Tree Tops: by Jim Dollar Photography

It should come as no surprise to me that most of my life, I’ve been afraid of being alone.  Whenever I am alone, the shell-overlay that keeps me together starts dropping, disintegrating, and I am left with the shattered pieces of what makes up my selves, all vying to have their voices heard and their needs met.  I can remember, when I was a younger girl, getting an extreme sense of panic whenever I was alone.  Not always, though.  At times, I craved that time of sole being, connecting with nature and the world around me; connecting with what I then called “God”.  There do seem to be more parts of me that are afraid of being alone than that revel in it, though, and there is this underlying lack of being able to catch my breath that streams out from me whenever I am left to my own thoughts.  It is confusing, to even me, this frightening unknown regarding which of these thoughts, which personalities are going to come barreling through – and face forward.

It always surprises me when I meet a new one.  There are so many facets of me that are yet to be discovered.  I’m not exactly a diamond in the rough, instead, I am cut by some mysterious jewel-maker into differing reflecting sides.  These sides aren’t all symmetrical, and they aren’t all polished.  Some don’t seem to be sides at all, but little juttings-out or material that form a small ledge, or bump, off the main formation.  Often, they are sides that I’ve never seen, having equally, no idea of their existence.  In the quiet, when only my inner voices are heard, when the distractions and confusion of my outer world grow still, a small voice can sometimes make its way to the surface of us.

As I am outside doing menial chores in the crisping air of descending fall, this is just such a day, as it brings out another of us while I am taking care of the animals that make up so much of my present life.  One of those very rough-cut or jutting sides surfaces — comes forth from within me.  It begins with the changing out of the waters for the wolf-dogs.

Whenever I am using hosepipes, the smooth rubber molding sliding with a familiar fit into my smallish hand, whenever I am dipping animal foods from bags, the powdered scent of the processed bits clouding up to assault my nostrils, I am taken back to periods of time from my childhood, spent in the barns and coops and pens, yards and woods and pastures.  I see the hoses that we used on the farm when I was a child.  The animals of my memory come and take drinks.  I see the rusting metal bowls, the upside-down hubcaps, the wooden troughs.  Dogs walk through my mind’s eye and lick up the cool liquid:  Jo-Jo, the German Shepherd, Chigger, the feist, Terry, the Bulldog lapped the water as it emerged from the spigot, Sirius, the old, sick stray that I’d befriended, daily delivering water – right up to where he sat.

Water slides down from the pipe in my mind’s eye, filling to overflowing the containers, as Hogs push each other with dirty snouts.  Gathering in the ensuring mud, they jostle for the prime positions for the best fare being slopped from my father’s metal bucket.  The splash of water against the side of stainless-steel bowls calls to multi-colored, glittering yard-chickens.  Coming in an awkward run, they dip down their feathered heads, lift orange-yellow beaks to the sky as the cool well-water slides down their parched throats, and my eyes scan the grassy tufts from which they emerged, trying to decipher there the hidden nests of fresh eggs.  Cats weave and twine betwixt my legs, attempting to trip me up as I progress from one animal’s station to another.

This youthful environment provides innumerable opportunities for me to join with, and appreciate, the soul of nature.  Skip forward to the current scenes that make up my “now” life, and it is easy to see that my current environment, full of dogs and cats and woods and sun, reflects this same connection.  These similar experiences build bridges that, inadvertently, drag me back and forth across times.  Flashbacks start.  My senses are confused.  I’m not sure where or “when” I am, or who I’m connected to.  I’m not sure which of my personalities is supposed to be “facing forward”, and I may even forget who the important people in my life are.  I have lists of people who are critical to me at any given point – but the lists are rarely ever tied to any independent feeling of where they belong in time.  I depend upon outside, experiential, environmental clues for that.

I stand at the home where I reside in what you all know as the current time.   Above the enclosures for the wolfdogs tower large trees and my eyes are drawn up the length of them to stop where their branches meet the sky.  The sight of deciduous leaves and evergreen needles create a lace fabric, fractals upon fractals revealing their primordial patterns in this limitless, visual canvas.  This day, as my eyes fall upon the pattern made by the deep green of the trees against the bright blue of the sky, I morph.  I shift.  I become a thing, a beast, stopped in time — my gaze locked on that beautiful mystery of nature that must have invoked feelings in the innermost heart of those who originated our species, from the time when our newly opened eyes first ever saw the scene.

Looking up into this tapestry of nature, some primal self awakens within me.  I am drawn up, into the trees, my spirit, my very existence seeming to bond with them.  My body, on the ground, is frozen, as affixed to its spot as any rooted tree ever was.  I am immobilized – - outside of time.  Everything is stillness, and stillness is Everything.  The air blows through me, the very act of my breathing a thing of non-happening.  I am one with the earth, therefore, in flesh, I am nothing.  I am Tree Gazer.

I’m not sure what has gone on in the life of Tree Gazer.  I’m not sure why he looks at dissociation into the trees as an escape from events in this mortal plane.  He can see nothing around him; only above.  He is aware only of the fact that he is an invisible part of Earth.  Nothing can touch him, nothing can harm him; he cannot move, for he is not.

As soon as he slips into our primary train of conscious being, I know him as myself and my brother, both.  For The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now remembers stepping aside, and back, letting Tree Gazer come in to become one with the beauty of the forest, to become invincible in his nothingness so that goings-on did not affect us.  The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now suspects that these days were days at school, in the forest behind the playgrounds, or at the farm, past the pastures, lying atop fallen leaves on the gentle, tree-laden hills that led to the creek in our woods.  Then again, perhaps, at our Grandmother’s house, behind the old out-buildings.  These are places where our physical form was most likely lying – while Tree Gazer stopped our pain, taking us up – - to join beauty, up and away into the most majickal of places where the trees meet the sky.  Where all is well!  All is well when All is nought.

We are stuck, Tree Gazer and I, staring into the treetops, and as liquid begins escaping from the top rim of the metal washtub in the enclosure of the wolfdogs, Jupiter and Merlin, there is a part of us that is aware of what you all perceive as “now”.  There is a knocking at the door of our awareness from some unknown someone else inside who is saying, “You must re-engage with this life – for there are other living beings who need your waters, and there is a bill for it that will have to be paid, so you mayn’t stand here, staring into space like one devoid of your senses!  WAKE UP!!”

And with a sigh of resignation, deep down in our spirit, we climb our awareness up to the top, and out, and descending, falling from the Heavens, slowly, ever so reluctantly…we Awake.

Thanks to:  Jim Dollar Photography, for this beautiful representation of what Tree Gazer sees!

Trout Lilly on Black by Jim Dollar Photography

I’m going to be put to sleep again.  Another surgical procedure – though this time it’s only a biopsy and a couple of lights and cameras.  At times past, the repercussions to my body were much greater.  Every time that I face being put under, I ask myself the questions that are probably normal questions for everyone to ask.  What if I don’t wake up? What if this night is my last night on Earth?

After all, there are people who don’t wake up.  One has to sign that “Waiver” that basically states, “If I don’t wake up, nobody has the right to sue you because I know that those are the risks I am taking.”  Still, I don’t think anyone ever PLANS to not wake up.  Maybe some people have, and it would be interesting to know whether or not those people woke up.  The one time that I planned to not wake up, life thwarted my plans — but that time had nothing to do with a surgery.  After that rude awakening, I walked around feeling like a ghost for months.  Looking at my life from the parallel place that would have been my non-existence, trying to imagine how the world that I was reluctantly seeing before me would have performed without my physical presence in it.

Surviving operations, having health problems thwarted via modern medicine, these experiences have left me with the same sort of perspective.  If I had been born in a time or a place without modern medicine, I’d have died as a teenager, while giving birth to my first daughter.  Most likely, she’d have died as well.  As it was, it took a valiant effort and an extreme amount of suffering to bring her forth into this world.  When it came time for her to birth her own first daughter, it again took a team of people to help my granddaughter arrive here safely, and alive.  I think about how this is against the evolutionary progress of the species, realizing that my genes would have been culled out from those of the fittest, the most survivable of our race.  I ponder what it means that we are a people who take care of the weak, the injured, the deformed, the imperfect.  It’s unclear to me if this is evidence of our becoming stronger as a species because we are showing compassion, thus an elevated plane of “living”, or if it only serves to weaken us so that any beings we encounter who do not share our reverence for human life will slaughter us quickly, mercilessly.

This morning, my worry isn’t about this survival of our species, but about my personal survival.  Surviving has presented a conundrum for me all along since I seem to have been born without that basic appreciation for life that I’m told I should have.  Mostly, it’s about the suffering, these feelings in me that my living is a thing too difficult to be borne by the mere mortal that I am.  It seems that I need more than this one lifetime in order to work out why the living is worth it in the balance, or that I’ve lived enough lifetimes to know that it is not.  That is not to say that there are not times when I am exuberant about living!  Excited about living!  The mere present made to me of a full-of-color fall leaf, or a multicolored stone, the breathtaking landscapes of Earth, the overpowering brilliance of a sunset, I suspect that I drink these things in more fully than most humans do.  Perhaps it is this lingering at death’s door that makes me even more appreciative of the miraculous beauty in every part of living that I make it through.  I would not trade any of those sorts of time in my living for dying.  It’s the remembering them when I am so overwhelmed that is the crux of my problem.

I also suffer from survivor’s guilt.  Isn’t every woman some mother’s daughter?  Every son, some father’s son?  It seems unfair to me that I have access to modern medicine, that when my gallbladder and ovaries and uterus all went haywire, I was able to have the offending parts removed and continue living the life that is deprived of others who are not so lucky.  Not just the people who lived in our past before our surgeons got this good, but the people who die in the here and now, today, in the jungles, or on a cot lining the halls of a non-sterile building in a non-air-conditioned medical center, their faces, their presences, the ghosts of them flit through my mind.  Who decides who lives and who dies?  Who decides who gets to live when, and who gets to live where?  I’m not the only one who ponders these questions.  These are questions for the ages.  Even if these questions are answered in my next incarnation, I am certain that other mysteries will come to replace the present ones, and I will still be left wondering.  This seems to be a terminal condition of my now evolving life-form.

Another thing that some might consider an oddity is that I have wondered why we allow ourselves this act of sleeping through the violence done to our physical form.  I firmly believe that our higher self is awake and aware of every thing that ever happens to us, and that these realities are ingrained within our soul whether we are conscious of them or not.  That has certainly proven to be the case with my Dissociative Disorder.  As a child, I asked myself why people wanted to be put to sleep when it was obvious that their bodies would still KNOW what happened.  It seemed better to go through it consciously, so at least one would understand WHY there was damage to their psyches.  I was determined that if I ever needed surgery, I’d want to be aware of what people were doing to me.

A friend of mine has been unfortunate enough to have woken up during surgical procedures, and hearing her tell the tale makes me know that I would not want to be awake!  I’ve read enough true and invented tales of people who are aware and alert while losing limbs, being disemboweled, having layers of injured skin peeled away, that I know my childish idea was one better left dismissed.  I’m not even saying that it isn’t true, the thing that I believed about our knowing all that has happened to us physically being better in the long run, but I’ve experienced enough of my own suffering to know that my naive notions of wanting to KNOW what has happened to my body at all times is a flight of fancy better left fanciful!  There must be a mark left upon our overall being, though.  There must be some residual, “What the fuck was that dissociation through medicine that you just did, and then you let a stranger poke knifes in me and carve me up while you were gone?” feeling left over in our bodies somewhere.

Being alive in the time that I’m in is a thing for which I’m grateful.  Having doctors who can repair bodies is a thing for which I am grateful.  My son would not be alive today if surgery had not been performed on his tiny form, barely a year old, and as he makes his own way down the path of a medical career, I realize that he is a part of the perpetuated cycle.  Modern medical techniques save a life that would have been lost, and that life continues to study more in the annals of medicine so that future people can be saved and contribute more to this world.  So, what does this mean for us, this fact that we now sometimes get to decide who lives and who dies?  Because, that’s really what it is.  When my gallbladder attacks got so bad that I could barely eat and was in a constant state of pain, because I was born in America, because I was smart enough to work the system and obtain a physician, because I acquired the resources to pay someone to cut me, and because someone agreed to cut me for a fee, I got to live.  At that same moment, I’m sure that elsewhere in the world, another girl, in the same physical circumstance, lay dying.

The point is that with all of our “evolved” thinking, with all of our progress, I’m not sure that we are making progress in the way that I would consider true goodness.  We live with blinders on.  Some of us on this planet live with so much to eat that our health is affected in very negative ways.  As a person who is overweight and who has type two Diabetes, I’m only too aware of my own participation in this system.  Others of us on this planet live with so little to eat that our health is affected in very negative ways.  Intelligent, worthwhile people, people like my son, those people starve to death or die of untreated diseases and afflictions every day.  Tick, tick, tock, tock……  Lives wasted.  Opportunities wasting away.  It’s not just the people who are dying who are losing out.  We are all letting the geniuses of our species go undiscovered, wasting away, suffering into little evaporating pools of nothingness due to the mere circumstances of their births.  Who knows but what we might have already discovered immortality for us all if we truly knew how to harvest those richest of intelligence treasures amongst us?  It is true that the people who are dying in Africa have the most diverse genes, the most potential for helping the whole of us.

It leaves me to wonder if our species here will ever get it right.  When a problem as simple as one side of the planet getting too much to eat, or too much of the wrong things, and another side getting not enough to eat, so much so that they are never really viable humans, (which leaves me to wonder why the pro-lifers aren’t worried about THIS type of death), when seeing something this glaring not being fixed, I have little hope that our quest for enlightenment will ever come to fruition.  We are like worried mothers who complicate things well past any plausible solution.  We make excuses for ourselves and we blame others.  I know this technique well, for it’s one that I’m currently attempting to face head-on and outgrow in this microcosm that is my selves.

