Thursday night, my polycule plus two of my girls celebrated what we have dubbed David Bowie Night. Cuddles and Labyrinth were enjoyed with cheap pizza. Would have been so much better without the prerequisite January boogers… and I think I threw my back out coughing. Nonetheless, a dark anniversary celebrating the death of a musical icon.
Today [the 12th] was yet another dark anniversary, six years since my biological mother’s death. Which I could have let pass without notice. I tend to think of her at her birthday time near Halloween. But my baby sister is still deeply mourning. This mourning has become a crutch and a nightmare, an excuse to self medicate and an opportunity to remind me that I don’t remember mother being happy. I never knew that person. I have seen pictures where I think there is a genuine smile, but can you ever be sure it is real when the photographer yells, “say cheese”?
I do remember Chuckles calling me that morning. I was on my way to my last day of work, literally as I haven’t had a day-to-day job since then, and he was crying so hard. Chuckles was so much my baby the first two years of his life and I never got to have that connection with baby sister. But Chuckles was crying and my heart wrenched, I knew what he was about to tell me, my last chance to make peace with my childhood was forever gone. And he almost whispered, “Sister, is it bad that I feel relief?” Of course not, that is the darkness tugging at you. You deserved to feel relief, dear brother.
So much darkness… we are born of it. The womb, warm and dark, strange sound and impressions before we are thrust out-of-control into the hands of a midwife or doctor and startling bright lights. Our known universe, if you prescribe to either Creationism or Big Bang Theory, started as darkness. Beautiful, tranquil, endless dark… until something turned on the lights and shook the very foundations of all that is, the firmament, if you will. And back into the darkness we go when our bodies pass away and we face the unknown. Maybe we go to the Summerland or Heaven or Valhalla, and maybe we return to the primordial darkness, reunited with what was before there was anything at all.
And as I wax prolific, sober as a judge, I realize with much clarity that I worship this Darkness. Hecate, Santa Muerte, with softer aspects of Gaia, Quan Yin, and Venus — the five ladies of my altar in no particular order, pregnant with possibilities, vessels thru which we pass back and forth from the dark to the light and back again. I belong in that darkness. With the lights out, we are all the same. We can dance and giggle, hold one another close or push each other away, but there are no prying eyes, no worries. In the dark, there is no beauty and, therefore, no ugly as comparison. A single heartbeat, almost imperceptible, at the beginning, less than one day after fertilization, life in darkness, roughly 38 weeks of darkness. And forever longing to return to the place of peace, safety, and comfort, we spend a lifetime rushing toward our end.
I wish I could remember those 38 weeks. Maybe then the dark anniversary and the word “mother” would not leave such a bitter taste. I like to believe that everything has reason and purpose, that I was only born into said circumstance to attain the parents I was meant to have but who were beyond the ability to procreate. Or I am just fooling myself. Like when I was little and I dreamed that my real biological father was Eddie Van Halen and someday he would rescue me like a damned princess in a tower. [No offense to my actual bio dad, he turned out to be a decent fellow. But, kids have fantasies to help them survive the bullshit, and you can’t fault a child for that.]
The Darkness is Me and I am the Darkness. Sometimes, I just got to sit with that for a bit.
Mahalo.
