Second Thoughts

Correct that. I thought the obsession was over. It probably is, but I’m not sure I can handle this. Dreams. More dreams. Can’t even remember the details, only know that I woke up crying his name out as though I’d walked away from a priceless gift, realized what I had done and forgotten my way back – he’d disappeared in the gloom. I’ve still managed to keep the headphones off, but I’m feeling nauseous.

Hey, Twenty-Nine

Something is wrong. This dead silence deafens. It hurts.
Why should it hurt – clear-sightedness shouldn’t pain me
and yet it does. A voice speaks. "You’re a ninny," she
says. "You threw out the baby with the bath water.
Or the bathwater with the baby, the reverse,
in your case. Why would you also throw out the key
to your peace of mind? If his voice soothes you, if he
brings you solace, why push him away as though cursed?

If you gain strength from his voice, by all means don’t frown
on listening, and celebrate it with pleasure.
Look for happiness and peace in equal measure
with disciplined restraint and calm; do not look down
your nose at your own weakness; just let us ensure
that you manage not to cling to him while you drown."

24JUN2012

©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved

Back to the booze. I’ve stayed away from the music, on this day, his nineteenth birthday, but am planning to tune in to Italy v. England at 2 pm, since I would have done that anyway, long before I ever heard of Il Volo – if I’m supposed to tune out the European football quarter-finals just because Piero Barone is Italian and I’m trying to end my obsession with Piero Barone, think again.

Forza Italia!

Sanity Spells

Getting sloshed again and wondering why.  I can go an entire year without any alcohol and over the last week or so, I’ve been drinking consistently.  End result of it:  I go to sleep.  Thinking:  another escape route, and it probably is.  At the moment, I don’t have the self-discipline to stop.  Correct that:  I don’t WANT to stop.

The obsession tore apart like a bubble – pop! – which is a good thing, but I’m wishing I had something more reasonable to replace it.  I’m basically floundering at the moment.  I managed to set aside my headphones and can now absorb the silence without screaming.  I still blame myself, but am so used to the self-accusatory silence it doesn’t bother me now.  I’m a narcissistic, self-centered, brother-murdering, evil bitch.  Sue me, kill me, I don’t care.

I was sewing that shirt together – something of a distraction, I guess – so of course the sewing machine started acting up, and I had to stop until I could figure out how to raise the Singer feed dogs – Singer, naturally, failed to include an index in their manual (in 4 languages, and if you don’t think THAT’s annoying, think again), so I’m having to search the manual minus the benefit of an index or Table of Contents.

Am not quite sure how to heal myself.  Fine, Sekhmet joined forces with Mr. Signpost and killed the obsession, but haven’t yet managed to undo the self-loathing.  I almost wish they’d done it in reverse:  kill the self-loathing and then let me work on the obsession.  Instead, it feels like they dynamited the bridge over the chasm and then watched dispassionately while I fell through the only safety net I had.  I’m still falling.  Scream.  Flail.  Oh, save me.  Save me.  Yeah, even I don’t buy it.  I live.  I die.  Who gives a shit?

So last night, I woke up around 1:00 am, and was trying to fall back asleep while watching a curious light - about 4-5 feet off the floor - wander around the corner of the bedroom.  Thought at first it was a car headlight through the blinds, but when a car actually drove past and their headlights did flicker briefly on the wall I realized I wasn't looking at headlights.  Someone with a flashlight?  Nope.  And the light wasn't the same as a flashlight's light anyway, more of a self-generated light.  It was moving, so I wasn't looking at a streetlight.  Finally said, "Well, whoever you are, I'm going back to sleep.  Have fun."

I know Dixie has been here and about – once I was sitting in the study and saw her zip into the bedroom. Didn’t think anything of it until I remembered she was dead.  Followed her.  Casper was sound asleep in the living room, Peanut sound asleep on the bed.  So I said, “Hey, Dix!”  So I suspected the light wasn’t Dixie, even though it could have been.  Not sure what that was.

Moonphase:  Waxing Crescent.  What do I want to increase?  My sanity?  How do you cast a spell for that?  Plus, it’s raining and cloudy.

“Whatever deity brings the rain, help me now to heal my brain”?  I like it.  Wave wand.  “So be it!”

I feel like going to sleep now.