So, what do I want my legacy to be?  I ask myself this question as I go to the table, as I go to sleep and go under the knife, yet again.  As my unconscious body cringes inside at the things that I’m allowing to be done to it, I wonder what would be said about me if I didn’t come back.  After all, one day, I won’t.  One day, I will sleep my last sleep, sing my last song, write my last word, draw my last breath.  Death is coming to us all.  This is the one appointment that we all must keep, regardless of which side of the planet we find ourselves being born, regardless of what type of medicine we have access to, because, currently, we have not found that way to physical immortality.  Recently, someone said to me, “I think that you are an interesting person.”  I guess that’s as good a legacy as any.  Perhaps I can at least mirror for others what it is like to connect to life’s spark – even though I often do it reluctantly.  Maybe this act of being fully engaged, fully “awake”, makes me stand out from the crowd.  Maybe I can inspire someone else to have the courage to be considered “interesting”.

This life is all that we know will ever matter to ourselves.  It’s the only thing of which we can be sure:  The present moment.  It may be that whatever we plan to do with that doesn’t mean anything in the long run.  As a friend of mine said, “If life means nothing to you, if you don’t want to be alive anyway and none of it means anything, then why would you care what other people think of what you do?”  It’s a good question.  A fair question.  Something inside of me must not fully believe that this moment is all that exists.  But, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what else does.  I do know that being asleep later today, on that table, some part of me will be looking out, wondering, “What the fuck?”, and waiting to awaken, yet, again….

This post is dedicated to:  Those needlessly dying, in acknowledgment of their suffering, and as witness to their having lived at all.

With Appreciation to:  Jim Dollar Photography – whose images always stir my soul to appreciative living.

Oak Limb in Fog, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC by: Jim Dollar Photography

I now know that I must intellectually come to terms with the fact that some very bad thing happened to me.  I don’t want this to be true.  It’s a good thing that I’m not in my right mind, because who, in their right mind, would want to come to such a realization?  If one had the chance to forget, to lock something bad away so that one could live one’s life without the haunting memory of the thing, wouldn’t that be the reasonable path?

Well, that’s what I’ve done.  Must have done.  The problem is that The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now doesn’t exactly get to escape the ghost of my/our past — because, inside of me reside the people who KNOW what happened.  Not only do they know, but they are stuck.  They are encapsulated in the moment of the terrors, forever in that shocked state of the denial of a reality that was so much for them to bear that they broke off from me, sacrificed themselves for me, so that I could go on living the normal part of our lives.

In the wee hours of this morning, I awoke from a dream that was fleeing my conscious mind, as dreams are wont to do, and the dream itself had nothing to do with reality and didn’t even seem that symbolic.  There were emotions though, in the dream, and such was their nature that they left me feeling helpless and hopeless.  I’m not sure if that’s what triggered her, or if she was just there because of built-up stresses over the last couple of weeks, (for I’d felt her timid presence trying to break through several times), but something reached far into the sleeping depths, and awakened Shaky Girl.

Some people might take issue with the fact I give my personalities such odd titles; mere descriptive terms instead of proper names.  It’s even tempting to imagine that they might get offended by the sheer silliness of how I chose to refer to them.  The thing is that they/we understand that to become more and more integrated, to become all one big person, this is the goal of our communication, and so we try very hard not to make people who are more and more distinctively separate from myself.  Our lives are actually one life, broken into snapshots, better yet, little time-elapsed reels of experiential video.  We are all the same person, but we cannot all access the memories of the entire being.  Thus far, in our lives, this has been a very good thing.  Without it, we would most likely be already insane (more insane?) and at an even less functioning state that what now serves us.  As it lies within us now, there are still differing parts of my selves who have contracts to deal with certain things that we encounter in our lives. The Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now isn’t aware of all of the terms and conditions of the contracts.  I only know when someone nudges at the control center of the mind, pushes on the membrane of the symbolic wall that separates those who are in control of the body at any given moment from those who are not, letting me know that someone else has something pressing that they must say or do.

As I was awakened this morning, this was apparently the case, because I came directly out of a sleep state into the State of Being that is Shaky Girl, my body jerking and spasming.  She is what she sounds like.  Someone who shakes and shakes, and shakes some more.  From an outside perspective, it looks as if my body is having a seizure.  It’s as if I something cold has stricken me to the core.

I believe that Shaky Girl is more aware when things are wrong with me than I am.  My entire lifetime has been built around hiding from myself what I am feeling.  I’ve gone to such extremes to do this that I’ve invented people who can hold certain pains for me, and I’ve constructed various Shell People that I can wear so that I appear to be functioning to the outside world when, inside, I’m not functioning at all.  Inside, there are always people screaming.  Perhaps Shaky Girl is closer to the core of my true self than my “presenting” self is.  I believe that she can hear the people screaming and knows when trauma needs to be dealt with.  She allows herself to be used as a release valve for all we are running through our already overloaded capacitor.

Shaky Girl has not revealed to me where and when she was born.  Perhaps she doesn’t know, herself.  When she comes into my being, as she did this morning, I’m not even sure that she is aware of me.  She locks her spirit into the body-shell that we share and overlays herself.  She takes the body and I can not get it back until her shaking is finished.  I’ve tried speaking to her and telling her that I need the body back (especially when this has happened in the presence of a person who is distressed by my apparently seizing self), but she does not seem to hear me.  No one else would hear me either, for our speaking to one another always happens inside my head — all the better to hide from the outside world how disjointed we truly are.  Once, during a time that I really needed to come back, I tried singing to her in my mind, with the same melodious tunes that I had used to comfort my birth children when they were infants.  To my great surprise, this worked!  She never responded or gave recognition to my presence, but she did begin to calm.  She was able to let go of the body and go back to where-ever-she-goes, and I was able to stop shaking.

After a visit from Shaky Girl, I am left exhausted!  Often, my muscles are sore from being drawn up so tightly and shivering all over.  When she is needing to express herself, I can feel her for days, tapping at me, wanting to come out.  My clenched teeth will be noticed, and a background, constant hum of calming will be running through my mind.  I’m not sure who the gatekeeper is, who decides who manifests and gets to control the body and who doesn’t, but I know that it is not in my conscious control.  Whomever is the gatekeeper, this entity is apparently aware of when it is safe to have someone manifest who cannot function at all, or when it is best to let no one function (as is the case when Skeleton Man shuts us down in order to prevent acts of self-harm to the body).  This Master Controller doesn’t agree to let Shaky Girl out when I am driving, or standing in an office surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers.  When sleeping in my bed, I guess it is deemed safe enough to allow her the time she needs to process her traumas.

When I come directly out of a sleep state into the Being of Shaky Girl, my body having been hijacked, quakes ripping through me as earthquakes do the planet, this is a frightening thing to have happen.  It is especially frightening because I do not know what it is that is wrong.  I cannot hear or see anything through her.  I’m not sure that she hears or sees, either.  Our experience is that of an intense emotional state, the tension of which causes painfully knotted muscles giving me great incentive to get Shaky Girl to stop her control of the body.  It isn’t a comfortable feeling to have one’s self taken away from oneself, and while she is relieved to be able to process and manifest, I am unable to move or speak –  or stop shaking.  That’s one of the irritations of sharing a body.  What affects one, affects all of the others.

There also is no assurance that allowing Shaky Girl to come forward will actually help me, or her, in any way.  She seems just as “stuck” every time.  She doesn’t seem to be able to be reasoned with, and when I allow myself to meld with and become co-conscious with her, I can see or hear nothing beyond the emotion that is happening.  I have no idea why she is distressed, why she can’t speak, why she is shaking.  I have no idea what has happened to her, what has birthed her.  I would like for this to change.  I would like to help her to get “unstuck”.  I think that whatever experiences she holds for me, they must be pretty horrific to her.  The thing that I want her to understand is that “we” are no longer stuck wherever she is stuck.  That things that were unbearable for her might not be unbearable for us now.  I want to be strong enough that she can trust me to handle whatever knowledge might come forward from her.  I hope that I am.

This morning, for the first time, Shaky Girl parted her lips – and made a noise.  To my knowledge, it is the first sound that she has ever uttered.  It is the first time that something other than shaking has come through.  It was hardly a word.  It was a guttural, animal, low calling out.  A distressed beginning of a shriek; but it was something.  At least she is trying.  I am proud of her for that.  I’m proud of her for having borne up to the task of holding some awful secret for The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now for so many years.  I would like to find a way that Shaky Girl and I can be there for one another, comfort one another, share experiential memories with one another.

In a lot of cases where one person is divided into many, as we are, the separate consciousnesses of the self fear that to integrate is to die.  Since I can’t really access any thoughts from Shaky Girl, I have no idea how she feels about this.  It is my guess that her only fear revolves around her memories, and like the others residing in this form co-consciously with me, she is not afraid that she will cease to be when we are, at long last, all of us, merged.  Most of us have realized that we don’t have to be afraid of becoming One.  Becoming one continuously, linearly remembering/experiencing person does not mean that any of our individual selves will cease to exist.  To disappear into the whole does not mean a total disappearance of any one self, because that one self must exist in order to construct the whole.  It only means a difference in the way we function.

It is the same sort of thing that will happen to the whole of the human race in the eventual.  We are all already One — tied together in an inescapable, undeniable way, hurling through eternity, each of us needed to produce the glorious manifestation of our vastly different experiences.  All of the positive, all of the negative, all of the traumas, all of the victories, all of the living, all of the dying, one day, we will all remember.  This connectivity is already there, and we are all, already One; it is a simple dysfunction in our communication that makes us seem otherwise.

Dedicated to my now departed friend and fellow writer: 

Paula Arnold

~ with whom I appreciate being joined in the great One, and with thanks to her presence in the place where so much of her heart still dwells:  Heartfriends Inn

Heartfelt thanks, as always, to my brilliant fellow traveler, who lends me his beautiful imagery for visual representation of my story (and who tells great ones of his own):  Jim Dollar Photography

I did a very brave thing.  It’s not a thing that seems that brave.  I mean, if anyone else had done it, it would probably have been no big deal.  This weekend, I actually drove down the driveway of the house that I lived in when I was growing up.  Well, was driven down the driveway, to be more accurate.  The point is that I went down the driveway – at my own request.

Now, it doesn’t seem like a brave thing, to go down the driveway of one’s childhood home.  People do that sort of thing all of the time.  I’ve even heard fairy stories about how people return to these places because they feel SAFE there.  For most, I guess it’s not that traumatic or unusual an event.  For a select group of us, however, it’s a bit like going to sleep and saying, “Hey, I’m going to close my eyes and lose consciousness specifically so that the nightmares have something to do tonight; I invite them into my head and my desire is to run the night with them, toss and turn, getting no real rest, finding no peace in the quiet.”

Don’t get me wrong.  My entire childhood was not horrible.  That home where I lived from the age of five until the age of fourteen, it taught me a lot of lessons, and made me fall in love with a lot of things in life that have served me well.  On that forty-acre farm I learned to love the land.  I became a part of the animals, a part of the plants.  I learned to feel the heartbeat of Earth, herself, travel her flowing waters, traverse the very veins of her that give life.  I’m sure that it was there that I began to feel the stirrings of the web that was woven around me, and the particular fibers spun out from me that would be followed by some, tugged on by others.

Many of my personalities were developed there, and they were created to enjoy or perform certain tasks, so in some ways, I think I got a fuller experience, was able to manifest interest in more areas than my friends and family who are all stuck in one mode of being.  If this mental disorder that I have is responsible for making my life today difficult, it also has come with some blessings that I never fail to recognize and even, on the good days, be grateful for.  I’m sure that, on more than one occasion, my dissociative disorder has saved my life.  Our lives.

The thing is that when I return to any place from my past, I’m not only returning to memories of a past time, but I literally become the person from my past.  It’s not the action of watching a movie; it is being the action.

I will attempt to explain for people the difference in how someone might react “normally” (and I use this word reluctantly but can think of none to replace it) to returning to a place that invokes childhood memories, compared to what I experience in such a place.  There are triggers in seeing certain things that wake up in me states of being that were present at the time that memory tracks were laid down.  The Awakened One turns his or her face up and out, vying for a portion of my thinking consciousness.  When I am faced with stimuli that spawns many different presences to come forward, then they are all speaking, feeling, being, all at the same time.  Things don’t feel as if they are in my past, but in a current, present moment of beingness.  That state of being is very different from my “normal” (there’s a form of that seemingly inescapable word again), current self.  My “now” self gets lost and I often can’t even feel parts of my body.  The first things to go are my face and my hands.  My mouth has no feeling, and my speech seems forced through lips of wax that don’t belong to me, my fingertips numb and are unable to send signals to my brain regarding the things that I am touching.  Perhaps my brain is too busy to devote precious resources to things like mere physical feeling.

It works like this:  As I take the gravel-covered dirt-road to the old farmhouse, I see that the mailbox has moved.  It’s on the opposite side of the road – at the top of the driveway, and not across the road.  The Artist me sees it and remembers crossing that road many, many times, admiring the details of everything, longing to take out a graphite pencil and trace the lines of it all onto paper.  She would sit and look at things until she could merge into them and BE the thing.  She‘d then try to spit that experience out on some sort of canvas using all sorts of mediums.

As we turn into the driveway, the Little Girl me who used to walk to the bus, the one who was terrified of everyone and who cried before school almost every morning, is surprised at how short the driveway seems and that it is not at all as steep as she remembers.  The cold feeling, structure, and even the smell of the green metal bus seats come back to her as she recalls boarding the bus, plopping down and immediately staring at the ice crystals formed on the glass of the window.  She loved creating fantasy kingdoms in her mind and making up the people who lived there – while hoping that no one would speak to her and draw her back to the real world where there were no beautiful Ice Castles.  She remembers the tears running down the cheeks of her mother on some mornings, and her mother saying, “But, you HAVE to go to school, Deneen.  They’ll put me in jail if you don’t.”  I don’t know why she was so frightened or upset, this Little Girl me – but I remember her being so as those feelings are brought into the “now” of my existence.  The “now” me feels sorry for the mother, and understands better now the mother’s position.

