Mr. Signpost does it again. He's going to be storytelling at the Moth on 11 July and has been tweeting about it. Not knowing what that was, I went and looked it up.
While wandering around in the Moth website I found another storytelling event I wasn't prepared to appreciate and then did. A woman had told the story, although I'm not sure when the date was. This was Radio Episode #603, and originated in Detroit, I think. General topic of the story: surviving intense grief using passion. By which she meant: uncontrollable lust. She lost her mother and then her son; I lost my only brother. We both lost any sense of hope or future. We both were acting as though we were normal, but weren't. We both collapsed finally. We both tried to endure that intense grief by letting lust consume us, and both of us were stunned by the incongruousness of it. Great.
Started crying again, but it was more a relieved, "I thought I was completely insane!" You shut down in a state of grief, and your hormones break through with overpowering dynamite blasts to try and get you back into a state of living; those blasts are so intense you can't control them. She obsessed over an old man in a wheelchair in Krogers fondling zucchinis; I obsessed over a way-too-young Sicilian teenager on the cusp of manhood and the voice of Pavarotti, on American Idol. She recorded it in a creative storytelling event; I'm still writing a sonnet cycle. And we shared the observation that neither of us will ever ridicule a teenage boy ever again, because we both now know what they go through. Really. I thought it was just me.
I think the only difference between the two of us was that the grief, fear and despair that the unfortunate Mr. Barone sustained me through were three events in one month: the heart-breaking loss of a pet in my arms, a fear of facial disfigurement due to cancer, the cancer itself and the unexpected and devastating loss of my brother with all the guilt that accompanied it. Thank goodness he never knew about it. But once again, it was Damien Echols, my favorite Mr. Signpost, who pointed me over to the storytelling website, and I learned that my insane obsession with Piero was actually rather normal. It doesn't mean that it has gone away, though.
The other strange aspect to this turn of events was a dream I had last week, the night of June 11th - after I'd discovered Damien was on Twitter, so that's what I meant about "finding him again". One of the few dreams I've remembered lately, because I have trouble remembering dreams after the stupid neurologist put me on those muscle relaxers to stop those godawful leg and feet cramps, and so memorable I recorded it that day:
Damien Echols. I’d found him again and he was hugging me; no romance or sex sensations, nothing like that – love, affection, tenderness, protectiveness almost. He seemed so huge, compared to me, like the Abraham Lincoln statue in D.C. I know he was trying to convince me to let go of the self-recrimination and guilt. I told him I couldn't. When I couldn’t, he didn’t seem angry or disgusted or annoyed; he understood. I got the feeling he’ll keep trying. He felt so good and so safe. This was even before I read his Salem entries I think.
Actually, the reason the hug stood out was as pitiable as it was weird: my self-loathing is still so intense, the fact that I even allowed him to hug me in a dream (in reality, I probably would have stepped back and put my hands up) was perhaps a minscule breakthrough, because even compassion or kindness sickened me ("If you knew how awful I was to have murdered my own brother by my own ignorance and narcissism, you wouldn't be nice to me."); hugs were even more unwelcome for the same reason. ("Don't TOUCH me! I'm unclean!")
Anyway, so there you go. Mr. Signpost. Apparently I was right - he kept trying, without even knowing that's what he was doing.
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