CHICAGO

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Reflections Across Time…

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Dregs of hot chocolate pool darkly in my cup, drank to the bottom, and a candle flickers on my altar as I write this.

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Chicago, the distant past

My grandmother grew up in a small town called Lanark, a couple hours west of the city.

My grandfather briefly lived in Chicago as a boy. Later, as a young man, he studied at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a couple hours south of the city. This was where my grandparents met. He was a mathematician. She was a chemist.

…

Chicago, the winter of 2018

Gazing out from the interior of a taxi. The window is peppered with raindrops, the rain is coming down hard. Beyond the hazy pane there are buildings wrought in bronze and chrome, dark glass and stone. Skyscrapers so tall that I have to lean forward to see where they finish, my cheek and breath warming the window, creating clouds. The buildings loom; gilded monoliths stamped against a white sky, speckled with rain, blurred by breath. This brief scene hangs in my memory like a photo drying on a string, so clear and fresh I could have sworn I had captured it on camera, and not simply tucked it into the corners of my mind.

Memories follow memories, running like rivulets in the well-worn grooves of my thoughts when I gather them…

A visit to Oliver’s mother’s family home. The warm kitchen with its sturdy table and painted ceramic fruit bowl and beautiful old benches, all speaking the language of use; generations of dinners carving the space into a shape looks like home, even to the eyes of a stranger.

The liquorice grooves of a Vampire Weekend record, played in the bedroom of Oliver’s cousin. My favourite band. Later, an outing to a local student bar where punters dress in the colours of their favourite sports team.

A yellow gingko leaf, plucked from the lawn of a University building.

Our forays into the city…

I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of 80s character Ferris Bueller, with a day of rollicking shenanigans, but our finances were a little too skint to pay the entry fees to the Art Institute and the Sears Tower. So, instead, we visited a free garden and a zoo in Lincoln Park.

A lion behind glass. A child banging on the glass.

Hot chocolates at Katherine Anne’s to warm ourselves after walking around in the cold.

A hazy memory of a deep dish pizza, all cheese.

My knee injury, which began that day and continues to this day.

There is a thread that runs between all of my memories of Chicago: a feeling, as if of looking in through a window at a familiar scene. In the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Cameron stares at a young child in a pointillist painting. The painted child stares back. This is the kind of uncanny feeling I had. Chicago is a place I am deeply connected to, but it is not mine. It feels familiar, but I am only ever a visitor. My past, present and future flow from this place, and yet it remains mysterious.

…

Chicago, present day

My brother currently lives in Chicago, studying mathematics at the University of Chicago.

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INSIDE BEAUTY & THE BEAST’S LIBRARY

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A tale as old as Time:
The story of Transformative Love

~ 8th November 2018 ~

It was so long ago, what could I possibly have to share, aside from tiny shards of memories? There is something, though… Something in me that wants to be rediscovered through words, like a treasure waiting to be unearthed in a deluge of raindrops. I can feel it jittering behind my ribs when I look at these pictures. Unfortunately, my hand is unpractised, my writing unpolished, my wrists a little creaky, and dust has settled across the attic in my mind.

As rusty as my writing skills are, there is no other way to start but to begin. So! I pick up my thoughts, blowing away a fine film of dust, and decide I am as ready as I will ever be…

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

Long ago, when I was still a young thing in a land far away from here, I lived in a small provincial village called Gypsum, set between dun hills the colour of clay when it has been washed and bleached by the sun. The little town was peppered and scattered into the folds of a valley, so small you could miss it on your way to the great plains of Utah or the big city; its only sign a little cross on the hill, watching over the huddle of shops that sat on the other side of the river. I had moved there for love, for my husband at the time lived there with his family, and we all lived together. Six years rolled by, and the river thawed and froze and the snows came and went, but always I felt restless. Something in me wanted to leave and keep on leaving. My husband and I traveled and returned many times, yet I never felt at home in those hills in the mountains. Sometimes, when I was on my way to work, I would have this desire come over me. The road stretched on and on - that great long highway, the i70, carrying trucks from one side of the country to the other, and it spoke to me of other places… other lives and possibilities. In my daydreams I never turned at the exit to my destination, I just kept on driving.