Glancing at the bank that lines the red-muddied & graveled road, I remember climbing it, pretending to be a mountain climber.  I fantasized about actually being a mountain climber, and in my mind, my feet KNEW where to find the small outcrops to gain leverage  to propel me up the side of steep cliffs!  All of this practicing made me unafraid of heights and jumping off things.  I became one with the earth that I was using as my personal gym.

Once, while I was playing on the bank in this manner, I encountered a snake and met the “Me Who Fears Snakes”.  She screamed her first scream, my not knowing where the sound was coming from until I puzzled out that it was emitting from my own open mouth.  Silly, really, because “I’VE” never been afraid of snakes.

The Male personality, who is somehow tied to the mountain-climbing-person, sees the curve of the drive and pays attention all the way down because he LOVES riding his bike down this road!  He goes very, very fast, can ride with no hands, can ride standing up on the pedals – with no hands – just coasting so fast, the wind whipping through our hair, laying into the curves with our body and feeling the delicate balance of being caught between fast motion and the gentle pull of gravity.  We come to a gravel flinging skid at the bottom of the hill.

The side of me that loves burying her toes in freshly turned soil, who loves picking ripe strawberries, hot from the sun, and popping them into her mouth, who brings her mother the huge cucumbers thought to be past their prime with a request that they be peeled for her, this Earth Connected part of me mourns the loss of her gardens as she sees the barren soil to the left of the driveway, bearing only fences and grass as its current fruit.  Where are her grape vines?  Where are the mounds for the strawberry vines?  Her heart sinks as she recalls losing more and more of her blessed plants on other occasions – but those are other stories and will be told, some god or gods willing, at another time.

The Suicidal Girl barely can stand to rest her glance upon the spots where she sat, wishing to die, trying to not want to die, crying into her skirts, or wetting the fur of her dog’s coat while she murmured and wailed into his side, muffling the sounds from those who might notice or come to ask her what was wrong.  She’d learned a long time ago that she should never REALLY answer that question.  No one really wanted to know what was wrong.  People wanted her to say that nothing was wrong, that she was fine.  She was expected to avoid people, or if caught up by one, to smile and express her joy so, when so caught up, she’d go away and step aside for one of us who could properly handle the social interaction.

There are more people present than these.  Some of them are smiling and playing.  Some of them are screaming.  Some of them are cutting grass or kissing boyfriends.  I think that the above descriptions are enough to reveal to you.  I’m aware that most people aren’t used to dealing with the idea of a constant parade of people marching through their skulls.  Especially simultaneously!

For most people, they may see their childhood homes and be stricken with overwhelming memories and images – but they aren’t thrown into several States of Being at one time as I am.  At least this sort of thing does give all of the people inside of me a chance to try to all be present at the same time so that we can all become aware of one another and the parts that we all play, and that can lead to co-consciousness and better cooperation inside this splintered head of mine.

This visit was only possible for me because I had a strong, accepting person along for support.  It is critical for any person with any sort of psychological or metal disorder to have supportive people around.  Without them, we rarely have the strength to begin traversing the frightening and difficult roads to facing our demons.  After all, my personal demons are so disruptive that they literally split me to pieces – and I have yet to even meet all of the pieces I am, or gaze full-face upon all of the demons who helped create the me’s.

Now that the voices of the people inside me are awakened and all jostling for attention, now that even more memories are pouring in, I wonder how long this road will be and who and what events I will encounter.  Living a life where one can crumple into a ball of dysfunction over things as simple as spotting a certain stitch on a quilt, or hearing a certain phase, enduring the internal screaming and the overwhelming panics that plague the inside of my head (because God forbid that we show the public our ACTUAL state), it all begs of me certain questions.

Number one:  Will I ever be well, or is “normal” (that damnable word again) functioning a pipe dream to me?  Is trying to integrate the right task, or should I further suppress everyone inside of me and smother their voices and panic and build a “functional, dissociated” me?  A walking shell that seems normal?  Should I be the literal manifestation of a zombie?  Living without life?

Number two:  And this all follows the attempted logical thinking of number one – Was going down that driveway, searching out my demons ACTUALLY brave?  Or, was it simply the stupid act of a woman desperate to try to fit into a life that makes no sense?  Am I destined always to be the square peg beating the crap out of myself, trying to get into the round hole that is “normal” functioning?

I don’t even care if I function normally.  Just help me function any way!  Any way at all!  And help me not to die.  I’m not praying to any one.  I’m just making a general request as is my right to ask the Universe since I am a being who has been given the spark of life and conscious thinking.  Help me to use it.  Help us find a way to life in some sort of consistent manner.  Help us to want to live the life we‘ve got – whether or not we can EVER make any damn sense of it.

Dedicated to:  My Support System (You know who you are.)

Thanks as always to:  Jim Dollar Photography We love your work – and we love YOU!

City Cemetery, Louisiana by Jim Dollar Photography

So, it’s that time again.  Time for a New Year and the wonder over whether or not there will be a new me.  Perhaps, several new me’s.  It seems that I have a brain and a life that is always reinventing itself.  Sometimes to my betterment, sometimes to my detriment.  Still, I’m never that.  Never “still”.

I search behind me and in front of me, looking for common threads.  Common events and relationships that define the base me.  Something of stability to hold onto in this shifting plane that is my life.  I have lived so many, many lifetimes, and I’m not talking about having been reincarnated.  I mean within this lifetime.

All of the lovers.  All of the different times, and the different ages that I’ve lived with the souls that interact with me as my children here in this place that I call life, on this planet that others call Earth, in these years that I’ve called “now” in the stair-step progression of the thing called time – that thing I flow through like an unfamiliar, alien liquidity to my awareness.

I awoke again last night in a familiar panic.  It’s a panic that I’ve felt on and off since I was at least as young as five.  Perhaps even earlier, but I clearly remember the panic from when I was five.  Then, like now, I became aware of myself trapped, here, in this physical form, owning the experiences that happen to these senses that are attached as input receivers in this physical self I occupy.

I panic because I don’t understand WHY I am in here.  I don’t understand WHAT it is all for.  I’m confused about this idea that my hand is my hand, and that another person’s hand is his or her hand.  I’m acutely aware of the fact that others feel, when they look down at their selves, this same sense of being trapped inside of something and looking out and wondering, “Why?”

Except, I’m told, most of them don’t.  Most of them aren’t wondering.  They’re just living.  Taking their being, and their right of being, for granted.  I envy them, really.  I envy their peace and the fact they aren’t awakened in the night with these troubled dreams of a spirit in chains to a physical reality that feels all wrong for them.  That feels like a pair of ill-fitting clothes smeared with heavy grime and mud and history.

Just as soon as that happens, though, just as soon as I get that feeling that I can’t breathe, that I’m suffocating in this flesh, that my life is a purposeless torture, a personal hell from which I cannot awaken…as soon as this perception of reality becomes the dominating factor in this organic machine that is my brain, I find the valley before me open onto a brilliant sunrise.  I come to feel the arms of Earth wrap around me, and the energy of a soft, rolling mountain range gather me to her bosom and hold me tightly until the blanket of night replaces her, wrapping Orion’s starry, shining gaze upon my comforted countenance, the eloquent music of Ocean’s tide lulling me back to peaceful slumber.  And then, oh, then, I am right, exactly right where I belong!

It is then that the wonder at the miracle of my being juxtaposes the knowing, painful mystery of it.  I am grateful for the fact that I am AWAKE, no matter how hard reality has had to pinch me in order to keep me so.  “One day,” I tell myself, “one day it will all come together and make sense to you.  One day, this same awareness that is you will be looking back at you, just as you look back upon your childhood self of this brief lifetime – and when you do, you will feel love and compassion for the confusion of the child that you currently are.  One day,” I tell myself, “you will be large enough to contain both the beauty and horror of existence in equal degrees, and this will pose no conflict for you.”

Until that time dawns, I guess that I shall continue to wake up in the dark, my heart pounding, a cold sweat dripping it’s salty burn into my recently opened eyes.  Until then, I’ll soak in the wonders when I can, spread my arms with loving as wide as they can go, and take my comfort from what ever pitying source crosses my path to offer it.

As I map out the ticking of the clock to show me into a New Year, a New Me, I keep in mind that it is but a mere shadow of another, important countdown.  The one where I find myself in that place called Heaven, Nirvana, Paradise.  That one where my AWAKENESS comes into synch with the reality I occupy, and I can and will, at last, don the clothing that fits exactly upon Me.  At least for a spate of rest, until I broach, yet again, another unrest.  Another spurt of discomfort whose purpose, like now, spurns me to grow again, and again, and again into the endless, wondrous, birthing process that we all must labor through.  The forever, neverending birthing of Me!

Special thanks, as always to: Jim Dollar Photography

CAPE HATTARAS AT DAYBREAK by Jim Dollar Photography

I step out of the shower and look down at the painter’s helper, a little stool with a handhold cut in the middle.  It used to be hers.  Here it sits, in another woman’s house – just as it sat in storage at yet another woman’s.  My mind travels over the times, touches on the visual memories of how it was, what it went through, what it was used for and saw in the home that I shared with her.  The home that I shared with my Denise.  Soon, it will be four years since she left me.  Four years since she died and left me to deal with the kind of unrequited love that we people are destined to when we can not stop our love for one who still holds onto our hearts from the beyond.

I don’t know what this thing called love is, much less what this thing called “unconditional love” is, much less this kind of love and pain that reaches from beyond the grave to wrap around my heart and knock it around with some sort of never-ending comfort/pain/knowingness.

I want to be over her.  Sometimes, I want to be free of her.  Sometimes, I want a break from the pain and the tragedy that she and I became.

I say it over and over and over again:  “If she were here, if she were still alive, I know that she and I wouldn’t be together.”  It’s the truth.  A sad truth, but truth nonetheless.  For you see, I’ve grown since her death.  I’ve become the independent woman that she wanted me to be.  The kind of woman who would never continue tolerating the kind of abuses that her alcoholism and drug abuse put me through.

I’m not one of those people who makes others into saints just because they’ve died, just because they are no longer capable of making the kind of huge fuck-ups that we all manage to accomplish while we are traversing this rocky road that being alive is.  Death doesn’t erase our mistakes.  What we are/were, remains.

No, I WANT to remember her in her pure humanness.  All of her flawed beauty thoroughly intact.  After all, if she were perfect, if she hadn’t struggled, how would I justify the ways in which I failed her?  How could I stand my own imperfections?

None of us are supposed to be perfect.  Our cracks and scars are a part of what make us unique.  They map out the places we have traveled through, where and what we have been, the dirt and calluses on our feet bearing testament to our effort in climbing up the steep cliffs, taking the falls upon the sharp rocks that are always waiting below when we slip from our attempts to top the mountains of trial that are always before us.

And slip she did!  Just like me, she had parents who were deeply troubled.  Just like me, she had a childhood that shouldn’t have been visited upon anyone.  Just like me, she started off way behind the mark as life dealt her challenges that no person should have to bear.  Especially no person who is a little, tender-hearted, sensitive child.  Like me, she felt things so deeply that, at times, it was too much to bear.

Is this why I love her so, still?  Is she simply a reflection of myself?  I see this in almost every person, features of my own self looking back at me through the universal mirror of the eyes of others.

There were so many parallels of her life and my own.  Ridiculed by others for different reasons, I escaped into the books that dyslexia only served to make mere mocking, further dysfunctions for her.  She escaped into violence, and into alcohol.  I created worlds, even people, inside my mind, into which I escaped.  She made lines of white powder and snorted them up her nose so that she could skew her perception of her world into something bearable.

I used to get so angry when she was alive with me!  I would get so angry when she wouldn’t TRY to get better!  I wanted to be worth it.  I wanted US to be worth it.  I wanted her to know that SHE WAS WORTH IT!!

She didn’t believe it.  She didn’t feel it.  I don’t think she ever felt it.

Wherever she is now, if anywhere, I hope she understands, knows, at last, that she is worth it.  So what if she was transgendered?  So what if she was dyslexic?  So what if she was alcoholic, drug-addicted and bi-polar?  It makes her no less wonderful, no less a miracle for surviving as long as she did – and all the while, her tender heart intact, as covered over with bravado as it was.

I knew her.  In her glory.  In her failures.  In her humanness.

And I loved her.  Love her still.  Am as trapped as any trapped person has ever been.

We are intertwined, she and I.  In the awfulness and the wonderfulness of living and dying.  So, I guess that what I need to come to terms with is a simple acceptance of it.  An acceptance of the fact that when I was born, a part of her was already born into the history that would become the events of my life.  A part of her was born into me as my light came on in this world.  She was always, even before I met her, a part of what fueled my light.

For, if she is a part of the darkness and pain that has been brought to my self here, in this world, she is also, most definitely a part of my light and if it is evermore in no way except to burn the fuel that is me – - shine Denise Ansley!  SHINE!

Further Musings On Denise’s Death

…And More

…And Ever More Musings

Dedicated to: My Denise

Jim Dollar Photography – Thanks for your beautiful photographs – and all of the other beauty that you’ve lent my life.

Still, nothing takes out of my head the worries that I have about other things that aren’t so trivial.  Things like, “What does being ‘in love’ really mean?  What will I feel like at the exact moment of my death and, come to think of it, how will I die, anyway?  What would the lives of my children look like if I’d had the proper resources to devote to their educations, and what if I’d never met and married an abuser?  Why did I get my parents, and why was I born where I was in North Georgia, and not in Africa as some starving infant?  Why don’t human beings put more value on, and show more respect to, things that are alive?”

