When I was a child, I remember having to collect stuffed animals. It was not so much that I needed nurturing, but I had too much love and not enough places to put it. I felt overwhelmed with it, disarmed by it. These stuffed animals were my placeholder siblings, children, partners. They were animated by my imagination. When my parents would yell at one other, I would take all of them to the back of my closet and cradle them. Comforting them first.
He lived in servitude to a Monster in his head, that only arrived at night. A chameleon virus, shaping into people and spaces and leaving them worse off. I watched this Monster puppeteer his actions, swallow his life up, in splintered fragments. My sacredness diluted by it’s carnal indulgences. Four years, I spent watching the rare and celestial be traded for something cold, brash and hedonistic. It was the last time.
When you have too much love, no one teaches you that there can be a wrong way to feel it. That there are very, very wrong places to put it. That it can extend out of you and loop around things that are dangerous, forming a psychic toxicity that can kill you. Disparage you and pull you out of your body.
You have to learn to put the love back into the earth, because it is the only big enough container. You will see yourself in cranes, deer, and scarab beetles that prance around your head when you are thinking the right things. You will feel yourself in the way your feet feel in the grooves of a mountain. You will use your fire and intensity to climb the mountain. And the earth, in her interconnectivity, will love you back, unconditionally, asking nothing of you.
The last time I sat next to him, I felt a pit of emptiness in his pulse, breath and veins. For so long he clung to my skin with a sticky feeling, swollen inside me like a brilliant knife. Somewhere, nestled deep between the unnatural palpitations of his heart, lay a silent cave of childhood grief. Too deep for me to return to.
I had my friends lay beside me, and exorcize me, one by one. Some with poems, others with energy work, extracting cords and etheric “No Trespassing” signs. Until I felt the spell break, the snake around my heart uncoil, the ghost reluctantly depart.
I know the danger of tricky memory. I am far enough away to only stare, unblinkingly, ahead.