The Bough Begins to Break

In honor of Lithia (although I suspect Litha wasn't all that honored), I treated myself to what we called "poor (wo)man's pasta alla Norma" - mainly because I didn't have the right ricotta or pancetta, and am not all that enamored of tomato sauce. Pasta, fried eggplant and crumbled bacon was pretty much it, give or take an onion instead of garlic, and rosemary instead of basil. Yeah, I know - I have to turn in my "Italian Pride" membership card for that classic re-write that absolutely no one from Italy would recognize. It was good, though. Oh yeah, and in place of the red wine, I mixed my favorite Spanish tempranillo (garnacha de fuego) with zero calorie fruit flavored water (blood orange mango), making it taste something like sangria without the fruit - which I also didn't have.


I had started out a sonnet of celebration for the summer solstice, only to find it turning depressing on me, primarily because everything was turning sour again.


Lithia
Oak cedes to Holly; and now dark is the night moon.
Light fades; this is the time for lessening they say.
Wish for the unwanted to diminish, and pray
sun deities work their magic on the rough-hewn
bone trove they have been handed in the shaded gloom.
I hide from the light; in the cellar of midday;
no one speaks to me, or brushes old things away;
no one comes for me, no one enters the dark room.

I hear my own breathing, labored and hoarse
Scratch my own skin, eyes blazing, claws bared, drawing blood
Sunk in self-loathing at abandonment, deadwood.
Fierce keening I cannot suppress; I need to force
"Mistress of the desert; blazing eye of the sun!"
But she has turned away from my cry too, of course.

21 June 2012
©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved

The chair Jim was going to come back and assemble for me right about now – needless to say, I have to do it myself. It’s a very heavy metal and fabric-seated chair which I have managed to drop on every body part I have (fingers, knees, arms, hands, toes, ankles, wrists), because it’s really a two-person assembly, not one. I can’t brace the thing AND screw it together singlehandedly, so have just about disabled myself over a two-day period, and the thing still isn’t assembled. I’m covered head to toe with bruises and gashes. I also need to get up and walk away from it repeatedly before I really lose my temper and start getting violent – both at the chair and at myself.

I can’t seem to even myself out – calm down – emotionally stabilize. I’m flying from mute silence to rage and back again. I’m diving into paranoia and climbing back out again. I’m tired of the fiery wheel sensation of it all.

The Bough

So today you tweeted, tell me something of you.
I thought, in one hundred and forty words? Surely
I can’t so condense the untrammeled depths of me!
Then I read the words of girls whose years were so few
their lives could easily condense into small cubes.
When they delighted you with their simplicity,
with their teenager’s heartbreaks and difficulties,
my screaming resolved into the cry of the loon.

That was the moment, my love, when the bough did break
into millions of toxic splinters in my chest
with an enraged lion’s roar through the doors now burst
a wrathful and raging demon, a soul to take
"Not an angel, not a god, he’s a boy!" The first
rays of an angry sun slid o’er me like a snake.

22 June 2012

©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved

The One Place I Can't Go

Stitched the interfacing, finished assembling a heavy bookcase I purchased at Walmarts using incomprehensible instructions, started shampooing the living room carpet. In a bit of a better mood, even though I was back to digging stuff out of my toolbox(es): Phillips head screwdriver, straight edge screwdriver, hammer. Last time I used these I was searching for a soul mate by furnishing the bedroom, as I recall. Immediately had to put the whole soul mate search thing on hold while I tried to heal from the injuries inflicted by a fool in a jeep trying to get to a (wait for it): funeral, which he felt it necessary to drive to at the speed of light. Heh. And we can all see how well I healed from that.

Mr. Signpost again reminded me of the more familiar signs of the Summer Solstice: the Holly King taking over from the Oak King. There is actually a park celebration here in the Andovers today where they replace the Oak King banner with a Holly King banner and then tell the story of the Oak and Holly Kings. They also rent out kayaks and paddle boats on the pond, and I'm reminded of Greenwood Lake, and how badly I wanted to do that.

In any event, Damien's version is much better than being chased naked through a dark forest and bleeding out through my dead feet (see last entry). Although I'm not sure how much safer that version of searching for a soul mate is, compared to setting little pieces of paper on fire in my apartment without a fire extinguisher nearby.

Well, I got off my lazy butt and looked it up: Damien switched over to Twitter on May 7th - and rather calmly as a matter of fact (as you'll recall, I had assumed he did it a tad more dramatically, an entry or so ago) - which is about the time I was beginning to really suffer from the pain in my forehead and had stopped posting blog entries for a while.  And of course I missed it, being as miserable as I was at the time. I enjoyed reading his past tweets the same way I enjoyed reading his journal, and found a few other semi-coincidences between his tweets and my blog:

Me, on 9 October 2011
Back many, many years ago I had started a Day Book. There is (or was) a witchy little shop I loved, on East 9th Street in the Village, Enchantments, where I went through Wicca 101. Another reason why, when I read about Damien, I thought, "Thank goodness I lived in New York", where they tend not to arrest you and throw you on Death Row for going to Wicca 101 classes.

