Siren

He told me I was like a Siren. A Siren who had lured him away from his journey, who had stolen him into the sea. At first, I was flattered, picturing a mermaid with translucent jade skin, dusted with champagne sunlight and sea foam, with hair wild and cheeks aflame, enveloped in tendrils of purple seaweed. I saw it the way I saw everything else, like a story.

As our relationship developed I saw that he spoke of something carnivorous, fatally provocative. Emitting demonic fumes, like a venus fly trap, until I could lure him into a bottomless cave. Only to envelop him, chew him, swallow him and spit him back up in splinters and fragments of flesh that sprayed across the midnight surface, engulfed by the oceans tongue. Perilous and hungry for men. This is the Siren he spoke of.

He said wanted sink into me, deep, heavy, like melting in a witches brew, like dissolving into the stars, sorcerous, and intertwined like celtic knots.

I was seen as a pitstop on his heroic journey, the temptation to his messiah, a side effect to his immaculate vigor. He was unable to view me in my totality, as separate and soverign.

As a woman, you are not supposed to be aware of the potency of your own sexual power. This is why we were burned at the stake.

The more I do away with convention in search of expression and comfort the more beautiful I become. This scares him.

I am wild, hot blooded, elusive, angry and untamed. I will not be small or discreet or apologetic. I am the snake that unfurls and riles through the dirt and I fit into the places you don’t want or expect me to. I overflow and seep into the earth, melt like wax and beat the breath of the moon. My sex is my power. In my body I carry the allure of the feminine that drives all nature. You can try to assign me as the characters you need to act out and exorcise your trauma. The traumas from your mother, her mother and the great mother.

Try, and I will haunt you in aromatic memory, and leave you in a garden of agonies to rot and ferment.

Cryptic

I liked you best last night.

I liked you best because you looked soft and tired, slightly hungover, and almost vulnerable. I can’t seem to otherwise penetrate the glass encasing you have built around yourself, of intellect and formidable cool- equally terrifying and inviting.

I am cornered by the unbearable notion that in between these sickly walls, I cannot reach out and feel you like I would like to.

In my mind, I grab you and stroke you and maybe even vulgarize you - a little- but most of all, I speak to you, without fear of the intruder in the room, the intruder who links us together, the very loved intruder whom we protect (perhaps to save him from hurt, but more likely to save us both from the insurmountable obstacle of being vulnerable.)

Yes, in my mind we have a full, complete, apocalyptic love affair, the stuff of myths and movies. In the space between stolen moments, I reshape and colour us into something big and great and passionate and fluid. All heart and madness.

These tales are much better than the half formed, undefined reality. This almost lazy triangle we have to constantly recalibrate ..

But I think we both prefer the incandescent secrecy, in case the real thing was boring.

My Alien Experience at Coachella Weekend One

If I don’t narrate the events of my life with rigorous honesty and fearlessness, I am afraid my memories will shift and slip away. The following story is told with sincerity, vulnerability and truth.

Some say to have a mystical experience, you have to go to the desert. If you think about it, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses..all of them went out into the desert at some point. There is something about the desert, about the absence of water and a vast barren terrain, that seems to act as a stage for divine manifestations. Coachella weekend one is no exception.

My friend Laz and I were driving down to Palm Springs to do an art installation at the Ace Hotel for the weekend. It was his thing, really, and I was just happy to get out of L.A. The plan was to set up a tent, an altar and a temporary “Witch Doctor” station, where we would prescribe spells under the gentle guise of ‘art’. Laz, with his background in superstition, folklore and sublime artistic talents- was the main attraction. And I was there to implement my intuitive skills..talents I hadn’t quite owned just yet. I was still in the ‘broom closet’, shall we say..still hesitant to present this deeply personal side of myself to what was going to be the greater Los Angeles area, crammed into Palm Desert. Quietly afraid of ostracisation, maybe even of  being burned at the stake.