Now, it so happens that our story begins where my daydreams ended: further down the road than I had ever traveled. We were on our way, Ollie and I, headed for a new adventure. We had traveled the West side of the country for three months during a glorious summer, living in our little honeycomb yellow van, only returning to the clay hills of Gypsum when our money ran dry. We had stayed then, helping with the harvest. But soon the chill winds of November began to blow and I had that restless feeling come over me again. We counted our pennies and found we were ready. At the beginning of November we packed the van with our warmest clothes and set out East.

This was our first stop on the untraveled road.

A single pinpoint on the map, situated in Iowa, I had come across it on some late-night search for beautiful libraries.

All spiralling staircases and rose coloured pillars, gilded book titles glinting in the half light, it made me think of the library from Beauty and the Beast. Ever the escapist, I wished, in my constant running away, to escape not only the life I was leading but life in general. I wished to live in the books, pages and words that had held me during childhood.

If only, if only, my heart sighed.

And here our story takes a turn inwards, for what I wish to say cannot be captured by the simple reality of that day when we walked the echoing tiled floors, sitting a while at the desks before returning to the van to read and eat and carry on.

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

There was once a young girl who learned the hard way that she could not outrun herself. Try as she might, her shadow was always one or two steps behind her. Something had happened to her when she was very young; a terrible thing that had hurt the girl so much that she wished to be rid of it. This freedom-wish grew and grew inside of her, till she was filled to the brim with dreams of a life untouched by the terrible shadow that pursued her with grasping hands. So she began to run. Across mountains, through valleys, over oceans, she ran and ran. Whenever she stopped the shadow was not far behind. Every place felt full of potential till the shadow showed up. Each time the girl wished she could remake her life anew, and each time she found herself slipping back into her old life. New friends would soon see the dark splotch hanging around her, and, unable to hide it, she felt so ashamed of it that she began to pull away from the people around her, for fear that they would spy her secret shame.

For seven years, the girl ran and the shadow followed. Till one day, growing sad and weary after much heartbreak and loss, she decided enough was enough! This running away from the shadow needed to end. So, she stopped, turned, and faced it.

When she looked, she saw that the shadow had a shape alike to her own, only smaller. It looked back at her, waiting, expectant. Hands on hips, she was ready to give it a good telling off! when she noticed something… the shadow looked sheepish, shy and a little sad. As she watched, it reached out a small hand, palm to the sky. The gesture was no longer scary, made frantic by the chase; it looked almost timid, scared of her rejection. She felt her heart give a little, and found that her own hands, which had been at her waist, had fallen by her side, and her fingers were inching upwards, as if mirroring the shadow hand. Slowly, tentatively, she reached out. Palm to palm, they touched. And in that moment she saw things clearly, all those things that shame had hidden from her. What had seemed a blotchy body formed from fog was now a young girl. The girl. But much younger - her childhood self. She could see that in all her dreaming and wishing for a different life, she had abandoned her younger self, the self that had gone through the difficult reality, in favour of a dream self; one who she imagined she could be, had she never been hurt.

Seeing this, the girl knew that she had been wrong to run, and wrong to cast herself aside, and she had been especially wrong in thinking that she need feel shame for what had happened to her. She could see that this younger self needed her, and, funnily enough, she needed her younger self. Her whole self.

So, taking out a needle, she began to sew her shadow back on the soles of her heels, stitch by careful stitch. And as she did so she sang a song of acceptance and love.

She is still singing, my beloved, still stitching and singing herself back together, and with every act of acceptance she feels a little more whole.

⋆⋅☆⋅⋆

Sometimes the monster in the story is a metaphor for the part of us that wishes to be loved. Sometimes our monster keeps us captive, or chases us, in the hopes that we will love it. Like Beast, we may wish to be accepted. Like Beauty, we might dream of a better life. Although it is a fools errand to try to love a monstrous person into changing, that same love turned inwards, upon our own monsters, works like a charm!