If you ever find the store, not only is it the best-smelling store on the planet, they have the coolest stone carving of the "Green Man" hanging from the wall in the back of their tiny garden; something you never expect to find in lower Manhattan.

Damien, on 27 May 2012
Today I paid a visit to Enchantments. It's one of the more well known magick and meditation supply stores in NYC. Herbs,incense,books,etc.

I don't consider this a genuine (and startling) "coincidence", as I did when I found him next to Sekhmet. THAT was so unexpected, I'm still struggling with that one. This, no. We're both Wicca; that we both visited Enchantments doesn't seem all that much of a coincidence. I just smiled when I read the entry.  The "coincidence", such as it was: the reason I re-opened the Daybook I'd started during those classes - and actually started in the backyard garden of Enchantments under the watchful eye of the Green Man or Horned God on the wall - was because of Damien's prison journal, which I'd found so inspirational.


Last coincidence I'll mention. Salem. I'd thought he had just visited Salem. Now after reading all of his tweets and slowly catching up on what he's been up to, I realize he's moving there.  Another gloomy reaction; the sonnet cycle went up another notch.


The One Place
Packing up and moving so I hear: Salem, Mass.
I know my way to Salem in the dark; trust me.
I’ve been there, I know the jogs in the road, I see
the signs, I remember the smells and the hourglass;
the grains of sand slipping through, how I was aghast
to realize in Salem, what a chance I’d been
given and how, in Salem, I’d let it slip free.
I hear her name and turn quick away, let her pass.

And yet. Salem is where I hear you choose to go,
"I belong there", you say. I’m sure you’re right. And yet,
I feel a surge of grief rising; I won’t forget
where you are as I learn at your feet all you know.
Right below my surface, slithering in protest:
the one place you are is the one place I can’t go.

20 June 2012
©Snake's Trail, 2012, all rights reserved

Damien Echols is moving 30 minutes away from me. The one place I can't go back to. Ever. I'm not sure why that bothered me so much - even if I loved the place as much as he did, I doubt I would have ever gone there just because he was there. But I do remember thinking it would be a fun place to go to on Halloween, though - once. No more. So ... an odd coincidence: he's moving to the one place I can't go to without ripping my heart and guts out all over the sidewalk. I don't know what that meant - such an almost deliberately odd coincidence, if you could call it that.

At least in New York I always knew he was safe. Moving to this state - I don't feel that way anymore, but I'm sure that has more to do with me than anything else.

Day #42: More on the Sekhmet-Damien Tag Team with the Summer Solstice and Eurydice Thrown In

Woke up this morning in a thoroughly bad mood.  I so didn't appreciate yesterday's tag-team suggestion that I stop torturing myself ... personally, I think it's my constitutional right to torture myself! ... so much so that I got myself thoroughly soused yesterday on   Bailey's Irish Cream, which I happened to have in the house.  Ergo, part of my problem is a bit of a Bailey's hangover.  And I'm not even Irish.

The other half of the bad mood is self-recrimination for making some sugar-free blueberry crumble yesterday.  I love blueberries.  Absolutely love them.  The crumble was mouth-wateringly delicious; one of those desserts Mom used to make in summer.  Should never have done that, though - I suffer like hell the next morning after eating even one blueberry and I ate a whole bunch of them.  So I started out this day in a thoroughly bad mood.

And yes, I KNOW the right to torture myself is not in the Constitution, leave me alone you anal-retentive OCD'ers preparing to set the record straight!  Geez.  Some people do not recognize creative license ... oh, never mind.

Took a deep breath, preparing to start over.

As a bit of an intro:  a sonnet cycle is defined as a group of sonnets having a single subject or controlling idea.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed one to her husband (remember "How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways."?)  That was only one sonnet in her sonnet cycle to her husband, published as "Sonnets from the Portuguese".  Petrarch wrote his to "Laura", Dante, Shakespeare - all composed sonnet cycles.

Not that it is any comparison to those, but mine had as its controlling idea the passage through intense grief via an obsession with passion in general and Piero Barone in particular - the obsession with Piero began with a brush with cancer, the death of a beloved pet, and reached its apogee when Jim died - all of it happening in a month's time.

I use the Italian or Petrarchan format:  14 lines with a volta (turn) at the 9th: abba-abba-cddc-dc, and the Alexandrine - 12 syllables per line.  It's ongoing.  When it ends, it ends.  I'm not there yet.  Thus far, there are 25 Petrarchan sonnets in this sonnet cycle.