As we slid past the windmills, copper and gold dunes and Coachella traffic, Laz recounted a dream he had about driving off a cliff, whilst I chained smoked through the humidity. I rehearsed what we had planned in my head. Arrive at the Ace hotel, set up our tent,  then go check into the Airbnb, begin at night, do the whole thing again tomorrow.

We had each brought boxes of sacred items, Laz’s had been acquired in Haiti and at a local botanica, a store run by a Shaman with two pet parrots , walls painted with hummingbirds and sugar skulls, Guatemalan fabrics- selling oils and amulets and wax candles in strange shapes and violent colors with exotic names. The items were pressed into an old box that suited it's contents. We planned to construct a grid to each of the four elements, creating a high vibrational space for healing.

I collect things like make up and fortunes from Chinese restaurants, photos of old boyfriends and letters from friends..but also bones, feathers and dragonfly wings, crystals and candles, rocks, shells and dried flowers. I keep them in a box at the foot of my bed, and when I am short of inspiration, I trace my fingers along each one. On New Moons I spread them out in front of me, like an intricate map, and I follow them into other realms.

I was going take others with me, this time.

As soon as we parked the car at the hotel, I noticed a feeling in my stomach, a feeling of a lack of preparation before something astronomically changing. Almost like when you are on a plane, and you realize you have forgotten something. I knew something was about to shift for me, for both of us. What followed this feeling, in the desert, was a sequence of events more bizzare and euphoric than can possibly be conveyed through writing. A synchronicity safari, weaving out of us faster than we could record.

The Ace Hotel is a strange combination of pretentious, dingy and chic. It's occupants were always bikini clad hipsters and men with well groomed hair on their face and none on their chest.  We assembled our station by the pool of the hotel, or rather, Laz assembled it, while I watched and contributed by adding helpful affirmations and smoking. When we were given our wristbands for the event,  we gasped. They said “We’re Here Now”, in the font of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. This is the closest thing I have to a bible.

The altar was set up quickly, and we decided to go unpack our bags at the airbnb. I said that this felt like a dream, in that way desert humidity makes you feel euphorically drowsy, almost like you could melt into your surroundings. When we opened the door of the mid-century home, a wall decor replica of my tattoo of a Gardenia was hung on the wall. The tattoo, which was done by my close friend Marielle, came out of her imagination- I couldn’t rationalize how it could have been added to the stock of some random furniture store in Palm Springs. But, like most people, I chose not to assign meaning to it and silently dismiss it as a surreal coincidence. I told Laz, this feels like a dream. When we stepped out into the poolside area, there, painted on the brick wall in huge letters read “Your Dream Here” I decided at this moment that coincidences don’t exist, at least not at this amplitude and pace. Laz, who was witnessing these events unfold was giggling excitedly, affirmed their magnitude, which was comforting because I could easily have been having some sort of thirst driven hallucination.

We returned to our tent at the Ace that night, and sat behind our altar, illuminated by candles that dripped in different colors. Bees and flies flew onto our table, and shimmered between the glitter and tarot cards, the bones and crystals. We invoked Earth forces and Star beings, asking for guidance and protection. Soon after,one by one people entered, first a leather-clad Musician who talked about loss and an inability to find the right job. In this setting, I could feel myself downloading information, almost in a language I didn’t speak- and shocked myself by my own accuracy and boldness in my understanding of these individuals. We prescribed rituals for him, and he ended up crying for about ten minutes- another shock that Laz and I attempted to contain with hugs and affirmation. There was a girl with arthritis who asked us to heal her wrist pain, and declared that it had subsided after we put our hands on her. There was a man who said he had been pulled and told to come over here, and I was told to tell him (by what or who I still don’t know) that his Grandmother was watching over him. In these instances I feel I was somehow picking up on ripples of a voice that did not belong to me. In the winking candlelight there was an air of unreality, with Laz my only tie to the real world. We were transmitting some borrowed power, borrowed from a place we didn’t quite understand. He spoke words out of my head, as if we shared a bottomless tidal pool of knowledge that diverged in and out of each other. Each visitor in the tent left in tears or in awe. But no one was more awe stricken than either one of us.

