carrying the dead

i can't remember if this is posted here somewhere already, and frankly i'm too tired and/or lazy to look it up. so here goes nothing.

november 21, 1990. i was supposed to go out with my girlfriend at the time, but was asked to work until close at my store. i readily agreed. i like my job well enough, i liked my boss, the extra cash wouldn't hurt and she would understand. i called, she did, and that was that. until 11pm. her parents called me then, to tell me. she had decided to surprise me, to come and see me at work, something she had never done, a place she had never been. she lived on the north side of denver, i on the south, and we usually met somewhere in the middle. one patch of ice on an overpass, one inattentive moment or tiniest lack of ability to overcome that ice patch, and her car went through a rail and fell. she more than likely was killed instantly. and so was i.

this writing will not finished today, not by a long shot. there's so much more under all of this than even i understand that it will be pouring out in pieces and bits for weeks, months, years. but it is time to let it out. it's time to figure it out. because it is partially responsible for the mess that is my mental landscape.

i don't mean to absolve myself or to blame my entire depressive history on one car accident almost 20 years ago. heaven knows that i was enough of a mess prior to that. looking back, i had been wrestling with depression for years. carolyn showed me joy. she was not a cure, not a miracle that kept my illness from plaguing me. but she offset it to some degree, or gave me highs to match my lows. she forced me to see the big beautiful picture, let me have some faith in that beauty that is everything. she took me to beautiful places where she had spent her life and showed me how they made her feel, and together we felt our own smallness and significance in the face of mountains and lakes and rivers and forests that were so immense yet made of the tiniest plants and creatures. she gave my heart something into which it could pour itself.

when she died, that part of me died with her, or so i imagined. i dammed up the font of my soul, turned off my feelings and began to live my life in black and white. without her in it, the world simply had no color, and i foolishly accepted that it would always be so. without joy, there is no color. without that other piece to my puzzle, i did not fit the grand design. i shut off my heart and went about life as though there was never to be anything like that ever again. my place in this world had been taken from me, and now was my time to be but an extra in the movie, some cog in the machine that made the story go along for others.

now i have been trying in my own screwed up way to capture all of that for 18 long years and i didn't even realize it. my heart has been off, but it has not wanted to be, and it has been trying to make its way out of the prison i built for it all along. through whatever means necessary - be it drugs, religion, self-flagellative relationships, rebellion, music - my soul has been trying to free itself and regain that magic i once lost. for years i reeled with it, allowing myself to flail uncontrollably in the world and make a mess of things. for years now i have been trying to control it, trying to point that impulse in some direction that i can perceive as 'responsible' or 'productive'.

i am not, down deep inside of my soul, someone who feels nothing. i am not a man who is rigid, who needs control, who want things to be orderly and regimented. i have tried to be, and i have been fighting myself. i am kali. i am wild, i am freedom that is not run amok but travels creation with abandon and self-assurance. somewhere within me lies that bohemian youth that does not care for the way that thing seem but rather sees things for what they are. somewhere within me lies that free soul that she unleashed that could find joy in the bark of a tree or the tickle of a crawling ladybug on his skin.

i have told myself for years, secretly, that i died on that night, but the truth is that i tried to kill myself. not literally, but figuratively. i have been punishing myself for the decision to stay at work by killing everything she gave me. her name was carolyn, and i loved her fiercely, for she taught me to live fiercely. and she is the dead i carry with me. and man - that would really piss her off.

question

drawn to the ground and an end to flight? i suppose. i have flown, tossed by breezes that were not mine, unfamiliar sky, bold and beautiful and blue, rippled clouds and volcano-poured sunrises, windy clearness buffeting and gray mists hanging low and pregnant with possibility. i have thrilled in unpredictable loops, stopped my heart with close passes to the ground at speeds that seemed irrecoverable, danced the tops of trees and flown still and serene against a neverending baby blue. the province of dreamers was my home.

my string plucked from my tail, solid, predictable, unmoving and safe, the ground has beckoned and i have slammed into it headlong and pointed, my nose buried in turf and leaves and things unfamiliar, things i have seen only from above and which have me feeling lost and wondering what this is wrapped around my tip. trees which were my footbeds are now my companions, soil and roots now where my feet rest and wander. my legs are unsteady, my eyes unaccustomed to obstacle are clouded with forests and fields and mountains and buildings. my vantage, once grand and unspoiled has contracted into a small frame to fit with the rest of the grounded.

am i of the grounded? can i be one of these who surround me, feet happily twined in grasses and hands that play in those leaves, toes that feel their way around roots and do not stub and stumble upon them? i fear my hair becoming tangled in those naked branches, breaking my now tender feet upon rocks i have not felt before, tearing my skin against trunks around which i am unused to making my way, having always merely lightly touched their tops and pivoted over.