The 25th entry in the sonnet cycle was this, and the inspiration easily recognizable if you read yesterday's blog entry:

The Sekhmet-Damien Tag Team

All I want is to crawl into his arms and whine;

whining is such an excellent way to express
a child-like frustration at being blocked access
to something longed-for, ached for, needed, while confined,
It is annoying, but so primal; such a sign
of desire for a basic thumb-sucking solace.
Piero, they’re picking on me!  See my distress;
make them go away; kiss me; hold me, I’ll be fine.

In his place I’m met by Damien and Sekhmet;

standing shoulder to shoulder; I can’t get past them;
I need to object, “I have the right to condemn
myself, I have the right!”  But this solid duet,
implacable, serene, will resolve this problem
in their own way, blocking me, solid as cement.

18 June 2012

©Snake's Trail, 2012, all rights reserved

 I may be still refusing to listen to the "tag team" (mainly because their POV makes no logical sense to me - see previous entry), but he at least has nudged me into getting back to my Daybook.  I still can't quite call it a "Book of Shadows" because I still blow things up and give myself itchy skin rashes with recipes I've tried thus far.  I could call it a "Grimoire", I suppose, but I was reading the Veritable Key of Solomon (Skinner/Rankine) before everything went to hell in a hand basket, and spent most of my time turning the book upside down and sideways and saying, "Huh?", trying unsuccessfully to make sense of the sketches and diagrams.  So apparently, not only am I a poor excuse for a witch (who flies into trees on her broomstick),  I'm in absolutely no danger of turning myself into a skilled alchemist either, as far as being able to make sense of grimoires goes.  Too bad, too:  I could really use the gold.

So, I flip open the Witch's Book of Days, which I haven't looked at in months, to June 18th.  I don't know why I haven't noticed this before:  the book was written with the assumption that witches are all women ... which would be of interest to, say, John Procter or Giles Corey, the former executed by hanging and the latter buried under rocks in Salem for being one.  A witch, I mean.  And that doesn't even touch on the guys who were gruesomely punished in my immediate lifetime, just for the crime of being witches.  Do we want to go into any more detail on that?  No, we do not.

But I digress.  More coincidences.  The entry for June 18th is about Eurydice.  Another "WTF?"
reaction.  She was the subject of Sonnet #13.  I slam the book closed again, beginning to become seriously freaked out by all these coincidences.

 Instead, I search for information on the Summer Solstice, a few days hence:

 " ... the festival celebrated on the Summer solstice in June. They [Polish/Slavic pagans] believe that it was a sacred holy day honoring the two most important elements: Fire and Water. The tradition is to burn fires at the end of the day and bathe in open waters at sunset, singing and dancing around 'pal' till midnight. At midnight, under the pretext of searching for "Fern flower the flower of the Fern," unmarried men and women run into the forest. Ladies with a crown of flowers on their head (Polish: wianek), a symbol of their unmarried state, go first, singing. Next they are followed by single men. If you find the "flower of the Fern" the wishes of life may be fulfilled. However, nobody found it so far, but they lived happily together. The lucky man would return with a flower ring on his head, with the now engaged lady."

 [Long pause]

 Okay, so it's a seriously dangerous holiday for gimps and klutzes:  roaring fires, skinny-dipping in dark, who-knows-what infested waters, and running blind in a forest chased by who knows what lunatic?  What kind of stupid holiday is this?  And am I still naked from the skinny-dipping?  What about tripping over tree roots in the dark?  I could slash the ^&%^$ out of my feet and totally bleed out, because I can't feel my feet and wouldn't know it!!!  (pant, pant, pant).  And another thing ...!  Yes, I know:  someone needs to seriously shut me up.

I'm off to bed.  Here's hoping I'll be in a much better mood in the morning.

Day #41: Damien and Sekhmet Join Forces. I Freak Out.

I had been sitting on the floor cutting out pieces for a new shirt. A somewhat muted turquoisy striped fabric I'd been carting around for years until I felt like making something with it. This was the start of a week's vacation and I finally felt like making something with it. The sonnet cycle was still unfolding, although without the lip-chewing intensity it once had, at the start. More like a peaceful intensity. Still intense, but not as gut-wrenching.  I still had headphones clamped on my head, though.

The turquoise stripe reminded me of the American southwest, I don't know why. Just did. That got me to thinking about Sekhmet's shrine or temple in Nevada. When I say that everything had stopped when my brother died, I meant spiritual things as well. Before he died, out of all the deities out there, I probably trusted Sekhmet the most, but after he died, I didn't trust anyone or any deity to come anywhere near me and not hurt me. Before he died, I used to talk to her; after he died, I didn't. I probably would have lashed out at her, too. "You should have told me, you should have prevented this!" Or maybe she did and I ignored her, just like I ignored my brother rubbing his upper chest and complaining of heartburn. Neither possibility was a good one, and I didn't want to know which one it was. True, lashing out at her could have gotten me set on fire, but I really didn't give a damn. Fine. Set me on fire. I deserve it.

