PonderEthereal

“Can I spend the night?”, I asked. “Of course.. come for the weekend.” And so I packed the pup into the car and drove down. On this night, I sat up until midnight in the living room with the girls. Twas the night before Christmas. They decorated the tree, I fussed with their laptop, making it run right and I checked on mine regularly. We listened to Christmas carols and kept Tobi from peeing on everything in sight.

Eventually, we called it and I went to snuggle up in bed. I laid back with my book and began to read. But without the hubub of voices and motion around me, it began to happen… they began to leak into the sides, the edges, around corners. Thoughts, memories, questions… and finally tears.

My family wasn’t there with me. Ethan was with his dad and along with my ex, his parents, aunts,…

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The benefit of being able to tell this story in retrospect is that everything unfolds reasonably, in order and foreshadowing can occur. If only there had been a narrator present at the moment I decided to go to the beach. He would have leaned in in his movie traitor voice and said something like “A girl, The Gods, A beach. A life at the brink of destruction. Who knew that five simple minutes and a scream to the goddess of destruction and recreation could destroy everything.”

But nay. At the time, I had no idea and it wasn’t until a few days later, sitting on a bench at the courthouse that I would comment on how horribly serendipitously everything unfolded and realize that truly there was a divine hand involved.

So it was entirely obliviously and unthinking that one fateful Monday evening, I went to the…

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I went to a conference this weekend and one of the things that stuck out to me was how REAL my favorite presenters were. They wore regular clothes and spoke in regular words and regular voices and talked about themselves and I was enthralled.

I remember when I started writing about the occult and people really liked how I wrote like I was a real person talking to the reader. In an effort to find ‘my professional self’ or to shape an image that is “sellable”, I think I’ve lost some of that. Nothing exemplifies that more than the fact that I’ve kept the last six months of my life under wraps to the public.

But after being at the conference and not sleeping very well at all last night, I think I FINALLY realize, three years later, that it’s my most personal stories that I…

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Tiamat is a personification of the abyss. She is primordial chaos. In the Babylonian creation myth, the Enûma Elish, she is ‘the beginning’ and from her spring the first of the gods representing land, water and other basic elements of our physical world.

Although her origins are debated, in every culture that is put forth as her possible birth place, the story is the same. She is without human form. She is as massive as the seas and very probably the essence of the sea. She churns and rushes and from her depths belches new life.

Although not a dragon, as we think of dragons today, she has always appeared serpentine to me. Pieces of being slithering, rolling over other pieces of being. When she ‘speaks’, it’s not words, it’s feelings, impressions that roll over you and engulf your entire being and quite possible two city blocks…

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“Why?”

That’s it. Just why. And even as the question comes out, the answer echos around my head close behind. It’s loud. So loud that I should have heard it. The answer is that there is no answer good enough. There is nothing he could tell me that would even come close to explaining the pain that he caused me, the damage he inflicted. This is the horror of abuse. Senseless, deep scars. There is no answer good enough. There is nothing he could say.

Even in that moment. Even that moment frozen in time, with no pretenses, only the reality. He, in the dark, staring into a mirror, looking back at himself, in slow motion, looking over at me. Me, in pain, bearing damage he inflicted staring back at him. Even in that moment, without walls, there is nothing he could have said. No truth from the…

No… clearly the place to start would be when I found out about Mistress. It’s at this point that I realize that I have really tried not to think about all of this. I mean yeah, I knew that. But no… I have REALLY tried not to think about it - to the extent that I have to pull my notes out… my calendar, my blog entries, my emails, my recordings.

Oh, yes. I have really neurotically recorded my life that way. I think it was partially a desire to just talk about things with others, where blogging was concerned… but ultimately, it was an adaptation to living with someone who painted a different reality than the story of actual events. Any time his character could have been cast in doubt, in retrospect, he simply rewrote the story. So he would get caught in a lie, fuck someone else, say…

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I should digress into secrecy, shame and humiliation because as all this was going on, I didn’t tell anyone. I barely told anyone we were physically separated until long after it happened. In fact, for 6 years. Although every now and then, it would spill out in moments of extreme hurt, anger or frustration, I was either afraid or too ashamed to tell anyone. As I write this, this is the very first time I’ve considered spilling out the entire story and it feels very much like a confession.

I knew, as everything was going on, over the years, that his cheating and other abuses were not ok or normal but I still wouldn’t or couldn’t see clear enough to label them for what they were - abuses. Even though, on some level, I knew. I also knew later that his “crazy making”, as a…