In the mind of The Deneen, there is always a litany of questions and a mountain of analysis going on.  I just can’t seem to shut the damn thing off.  I try, very hard, to be in that “state of being” where I’m just in the moment.  That creates problems for me, though, when I can’t see time as that linear.  I’m not sure if that’s a manifestation of my DID, or if it’s just that some of us are more aware of the fakeness of time.  The ludicrousness of it.  I just have to ask myself what it all means and what it all is for.  What is all this living?  What are all of these moments?  What are they even FOR?

Some of you are probably saying right now that being in the moment, one is not aware of linear time anyway, so there shouldn’t be a conflict where this is concerned, but I’m not so sure about that.  I’m not sure that we can ever just totally leave any moment.  It seems far more likely to me that we are pulling in all of our moments to us, so that we are everything that we ever are and could have been and are going to be, all at the same time.  That’s a LOT of beingness, and I’m just not sure that more of “being” is really what I want and need right now.

A couple of months ago, I decided, once again, that I’d had enough of this “being”.  Once again, I faced a time when I no longer wanted to be alive.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling like this, I can talk myself out of it.  I can remind myself how futile death is because of how futile life is.  I remind myself that I am but a strand in the great web of the Universe – but that every strand is there to hold others together, and integral to the intricate design and execution of the whole.  I think of the faces of my children and my grandchildren, and think of the legacy that I would leave them if they had to say, “My mother/grandmother committed suicide.”  I think of Denise.  I mentally bring up the pictures of the people filing past her coffin.  I replay the voices, full of pain, of those who talked to me about how horrible it was that she had taken her own life, how she hadn’t understood how loved she was and the emptiness that she was creating in the hearts of those she was leaving behind.

The truth is, and this is something that people who’ve never been that low don’t ever seem to understand, that when you’re feeling so worthless, helpless and hopeless, it’s hard to imagine or believe that your life, or death, has ANY impact on the world as a whole, much less individual people in it.  This popular idea that is today being put forth that suicide is selfish is misguided.  One can get into a state where one has no real sense of self.  One only has the sense of PAIN.  Pain, sometimes, that one feels one’s existence brings upon others.  Even saying this, I realize that to think that one can cause pain to another does represent ego, and that does represent a sense of self – but what I’m trying to get across here is that the person who is wanting to die is not wanting to die in order to get back at or torture anyone else.  They simply want the torture to stop for themselves.  They want the pain, the dysfunction that their life has become to come to a close.  A stop.  They don’t want to go to heaven.  They don’t want to go to a better place.  They don’t even want to rest.  They simply want to NOT BE!

Trouble is, after One has “been”, and since time IS artificial and everything that ever has existed exists infinitely, there is no UNBEING.  There is NO escape.  Not even in death.

I think this is the one that gets me.  That’s the one that keeps me here.  Death?  It’s like drawing with a yellow highlighter on bright yellow paper.  You’ve not accomplished a damn thing.  It’s still just yellow.

Veins by Jim Dollar Photography

I won’t tell her name but some people will work it out.  It’s not that I’m trying to expose her, or anything about her life.  Really, I’m trying to expose myself.  I’m trying to understand my part in all of it.  I want to unbraid the tight bindings of that night – including the knots around my vocal cords.  I want to break them open, and unfurl my voice into the silence of the night when I had my first remembered taste of penis.  She is integral to the story because she is also a victim of the story; a victim of our shared circumstance, our shared family fucked-uped-ness.

She really is amazing, this cousin of mine.  She has the most beautiful natural breasts of any woman that I’ve ever seen, and they emphasize this tiny, tapered waist and slim, firm bottom.  She bears dark, brilliantly flashing brown eyes, topped off with the dark hair of our shared Cherokee ancestry.  She has long beautiful fingers that might, in other circumstance, play piano well, or hold an artist’s brush.  Her skills aren’t applied or tested in that regard.  Not in any regard, really – except in that of staying alive and in comparative safety.  Compared to what, I don’t know.

The parties at her family’s house are infamous, and rumors abound about what had gone on there behind the closed doors of my beautiful cousin’s not-so-beautiful childhood.  It is said that there was copious drinking, a movie camera, a projection screen, fists….  Suspicions abound regarding the imbibing of lots of Cannabis, along with harder things.  Lots of hard things.

“When I was a little girl, I used to crawl out my window and hide in the woods,” she tells me.  “I had to get somewhere safe to stop Daddy’s friends from trying to touch me.”  I suspect that the “trying to” part has long since passed from her life and that she is watering the circumstance of her story down for me because she doesn’t want me to have to hear the painful stuff.

We all tend to do that.  Water down our stuff so that other folks aren’t made discomfited by our pain.  Maybe that’s why I split into different people.  Maybe I needed someone to hear my pain and I didn’t want to bother anyone else with it, so I made more of myself in order to give myself an ear.  She is doing that.  Trying to protect me.  She is always trying to protect me.

She is a little older than myself and so full of joy and life!  She remains joyful, even as childhood leaves her.  She’s to become the sort of woman that simply lights up everything around her!  Especially the men!  She is one of the little survival story miracles with which I fill my head to remind myself that none of us have to have our light and goodness destroyed by our circumstances.  I like to think that she and I have that in common.  That our common history intersects with the good and the bad things that come from being who we are, with the genes that we got, having grown up in the soil in which we were planted.

I am fourteen and she lets me come to her house and try on her clothing – including the pants that my mother’s religion disallows me to wear.  I pull on her bluejeans and turn a slow three sixty, checking out my ass in the mirror while wondering what it would be like if I were a normal kid who was allowed to wear them.  I wonder what the kids at school would think, and if people would think I’m attractive, or that I have a nice figure.

She has hats and pretty shirts and jewelry!  She has wonderful lacy bras that can’t go through the regular wash and have to have special care.  She has good smells and bubble bath and a stereo filled with fun music.  As two teenagers playing together, we put her jeans on me and a button-down shirt to knot up under my breasts, showing my tummy.  She hands me a hat and I grab a hairbrush to use as a microphone.  We crank up the pop music and dance about on top of the bed, singing along while checking ourselves out in the mirror atop her dresser.

These are such fun and innocent, memory making times!

I beg to be allowed to spend the night with her.  The infamous parties at the house of her parents have long since gone, and her house is considered a safe one.  Since she is older, she already has a boyfriend.  He is older than her and very cute!  He looks like Sylvester Stallone’s little brother.  I admire her.  Envy her, even.   Everyone tells her how good her life is, and how lucky she is to have such a brilliant boyfriend who is so good-looking.  I certainly think she is lucky.

Having run through all of the arguments against it, giving in at last, my mother tells me that I am allowed to stay over with my cousin for the night.  We have a fun night planned!  We are going to put on clothing and maybe even try some makeup!  We are going to search for new songs that we like and practice our dancing.  We might even get a visit from her cute boyfriend!  I am so thrilled that my heart is fluttering with excitement!  I like practicing for being the grown-up that I am trying to become.

On the night of our slumber party, only a couple of hours in, our visit is interrupted when she gets a phone call.  It’s her boyfriend’s sister.  He isn’t coming to see us.  In fact, he apparently isn’t even thinking about my cousin at all.  He is drunk and “riding around town” with some other girl!  “I like you and I want you to know because it’s not right for him to treat you this way,” the boyfriend’s sister says to my cousin.  I wait with baited breath as the two exchange more words via the phone line, and I see my dear cousin’s face contort with pain, and she tears up, her voice chocking with emotion.  At the completion of the call, my cousin slaps the phone back into it’s cradle on the kitchen wall, turns to me and says, “Come on, Deneen!  We are going!”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going there and I’m going to find that son-of-a-bitch and find out.  If he’s with another girl, I want to catch him!”

At that, I hear this nagging voice inside my head.  It is the voice of my mother.  I wonder what she will think of it, my going clear to a neighboring town with my cousin in order to chase down her boyfriend.  It will be dark soon and my mother is probably already in bed.  My right to even be here has been hard won, much less my chance of gaining permission to leave the home and drive somewhere else!  I could ask my cousin to take me by my mother’s house and drop me off, and something inside of me tells me that this is what I should do, but I’ve not yet learned to recognize that Voice of God inside of me, and sometimes, I don’t want to listen to it even when I do recognize it.  This is something with which I will continue to struggle.  I think that all Human Beings do, and that some people never even learn to hear the Voice of God inside of them at all.

Deciding that I will take the risk of angering my mother by coming along, I get into the car with my cousin, and we begin the climb up the long and winding country roads that lead to the town where her boyfriend lives.  The altitude and tree-covered mountains cause the radio to keep fuzzing out to white noise, and my cousin turns the dial with irritation, searching for new stations as she fusses and complains with a worried look, talking to me about her boyfriend.  He is an alcoholic, she tells me, but he’s promised her to stop drinking.  She put up with her parents’ drinking and she doesn’t plan to spend the rest of her life with a drunk.  He’s been seen with other girls since they have been dating.  This isn’t the first time.  She is going to find him and give him “What for?”!

Eventually arriving in the neighboring town, an entire twenty miles distant, we pull into the driveway of an old large, white, multistoried Colonial style house that her boyfriend shares with his family.  “Wait here,” my cousin tells me, exiting the car and disappearing into the house.  She isn’t gone long.

“He’s out riding around, driving drunk!” she angrily exclaims.  “I’m going to find him and find out if he’s with that girl!”

Spinning fast out of the driveway, we travel a little way down the street before joining the other cars that are driving in a loop, up and down the middle of the pretty, tree laden small town.  Dusk is falling, but there is still enough light to see.  In the middle of everything here, there lies a railroad track, slicing the roads in front of the mom-and-pop shops into one-way streets on either side of itself.  The scattered houses boast people on front porches, leaning on railings, sitting on rockers, even in front of the shops, waving to one another in friendly fashion.

I’ve rarely been to this town, and I’ve rarely participated in this activity called, “cruising”, or more often where I am from, simply, “ridin’-’round-town”.  This is what young people do in small towns in order to be seen, and to hook up with one another; like a social club on wheels.  One starts at one pre-designated spot and rides in a circle, going up and turning around at another pre-designated spot and riding back the other way.  Over and over and over.  Different people choose different turn-around spots, and even where one’s spot is can be the jump off point to further conversation between bored folks in an otherwise sleepy town with not much to do.

In this town, cruising is more of a challenge because the railroad track sometimes block one’s vision.  People have to wait until there are flat areas where the roads are closer together, or one has to see the people in the other cars at the unofficially designated turn-around spots.  It is at one such spot, crossing the rise of the railroad track, that my cousin spots her boyfriend.  He has a passenger in the car.  She floors it, and we’re off!  She spins the car around in a parking lot in order to catch them up from behind, and as we approach, we can see that the person in the car with him is another man, a lean, nice-looking black man, not the woman my cousin is expecting.

Honking her horn and yelling to him, my cousin gets her boyfriend’s attention.  He pulls over in a parking lot and comes stumbling out of the car.  Slamming on her own brakes and jumping out to meet him, I can hear my cousin saying, “What are you doing?  You are drunk!  You stink!  Why are you driving around and why are you drunk again?  Did you have some woman in the car with you?  Your sister called and told me!  Yes, your sister!”

I can’t hear his side of things, and he is slurring his words anyway.  Eventually, they both approach our car, and I see his friend walk around to the driver’s side and get under the wheel of the other car.  Leaning down to my open car window, my cousin tells me, “He’s going to be riding around with us for awhile,” and she opens the door, allowing her boyfriend to slide into the back seat, reclaiming the driver’s seat for herself.  Taking off more slowly this time, we drive away, resuming our laps through the sleepy town.

My cousin is very angry, and that is putting things a bit mildly!  Her face is tear-stained, and her thick mascara is running rivulets down her cheeks.  She is asking her boyfriend, “Who was the girl you were with?  Who is she?  What do you even want with me?  Do you even care anything about me?”

He is replying with barely comprehensible, slurred words, “Damnit!  What are you fucking talking about?  There was no other girl, Baby!”  Now, calmer, “Come here, Baby!  Come here Baby!  I’ve got something for you to take care of, Baby!”  He’s doing his best sultry whisper which, in his current inebriated state is actually pretty pathetic.  His hand is on his crotch, and its easy to see that he has a raging hard-on, straining against his zipper.

His attempts at seduction are temporarily halted when he spouts, “Pull over, pull over!”

My cousin complies and he opens the door, half falling out of it, vomiting onto the pavement of the parking lot.  I’ve never seen anyone this drunk before.

“Oh, God!” my cousin wails.

“Oh, God!” her vomiting boyfriend slurs.  Then, “I’m okay now, I’m okay now.”

My cousin, who’s jumped out of the car, calls through the window for me to hand her a napkin from the glove box.  I comply and she passes it to him, along with more insults.  He pulls himself back into the car, clumsily wiping at his mouth.  My cousin helps him shut his door, slides back behind the wheel and immediately resumes her verbal throttling.

“You are disgusting!  Look at you!

“Who was she?  Did you do something with her?” she asks.

He’s looking at her again, staring into her eyes through the rear-view mirror, the lustful look returning to his face.  Throwing the soiled napkin into the floorboard, I see him return his hand to his swollen crotch.

My cousin also notes the action.  Her driving is erratic and I am a bit afraid because she is paying more attention to her boyfriend than she is to the road as she spits back at him, “You are disgusting!  You just want somebody and you don’t care who it is!  You don’t want me!”  She looks over, noticing me in the front seat beside her as if she’s forgotten I am there.  “You probably don’t care if it’s me or Deneen who gets back there with you.  You’d probably be just as happy with her.”

His eyes turn on me.  He’s looking at me with the same deep, carnal look of desire that he’s been projecting at her.  He grabs hold of the back of our seat with his hands and pulls himself forward, closer to my face.  “Yeah,” he says, in a way that’s as sultry as his current inebriated state can muster.  “Send her back here.  You!  Come on back here!  Come on!  Come on, Deneen!  Come on back here!”