That evening, we returned to the house in a pleasant daze, and danced and danced till we were drowsy and could dance no more. We smoked outside and spoke of our family and the trauma we may have inherited, through blood, but were determined not to repeat. We talked about love and loss. We lay back on the outdoor couch and stared at the stars in the night sky, the only stars I had seen in months. I said that I didn’t know if it was healthy to live somewhere you couldn’t see the stars, and he agreed. They were vast and expansive, winking, twinkling and calling out through the violet sheets of midnight ether. If I looked closely at the the space between stars, there seemed to appear more and more parcels and fractals of light.

After staring up, necks tilted and eyes wide for what seemed like hours, a cluster of three or four stars began to move in a very peculiar way. They were not twinkling or blinking, but darting around in circles and back again. Almost as if they were tearing apart, or dancing. I initially assumed they must have been drones, but the proximity and luminescence was that of a star. Laz and I were in shock, and followed them with our fingers, confirming that we were both seeing the same thing. My heart thumped and my palms began to sweat. Laz started laughing and almost crying. We watched until they seemed to stop and begin to tear open, sending currents of energy towards us. Both of our mouths dropped open, and we began to vibrate, receiving a transference of light filaments that reached my heart and sent sparks through my body.

I couldn’t tell you how long this phenomena lasted for, as time seemed to disappear for it’s duration. We were both in hysterics, in bliss, in joy. We spoke more for hours, and the next day, Laz took an app that scans the sky and told me it was the Pleiades star cluster, the same star cluster my friend had very deliberately left a book on the week before.

The next day we drove back, on an almost straight desert road to Los Angeles. We sat in traffic  and both cried. We cried about being lied to about our own divinity, about experiencing something so beautiful and pure, so organically. About the intensity and depth of life that at one point, we had both resisted. About the trajectory of impossibility and unreality our lives took when we decided to trust feelings over facts.

From that moment onward, every fractal of a second in our lives were colored, and shaped by a dimension of the mystical, because it was the only thing left that made life worth living. I can feel in my body that life is only half-captured by the senses. There are spectrums of color and lights, chimes and scents that will evade our cognitive mind- but it does not mean that they don’t exist, bearing witness to us. We concluded the power of thought and belief is what life follows, so we decided were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality.

Quantum Love and Sex at World's End

 I often wonder if I am alone, or perhaps among a dwindling few, who still hold on to the spirit of romanticism in modern times. This age, increasingly foreign and disconnected, can make me feel like an alien, peering in on a lethal experiment.  I remain looking, mocking my naivety in what should be my prime years of romantic exploration.

The setting for my half finished love stories never remains constant, although takes on an ending theme of pixelated pain. My generation’s backdrop is the end of times, either spurred by religious premonitions or scientific prediction.  We are constantly on edge, unveiling fact by fact- the exposure of truth and universal destruction, each occurrence happening as quickly as one can refresh their facebook page.

Astrology identifies the millennial generation of twenty somethings as Scorpio Plutonions. Whether you adhere to astrological predictions or not- these are pretty spot on.

According to astrology, this generation's soul’s journey is built around learning and exposing truths, breaking down walls, and enabling radical transformation.

In order to do this, they must experience individual awakening, and from their uncovering of the taboo- they can liberate humanity. Those with this Pluto placement will deal with loss, abandonment, death, addiction, heightened sex drive and betrayal. Through transmuting this power, and using it to heal yourself, you can change the collectives attitude to transmutation. We are increasingly separate, often incapable of making eye contact, glued to our phones, our fingers achedly swiping for the next best thing. I wonder if this is perhaps not a symptom of apathy, but quite the opposite.

Maybe we feel too much, maybe we resent the crisis we've been handed, are afraid of feeling the despair because each moment is being retweeted as our last. In feeling, we become a part of it all.  

Interpersonal relationships involve delving in the despair we try to drown out. Our relationships with ourselves can be worse too, privy to the trends of the ever changing media, reduced to actual “likes” and contingent on presence through a screen.

