of the truths of Hammer, totally unexpected

Glee – gregarious and ebullient, she knows the words to any and every song

Roadkill – who will step out in front of a moving car, admonishing you that they'll stop

Cupid37 – who dressed up as Cupid (and sometimes worse) in public and appears in chapter 37

Pickle – because he's always drunk, but also because he's both sweet and sour but not a baby gherkin

Irish Coffee/Not Boy – the Irish-descended guy I like to drink coffee with, who's not my boyfriend

Absolem – the questioning caterpillar to my Alice, who can unhinge me by asking me who I am

DH – Dear Husband, as assigned in the infertility forums 14 years ago, soon possibly DX or DXH or DB

Minizon - daughter of Hot Pocket, my Glamazon-in-training

There are a couple of others, but I don't know if they know the origins of their internal nicknames, so I'm opting to keep them in the vault.  For now.

Sometimes we have learned of our super powers.  Some are still a secret. 

Sassafras O'Malley, who can utterly mesmerize you with her potty mouth, has a special disco ball ring that dazzles stupid people into submission, specifically to keep them from copulating when her muchness leaks into the water supply.  It's a tool to lower the chances of stupid people breeding.  (She also has sparkly boots.) 

Growler has the ability to create snow angels anywhere, out of thin air.  She can mesmerize animals instantly and cause them to do her bidding. 

Hot Pocket has the Broccoli Bomb.  When she unleashes it, it makes everyone around her snort broccoli up the back of their noses.  Painfully funny. 

The list is likely to go on and on as time progresses.  I haven't named all of these people.  In fact, maybe only half of them.  Hammer has had a hand in the naming, as has Hot Pocket.  But these names are so appropriate for each and every one of these friends.  It's like they just whispered themselves to us in an inexplicable moment of truth.  Mostly when we were sober. 

They're my incomparable cast and crew. 

And these are the names that will never belong to another (fragile) cat.  They are ours and ours alone. 

But somewhere, deep down, each of also has a third name, the one that no other human can ever discover.  Our deep inscrutable singular names that only we know and only we call ourselves, respectively.  I know mine, but I'm not sharing.  Only one other person knows it, and that's only because he knew it before I did.  That's Absolem.  And I know he's not telling. 

 

Where the clouds pull apart and the moon changes faces, in the quiet, secret places, are you there? Are you there?

I am kind of petrified of the dark. 

I always have been.  I went to sleep every night with my light on until I was in my early teens. 

It's not the darkness, per se, that's frightening; it's what may be lurking inside those shadows that scares the bejeezus out of me.  Too many horror movies when I was far too young to be watching them did nothing to help allay my fears.  Rousing in the middle of the night, I always imagine I see some indistinct, humanoid shape in the corner of the room.  And if I have to go into the hallway or (God forbid) the basement at night, it's always Pinhead that's waiting at the end of my path. 

But the darkness itself... well, that's kind of a different story. 

I love being comfortably in the quiet shadow.  I feel like I can bend and twist the shade into the cover I need, be it a lot or a little.  It's always been the place I was most free to dismiss my misgivings and shortcomings, to release my inhibitions and let my own inner light pulse dimly or brilliantly, as the moment demanded. 

To take away so much of my most used sense forces the others to compensate.  While I may be myopic in shadow, sound and touch become much more keen.  Music and sensation feel electric, and I am wholly entranced by that feeling. 

But that darkness also holds a silence that's begging to be heard.  The stillness contained therein demands a certain consideration, and I am enduringly willing to let that hold my attention, to envelope me in its secrets and dreams and fantasies. 

Inevitably, though, the light returns.  The daylight isn't by default a terrible thing.  It is beautiful and comforting in its own right.  It can also be harsh and terrifyingly revealing.  But I can't hide in the light.  There's little room to be covert when you're illuminated.  Somewhere, between the dark and the light, is the place I am most balanced and most erratic, feeling the tug of two different kinds of truths, their constancy pulling in opposite directions and holding me firmly in momentary stasis. 

I have an idea.

My BFF recommended an alternative Alice book recently, The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor.  It's a sci-fi story with Alice as the jumping-off point.  The idea is that Lewis Carroll's inspiration, Alice Liddell, was only half-real.  Beddor's Alice is actually Alyss Heart, a young princess who is heir to the throne of Wonderland. 