“Yeah, Deneen!” my cousin insists.  “Just get on back there!  Let’s see what he’ll do with you, just get on back there with him!  I just want to see what he’ll do.”

I sit forward on the seat, twisting my body back and looking back and forth from one of them to the other.  “What do you mean?” I say quietly to my cousin.  “You really want me to get back there?”

“Yes!  Yes I do!  Go on!  Get back there!”

What am I thinking?  Why do I crawl into that back seat?  I wish I hadn’t done.

Do I feel some sense of loyalty to my cousin and her “investigative opportunity” to see whether or not he WILL try something with me?  Have my previous experiences with Lib and Ray and the games that we have played together led me to think this is a normal request and will somehow be okay?  Have I been so conditioned to follow orders in unquestioning fashion that I do whatever is asked of me without thinking?  Am I just STUPID?!  Do I think he is cute?  Do I miss the touch and attentions of the boyfriend who dumped me and think the touch of this man would be better than no touch at all?  Am I a little turned on by the idea in my head of what might happen here, or do I have this weird fantasy that he might really LIKE me because of the look of desire that he is boring into my soul?  Do my naiveté and youth make me vulnerable?

These are hard questions, some of which I don’t want to ask.  Some of which I don’t want the answers for.  I feel a deep sense of shame and responsibility in that I don’t say, “NO!”

With another long look at my cousin to make sure that she knows what she’s saying, and being unsure about what it’s supposed to accomplish, I begin the climb over the bench front seat to the back, where her boyfriend sits.  The car is still rolling along the highway, and she is watching his face in the rear-view mirror, but he’s not looking at her anymore.  He’s totally focused on me.  He takes hold of my arms to “help” me into the back seat, and he’s looking into my eyes with a face filled with longing, his breathing deep, his touch sexual and clingy.

As soon as my bottom connects with the seat, his lips are on mine, his tongue in my mouth.  With my boyfriend I had done a lot of elaborate kissing, and French kissing was a part of that experience – but this is very different.  For one thing, this is my cousin’s boyfriend, not my own, and my cousin is watching and what is taking place here is hurting her feelings.  For another, this is aggressive and forceful – like Onion Sandwich Guy had been.  This time, the tongue in my mouth is tainted with an alcohol/vomit mixture.  Her boyfriend is not a bad kisser.  He’s a good kisser in fact, but the circumstances make the experience very unenjoyable.  Feeling my negative response and my hesitation, he reaches up and places one hand on the back of my head and pulls me into his mouth while his body tenses and wriggles.  As he stops the kiss, he pulls my head back a little and places his mouth close in to my ear.  “Here,” he says.  “Suck it!  Suck me, I want you to suck me.”  I realize what all of the wriggling is about because his zipper is down and his erect penis is exposed.

His name escapes my lips with a begging tone.  I’m begging him not to ask this of me.  I’m begging him not to want it.  I’m begging him to stop the tears of my cousin and her pain at having her suspicions confirmed.

Taking a firmer grasp on my head, he shoves it down toward his crotch, lifting his hips up to meet me.  He leans his head back against the seat, closes his eyes and lets out a soft, deep moan as my lips connect with the tip of his penis.  His moan soon turns to one of frustration as I keep my mouth closed, and he’s pushing against my lips and sees that I’m not fully cooperating.  His head snaps back up, his eyes pop open and he starts talking to me again.  “COME ON!”  His words now bear a tone of irritation, and his wandering eyes fall on the back of my cousin’s head and he seems to tune in to the fact that she is distraught.  She’s crying and wailing.  For some reason, this enrages him.  “SHUT UP!” he orders her.  Pushing me out of the way, he focuses his attention on her and, sitting forward on the seat, he releases the hold on my head, balls his hand into a fist – and with no further warning, smashes it into the side of her head.

Jolted from the blow, she screams, as the car swerves dangerously, and he begins to pummel her, hitting her about the head and shoulders, both fists in full, if badly aimed, swing.

I am only frozen for a couple of seconds.  How I come back around so fast, or how I think what to do, I can’t say.  Perhaps it is another personality, coming out and helping me.  Perhaps it is the fact that I’ve been with men like him before at some point in my history and know best how to calm them – though I’m not consciously aware of it.  Perhaps some survival instinct kicks into my being, or the voice of God whispers suggestions into my mind from way down in the depths of me.  Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, I get the idea that I have the power and can stop this.  Sitting forward on the seat beside him, I put my mouth up close to his ear – no small feat since he isn’t holding still.  I say his name, touch him at first gently, and then with growing insistence, calling his name more loudly and pulling his face around to mine, searching for his mouth with my own.

He responds, and I feel his arms go slack as he looses interest in hitting my cousin, and begins to slouch back in the seat, arms ceasing their swing to wrap around my body, pulling me back with him.  Taking hold of my hand, we together put my hand on his cock, and I begin to stroke and play with it, while kissing him deeply, pressing myself against him.

Soon enough, this doesn’t keep his interest, and in his angry stupor, he notices my cousin’s crying once again, pushes forward and renews his attack.  My cousin is screaming and we are swerving from one side of the road to the other when I suddenly realize that we are running a stop sign!  Brakes slam on and I’m thrown against the seat in front of me, our almost having crashed down a deep gulley.  We are off the road and now, I’m really scared!  I think that we should all exit the car and get off the road!  This situation is serious!  My heart is pounding faster than ever!

The boyfriend responds to this new circumstance by yelling at my cousin and telling her she’s crazy and blaming her for having missed the stop sign.  His face is contorted with anger, and red and I can see his fists balling up again already.  I realize that I need to step up my game.

My cousin is looking back over her shoulder, backing up the automobile, and she’s gotten control of her crying for a moment.  I think that she is probably scared, too, and I don’t understand why we are still driving.  “I’m taking you home!” she announces to her boyfriend and a sigh of relief passes through me as I know that this ordeal will come to a close.

“No.  You’re not,” he counters – and I move into action.  Putting on my best sexy attitude, I place my body between his and my cousin’s, blocking his view of her and placing my face in the line of his vision.  “Hey,” I say softly, and I lean in and plant a kiss on his lips, steeling myself against the tastes in his mouth as I hold his head in my hands and slip my tongue inside.

He forgets my cousin, reaching up to grab my head in return.  His eyes close and he again begins making little noises of pleasure as I press myself into him and slip one of my hands down, grasping his penis.

“Yes!” he breathes against my mouth.  “Come on!  Come on, Baby!  Suck it, Baby, suck it!”  This time, I don’t hesitate, swooping down and opening my mouth over the bulbous head of his circumcised penis.  I learn quickly that if I suck hard at the top and continue the action down the shaft, forcing him all the way into my mouth and pushing past the gag reflex in my throat, he becomes totally focused in on what I’m doing and the sucking and stroking I’m applying to his cock.  Any hesitation on my part, or if I begin to apply my oral manipulations with less vigor, his attention begins to waver and he shoves his body forward so that I can feel, more than see, the tightening of his fists again, his eyes returning to glare at my cousin’s back, preparing their next assaulting strike.

There begins this surreal, dissociation that is a dance between my paying intense attention to his sexual body language, his distracted, balled-fisted violently potentialled body language, and my own feelings and responses to the sexual act that I am performing on him.  I try to suck for only a bit, and then come up to get a breath and gather myself for the next gulping.  I find myself unable to shut off my mind, or my thinking or my processing of the information bombarding my heightened senses.  One of the things that is happening is that I am finding myself comparing the differences in this penis and that of the boyfriend with whom I’ve recently split.  His skin had been lighter, near translucent, his penis lined with beautiful blue, pumping veins, the shaft long and thinner, curving back toward his flat, hairless tummy.  The man with whom I now find myself is darker skinned, his member red and ruddy, setting thick and straight amongst copious dark hair.  I note the difference in their movements, the subtle change of thrust from the hips, the tonality of the sexual moanings.  It hasn’t occurred to me before this instance that sexual acts, sexual organs, sexual expression can be so different from one man to the next.  I find myself experiencing this profound sadness regarding the fact that I’d never even performed oral sex on my boyfriend, that I didn’t know, would never know, the taste of him and how it might have been different to have performed this act as a loving expression instead of a manipulative necessity.

From my position, head down in the man’s crotch, I can’t really see what is going on with my cousin, or where she’s looking, or where we’re going, but I eventually hear her declare loudly, “There’s your car!”, and even as I am too frightened to stop my machinations upon her boyfriend’s member, gratitude fills me as I realize that I will soon be released from this impromptu and necessary duty.

In a bit, I feel a couple of turns, and we slow, pulling into some place to park.  The minute the car stops, I remove my mouth from his dick, slide across, away from the man, reaching for the door handle with a desperation that I somehow manage to keep from showing.  Popping open the door, I spring out and say a silent prayer of thanks as my feet hit the pavement.  It’s over!

My cousin exits the driver’s door, opens the other back one, and our companion stumbles out.  Immediately, the two begin arguing.  In the parking lot of the gas station where we’ve come to rest, I see the car from which we had retrieved our passenger what seemed like a lifetime ago.  The door of that car opens and the tall, handsome black man who’d been riding with my cousin’s boyfriend approaches us slowly, standing back from the main action a bit.  I find myself instinctively gravitating toward his calm presence.

“Deneen!” my cousin is shouting my name.  “Deneen, come on and get back in the car!  I’m going to take his drunk ass home!”

I shake my head, “No.”  Inside I’m thinking, “NO way in HELL are you getting me back in that car!”  I’m very confused about why SHE would choose to do so.  I can still taste his cock in my mouth, feel his saliva coating my tongue.  “No way in HELL!” I think again.

“Well, what are you going to do then?” she asks, angrily.

“I’ll stay here,” I say.

“Okay!  Do whatever you want!  I’ll come back and get you when I get him home.”  With that, I watch my cousin open the door and pour her drunken lover, who for one horrid moment had been mine, into the front seat, climbing in behind him and slamming the door.  I watch in frightened-for-her silence as the car takes off down the street at break-neck speed, wobbling between the lines as it goes.

A few minutes tick by, and I note the silent calm descending.  I turn to the friend, the guy who’d been left standing in the parking lot near the abandoned car of the boyfriend’s.  He smiles at me shyly, ducking his head a little due to what seems a sudden interest in his feet.  “Well,” I drawl out, “I guess its you and me.”

“Guess so.”

We stand in silence, and I hug myself with my arms because I’m cold.  I say so.  “I’m cold.”

“Well, I am, too.”  Another pause.  “I don’t have the keys, he took them with him, but it might be warmer in his car – even though I can’t crank it up.  He didn’t lock it.”

“Okay,” I agree, and we walk slowly over to the car.  Trying the handle on the passenger door and finding it also unlocked, he opens it for me, lets me climb in, closes it and walks around to the other side, climbing in beside me.

We sit in silence again and I find it peaceful and a welcome break.  My pulse is starting to slow.  Except for the cold, I’m comfortable.  “Sorry,” he says, “that I can’t put the heat on for you.  He didn’t leave me the keys,” my new friend explains again.

“That’s okay, “ I say.  “I’m just grateful to be out of that car with them!”  I want to tell him what happened, but I’m afraid to speak of it.  Plus, this is his friend.  “Does he often get like this?” I ask instead.

He grunts a sort of  “Uhhmmm-hmmmm.”  He seems as shy as I am.

We continue sitting in awkward silence for a long time.  “Do you think she’ll come back for me?  My cousin?”

“Man, I don’t know what to expect!  Prob’ly she’ll eventually show up.”

Several more minutes pass by, feeling like hours.  My newly slowed pulse begins to quicken again.  I’m wondering if my cousin has wrecked the car!  I’m wondering if she is okay!  I’m wondering what will happen if I’m left abandoned here!  I’m wondering how I will ever find a way home and what my mother will say.  “I think,” I say, to him, “that I want to go to his house.  I’m afraid something has happened to her.  Do you know where the house is from here?”

“Sure.  You can just about see it.  I’ll take you over to the road and show you.”

“You wanna’ come along?”

“NO!  I don’t wanna’ get nowhere near that shit!  When he gets like this…” he shakes his head, looking down again.

Climbing out of the car, we walk over to the street and he points down the road.  “Right there!  Past that last house in the distance.”

“Thanks!” I say.  “I’m just very worried about her!”  I begin my walk up the sidewalk, looking for a place to cross the road.  Rubbing my arms and hugging myself trying to keep warm, I’m worried about what I’m going to find.  Looking back over my shoulder, I see the young man’s eyes still on me as he throws up a wave, then turns to head back toward the parked car.

With my brisk walk, it doesn’t take long for the big white house to come into view.  I breathe a sigh of relief that comes out as a cloudy, cold mist in front of me.  Redoubling my pace, I walk through it, and notice my cousin’s car sitting in the driveway, remarkably unscathed.  In my haste, I almost pass the automobile by on my way to the door of the boyfriend’s house, when I notice movement through the frosty window of the car, and muffled sounds coming out from behind the fogged glass.

In horror, I realized that my cousin is screaming for help from inside the vehicle.  Seeing me, she beats at the window to attract my attention.  Time slows down as I step towards the car.  There is blood running down her face.  He is sitting there, staring down at her, holding her nose between two fingers and twisting it, oblivious to all else around him.  “Let me out!  Let me out!” she’s yelling.  “Deneen!  Help me!  He won’t let me out!”  His free hand grabs the fist that was banging against the glass, holding that as well.

Horror creeps through me as I realize that she’s been here, trapped in this car the entire time.  Past that, I don’t even have to plan what to do.  A slamming noise directs my attention to the front door as a porch light snaps on, illuminating a short, stout, blonde young man.  He is barging through the front door from the inside, on approach to the car which holds my cousin captive.  He’s wearing nothing but tidy-whitey underwear; not even socks.