Society teaches us about sexuality from two extremes, either shame based abstinence, following a religious rhetoric- or a careless promiscuously as easy as an endless cloud of pornography, or a swipe and 2.1 miles away. Regardless of where on this skewed spectrum your beliefs lie, there never seems to be much discussion about the non-physical aspects of sex. It is, after all, the closest we can get to another human. The gateway for all procreation. And of course, incredibly, inconceivably, magical.

The few times I have been lucky enough to achieve an instance of love that transcends all moments, past, future, and facebook live- I have been lifted up and revived.

Those moments are few and far between. I tried dating apps, but I couldn’t help but wonder if they rob us of serendipitous connections. You can’t feel someone’s smile through wifi (even if they are only 1.2 miles away). Being in love made me feel like I had safely returned to my own planet, there was a familiarity to touch that exceeded the end of times, a familiarity to trees, to all of life. Even grey cityscapes, smog sunsets and the age of technology retained a magic that was long forgotten.

Somewhere between the polarity of toxic abstinence and hypersexuality, lays a subatomic dance that exceeds the lengths of the cosmos. This dance, as old as the stars themselves, is now known to us as “quantum entanglement” The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles, having once interacted, can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. They will  continue to affect each other, even when separated by time and space. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’ And it indeed is, spooky as fuck.

In applying this principle to humans, think about our molecular make up of particles and fluids,  and think of the moments when people would experience entanglement: being twins, being the recipient of a blood transfusion, organ donors, family members, and of course, being sexual partners.

To bring this back down to  earth, consider the moments in sexual  relationships where you have intuited a partners actions, where you feel another’s presence and emotions from miles apart. Where maybe, you have fallen in love, and found the line between your feelings and your partners  indistinguishably blurred. This is actually the result of these particle dances, particles that are meshed together in the most intimate of ways.

Even if we are detached, our magnetic fluids mingle and melt together, trapping us in an  invisible net that extends above and beyond time and space. It’s kind of poetic, and beautiful, and also terrible.   In the heated delirium of sex we form quantum vows, vows that have the power to bind us to another person. The merging of two bodies of light, capsules of polarized luminous material, merging and unmerging and intertwining and dancing.

Tantra is the only school of thought and practice that has given sexuality the sort of attention it deserves, exploring the deep  spiritual ramifications. “Tantra” comes from the Sanskrit word for weaving. Soul weaving. There is nothing casual about Soul weaving, no matter how much we try and diminish and hide the potent power of sex.

And yet, we are proud and great at pretending . You can try to mentally record every second with someone, as if you were watching your own movie, seeping in the cinematic beauty of it all. But then it fluctuates, and reality hits you on the back like a stair you missed in the dark. The tangles of distant texts draw you both away, pregnant pauses and silences in the unapologetic form of blue bubbled texts. You are quantumly still with them, as if you lost a limb and could still feel it. It can feel like your very cells are tearing in half. And yet, you can still live stream their movements, each one more unrecognizable than the last.

You try and replay the movie, but we are the generation of faux apathy, and when you grasp for the shards of vulnerability amidst the cool facade of disconnection, you get cut.
Scientifically, we are still incapable of gauging to consequences of these silent resonances and quantum contracts. Perhaps heartbreak and attachment is a longing for the particles someone took with them. A mere quantum side effect of intimacy, drawn out by emotion. The upside to quantum entanglement, is that maybe if you grow, they grow too.

Past Life Pair of Jeans

______

Time is not linear. The past, present and future are happening simultaneously, non-linear, in a loop or maybe a spiral- continuously bringing us back to things we haven’t understood. Sometimes trauma, or relationships, where the characters change, but the stories remain the same.

When we talk about past lives, I forget that they are not actually behind us, the same way time is not a straight line. Past lives are really happening simultaneously with each present moment, and the decisions we make have ramifications and ripples on those lives too..and vice versa. Sometimes, in distinct moments I can feel those ripples, like whispers. I can feel the relationships between events folding in and out of space and time with perfect impossible geometry. In stillness, I can have flashes of lucidity and feel resonances of other timelines.