i feel too heavy. i feel my relentless weight bound to the earth. lightness is my being, my way, my dance. i am not a dancer here. i am not a dreamer here. this is not the province of dreamers, this does not yet feel like my home. i am still of the sky, and i will continue to look longingly to it, wondering how i became so heavy.

who am i?

so, while falling asleep last night brandie told me that i really do seem to feel better, like i'm happier. nice to hear. then she said something that completely spun me off of my axis, not for its sadness or cruelty or any such thing but simply because it's me we're talking about here and i can't let something be simple. she said it's like the real me is being let out, being allowed to emerge, something along those lines. you'll have to forgive me for not remembering her exact turn of phrase - i've slept since then.

all i could think of was how disturbing a thought that is, that the real me has somehow been subsumed by this disease of the brain and mind. but has it been? was the real me that which has been buried under mountains of sadness? or is it more accurate to say that is the real me, and we are now in the process of creating a new me, chris v2.0? after all, it's my brain that is miswired, my patterns of thought which are twisted into self-defeating and self-loathing spirals of doubt and fear. it's my emotions that have driven me into slow, dark doldrums of sadness and sparked off into fits of irritable anger. it's my own analytical ability and emotional sensitivities that have allowed me to fight with others by finding the thing which will hurt most to hear in the course of an argument and using it against them. i am, to some degree anyway, the very thing which i have set out to defeat.

i don't mean to suggest that depression and anxiety completely define who i am, but to a point they are part of who i am. the real me is indeed sad, is indeed a miserable sack of excuses and mental boobytraps designed to preserve my own self image of someone undeserving of what he has or might have. we are, in part, not only the 'good person down inside there'. we are, to some degree, defined by our behavior, or no one would ever be accountable for his actions because someone will always believe 'there's a good person in there, he's just hurting'. there very well be a good person in here, and i'll be working very hard in the years to come to make that person who i am, but for now i'm not certain at all that who i really am is being uncovered so much as reborn.

i do believe in a soul. i believe unquestionably that there is some fundamental particle of our consciousness that is a piece of the eternal everything, and so in that regard i believe that each and every person is capable of good because at our core each is grown from the same seed. but i also cannot see how that seed is all that defines us in each life (in case there is more than one - a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that i have had experience and recent revelations that suggest that there is more to our existence than this one spin through the solid world).

let's look at it using the seed as an analogy. a seed grow into a tree, yes? now, each tree is grown from the same thing, built of the same stuff. we see an elm, we see it is grown from an elm seed. we see it is built of xylem and phloem, woody fiber and bark, leaves and chlorophyll, cellulose, cell walls and membrane layered on one another, nuclei, mitochondria and all the other building blocks common between them. now then, when we see the elm, we also take into account its location and its form, its general health and its effect on its surroundings. if our elm stands on a riverbank, healthy and strong, evenly formed and branches spread out to the sun, leaves wide and green, gathering sunlight and providing a home for a squirrel and countless insects, giving shade to lesser plants and acting as it should to filter carbon dioxide into oxygen for the mammals in the neighborhood, we see its magnificent beauty, accept the miracle that is the tree and praise its wonderful design and say to ourselves 'that is a good tree'. but if our elm grows too close to our house, growing unevenly and with its roots upsetting our foundation, causing thousands of dollars in damage and costing hours of cost or effort to remove the offending part, or even the entire tree, in order to preserve that which it is destroying, we no longer see the beauty and wonder of the tree and say to ourselves 'damn tree buggered up my house and cost me a fortune'. the elm is still an elm. it is still made of the same stuff. but the effect it has on its surroundings has changed what it is. its role is not 'beautiful tree', but 'destroyer of sanctuary'. not 'good tree' but 'bad tree'.

is it not likely that we as humans are like this? whether speaking literally or metaphysically, we are all built of the same stuff. we are, each of us, a conglomeration of not only that fundamental bit of the divine that we call the soul, but also of our neuroses and behaviors and beliefs and loves and hates and fears and joys. those things are as much a part of who we are as the spark of life itself, and if those things are negative then our true self is, for that time, a negative self. my chemistry has made me sad. my thoughts have made me sad and fearful. these things are part and parcel of who i am, and i accept that. my true self for most of my life has been unhappy and afraid. but i can move the tree, uproot my elm gently and with care and move it to the riverbank where it can flourish and do what a tree is capable of doing. i can turn 'bad tree' into 'good tree' by changing the things that define 'bad tree'. there is nothing other than that sad person to uncover or resurrect, but the building blocks are the same as those of a happy person. it is simply their assembly which is off, and design flaws can be worked around and compensated for. so while i may not believe that my true self is coming to the fore, i do believe that i am redefining who i am, and while daunting that is also one hell of an exciting prospect.