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So I run 'cause I must leave that dog in the dust
Gonna run like a river, right down to the sea
Gonna run like the sap through the heart of a tree

Oh, you were the pebble, and I was the ripple
You were the puzzle and I was the riddle
Together, together, got lost in the middle

~ 🎶 Ten Degrees of Strange,
by Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane

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DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL

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PROLOGUE + PLAYLIST 🎶

There’s a scene in the movie ‘Jennifer’s Body’ where a mysterious whirlpool at the base of a waterfall sucks in objects that are never seen again. Scientists drop all kinds of things into it, ping pong balls, coloured dyes, but as the narrator says, “nothing ever surfaces”. It seems symbolic - an endless hole, a yawning maw leading to unknown underground dark places. Named the “Devil’s Kettle,” by the locals, this waterfall is the namesake of the fictional town in which the events of the movie unfold. It’s a story in which a teenage girl’s body is taken over by a hungry demon, seducing the boys in her town so she can consume them.

Thus we set the stage for our dark tale…

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ON THE SURFACE

A storyteller sits in an old armchair. A heavy book rests in her lap. Cradling the spine with one hand, she cracks open the cover, dust swirling and spiralling out from the untouched pages. Finding her place, she begins to speak…

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“How long has it been, dear reader? This bookmarked page has sat, waiting patiently, for five whole years. And how much has changed, my beloved? Much has happened since we last sat together…”

So much has happened, and yet I have been silent.

This particular story was a long time in the making. The pictures were taken back in 2019. They sat, waiting patiently, like all the other stories that are awaiting me in my drafts. Calling to me throughout the years with soft unworded whispers that drizzle down to pool in my chest, making me ache for all the things I have desired to say and do and create during the dark years.

You see, I got sucked into a kind of devil’s punchbowl. At times things were so turbulent that I did not have the space to write. At other times I was lost deep in the dark waters of self reflection. I did not take photographs. I did not write. I did not film. Aside from the small stories I shared on my Instagram during this time, I did not create.

Then, in 2021, the words began to come. I sat on a leather couch, in a lamplit lounge on a palm-lined street in L.A., my heart hurting, and began to write on this very page. What came pouring out were the first chapters to a much larger story. My Story. The story. Our human story.

Soon, it all became too overwhelming. It was too much to tell My Story. My Story that was still unfolding, as I sat in the lounge of the partner who would turn out to be my second abuser. I already had a lot to say, but I still had a lot to unravel before I could find the main thread of the tale. It would take another few years before I uncovered the heart of it.

So I gathered up those initial words like seeds. I cut and pasted them, sowing them into another document where I have been slowly tending to them ever since. I write My Story in stops and starts. It is both painful and healing to dredge up my past. Mostly, it is exhausting. I spiral around it, sometimes leaping away, wanting to leave it all behind and let the past be the past, before I am drawn back, desiring to understand my past, and, through it, myself.

That story is long and unfinished. But it started here. Its roots are right here in this very page. This is the beginning, the scribble that I cannot unwrite or unsee. I want to begin here. I want to name it. Place it. Put words to it, as a sculptor moves clay, bringing earthen form to the thing of their mind’s eye.

I am sitting in my bedroom in New Zealand. It is currently Wednesday September 18th. Opening the page, I discovered that tomorrow will be the anniversary of my website’s creation, a fact that feels poignant. I have waited, the hope and desire to write coiled inside me till this very moment when it all burst forth on the most ordinary of days, prompted by nothing spectacular. I am recovering from a cold. I have a pile of to-dos still cluttering my list, all of them seemingly important enough that, up till now, they have taken priority over writing. I figured I would get to my writing… one day soon. When I had gotten my things in order. Dear reader, my things are not in order. But there is a candle burning in the corner, and one on my altar, and I am ready. I am finally ready.

I wish to take you back, before we go forward, for I feel that there is so much to be gotten from sharing the unspoken pasts that have shaped my present. Both for me, in the telling, and for those who might listen. This will be the first of a number of very old and dusty memories that I publish here on my website. I am excited to bring them to the surface, to look at them and remember them with fondness and heartbreak and nostalgia, before moving on.

The pages I am about to share with you come from chapters that seem like distant memories to me now. They have become my own legends; tales I occasionally tell to new friends over a beer at the pub, when I am explaining the course of my life. They underpin every adventure I have set out upon since 2019, and every misadventure that has befallen me.