I can be retracing footsteps in old locations and feel like I must be running into old ghosts of myself, trapping translucent memories with breathless wonder. I could be driving down a highway and think, this car could be a horse, or even a spaceship- and maybe in another timeline, it is.

Why do some decades or objects, cultures, or ancient texts hold a sense of familiarity? Why are we drawn to the things we are? Are they pathways to past lives or merely avenues for expressing individuality?

I have been told my various mystics that I was a dolphin in a past life, and an Queen of an intergalactic race known as the Pleiadians, and a witch who was burned at the stake. Also, that it’s my first incarnation as a human? It’s very easy for me to get wrapped up in these stories, or assign egoic meaning to them- but no one ever seems to get told they were a garbage man in a past life, or worked at a 7/11, or anything like that. Those possibilities are more likely. Everyone I’ve spoken to about past lives were grandiose things, like Cleopatra, or Jesus, or Abraham Lincoln.. Seems a bit strange and presumptuous, but my generation isn't known for it’s humility. This is like some new, twisted form of plagiarism. Soul plagiarism.

I cannot explain why some people seem to arrive in this world with a sense of knowing and belonging, and why others seem to gasp, grapple and sputter until the very end. Why some elderly retain the appearance of a child and why some children seem to have come in with shrouds of age. Regardless, we are all comprised of the same energy, the same luminous source material- just compartmentalized in the form of human individuality. If you are going to take credit for the lifetime of someone else, you may as well decide on just about everyone- as separation in and of itself, is an illusion.

Nevertheless, my life seems to have reoccuring themes and patterns, images that circle around until I can understand them. I am intoxicated by the fictitious draw of the past and future. Time hangs above our shoulders, atom-thin, like an inescapable net that compels us to be anywhere but in the present. We are all obsessed with the past, peering into our phones, drawing inspiration from old decades and romanticising simpler times. Predicting our demise.

I’ll admit I find comfort in old things.The future is uncertain, branching out in front of us at the speed of light, into trillions of fragmented possibilities. There is fixed stability in old books, stone sculptures, antique slip dresses, and latin script. Memories are fragile, and life is brief, but these objects that have outlived us all, retain a quality of magic.

Sometimes, I can sense chains of events before they occur, purely based on the  paranormal phenomenon of pattern that existence follows. Relationship dynamics that seem to play out on a loop, with different characters but sometimes even the same setting...The daunting familiarity in new people who always end up being impactful. I feel more secure when domestic trivia doesn’t distract from tarot or astrology, when I can decide on a timeline and ground myself in a predictable future. Otherwise it feels like the endless array of possible outcomes is overwhelming, so many apocalyptic potentials looming over our heads in the form of pixelated predictions. All of this is so silly, because realistically, quantum physically, the past present and future are happening simultaneously.

Before I realized that time was a construct, I lived in a sickly and confined version of reality. It is a real miracle, that in this blip of time, this miniscule thread on the tapestry of life, I have had the chance to exist in a time of such flux and change. Now when I enter room, it seems like atoms and astral dust race to keep up with my perception, quivering, glimmering and not quite certain. I sometimes wonder if anything really exists, or if reality is just a malleable substance to be toyed with, subject to our beliefs and expectations.

_______________________________

In Rosy Memory

He looked like he was raised by the forest, or maybe by a mountain. His skin was sunkissed and warm, freckled with dirt and hair, long tarzan locks and thick, calloused hands.

He had a love affair with plants and soil, an insatiable appetite for all that was untamed and unexplored. Forever humble to the intelligence and wisdom of nature.

It began with shifting glances in quiet moments, never quite still, our eyes fluttering like butterflies searching for a place to land. Silently reaching for each other, and never quite touching.

We danced around like this for a week, ebbing and flowing out of each others bubble, in a shy, flirtatious routine. I crouched down next to him  on the couch, and asked to read to lines on his hand. Rivers and indents of flesh, pulsing blood and worn skin that told tales of heartache and a mind  stretched too thin- where his heart and intellect were in a silent war. I traced the lines on his palm with my fingertips, the same way I wanted to trace the rest of his body. Slow, soft, recording every inch of him, till I could recite it by memory. I think that was the moment it became real.