The primary problem I have with the women who run her temple out in Nevada is that they're too - nauseatingly girly. Only American women can't conceive of a deity who could very easily get annoyed with a follower, chomp her head off and enjoy the blood spurting out of her neck. That's why I liked Sekhmet from the start: all powerful and extremely dangerous. And after she pretty much flipped me the bird during the psychic reading that Damien hi-jacked, I had read a supposed channeling from her, "recorded" by a woman in that temple: nicey-nice and lovey-dovey and said, "Yeah, right. We talking about the same cat?" I didn't think so. Didn't sound the Sekhmet I knew, that's for sure.

But I started thinking about her as I cut out this turquoise striped fabric. I figured she probably knew where my head was at, and I don't recall any Egyptian rule that ordered me to worship anyone when I was too pissed off to speak or pray or invoke coherently. I didn't even feel like apologizing, but did, in a half-hearted way.

"Look, I'm just in too much of a mess right now. You have a problem with that, fine - bite my head off, I don't care. Oh yeah, and thanks for the ...er ..." I figured I'd better stop there.

What I meant by that: the previous night I had enjoyed yet another dream. Correct that: I was ABOUT to enjoy another dream. First erotic dream I'd had in ages, and the man in the dream was Italian yes, but not Piero. I knew who he was. I hadn't thought of him in a long while, either. But without going into any nauseating details (you're welcome), suffice it to say that he and I had just reached the point of complete and nigh irrevocable ecstasy when I was brought wide awake screaming in pain from two powerful leg and foot cramps at once. My left foot was twisted into a knot so violent I couldn't straighten it back out again, and my right calf muscle was having a charley horse that was gluing the muscle to the bone. And I was literally screaming, "Help me, help me, help me!" at the top of my lungs because I couldn't even move, the pain was so severe. It took me about an hour to get my legs and feet to within tolerable comfort levels, and trust me - wherever I had been going in that dream was long gone.

Sekhmet being the deity you also invoke for sexuality, kundalini and libido issues ... anyway, I shut up. Wasn't her fault anyway - for that you can point an accusatory finger directly at the fool who drove his jeep into a Cambridge bus at top speed and knocked bones out of my spine. Messed up my back, my spine, my legs, my feet ... and now my wet dreams. [Grrrr ....]

When I finished cutting, I did some chores, looked around for some other projects I could start, vacuumed the carpet, picked up stray pins, sat down at the computer, brought up Twitter, gawked in shock and screamed, "What the f...???"

I had to have sat and stared at that photo for half an hour, muttering the same thing over and over again, “What the ...”, and “That’s not fair!” and “I don’t get it”, and all sorts of other stunned things.  Damien.  Standing next to Sekhmet.  I tried to view it logically, tried to recall what sent me towards Sekhmet in the first place.  If it was Damien, that would explain this photo.  Then I did get angry.

“Sometimes a coincidence IS just a coincidence!”

Except I didn’t really believe that, and got even angrier at her.  “No, you can NOT use Damien to get to me!!”  Except, she could – obviously - and apparently did.  I mean, this felt in direct response to my telling her to go ahead and bite my head off, which had literally happened five minutes earlier.

To be certain, I went back and looked for my first mention of Sekhmet in this blog.  Tuesday, November 8, 2011.  I wanted to make sure Damien didn’t mention her, which would explain why he was now posing next to her.  No.  I brought her up, he didn’t.  Damien was talking about the Angel of Death,  “Azrael”  (and he also posed with the Angel of Death in the same sequence of photos).  I was the one talking about Sekhmet.  The incident where he hi-jacked my psychic reading and she ignored me was a week or so later, on November 20^th.  This is what I said:

“Aside from the fact that I can’t find “Azrael” in my Lewis & Oliver Angels A to Z book (I wonder if he’s in Michele Belanger’s book on Demons), Damien really has become my Signpost Guy, because at that very same time he mentioned Azrael, I had begun reading all about Sekhmet, who had, it seems, a lot of the same characteristics as Azrael.”