My mind seizes up as I become a spectator, dissociated, ghost-like.  I realize that I’m looking at the boyfriends brother.  My cousin had described him to me, saying, “He’s a blue-eyed blonde and I have the dark one, but they are both so damned good-looking!  You’d really like him!”

Here he is, standing in front of me.  He notices me, but only gives me a cursory glance.  His target is the car.  I don’t know how he got here, how he knows to come – but here he is.  He’s banging on the car window, yelling his brother’s name.  “Let her go you Son-of-a-bitch!  Let her the fuck go!  Unlock this fucking door!”

Amazingly, his brother complies, and my cousin comes tumbling out of the car.  The blonde youth reaches in and grabs hold of his older brother, pulling him out behind her.  The boyfriend is so drunk that he can’t stand up.  “His brother punches him as he’s lying on the ground.  “Get the fuck UP”, he says, under his breath.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?  Take this shit in the house!”  He pulls him up by his shirt, and man-handles/supports him to the door, dragging him through it.  Like the automaton I’ve become, I walk behind them, stopping short of entering the door.  The men disappear from my view.

“Come on, Deneen,” my cousin is walking past me, from behind, into the house.  As I step hesitatingly through the door, more family members appear:  a mother, and the sister who made the initial phone calls that brought us here.

My cousin’s face is swollen, there is a horrible combination of blood, tears and mascara coating her beautiful features.  Her lips are busted and poofed all out.  Seeing her face, the women cry out.  “Did he do this to you?”

“Yes,” she replies simply, too tired or to numb, even to respond tearfully.

“Don’t worry,” the chorus of the women’s voices say.  “He’ll get his.”

I’m far enough in the house to get a view of the interior rooms now, and I begin to comprehend what they mean by their statement.  On the tile floor of the kitchen are the two brothers.  The one whose penis had recently been inside my mouth is on the bottom, lying, helpless, reacting to the blows that are falling on his face, his stomach, and other areas of his body.  His well-muscled brother is atop him, raring back and delivering fist after fist full of quiet rage.  I want to feel sorry for the nearly unconscious man on the floor – but I don’t.  At that moment, seeing my cousin’s face, remembering why my mouth is tinged with the taste of alcohol and vomit, why the musky scent of cock still floods my nostrils from the residue left on my own, swollen lips, I’m glad.  I’m glad that he is being made to suffer.  I’m glad that he will awaken with his own mouth large with swelling from the hits he’s receiving from the end of his brother’s fist.

After a time that the mother deems appropriate, she steps into the room where her two sons are entangled on the floor.  “Alright!  Enough!” her voice reaches her youngest, and he responds, if slowly, pulling his fist back, but stopping short of delivering the planned, next blow.  He stands up, and steps away from his brother, his body trembling with spent emotions, his breath coming in shallow bursts, rippled chest heaving and glistening from exertion and perspiration under the dim glow of the kitchen’s yellow light.

Later, the next day, I walk in the door of the home that I share with my own mother and my own siblings, and I find my mother waiting for me.  She is visibly angry, and I can see trembles underneath her surface.  She addresses me with a loud and accusatory tone as soon as I enter the door.

“Deneen, I heard you was with a black man!  Your aunt called me and told me that ya’ll went off last night.  Did you think I wouldn’t find out?  She said that ya’ll left and that your cousin was with her boyfriend and that you was with this black man.”  My mother’s voice chokes with emotion.

“You probably had SEX with him.  I’ll bet you had sex with him.  Did you have SEX with him, Deneen?  What did you do with that black man?”  She stands towering over me, her five foot ten to my five foot four, and spits the words toward me with her upper lip curled up in disgust, her shoulders slumping forward in defeat, eyes alternately glaring at me, then casting downward.

“NO, Mama!  I did NOT have sex with him!  I just sat in a car with him!  I just talked to him, Mama!”  Inside I’m thinking, “He was kind to me, Mama.  That black man was kind and friendly and made me feel safe.  Why don’t you ask me about her boyfriend, Mama?  Why don’t you ask me if I had sex with her boyfriend?  Why don’t you ask me what his white dick tastes like Mama, or what it feels like to have a tongue tinged with alcoholic vomit shoved in your throat?

“Why don’t you let me tell you what its like to watch someone you love beaten in the head with fists and to be powerless to stop it except for placating the perpetrator, distracting him with your mouth around his ruddy and ready dick?

“How could I ever tell you about what I have let happen to me?  How can I forgive myself for going with her, for climbing into that back seat in the first place?  For not biting his penis when he first tried to force it into my mouth?  How do I get over THIS, Mama? What about THIS?

“Why, Mama, are you not asking the right questions?  Why can’t I tell you about what actually happened to me instead of denying the false reality that you’ve built up in your head?

“Why, Mama?!  Why…?”  I don’t dare speak.  I don’t want my mother to have excuses to keep me from hanging out with my Beloved Cousin.  I am worried about her, and though I’m afraid of what else might happen while I’m in her company, I don’t want to hear my mother say, “I told you so,” regarding how safe it is to hang out with her.  I don’t want to confirm my mother’s fears in regards to that fact that I WASN’T safe.  I don’t know why.

Looking back, I can’t exactly tell what the particular emotions were that my mother was experiencing.  The entire time that she was yelling at me, she continued trembling, her muscles all bound up tightly.  Anger was certainly one of them.  Shame, too.  Probably some guilt was thrown in because she probably thought that she was responsible for whatever unacceptable behavior that she’d believed me to be guilty of exhibiting.

I have kept my silence with her on this point to current day.  For one thing, I don’t like making other people suffer, and it’s not an easy or a fun thing for me to be sharing these stories with all of you.  It just feels like a necessary thing.  The silence is WAY too deafening, disabling, disorienting to live in.  I don’t want other people to have to carry these sorts of secrets and burdens inside of them.  Whether we like it or not, the shame of having gone through these sorts of experiences and feeling that one can’t talk about them is damaging to us.  For some of us, it damages our spirits, and we live while dead inside, or may decide not to live at all and take our bodies out, the way that My Denise chose to do.  For some of us, it damages our physical bodies even if we chose life, manifesting in all sorts of aches and pains and cancers and illness.  For those of us who are like me, it manifests in mentally disabling conditions that blank us out from a reality that bears too much pain for us to live with.  Where would I be today if I had allowed myself to share and process OUT of me this inner pain?  Well, I wouldn’t be writing to you all NOW about it, because I’d have no great and paralyzing need of healing.

All things in their time.  All things to their own purpose.  If I can turn the events of my life into something positive and helpful for others, to show inside the depths of the tunnel that has trapped other Human Beings that there is a way up and out into the light, well, then I can be the meaning-making machine that God has created me to be, and I can put into perspective and positive viewing my made-up reasons for what I’ve gone through in my physical and spiritual growing.  This turns my horrible circumstances on end, turns them inside out to the point of their being a blessing.

Weeks after the above incident, my Grandmother greeted me at the door of her house.  “Deneen!” she exclaimed with elation.  “Yer cousin and her boyfriend have got engaged!  They’re agonna’ get married!  I’m so happy fer her!  He’s from a great family ya’ know.  He’s got a good mama.  They’re agonna’ get married!”

“Really, Granny?  That’s great!” I heard some shell person say with my mouth while I waited deep down inside.  Not speaking.  Fearing.  Not speaking.  Inside myself I was saying, “I will not go to bless that union.   Never.  It is an evil thing.  I will not go.”  And we (the we that equals myself and the others inside of me) didn’t.

I was told that it was a big wedding and that the bride was very beautiful.  I kept imagining her in her wedding gown, bruises covering her face, her nose bloody, streaming mucousy red fluid down the front of the white lace.

I didn’t go because I loved her.  I didn’t go because I am forever imprinted with the taste of his cock in my mouth, the taste of alcohol laced vomit transferred to me from his tongue.

We couldn’t have borne it.  We didn’t go to the wedding.  We stayed home, thought of our love for her – and prayed.

The following poem was written on a napkin at an all-night Café one late night, and inspired by the recollection of the above events.

Five Second Rule

This writing is dedicated to my dear friend Karen Lowe, who encouraged me to drudge up whatever needed to be remembered and, “Damn Gurl! If you know this is what God is tellin’ you to do, just start damn writin’ sumthin’!”

Thanks, as always to Jim Dollar Photography

DAIRY FARM Jim Dollar Photography

The following post was written by the male personality of Deneen Ansley, with her blessing – and thanks:

Hey everybody.  I’m somebody new and somebody you all haven’t met yet and Deneen and I are trying hard to work this all out so that she can let me come out and talk to you.  It’s not that she doesn’t want us to come out, or that she’s being selfish or anything like that so I don’t want you all to get that impression.  She’s just real crazy about this writing stuff and she thinks its her “purpose” and all that – so she gets real finicky about letting us mess with that (I wanted to say “fuck” with that, but she still hasn’t shut up totally to let me talk and she told me to change it.)

Trying to work this out so that I can talk to you all in this mode is not an easy thing.  You see, I’m not even sure if I know how to type.  I know how to write.  I mean, I learned English and I’m old enough to know about writing and sentence structure – and to know that I don’t always wanna use proper grammar and stuff.  What we’re having to do here, and we is Deneen and me, is that she’s having to let her hands click and clack this out on the keyboard while I talk in her mind.  It’s a weird bit of stuff this co-consciousness.

So, I don’t have a name or anything.  She just calls me, “The Male”.  The only time that she is usually aware of me usually has to do with a lady.  I guess I’m a typical guy that way.  There are just these certain girls that attract my attention and…well…I start think about things I want to do with them, and things I want to say and how I want to say these things.  That’s when I start to talk to her and tell her what I want.  Oh, I know it’s confusing for you people but when I say “her” I’m talking about Deneen unless there’s some other girl I’m talking about in the sentence.

She did allow me to come out once because she wanted to play a sexual game with someone who wanted to be with a man.  It was the first time that I’d ever tried to come into alignment with her body and use it on purpose while she was still there aware and in it.  It didn’t go so well for me.

I’m awkward.  I guess the way a teenage boy is awkward.  I’ve never gotten to use the body or get used to it.  Then I have the hips that sway and these boobs of hers that I don’t know what to do with, and that don’t feel like me, or how I envision myself to be.

This person that she wanted to have sex with me (I mean, her), they laughed at my awkwardness and I kept running back to the safety of her mind and she would have to take over running things, and then I’d try to pop back in.  Kinda’ like wearing a shirt that doesn’t quite fit, ya’ know?

I wanted to be in the body, and I wanted to be able to express myself, but it was just….  I couldn’t get it right.  It made me feel bad about myself.

This person who wanted to have sex with her, this person laughed at me, too, so that was pretty ego bruising.

Let me also tell you about what is happening as I’m writing here.  She, Deneen, has told me that she’s going to allow me to write and tell my story, but she won’t shut up and stay in the background and let me do it.  She keeps wanting to edit things because she hasn’t trusted any of us to be a good enough writer to tell our stuff in any way that she considers “quality”.  That’s her word for it anyway.

I personally think that she outta just let me go to write how I talk and how I think and that this is what all of you really want to see is the real “me”.  You know her.  You don’t know me.  You don’t know how I feel, or what its like to be inside of her, trapped in and wanting to live, but wanting to do it in a way that helps the host body.  Without her being healthy and being able to live and be happy, well, I can’t run around in here doing my thinking and my dreaming and my existing.

I like that she’s a lesbian because we get to meet a lot of women that way and I like me a lot of women!  I mean, I REALLY like women!  I like those fem ones.  She goes for those butch types, and I’m not really sure about all of that.  To me, they look like boys and I don’t look at boys like that.  I try to think of them as my brothers, and as friend of hers, and I try to divorce in my mind that thing where she has sex with them and their hands are all over the body that we use and stuff.  Kinda grosses me out.

Just like her, I can dissociate and go away, though.  I’m not sure where I go.  When I’m not here, I’m just not here.  I’m blankness.  I’m a lack of existence.  Like being in hibernation, or being something dormant that only comes up out of the ground when a seasonal rain hits.

See there!  I can write all flowery like, so she needs to just back off and try to go to sleep and let me do this here writing thing.  After all, she is me, and I am a part of her, and neither of us is as good without the other.  I’m not sure that either of us can exist without the other, and I guess I’m a weepy and romantic kind of guy in that regard because I love her, and I love her for caring about me and about my existence inside of her.  I appreciate the fact that she is trying to help me to get what I need, and that she isn’t rejecting me in this integration thing where we’ll be able to be each other at the same time.

When I am here, I wonder what that is going to feel like.  It’s scary.  I wonder what she is going to feel like when I am inside of her.  What will happen to my disgust at the butch women’s sexual touch?  What will happen when the part of me makes her want to lay down with a really pretty feminine girl?  I hafta believe it will all work out, but like with anything new, it’s kinda scary.  It makes me nervous.  This whole idea of it and what I’ll feel like.

She talks to me about it.  I mean, we discuss it together and we try to imagine it.  When she rides the rollercoasters, I try to tell her to let me come along and that we can practice this “coconsciousness” thing, and we can try to learn together what it feels like to both be present in the body at the same time.  I’ll be there, but then she’ll forget and tense up and won’t let me have the body and I have to tap at her awareness and say, “You’re not letting me do this.  You need to let go.”  Then, she’ll relax and let me slide into the space where she is, where the body control happens.

I can’t tell you like she does how we work it out, or how we switch it out, or who decides who is going to be there.  I don’t understand any of it.  I only know when I am needed and when I am awake.  One of the reasons that I’m typing to you now is that I recently woke up because she needed me.  That’s when I started talking to her and we started communicating in a real way.