Her mother, Queen Genevieve, and her father, King Nolan, are killed by Genevieve's evil sister, Redd, who has been living in exile for some years.  Alyss and her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, are forced to flee Wonderland through the Pool of Tears, which is a portal to other worlds.  Alyss ends up in Victorian-era London, while Hatter washes up in Paris.  Alyss lives a sort-of Oliver Twist street urchin life until she's arrested, sent to an orphanage, and eventually adopted by the Liddell family.  Hatter is on a constant search for his princess, stumbles upon Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and gets ever closer to returning the heir to her home. 

In the book, Wonderland is the source of all things everywhere in every world.  Anything that can be dreamed up, imagined, can be sent via looking glass to be added to the vernacular of other worlds.  Airplanes, pogo sticks, and light bulbs were all originally conceived in Wonderland.  White and Black Imagination are at constant odds, often times manipulated to fit the schemes of Wonderlandians, to both help and hinder. 

Alyss assimilates as "Alice" after a few years, but she is suddenly and unexpectedly rescued and returned to a decimated Wonderland to battle Redd for the throne.  Her abilities to use her Imagination have been buried deeply within the young woman, and she must convince herself and everyone around her that she is indeed that Alyss.  She tries and practices, with little success, and discusses it with Hatter before she has the great epiphany:

                It's unconscious.  To will something into being, the willing of it must be so deep down that no self-doubt is possible.  The imaginative power itself must be a given, a thing already proven that cannot be disbelieved.

That's the crux of it, isn't it?

It's not the belief of others, not the faith of the external, that makes something happen.  It's the personal belief in yourself and your own abilities, that what you're doing is so true and real that it can't do anything but BE. 

When I started writing again, I spent a lot of time worrying about what other people would think of my work.  I've written before about my tendency to second-guess myself, whether about the mechanics or the spirit of what I'm writing.  Some things are better than others, certainly, and that's what an editor and the Inner Circle are for, to help me see when there's something that could be improved. 

But, the thing is, I have to write.  Rarely a day goes by that I don't write something, whether it's a blog post for Muchness and Light or The Gracious Whore, a piece for a third-party site, revisions or a draft for the book, an article on a musician, or even a press release for whatever project.  My laptop and I move from place to place and headspace to headspace, finding the right groove to let the words flow.  I notoriously email myself stuff throughout the day, from my phone to my laptop--little bits of wordage, ideas for story progression, or thoughts on a blog post I'd like to do.  In part, I have to remind myself of the oh-so-many things that go through my brain in a day, but it also helps me to flesh out those ideas when I see them pass through my fingers, before my eyes, into type. 

I know several writers, musicians, and artists who've been moved and influenced by Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.  For whatever reason, I'd never read it until I picked up a copy this past December.  I absolutely see the appeal in what Rilke had to say to Franz Xaver Kappus in his ten letters, dated from 1903 to 1908.  (Interestingly, Rilke comes across to me as distractible and a bit flighty at times, much like the two people I know who most profess his influence on their artistic hearts.)  He hits me right from the beginning with the gist of what I needed to hear in December:

                Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.  There is only one single way.  Go into yourself.  Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.  This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?  Delve into yourself for a deep answer.  And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity.

I absolutely must.  What I'm finding is that there are days when I also believe in what I'm writing, when the power of my own imagination overwhelms even me and shows me that I'm pointed in the right direction, that my imaginative path is indeed both true and real. 

I've had a few days lately when I've been so consumed by my own thoughts and words as they flowed that I cried.  I was caught up in the emotion of the unfolding page-bound moment that I shed tears for the intensity of the situation enveloping my characters.  They're imaginary, though certainly based in part on real people I both know and am.  Even the fictional has basis in reality, and I was tapping some deep, long-still emotional wells.  The jostling rippled through me and onto the page.  It was gut-wrenching and difficult but incredibly cathartic. 

Right now, I'm in a place where there's no self-doubt about my writing.  Don't get me wrong: I can always see places for improvement and development.  But today I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, writing what I'm supposed to be writing.  And I can trust in myself enough to let it flow and just be.  All of this could change tomorrow, I know.  I'm hopeful that I've grown enough as a writer and a person that I don't forget the placid confidence, that I have the self-belief to let me delve into my imagination and bring forth some deep answers--about me, about you, about life and whatever--and  the self-assurance  to let them take stand on their own merits and just be.