I liked sleeping with him-just sleeping, more than anything else we did. Enveloped in his limbs, heat and steady breath. Drowning in tendrils of hair, tangled toes and fingers, breast to breast, woven eyelashes and open mouths. Entering our respective dreamworlds as one, wild thing.

This was a new kind of love, aware of it’s timely limitations. A place of recovery. I think we had both been wounded by previous variations of crazy- lovers who had needed caretakers, who had then just taken and taken and taken..until we were left empty. That adrenalizing intensity of being with someone who was unsafe, was missing. That feeling of constant imbalance, of teetering on the verge of madness and heartbreak- was gone. Instead, there was gentle care, playful possibility, tender and unpossessive.

We walked to the ruins of a castle by a seaside village. There was a rare kind of golden sunlight that day, the kind neither one of us expected to stick around- but it did, and cast a dewy glow on the road ahead. Treading lightly on trails leading to infinity, on emerald cliffs that just about hovered above a gentle sea. There was no distinction to where sky met sea, just never-ending pools of etheric blues, drawing us closer and closer to the old ruin. We agreed that we could be in Ireland, or on our way to Hogwarts. Then we lay on the beach, half asleep, in each others arms.

Naturally, we both wanted to stay longer. In that pocket of time, it was so perfect, pure and untainted by reality. To extend it would be cruel. Maybe he would have been unprepared for my wounds, or I would have grown resentful of him. This way, our love has a fighting chance, in imagined realms, in rosy memory.

Nothing has Perished

I  spent two weeks before we met singing love songs and giggling, almost like my soul knew he was coming before I did.  When we met, a warm resonance went through my body, like an etheric chime, reminding me that he was a man i must have met before, in my dreams.  I swear for a moment, it felt like my soul pirouetted out of my body, meeting his mid-air.

He had eyes that stole secrets from the sea, with curling waves of hair and a mind like a library. Sometimes he spoke  in poetry and fairy tales, or legends. Other times he spoke like joke books or esoteric archives. We enjoyed each other’s minds as much as our bodies, which is the only way it could be, as I always fall in love with my ears before my eyes. There is an inherent playfulness, and even when we were exhausted we behaved like children or puppies, rolling around in each others dirt. He was the first man I have met who isn’t threatened by my boldness, who hasn’t wanted to cage me, or own me.  He was just as enthralled by my wild as I am.

There was an urgency to getting to know one another. As if we got high off of telling each other what was shocking to tell, we exchanged abbreviated stories of our respective realities..darting back and forth like the silloques of bumble bees.

The morning light sprayed through a prism in the window of my  room, and cast a veil of color on the ceiling. Emerald, magenta and orange. The moist sheets stuck to our skin as we wrathed and basked in each others warmth. I felt the currents of energy between us opening up portals beneath my skin. He clasped his hand around the small of my waist and he complimented me, compliments interspersed by a steady rhythm of kisses. He  told me I taste of strawberry ice cream. His voice sounded out from the depth of his core, almost as if it hurt to speak, but like he had been yearning to for a hundred years. It reminded me that sometimes there is rage in pleasure, the same way there is immense pleasure in rage.

Every word he mouthed touched the strings in my soul, sending a deep echo to the subterranean chambers of my body.

I nestled deeper into his armpit, and he whispered to me. He said I have doe eyes that speak of innocence, but my mouth, my mouth speaks of sex.

Transmuting Teenage Trauma into Superpower

When I was sixteen, I wore heavy kohl eyeliner, brushstrokes of fury, rimming my eyes and sunken skin. My aphrodisiacs contained in fluorescent orange bottles, pills for imagined pains, which I handed out like candy. My friends and I hung out in parks, or Melrose, or Venice Beach, inhaling fumes of smog and sweet pot under the beating Californian sun. I stole things compulsively, fueled by the belief that the world owed me something. This concrete and technological dystopia that I had inherited without wanting, needed to be punished and fought against. I was also funny, in a feral, untamed way. Perfumed with rage and angst. Caught between keeping up with unrealistic ideals of beauty, and cursing them. I  clumsily threw myself into danger, rolling under the stars in cars with boys, running away from everything, running into nothing. Suffocated by my parents, and simultaneously needing more love. Only consoled by open moonlight, by inebriated emotional intimacy, by reckless expeditions at two a.m. Yearning to live how animals live, purely by impulse and desire. This boldness is not a trait admired in young women.