Deneen has got this problem.  At least I see it as a problem.  She doesn’t think it’s a problem which is part of the problem.  She flirts a lot.  She likes to flirt.  She’s got this idea that it makes her better somehow if people are attracted to her.  I don’t feel like that and it wouldn’t do me any damn good if I did because I don’t get to come out and use the body to flirt with, and if I did, the girl would have to be a lesbian to like me because the body is a girl’s.  Deneen’s body, I mean.  Which is the one I use.

I guess I don’t mind it really.  It doesn’t really affect me when I do come out.  I remember one of the times that I used to come out was to play with Deneen’s little brother.  That makes him my little brother, too.  He had all of these sisters.  Three sisters.  Then the Daddy who didn’t stay home much or do much with us.  Well, he did take us fishing and do bonfires and stuff like that, and I got to play with the bonfires, and Deneen let me handle the worms and stuff, but then she’d come back and take over and do girlie singing crap, and run around laughing and scare all of the fish away.

She and her Dad also took us on the river sometimes and I’d be there for that.  Whenever Deneen got scared, like if there was something physical to do that might be dangerous or that she thought was yucky, she’d step back and I’d come out and be there and do it for her and enjoy it.  We didn’t really know that was what was happening, but now I can see that it is how it was.

On the farm, there was a lot of people daring people to do things.  Deneen got us stuck in a tree before, too, and she was just screaming and crying and panicking and I couldn’t do anything to help her.  She has to relax into me to let me come.  When I do, I smooth the fear out of her and think about things logically.  The adrenalin doesn’t affect me the way it does her, and I don’t freak out.  I’m not scared.  I like doing things like jumping out of barn roofs or down banks, or across creeks, or riding bikes really FAST!

So, her brother, he wanted to be able to do boy things and play with frogs and bugs and all of that.  I can remember it so vividly.  Deneen would look at him and wish that he had someone to relate to and who could play with him and she’d look at the bugs and wish that they didn’t bother her, so then she’d think about being brave enough and in a place where she wasn’t grossed out by them and…then I’d wake up and go play with the bugs and stuff with her brother.  We spent a lot of time in the yard hunting in the grass, and a lot of time on the old back porch between the two freezers because Deneen’s Mother wouldn’t want us to take our stuff in the house.

The smiles on her brother’s face were just precious, and we both loved him a lot!  I miss him, too.  We don’t get to see him anymore much, and he wouldn’t even know who I am anyway – but I’ll bet if I started talking to him about what we used to do together, he’d remember it, and even though it wasn’t really Deneen, he wouldn’t know the difference.  Well, I guess it was Deneen since I’m her.  It’s just weird for me sometimes to think of it like that.

I was trying to tell you a story and I keep getting off track, and pardon me if this isn’t as good as the stuff that Deneen usually writes, and if it goes off on these tangents and stuff.  I’m asking her not to edit this, and though it makes her uncomfortable, she’s kinda agreeing with me.  She can’t write for me.  It won’t be me then.

The story is how I am getting to write here to you now, and how it came about that Deneen and I are talking so closely now and trying to make sense of this all “becoming One” thing.  We even dream about it.  She does.  I don’t know if I dream, or if her dreams are my dreams.  I have more questions than I have understanding of anything at this point.

Now I’m going to attempt to stay on track with you here and tell the story.  Deneen went on a visit to a rollercoaster theme park and while she was there she got upset a couple of times.  One time, I didn’t have anything to do with.  She had a flashback when she saw a little girl, but that’s her story and she will tell that to you eventually.  The second time became my story.

Deneen has had a lot of people treat her very badly.  I try not to think about it.  Especially because that means it happened to me, too, and frankly, that’s just not something that I’m equipped to deal with at this point.

Lots of these people were mean to Deneen about sex.  She’s really fucked up (sorry to use the word “fuck” Deneen, but I want to).  She’s fucked up when it comes to sex.  She also is flirtatious in ways that I think are inappropriate and dangerous sometimes.  She can’t see it the way I do.  I feel bad for saying this about her, but she’s broken somehow in that way.  She’s divorced from the reality of things that way.  She doesn’t respond in normal ways when it comes to flirting or even sex.  Not that I’m always there for that or anything.  If she’s having sex with a man or a butch, I try my best to stay away.  If it’s a fem girl, well, then I peak out if I can wake up.  She doesn’t want me to tell that because lesbians are funny about men and she’s afraid that if she does date a fem lesbian in the future, they may think a man is looking at them.  I think she needs to stop worrying about what I say because the stuff she does is way more dangerous to us than this stuff that I’m saying now.  This stuff just affects her ego.

I don’t want to crush her ego – but I want us to be safe.  I NEED for her to be safe so that she can keep the body safe, and keep the mind working.  Otherwise, what happens to me?  I am only here to help keep her safe.  US safe.

In the theme park, someone made her react and made her feel threatened.  She was being her flirtatious self, and I think that’s what caused it, so, yes, I do think she is responsible for that.  I’ve told her that I think she needs to be more careful about that sort of thing and get a handle on it, but when she’s out, when she’s there, she doesn’t see it at all!  She didn’t see it this time and didn’t think she was doing anything wrong.  I don’t know that I would judge her at all and say that she’s doing something wrong, but I don’t fully understand why she does what she does and why she doesn’t understand that this can be dangerous to all of us in here.

So, she flirted and then the person crossed some imaginary line that she had drawn god knows how with god knows what and god knows where the line was and she freaked out!  She needed to go run screaming into the bushes and hide from everybody because some of us in here got scared.  I can’t speak for them, but I can say that a bunch of people woke up and were screaming.

So, Deneen turned her attention in, to all of us.  “I need to go away!” she said to us.  “I don’t want to ruin my time and everyone else’s time so I need somebody to come so that I can go away.”

I woke up and I came out, so when she backed out of the place where the body is controlled, I slid in, put the body on like the ill-fitting shirt that it seems to me, and I took over.

When I was present, I was able to get the situation under control.  It was hard and, I’ll admit, a little bit touchy, but I managed to somehow figure it all out and navigate it.  Thanks a lot to some of the great friends that she has.  There’s more that I’d like to say about that, but she’s asking me not to talk about it so I’m honoring that for her since she’s agreed to let me talk for myself at all.

I won’t let people pick on us.  I won’t let people harm us.  I’m not afraid to speak my mind, especially to other men, or to butches.  Deneen won’t speak up because she can’t.  Its part of her being broken.  I don’t give a damn what people say about what women should or shouldn’t do because I’m not a woman.  That’s why I can protect us and not worry about having to be social or make people happy.

This day in the park she was really scared that I would mess things up for her.  There was this girl there that she likes, and she thought that her going away and my taking over would freak the girl out.  Me?  I don’t get that.  I don’t understand why that’s so important, and if somebody likes her, they’re gonna like her whether I’m there or not.  Hell, they’ve gotta like me too, or at least the parts of me that are going to become a part of her.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  We’re stuck in this situation, and we have to be there for each other and the people on the outside have to deal with it or not deal with it however they want.

She didn’t feel that way about it, though and she freaked out inside of us trying to make sure that I talked to this “girl” (who, by the way, doesn’t seem like much of a girl to me) and explain what was going on.

Uh, oh!  I think I’m telling the stuff that she doesn’t want me to tell.  Well, all of it is out in the open now anyway.  Some of her friends got to meet me and one of them even talked to me.  Tried to anyway.  I only figured out later that I was confusing them with my talking because I kept calling Deneen “her” and they didn’t know who I was talking about because I was talking with Deneen’s mouth out of Deneen’s body so they got lost about it all for a bit.

The thing that I liked best about it was riding the roller-coasters!  Deneen stiffens up and fights the turns cause she hurt our neck once, or our neck got hurt anyways, on a coaster.  I’m not scared of them, though and I lean into the turns and I relax my body and I just like, meld into it and float with it.  I really liked it, and it was great to get to be fully in the body and be able to decide what to do and how.

I also had to pretend to be her, and to pretend to be interested in the things that she would have been interested in.  For that part, I wasn’t the only one there.  I had other people giving the sentences and working the mouth to speak them while I sat back inside the main core that of our awareness and watched and tried to be vigilant and on guard in case there was any danger that I had to move us away from.

In the end, it all turned out okay, and now she and I are talking better, and she’s getting used to the idea of my traits and how helpful it will be for her if she lets me be awake inside of her all of the time.  She has to get used to the idea that she can take up for us in the same way that I can.  I have to get used to the idea that she and I aren’t really separate, but that it’s some sort of wall we’ve built to keep us distanced to serve a purpose to keep the main core of all of us safe.

I don’t know where I will go.  How it will end up for me.  I rather think that it’ll be like when they talk about all of the spirits joining together with God in the end of the time of people here on this earth.  You know, spirits aren’t supposed to lose anything of themselves when they all join up to exist with God and to be one with God.

Now, I’m not saying that Deneen is God.  I’m just saying that the process seems to me like it might be similar.

Still, when I think about going away, I do get sad.  I don’t want to get sad, and I guess that it is the only thing that scares me.  I just want Deneen to be safe and I don’t want anyone to hurt her anymore and sometimes she just doesn’t have good damn sense!  She freezes up and blanks out and then we have to be here, not just me, but all of us, to rescue her, or animate her, or take the words and memories and roll them away from her, or even to put down the body until we can make sure that she will stay alive.

She just has so much fear and pain in here.  So many of us have so much fear and so much pain.  We have to be here for one another.  We have to be here for Deneen.  One day, she won’t be broken anymore.  One day, I think she’ll flow her awareness from one of us to the other without the walls up, and I just hope that we are still alive in some way, but not hurting.  I’m not hurting, but some of us are screaming all of the time, and it will be very nice for those of us in here when all of that can come to a stop.  It’ll be worth it for whatever sacrifices I need to make for Deneen for that to happen for her – which really is what is happening for me too because I’m her too.

I know it probably has confused all of you what I’ve said, but maybe some of you will get some little pieces of it.  Maybe some of you will be nicer to people like us, and people like Deneen, and maybe you’ll understand it more.  She’s getting better about talking about us, and about talking to us even though I know she’d rather pretend that I’m not here, and that we are all not here.  That’s one reason that we don’t have names.  And theres the reason that she wants to get us all together as one and not name us and make us be other and more separate people.

Well, I’m going to end with one thing that I noticed and one thing that I liked.  I liked the fact that when I was on the rollercoaster and it took the picture and I looked at it, I could see that it was me and not her.  She always is smiling and she usually has her mouth open.  Actually, usually she is talking.  Some of us are very quiet.  Not her, though.  I don’t really think I look good using her face, and I think she is very pretty when she is smiling and not so pretty when I’m there and she’s not.  But I’m a boy, and I guess I’m not supposed to be pretty anyway.  So, I liked it.  Seeing myself.  Having control of the body while riding the rollercoasters.

Deneen is saying that it is like therapy.  Like rollercoaster therapy and that we should write it off as a medical expense.  She thinks she’s so funny!

So I’m gonna go and stop talking now and I hope that some of you out there have liked what I have to say and that I explained it like you could understand a little.  I kinda want to talk while I still can.  While I can still be somebody that’s her but not her.  We are on our way to all being Her.  Her without walls.  That sounds a lot like a rock group “Her Without Walls”!  As many of us are in here, it’s a shame we don’t play an instrument and then we could make a band all by ourselves.  The integration would break up the band, then, and that would be sad.

We’ve had enough sadness.  Enough, enough, enough!

I’ll be seeing you if you like my writing, and if I have more to say, and if she agrees that I can say it.  Thanks for acknowledging me because it can get lonely in here, and god knows I’m not going to get a girlfriend or have any sex or have a family except for Deneen and who she gets with.  Maybe it will be a good thing when I’m out there instead of in here.  I hope so.

Be seeing you!  At least on the coasters!

Special thanks to: Jim Dollar Photography

Mist Bound used by permission of Jim Dollar Photography

I met another of my selves today.  I’m not sure why she came to me and asked for me to acknowledge her.  She and I had been watching a program that had to do with our Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but I hadn’t known that she was watching.  In this program, they were covering the subject of how memories eek out from an alter self into the main self.  That must have been one of the triggers.  Perhaps she had watched from behind my eyes and said, “I think I can make that happen and then she will feel what I have felt and be aware of me.”  This is my paraphrasing of what she sent to me with feelings, because she didn’t have much language, her being a very teeny-tiny, young thing.

Perhaps another trigger for this new (who is really an old) self, is that I am in a space that I consider to be a safer space now.  Emotionally, I am in an environment where I can comfortably BE.  Where I can be my selves, even my crazy selves, and there is no judgment or ridicule or fear.  This Little One, and I’ve just now decided that this is what I’m going to call her, was brave enough to try to make contact with me.  She trusted me enough to tell me a little bit about herself, and what she is always feeling while existing as an emotional placeholder, deep down inside my inner being.

All of my Others use emotions to speak with me.  This so much more efficient than words.  Since they are inside of me, it’s easier for them to send forth a billowing burst of feeling into whatever conscious awareness holds the part of me that is speaking to you now.  When I become aware of communication from them, I turn my attention inwards.  I send back emanations, mainly in the form of questions, until I get back the affirmation that I have recognized and understood what they are trying to say.  They don’t say, “Yes, that’s it!” with words.  It’s more as if a feeling of peace settles into me when I come into alignment with them.  They somehow know when what they are feeling and trying to get across, and the receiving space in which I am dwelling, are One.  It’s a key fitting into a lock; a river finding its banks; a child latching on to and suckling the breast of its mother.

In this instance, I guess that I am The Mother, truly, because this entity is one of the infants who holds for me some of the memories and experiences of the child that I was.  I have become the default mother to all of the children inside of me.  Whatever the reason, this particular child either needed to come forth, or trusted me to be in a stable enough place to allow her to come forth.  What she has to tell me is not pleasant, or fun.  I guess that we both have to be in a place of readiness for any connection to be made and information exchanged, and somehow, this morning, as I lay sleeping in a bedroom that is still new to me – that happened.