So, let’s begin on this bookmarked page.

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DIVING UNDER

I swam upon the Devil's lake

But never, never, never, never

I'll never make the same mistake

No, never, never, never

~ ‘The Wind,’ Cat Stevens

It was a dark time, and it was a growing time.

The pictures that remain are softly lit, but the period was a murky one. Like a bittersweet pomegranate, or an apple with a shiny surface and a rotten core. I remember the good and the bad.

There was a sweetness to these moments. I took these pictures and that video on a day trip in the mountains. We all piled into the car, blasting music with the windows down, hair streaming out in the wind and sunlight. I remember sharing ripe blackcurrants picked from bushes down by the waterside, and the moments of companionable silence spent with the girl in the video, as we watched the shimmering leaves of the yellowed aspens; reaching out to touch ashy trunks, leaving our fingers coated with a fine film of sour aspirin-laced dust, like that magical-sad accident when you touch a moth’s wing and find that you have stolen some of its flying power. There were the moments when I would turn to find Oliver’s smile, or when he would take me into his arms to spin me around laughing. Love-filled moments. There were whoops of joy, as some of us jumped into the waters of the devil’s pool. The youngest of us, my nephew at the time, jumped into the azure river, far away from the bounds of the pretty ultramarine and midnight blue colours that belied the yawning depths of the middle of the pool. We had food, and shared jokes, and soaked up the sun, anticipating the winter to come, still feeling so young that time seemed to stretch like an endless Indian summer ahead of us, brimming with further road trips and possibilities.

Yet these pictures are tinged with darkness too. I can see it now, creeping into the corners, burning and smoking, threatening to set fire to the film. I think so much of the pain in these images comes from the people who appear in them. My heart hurts to see them. For a long time, I thought it was because of the falling out that had happened, and the wrongs that were done to me. My relationship with the girl in the video - my sister-in-law and close friend - got thrown against the rocks when we tried to live together. It ended in a brutal wreck, both of us retreating from the scene with new wounds. It was partly because of the flotsam, the still-sharp shards of that wreckage, that I left Colorado and returned to New Zealand; to escape that situation, and moreover, to escape myself. I overhead a conversation in Spanish in the kitchen: she was coming back for Christmas. I went to the bedroom and without a second thought, I searched for jobs in New Zealand, found one that sparked my interest, and booked a flight. It was mid-Covid, but I was hell-bent on leaving without saying goodbye. Within a couple weeks I was on a plane. I got that job. I began working at the National Archives of New Zealand. Ollie soon followed me. But the darkness followed me too.

One cannot escape oneself for long. I was met with my inner demons once again, and this time the wreck was much more severe. I ruined my own marriage.

This is the story left unspoken till now.

I want to share a little about the demons that live inside of me. The devil, the hungry ghost, the horrible gnawing thing inside me that consumed my life till it was all gone, leaving me with nothing but hope for a new one.

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DEEPER

I have been the bearer of great pain.

I knew I had been hurt, but I did not realise I could hurt others.

Strangely, the pain I feel when I gaze at these images does not come from the wounds that were inflicted upon me. It comes from someplace deeper - less fretted over and worry-worn than the replayed arguments and the jabs that stung. Somewhere more subconscious, dark and dim. It comes from knowing that I hurt these people. I loved them, and I hurt them.

First, there was the wreck of 2020. Even the most angry parts of me, the bits that remember overhearing whispered words like poison in the walls, or that time I was told I should stop voicing my opinions, even the label “know-it-all” and the misdirected accusations and the scapegoating that drove me to a point of near-insanity, making me actually physically lose my voice, even those angry parts do not hold a candle to the self-reproach that I feel when I think about the lasting hurt that I may have caused.

Let me put it in plainer words. I really fucked up. I did not support my friend in the way I should have during her pregnancy. Instead of believing in her, I worried for her. The words I used, my tone, my attitude, it all landed in a way that caused a deep rift. I did not intend to hurt her, but I did, and I can see that now. I can see the way it must have felt, and it pains me to think about it. Because I know exactly how it feels when someone substitutes worry for real care. It has taken me years and years to see the picture this way.

