This Wood in Light

I am at the end of a very long day. Lean in, so I can feel your breath on my cheek. I want to whisper in your ear...

It's not been a day for drink, or drugs. It's not been a day for fun, either. It's just been a long, long day. I know when the time changes the day will go quickly, and that is soon enough. It's just that no time change, or spring or end of winter, can alter today.

I know some pills that would make this mood more bearable, but it's not even an option. The next best thing is some coffee ice cream at the local store. It's a mile away through a dark, cold night. I would like a text from my therapist, but will have to do without. It's been a very long day for him too, evidently.

The Next Morning:

I did get my ice cream. It wasn't all that cold...32F. By Sunday it's supposed to be 66F in this small corner of the world. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is Spring.

After the emergency yesterday, I am left feeling ok; I am just waiting for my body to explode. The attendant symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) kept twinging on me. There are physical symptoms with PTSD. A multitude of them too many to list here. Some of mine include: shooting pains in my hands and head, pain at the nerve junctions in my mouth, chest pain. It feels as if a small but powerful electrode is searching here and there for weak spots from head to toe. In the ensuing days, I will develop: mouth sores, (inside and out), gastroenteritis, and more chest pains; maybe bronchitis. I might have another head spin; another attack of paranoia, racing thoughts and a flare up of my diagnoses.

So I am come here to lay all this on you. I search for words to tell you how I feel, and find myself frustrated. So I retreat to metaphors: storms, forests and fields. Because that is the best that I can do.

I had lived in darkness for several years, hiding in a room, when a woman took me in hand. She convinced me to walk across a field and over a hill. When we dropped down into the other side, we stood in a forest. I woke up as I walked onto a small, green space, which was bordered by a small creek, and protected by the hill. In front of us, was the largest tree I have ever met, in person. It would have taken five people, holding hands, to span it's trunk.

There will never be enough, or the right kind of words, to describe those moments in time, or how beautiful that place was. I stood stunned and astonished. I felt awe. I felt light as a bird, and my whole body opened, after years of being enclosed. I felt delight, as I feel it now, thinking of it. I have never been so overwhelmed by joy. It astonished me, this joy, and I knew I would be able to keep that memory, and emotion in my mind forever. I knew I would never have to leave.

I carry that memory into my work, when I write, for you, about the forest, and the fields behind my house. My delight is revealed in my description of the "unicorn meat eating" cats, and their adventures. I sit in this small corner of the world, and try to find the words to describe that moment. There is nothing I will not write about to bring to you the memory of that darkness, and the memory of the light in that woodland.

I bring you all of the words I heard as a child. So much of it is standard Romantic fare, high-flown and desperately in need of trimming. I bring you all of the movies and music and fantasy that I live in, silly as they may seem. I bring you my body, and my diagnoses, my therapists, and my shrink. Sometimes I drag the outside world, the headlines, in. Popular stories of the day, to try to stay relevant and earthbound.

To my delight, I still stand in that grove, where the darkness recedes. I pour the words on the page, and hope you find joy; I hope you find yourself; I hope you find help for a friend; I hope you find each other.

Mostly, I find myself, the most private of persons, and I stand vulnerable and open to your view. Every instinct and cultural more I have wants to hide everything. It is very difficult to stand open to investigation every day, hoping you will find something that you like, and take it home with you.

Because I am that grove, and that hill, and that tree. It was hidden then, and lives now only in me, a place of almost unendurable beauty, revealed for a small space of time on this world. Many groves and people like that exist, seemingly lost in the vastness and busyness of our lives, and of this world, so big and so full of people. Seemingly lost in time, as well. Because there are many lives that have remained unwritten, and will remain unwritten in the past, present and future.

I am here, I sit in this wood, and I try to open a window in time, to a day, and a place that exists, that is not present in the material world.

So, what I have come here and now to whisper to you is this. If I fail, then it is not for lack of trying. I cannot open myself more to the eye than I have, and remain an integrated soul. No more than the grove would survive by having ten thousand people walk through to admire it's beauty.

And if I succeed, which is every artist's desire, then in a small way, I have started your morning out well. I will receive validation...that the darkness did exist for a reason. And the pouring out of every particular of my life is worth it, if someone who is mentally 'ill', or a rape survivor, or alcoholic, drug addict, can take something away with them from this blog. If anyone at all can take something from my words, then the darkness is gone, and only the wood, and that morning in the sunlight, exists.