For as far back as the me who is speaking to you now can remember, I was aware of this vague memory.  It wasn’t a comfortable memory, and it had formed at a time when my brain really wasn’t yet good at making memories, forming words, or being exactly aware of the mysterious workings of all of my physical surroundings.

Here’s the memory:  I am very young.  Perhaps, a toddler.  Perhaps, not yet even able to walk.  I am on my stomach sleeping with my butt in the air.  I keep waking up because I have this feeling of exposure and fear.  Every time I wake up, this image comes into my mind of a giant hand that is so big that it looks literally like the Hand of God.  This hand is so powerful that it reaches down from the sky, through the ceiling, and into the bedroom where I am lying.  I know that if I lie with my butt exposed like this, I am in danger from this hand because it will descend, hook it’s thumb up into my butt – and lift me up, off of the bed.

That was it.  That was all that I had.  I had always believed it to be some irrational sort of creative imaginings on my part.  I’d even been amused by the ability that my child self had to come up with things like this to worry about.  There was this deeper sort of nagging feeling about it, but I pushed it aside as we humans are wont to do.

Last night as I was dreaming, Little One came forward and she reached out into my consciousness and took my symbolic hand in her small one, pulling me into her experiential memories.  She took my awareness and melded herself into it and she showed me new images, expanded me into her Feeling Self.  What she showed me was this:

She and I are One Being lying upon the bed in the mobile home where we live.  It’s the middle bed in the center of the home.  We can see the cheap paneling of the walls, the open doorway, and the open window with the curtain billowing about with an entering breeze.  It is daylight and we are trying to nap.  We like to sleep on our stomach, with our knees drawn up under us.  This is the position that we find the most comfortable – but, this position causes our butt to be exposed, sticking up in the air.  This fact makes us panic.  Our little heart flutters with fear.  Lying vulnerable like this is a bad and dangerous thing.  We somehow know this.  The image of a hand coming down is in our mind, and we know that hands come down and lift us up.  We can clearly see the hand, but it stops at the elbow and seems to float, disembodied, in the air.  We know that we need to sleep on our side, no matter whether or not this is the most comfortable for us.  At least it is more comfortable than feeling the slight parting of the cheeks of our buttocks that leave our anus open and vulnerable when we are on our belly.

Falling asleep, we keep waking up in a panic, realizing that we’ve rolled to our tummy again.  Each time we awaken with racing heart, we look to the open door and plop down, forcing our butt onto it’s side, pointing toward the window.  We know that this is the safe way to turn.  Toward the window, not the door!

Over and over again, we keep waking up, adrenalin pumping as we find ourselves on our tummy.  Scared, frustrated, we stubbornly keep flopping down on our side, practicing this new style of sleeping, butt to the safety of the window.  We are very determined and we know that we CAN eventually learn to sleep this way and not leave ourselves open to the terror of the giant hand.

The Me of today, woke up in the middle of this remembering, sharing this panicked, frantic, frightened state.  Every neuron and cell of my being seemed to be activated into a highly aware state and I felt like screaming out – crying for help; doing all of the things that she had not been able to do for us as a little, baby child.

Feeling Skeleton Man knocking at the door of my consciousness, I knew that my body was about to shut down and go into a state of catatonia.  The last time that one of my really young selves had come forward, I had been hospitalized for days, unable to function or regain control of my body.  Realizing that I was in trouble, I picked up the phone and started dialing.  That’s what I do.  It’s one of my tools.

I don’t have just one person to call, I have a network.  These people are my adopted family and they know about my disorder and the problems it brings, and they will come to help me if I need it.  I always have a running list in my head of which friends are available at which times, what their work schedules and familial obligations are, and whether or not they are in any current crises themselves.  I call until I get someone.  I just keep calling with the most logical person first in the call line.  While I’m doing this, I have this expectation that I will find someone, and I have this absolute certainty that there are people out there who love me and who will come.  It is such a blessing and a relief to have a life built with people like this in it!

I appreciate them, and I am cognizant of the fact that I have a responsibility to honor their own lives and feelings, and not to overwhelm them or trouble them when they have been otherwise drained of resources.  “It takes a village,” I’m fond of saying, “to take care of The Deneen!”  There’s more truth to that than I sometimes want to admit; but I’m okay with it.  It’s how things are, and it doesn’t make my life a bad or negative thing.  In a way, it’s turned my life into a fantastic and wonderful, on-going miracle.  It’s given me the opportunity to let people love me, to allow them to be the hero and come to my rescue and feel good about themselves, and to allow me to feel good about them in return.

On this day, the person who picked up the phone first was my new housemate.  She was at work, but she usually has access to her phone and can pick up quickly.  When I heard her voice, I dissolved.  I tried to speak – but couldn’t.  My sobs kept coming forth and overwhelming me, and there was copious snot and drool from where I’d lost control of my body as Skeleton Man and Shaky Girl knocked at the door of my consciousness, making me aware that they thought it was time to put my body down.  I fought.  I fought to stay present and to maintain control.  I talked.  I spoke to these Selves and tried to convince them that we could get through this without shutting down – but they are Me, so they know me too well, and knew that I had doubts about my own assertions.

It’s a very hard fight!  It’s like trying to move while being underwater with weights applied, and while getting no air and not knowing how to walk.

My friend had known that I needed someone, so had left her job to come home to see what was wrong in-person, since I hadn’t been able to speak when on the phone.  As I forced myself to grow calmer, and when I’d concentrated enough to regain control of my body, I began telling her about what had happened to me, and what I had remembered.  She sat on our couch and put her arms about me and held me tightly and said, “Well, you know that you are in a safe space here.  None of that is happening now.  Now, you are with me in the present moment, and you are safe.  We don’t let people hurt people here.  No body hurts babies here.  You are safe, the baby is safe, and no one is going to hurt either of you.”  Just hearing that brought forth so much peace inside of me, and I could relax a bit.

After blabbering on about all of the things that Little One had shown me, I moved on to subjects  about various things that had happened to women of my family via not only my father, but other male family members as well.  My roomie listened with rapt attention.  “I never knew anybody”, she said, “who was molested when I was growing up.”

“Well it is common,” I say.  “Some statistics report  that at least one in every four women are raped or molested.  And that’s reported statistics.”

“Four?” she repeated with her thick English accent.  “One in four?  That’s a lot!  What the hell is wrong with you Mountain People?”

I’m aware that this phenomenon is not limited to Mountain People, or  Southern people.  Having stated that, however, I must concur that it is quite prevalent in the culture from which I come.  Not only that, but in the culture of my experience, it was okay to laugh about things such as this memory of mine, and this image that my mind holds of a gargantuan hand coming from the sky and through the ceiling, all for the purpose of sticking a thumb up the ass of the infant me and lift her, by this method, up, off of the bed.

Another example of this misplaced humor revolves around one of the first kisses that I ever received.  There was a friend of the family who was a little younger than myself whose house my family often visited.  I quickly learned that to get caught in a room or hallway alone by him was not necessarily a good thing.  If there was an accidental meeting, he would glance around to see whether or not we were alone.  If the coast was clear, he’d look at me and break out into a big grin, pregnant with meaning, and close in on me.  My natural reaction was always to freeze.  I’m not sure why I always froze whenever men approached me to get use from my body.  Something inside of me figured that this was the safest, best, most expected response.  My survival self kicked in, and it told me that what I was to do in order to survive was to freeze – and often, dissociate.

This boy would trap me up against whatever wall was available, closing-in until I was pressed flat, arms at my side, or his holding onto one arm with one hand and pressing his body forcefully against me to trap the other one between us.  He would bring his face in, close to mine and start talking dirty as one hand would grip hold of my skirt and methodically gather the fabric until he could slide his hand underneath, fumbling around trying to make his way inside panties with hard, sausage fingers that hurt the delicate tissues of my vulva.  I wonder now if he thought that we was being sexy.  I wonder what in our environment made him think that this was the way to treat women, that this was an okay thing to do.

The boy wasn’t bad looking and he had these big, really ironically soft brown eyes with some of the longest dark lashes that I’ve seen to this day.  I would be reticent if I did not admit that there was also a certain element of thrill and danger that came into my being whenever he was around, and as I tried avoiding him in the hallway, watching closely, attempting to dart, unseen, through the house.  At those times, survival adrenalin would send a rush to my system.

When I was caught, there was usually no kissing, because I would turn my head to the side and he’d have to chase my lips with his, and he was far more interested in what his hands were doing.  One day, where the kissing is concerned, I was very unlucky!  Before I could get my head to the side, he trapped my mouth with his own, and the minute that he gained access to my lips, he shoved a thick and slimy tongue into my mouth.  The sliminess was enhanced by the fact that he’d enjoyed one of his favorite foods right before accosting me.  An onion sandwich!  I have to say that, hands down, this tops my list as my GROSSEST kiss EVER – and I’ve accidentally had a dog’s tongue slipped into my mouth, so it’s not as if I don’t have anything with which to compare it.

This all was complicated by the fact that my Mother was sitting outside waiting for me to emerge from the house.  The fact that everyone else was out and in the car made it easier for him to trap me alone.  I was in a hurry, and I was grossed out, and he was being particularly aggressive.  As I struggled to pull away from him, I fought waves of nausea, and his fingers raked across my body as I slid down the wall, pushing at his hands and making my break for it.

As I hit the door, I automatically slowed down to a regular, walking pace so that nobody would notice that anything was wrong.  After all, I was out in the open now and in no danger.  I could still taste and feel the impression that his tongue had left in my mouth and feel where his fingers had been on my body.  I didn’t like it, and I thought about ways that I might be able to make this stop.

“Well,” I thought to myself, “maybe your mother would be upset if she knew what was happening.  Maybe she would protect you.  Maybe she would make it stop.  Maybe you should talk to her about it.”  I decided to give it a try.  I began to staunch my reserve and I think my heart beat even faster than it had when I’d been trapped against the wall only a few minutes before.  My mother didn’t talk about troublesome issues.  She did sometimes talk about sex – but mostly in the vein of what kinds of it were sinful.  I wasn’t sure how she would react to what I was about to reveal so I decided to go with an “opener”.

“Guess what!” I exclaim.

“What?”  I have the attention of everyone in the car; my mother, my siblings.

“I just got kissed.”

“You did?”

“Yes.  I got caught and pushed up against the wall and kissed.”

My siblings gasp and announce, “I’ll bet I know who kissed you!”

The boy is named amongst squeals and giggles.

“Yes!” I exclaim, feigning an absent lightness in my being.  “It was really, really gross!  He had been eating an onion sandwich!”

My sisters dissolve in gales of laughter.  “OOOHHHH!  An onion sandwich?”

My mother is laughing along with them.

“I didn’t like it, it was gross.”

“So-and-So likes Deneen, So-and-So likes Deneen!”  The sing-song chant fills the car.  My heart sinks.  They aren’t getting it, that it’s not a GOOD thing that So-and-So likes Deneen.  It’s really NOT a good thing!

Now, I’m aware of the fact that there is a huge difference in a boy my age feeling me up and taking a kiss, whether against my will or not, and the sexual abuse of a small child, and I’m not trying to equate those two things at all.  There are, however, common elements flowing through these acts.  One of those is exemplified by the reactions of the people from the family of my origins when they are told stories involving improprieties.

Here is a classic example:  The boy who used to trap me has a sister who is also friends with my family.  She and I have spoken about various experiences that we have had with men and sex, and about how and what we were taught as young women.  Even as sensitive as she is about these issues, she still laughed when I related to her the story of my memory, and how my baby self was worried about having a thumb hook up her ass and lift her from the bed.  I think the fact that this image is one that seems to invite ridicule is one reason that I’ve had trouble exploring it.

Phone tucked under my chin, my friend on the other end of it giggling about my recent revelations, I call out playfully to my housemate.  “Hey, I’m trying to tell her about my memory and she is laughing at me!”  I’m kind of uncomfortably laughing, too, because…well, that’s what we do, many of us Southern Women of Georgia.  We don’t want to face the pain and discomfort.  We don’t know what to do with those things – so, we laugh to break the tension.  It’s a learned response.

“Laughing!” exclaims my English friend.  “That’s nothing to be laughing about!  There’s nothing funny about it!  We don’t do that to babies!  We don’t pick babies up by sticking our thumbs up their bums and she shouldn’t be laughing; there’s nothing funny about it!”

Bless you, My Friend!  You’re right.  We shouldn’t treat babies like that.  – And you’re also right, that in spite of the old, conditioned, uncomfortable giggling of my friend and myself, there is nothing funny about it

“We don‘t treat babies that way – and there’s nothing funny about it.”  Please, let this be the new covenant for my descendants.

“We don’t treat babies that way.”

What about my Little One?  What do I do with the baby inside of me who is so frightened, so panicked?  All that I know to do is to go inside my consciousness and hold her and rock and tell her that she can sleep any old way she wants.  To tell her that there are no mean hands that can penetrate the ceilings of our safe little house.  Where I am now, where I have brought her to be with me, we don’t treat babies that way – cause that’s wrong.   And whether you’re trapped on your own bed as an infant, or against the wall of someone else’s home when you’re a teenager, in spite of the learned laughter of culture, there’s really nothing at all funny about it.

Some things are just very hard to unlearn.  After all, at night, even in our safe little house, Little One and I, we still sleep on our side.

These girls use their musical talents to battle Child Abuse: Someone’s Sister

Here are some links to actual statistics regarding sexual abuse:

Child Sexual Abuse Statistics

College Statistics of One In Four

Sexual Abuse of Women:  Explanations

Statistics of Sexual Abuse

Sexual Abuse Victim Breakdowns

With special thanks to: Jim Dollar Photography

And to: Mike Bernier, whose gentle ear, over many hours, made the telling of this tale possible