And from that same entry:

“THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES. I know. I encountered Sekhmet and Damien’s mention of Azrael at the same time. I don’t know why I found Sekhmet so intriguing, other than: I was meant to find her intriguing, which almost felt like a calling of sorts. “

And again:

“If you read his description of his wife from his autobiography, his connection of sexuality with feline characteristics is pure Sekhmet, as connected as she is with sexuality and raw, untamed kundalini energy. She may have her claws in him too, even if he doesn’t know it. Or maybe he does and just never mentioned it.”

I just sat and stared at the photo, taking wild, unfocused gasps of air.  I think the most frightening part of the moment was the break between what I was getting from 2 different directions (the dream where Damien looked like the statue of Abraham Lincoln, and now this from Sekhmet):  let go of the guilt – on one side, but reality – truth - on the other:  my guilt made perfect sense to me, logically.  If I was not to be blamed, then why would Jim rub his chest in front of me, complain of day-old heartburn and make me think of heart attacks?  If I was not to be blamed why wouldn’t he just remain silent?  I wouldn’t have known about it, there would be nothing I could do.  But he did!  And I recognized it as unusual!  And we were a block away from Salem Hospital when he did it!  How could that NOT be my fault?  How is it I’m the only one who sees the logic in that?

I spend the rest of the day growling at her.  “It’s not going to work, it’s not going to work,”  through clenched teeth.

Except I'm not even sure I believe it.

Day #40 of my Suspended Search, and More Things I Learned from Damien Echols

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.

Day #39, and More Things I Learned from Damien Echols

This I didn't learn from Damien Echols, this I learned on my own.  I learned how to act. Actually, I had learned quickly how to act with the skill of Meryl Streep at Jim’s memorial service – I would watch myself pull off a stage performance of pleasant accessibility and gracious hostessing, only to pull back into a snarling and hellish dark corner and bare my teeth at everything the moment no one was looking at me. I was now doing that everywhere: at the office, while running errands, around the apartment complex. I had turned into an unapologetic, habitual liar wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.

Everything else had stopped. The Daybook I had been working on with such pride had stopped. Damien Echols, who, as you’ll recall, dashed off to New Zealand and was inaccessible for a while, had taken over his own Facebook page ... and then disappeared. I’d been so used to being inspired by his daily prison journal and using it for my Daybook, that it was another small sense of loss, not having his daily commentary when things began to go so wrong ... and trust me when I tell you: if there’s one guy who has first-hand knowledge of things going terribly wrong when you least expect them to – and then coming out the other side of darkness intact - it’s Damien Echols. But he had disappeared as well.

Losing his voice wasn’t exactly the equivalent of the overwhelming grief that I was going through after the death of my brother ... just a mild malaise brought on by spiritual loss. True, I wasn’t ready to contemplate anything spiritual right then, but I still missed listening to Damien.

I stopped checking his Facebook page to see if he’d said anything interesting, so unfortunately might have missed the moment when he said, "Eureka! Screw Facebook! I’m gonna tweet!" (actually I don’t know what he said about it, and I’m too lazy to go look, so I shouldn’t put words in his mouth.) Bottom line was: one day I discovered that he was on Twitter, and for the first time in quite a while I was back to paying attention to Damien, which helped because that meant I wasn’t focusing on anything else. Oh yeah – and I now knew how to tell him he’d hi-jacked my psychic reading if I wanted to. I was still hiding behind headphones and writing sonnets every day. The sonnet cycle was up to something like 30 poems. I was still religiously clapping Piero Barone’s voice over my ears.

Then I noticed that Damien had been to Salem, just half a month earlier. Home of the 17th century witchcraft trials, yes, but also the home of Salem Hospital (surgery), the place where my brother had complained of heartburn – though it was not really heartburn and I paid no attention to it and therefore killed him; and the place where I had returned alone to have my stitches clipped (and had to pull off the road repeatedly because I was sobbing so hard) the very same week that Damien was there. I was unaware of that until later.

But the one thing we do share is that neither of us believe in coincidences. I read his past tweets, looked at the words he wrote about Salem, looked at the day he posted the comments, felt ice crystals BEGIN to start crackling in that chasm where my heart used to be, and burst into tears – again. Then pulled myself up short.

After what I’d done, or had allowed to happen, in my abject narcissism, my heart was not allowed to heal, so it felt like some sort of unwanted kindness from the Universe. By that point, I no longer trusted the Universe to do right by me and was battling an intense fear of leaving the house because I fully expected something horrible to happen. Why wouldn’t something horrible happen? I’d killed my own brother by not paying attention to him when he needed me to.

