refractions #3 + 4
I don’t get to be one steady, stable person — with one steady, stable life. I am multiple people. I am fragmented and fractured, broken into multiple pieces that I am constantly reconstructing. Pieces that i am breaking and making mosaics with. Pieces that get ground to so fine they turn to sand and string and either fill up glasses and jars or weave themselves together on a loom. I don’t know what version of me you’ll get bc I don’t know what version I’ll get either. I am many different things, and places, and people all at once. A museum of glass mirrors. A graveyard filled with candlelight. The closet door cracking open and the darkness asking you to look at it. I see myself and I see a stranger — one that I have had to greet over and over and over again because I keep forgetting her name. Something the only thing I know about her is her loneliness. Though, I don’t know if she’s lonely or if she’s just sitting — waiting for someone to come sit down with her and write a book together or to watch people pass by, narrating their stories through their pacing and stride. Sometimes no one comes, and I don’t know what happens to her then — it seems like she still sits there. I look at her for too long sometimes and she looks at me. Longingly. She doesn’t have a voice. She doesn’t speak. She just looks. Breathes with her eyes and her hands. And sometimes, I sit down with her. Shake her hand. Re-introducing myself and her — ghosts passing each other in orbit; planets running around the house with their feet backwards. I sit there with her, too.
Sometimes darkness doesn’t want to be brought into the light, sometimes darkness just wants to be darkness. Sometimes you don’t need to fix the problem, sometimes you just need to acknowledge the fact that it exists— you can fix it another day, you can plant that seed and tend it another day because it will always be there. Toni Morrison calls it rememory. Jung calls it shadow work. the ability to allow for a memory that exists outside of your consciousness to be stumbled upon. A haunting of a specific time and place. To confront the dark side of the moon as if it never existed. We try to get rid of ghosts instead of asking them their story; we try to only celebrate the full moon forgetting that a new moon exists, and that’s how I feel about healing. Sometimes it’s not to get rid of the void, it’s to make the void small enough so that it doesn’t consume you — when you look into it, instead of asking it how do I get rid of you?…ask it what are you trying to tell me about what I’m avoiding?