Femininity had been bestowed upon me  like a delicate, linen dress. An heirloom of expectation.Not to be discussed, or too noticeable, but slipped into with an invisible grace. I found it itchy and too small so I tore at it with my teeth and fingernails, until I could fashion it into a mangled diaper or a witches hat.

In the height of adolescence, I was both uncomfortably hypersexualized and shamed by my peers.. Subject to the toxins of gossip and envy, because I seemed to invite them with my clumsy rage, and outfits that hugged my body, still new, sometimes forgetful of it's womanly curvature. Like any teenage girl you know, I procured trauma and heartache rapidly. Running too quickly to notice my bruises, summoning provocative reactions to serve a bottomless void.. Assuming with violent naivety that I was unfuckwithable.   Charging around in a stoned bubble, a child stretched too thin for an ill-fitting vessel.

Every immense high had an inevitable come down. As I sought out trouble, consequences eventually caught up to me. I became intoxicated by my own darkness, sometimes incapable of separating myself with the identity of being troubled. Locked bathrooms became sanctuaries. When I was heartbroken for the first time, I wanted to die. I sometimes slept with my arms crossed over my chest and prayed for death like a mummified corpse.  On a few occasions, I took a more literal approach.

This shadowy caricature of me seems light years away, but sometimes I send her my present day strength, parcels from the reserve of worth it took me years to find. I tell her she is beautiful, but she is more than the vessel of beauty that people seem to think they can comment on and criticize. I tell her that some of the pain she internalizes and then performs, doesn’t belong to her. I tell her that some of her pain is the heavy badge of being intuitive, and if she can deal with the insufferable vulnerability of feeling her feelings, she will notice that she sometimes lets things out so others don’t have to. I tell her that her life ahead will be embroidered by her most golden dreams.  I tell her she is magic, and that she will learn more about that later on.

In retrospect, I see that I have always been sensitive, a neptunian soul. Comprised of the stuff of water, music and dreams. A half foot in each dimension, giving the impression of being in several places at once. Even now, I feel sometimes so close to the veil, so psychically malleable  that I swear I am about to get sucked in to a alternate realm. I can see energy constantly dancing around me, and I now understand why I felt the need to be numb, or to be running, in constant movement away from myself. Sometimes, to be intuitive is to hurt.

My affinity for darkness is now cured by candle lit baths and black clothing, staying up till three amidst clouds of sage and dancing with spirits in my bedroom. I am sometimes scared that if I don’t do these things, the darkness will take its own path. Maybe explode, maybe swallow everyone in my sphere of influence whole. Luckily, I am too hopeful about the opulence in pregnant tomorrows, to flirt with death. There are better lovers and brand new fragrances,cobbled alleyways, glittering adventures, and dreams on foreign pillows awaiting ahead.

Had it not been for my various traumas, rebellions and heartache, perhaps I would have lived within the cornered confines of mundanity. Stayed in the toneless safety of my childhood bedroom.  I may have never heard the call from within, to seek. The need to seek magical dimensions beyond the visage of this dense, tangible reality. To find evidence of the web that connects everything that exists..  to possess the ability to see this world as a fabricated , shared hallucination..a veil before the infinite realms that call out behind inner silences.

Your wounds are not as important as what you did with them. How many traumas have you turned into strength? How many times have you transmuted pain, like alchemy, and emerged at the other end, gleaming brilliantly with the sweat of a brand new superpower? Those are the only traumas that count. They are the fertile soil from which we sprout, like plants from outer space. If you can persist without repeating your pain at the mercy of others, if you can triumph above the rage and the noise, you are indestructible.