Still, it could have been a lot worse, if Damien Echols hadn’t somehow managed to travel all the way up north from West Memphis, Arkansas to the bowels of Arkansas prison system, to New York City, the only place in the world I feel safe and still do, even after fleeing death on September 11th, and visit Salem, Massachusetts at the time he did. I knew there was some sort of meaning or pattern behind it; whether I was ready to accept any kindness from the Universe or not. In truth, I still wasn’t, but it almost felt like the Universe was using him, shining samurai sword that he was (imagery courtesy of Henry Rollins), to lay some groundwork. He was still "Mr. Signpost".

Day #38 of my Temporarily Suspended Search

The pain was getting worse; moments of shooting pain when I had to squeeze my eyes closed, clutch my head and wait it out. I only survived it without crying by telling myself, "It will be gone soon … not much longer." But then I reminded myself that, when I woke back up after the surgery, the tumor would be gone, but my face might look different in the mirror. I found that possibility terrifying.

I tried not to think about it. I painted my toenails. I listened to Piero’s voice. I went through my aerobics routine for exercise. I endured more moments of stabbing pain, and leaned over, clutching my head, whimpering. I heard Il Volo’s voices in my head, the day they made their appearance on Quelli che il calcio saying, "Arrendersi mai", and repeated it like a mantra. "Never surrender; never give up." Then I cleaned everything in sight, wondering if obsessive cleaning was another one of my efforts to avoid dabbling in reality. It probably was.

My brother arrived from New York, making bad "next of kin" jokes about painting two eyes and a mouth on my ugly forehead lump and taking my corpse along for Halloween, to frighten small children. (What are brothers for, if not to make you laugh when you least expect or want to? I’d burst out laughing at my brother’s bad jokes and then clutch my head in pain, yelling, "Don’t make me laugh!" Whereupon he’d make me laugh again.)

I thought: maybe I need to stop making the negative assumption that my face is going to change for the worse; maybe I need to think much more positively and assume my face will change for the better. Like: I’ll wake up and discover that I look 17 again.

The day of surgery arrived. While I was laying on the gurney beginning to doze, I learned that Blue Cross/Blue Shield had refused to pay for the procedure the surgeon wanted (calling it ‘cosmetic’) and had given me the choice: disfigurement or death. What choice did I have? I had a cancerous lump on my forehead. What was I supposed to do? Hold out for reconsideration of the decision while it grew larger and then killed me? I went with disfigurement.

The last thing I remember was, "This will make you a little sleepy" before I passed out cold. I finally woke back up again about two hours later.

When you’re still under the effects of anesthesia, you’re in what might be best described as a state of euphoria. EVERYTHING is wonderful! I felt absolutely terrific, even with the gel goop in my hair, caked blood on my scalp and a big bandage around my forehead. I was also starving because I hadn’t had anything to eat in well over 24 hours. Jim helped me slap a cap on my head to cover up the damage and he and I went to a restaurant where I ravenously devoured everything in sight. Driving away from the hospital, he made something of a face and rubbed his upper chest. "Heartburn," he said. "Musta been something I ate yesterday." I was still goofy-eyed and silly from the anesthesia.

"You shouldn’t have heartburn from yesterday," I said. Then I glared at him. Back to the New York accent, which the two of used on each other like we had been born and raised on Arthur Avenue. "Jim, I sweadda god, if you have a hahd attack on me, I’m gonna kill yuze!"

By the last gulp of ice tea, I suddenly realized: I wasn’t quite so euphoric anymore, and my head was beginning to hurt – a lot. We returned home. In the short time it took to get from the restaurant to the apartment, I began to clutch my head again. I managed to get a Percoset down my throat and fell on the bed. Blood seeped from my bandages into the pillow and I couldn’t even lift my head up to change the pillowcase. Oh … my … god … my head hurt. I barely hung on for the six hour interval until I could take another one. I was in so much pain Jim didn’t trust me to NOT overdose on the pain pills, so held onto the bottle and doled them out only on schedule, even when I begged for one. It wasn’t until well into the next day that I could shift from Percosets, which were making me nauseous, to Tylenols and not cry from the pain.

By afternoon of the next day I was supposed to change the dressings on my head. The hospital bandages had been placed over some of my hair, so I had a dickens of a time loosening the bandages without ripping hair out of my head. Finally, I was able to lift up the gauze bandages and see what the surgeon had done. My brother came running when he heard me scream in horror.

"I’ve got a hole in my head!! I look like Frankenstein's monster!"

Yes, she had managed to keep my face symmetrical, if you didn’t count the hole near my left temple and hairline. It was stitched closed by a series of X-stitches, and I really did look like Frankenstein at that moment. I was so horrified at my appearance I would have burst into tears, were it not for the fact that it hurt to scrunch my face up.

Jim said, "It only looks like that because your skin is still swollen around the stitches," but I didn’t believe him. While he rolled his eyes, I theatrically announced myself disfigured for life and sulked narcissistically for a few hours before putting Il Volo back on my iPod speakers and eventually calming back down listening to Piero’s voice. (How does he DO that? Every time he opens his mouth, he has the most amazing and immediate calming effect on me .)

Exactly one week after the day of my surgery, my beloved brother, the brother who had taken care of me through all of these surgeries, all of these medical disasters, my best friend in the world - dropped dead of a heart attack.
*******
Denial. His beloved daughter, my niece, is the poor soul who had to call me, and because we had always communicated via Jim, the second I heard her voice, I said, "What's wrong?" I was already back at work. First she told me he had had a heart attack, and I said, "No. No, he didn't. No he didn't. That's not possible." And then she said, "He didn't make it." and I doubled over, in the middle of the office, wailing, "No, he didn't die. He didn't die. He's not dead, he's not dead." and all of my co-workers came running to my cube from everywhere in the office at top speed.

The shock and the pain was so intense, I covered my head with my hands and leaned over in a silent scream. My mouth was wide open; nothing was coming out. My eyes were wide open in agony. I knew something was wrong and I hadn’t made Jim turn around and drive the 500 yards back to Salem Hospital to have them check his heart. How big of a road sign had the universe handed me? And I’d ignored it. I knew something was wrong, I knew it. And because I was so narcissistically obsessed with my own surgery I’d murdered my own brother, the best friend I ever had. If I’d had a pistol at that moment I would have used it on myself without hesitating, the self-loathing was that powerful and that intense.

One of my co-workers, Luisa, grabbed the headset from me, and talked to my niece, writing down her phone number and explaining that I had collapsed. I hadn't, really, but I was useless. I was rocking back and forth, still doubled over at the waist, my mouth still wide open in a silent scream, tears streaming down both cheeks. I kept thinking I should apologize to people, thinking, I shouldn't be acting like this in the office, but I couldn't stop. I heard Luisa say "Her brother", and everyone knew my brother had been my life saver through all these medical disasters and a few of them had even met him in person at the hospitals I was in, or talked to him on the phone. I heard people gasping, "Oh, no!" at the realization that I had just lost my only sibling and I don't really remember much after that. I do remember thinking, "They don’t know I killed him or they wouldn’t be so nice." But I couldn’t even vocalize that much.

After the funeral, I was riding the commuter rail between Golden's Bridge and Grand Central. I did not want to go back to Massachusetts, because I didn't want to leave my real home - Westchester County - where Jim and I had grown up and spent most of our lives; where he had died. I no longer remember which phrase became stuck in my head, but whatever it was demanded to be written down, so I pulled out a notepad and did so. I didn't know why, and I didn't know what else to do, but I kept writing. Those first few phrases became the first words in the first sonnet cycle I'd written, and which I found thankfully distracting in my first few weeks back home. Each sonnet in that cycle was like pulling a toxic little splinter out of the rough wooden plank lodged in my chest. I knew something was going wrong with me, emotionally, anyway. I couldn't get the headphones off of my ears. Well, of course, I occasionally removed them to shower or pull clothes over my head, but for the most part, I never took them off, as much as I hated the dead accusatory silence that surrounded me when I did. I would start to shake whenever I took them off. The second thing that was going horribly wrong was the irrational and abnormal obsession with Piero Barone, which, improbably, had gotten even worse.

I couldn't even explain it to myself, at first. I would burst into tears, wailing, "Stop it! Stop it!" at being unable to stop listening to him. He was so much younger than I was, I invented time-traveling fantasies, where the two of us would end up at some distant point in time, and be together away from the pain of this lifetime, and this moment. We would go back to Ancient Greece, or to the Republic of Venice, a white sandy beach at some point in the future, to my childhood when Jim was still alive, or any number of places.

But Piero would always be there to talk to, even if he didn't speak English. Italian was fine. I knew I was losing my mind. But I simply had to listen to his voice, listen to him sing, or listen to him talk in the breathlessly soft Sicilian dialect of his, or the pain in my chest would become too vast to endure. He was the only being whose voice could calm me down from the high-pitched hysteria in my head.

Everything else I had been doing, thinking, dreaming - stopped in its tracks while I huddled at the bottom of a chasm of grief and guilt and self-recrimination and obsession the likes of which I'd never experienced. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't talk to anyone. Except for my imaginary Piero, I was alone. I should have been able to get past the intense grief, but I couldn't. I kept writing sonnets. I kept watching him on You Tube as he toured South America with Il Volo and tearfully thought about how beautiful he was. I berated myself continually for doing it. I couldn't stop.

(To be continued)