I knew I had been hurt, but I did not realise I could hurt others…

Then there was my marriage. The wreck of 2021.

The truth is, I cheated on Oliver. Not once, but multiple times over the years that we were together. I cheated, then vowed never to do it again, then would cheat again. 3 times. 3 people. 3 deep gashes. That is what it took to break my marriage.

To explain why I did this, I would need to write several thousand more words. The river runs deep at this point, the caverns dark and horrid, but I have been exploring them these past few years, in order to face my own demons. Suffice to say, I felt a gaping hole in my heart where selfhood and a sense of secure love should have been. In running down all the wrong paths, I was reenacting those scenarios that had played out first during my childhood and then in my later teen years, when I went through 5 years of intense coercive control and abuse at the hands of a romantic partner.

… I knew. I knew I had been hurt. Yet still I did not realise I could hurt others. Not till it was too late.

Without intending to, I took my own hurt and passed it on to the person I cared about the most. In trying to fill the hole in my heart, I went and hurt Oliver in the exact ways that I was hurting. I cannot even begin to describe how it feels to know you have passed your pain on to a loved-one this way. Gut-wrenching. Sleep stealing. The worst of it is, I know that pain like the moles on my wrists; I heard its familiar ghostly voice when he spoke to me of the newly embedded question that was gnawing away at him: why did I look for love elsewhere? Was he not enough?

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INTO THE HEART OF THE DARKNESS

I feel it in my soul,

I feel the empty hole,

the cup that can’t be filled…

The beast that can’t be killed.

I know I shouldn’t love you, but I do…


~ ‘Bitter Water,’ The Oh Hellos

Not enough.

That is how I felt all the time in my own mind. My inner critic was like a constant hum, a tv playing in the background of my life, waiting for me to make a mistake, and then an invisible hand would turn up the dial and I would be sitting with my arms over my head, trying to hide from something that I could not shut out.

If shutting it out didn’t work, then maybe shutting myself away from the world would. So, I began to build a wall. Without ever consciously thinking about it, my mind set out to protect myself in whatever ways it could find. Apparently, what it found was that I could numb myself to pain by never really touching the outer world. Never letting it get to me. At this point, everything felt so raw that numbness was a welcome relief. Unfortunately, I did not read the fine print at the bottom of the contract… Build a wall to keep out the pain, and you are building a wall that will keep out every other part of the world. Pleasure and suffering, achievements and pitfalls, curiosity and challenges, awe and uncertainty, love and loss… Each is bound within the other. You cannot shut out one side of life. You either live, and experience the world in all its fullness, or you don’t. To live is to be invested, and to be invested is to risk something. In short: living is caring. Indifference is death. These were things I did not know, at the age of 20, when I decided to retreat from caring about the world.

Another couple points of fine print I did not foresee:

- Walls of indifference keep love out. Both ways.

- The hole in my heart would only become more hungry.

- The less I felt, the more I craved feelings. I wanted to feel something, anything! Adrenaline became my only way back, a return to feeling alive.

- The word “whatever” can lead one into recklessness.

Most of the time, the river of my life ran under a summer sun, and I floated along lazily, feeling relatively peaceful and detached. There were long stretches of time where life would mull on happily in this way, and Oliver and I were the best of companions. A lion’s share of our time together was spent like this. Happy, exploring, cooperative.

Looking back, I can see that the waters only became dangerous when a figure would appear. Someone hazy, just out of reach. A person who would first call to me, then dive away. In plain English, I was captivated by anyone who was initially interested in me, only to become emotionally unavailable… even cruel.

It was as if I hoped to reenact the pain of my past loves, so that I might change the ending. If only I could make this person like me. Love me! Then I might feel whole again.

So, I chased them.

I chased them because it was familiar.

Because I felt more comfortable earning love than having it. Especially when I felt internally that I didn’t always deserve it.

I chased them because I wanted to finally prove to myself that I was lovable, even by the most unloving of people. That was the impossible glimmer of gold I sought to capture. The love of the unloving.

All the while I scorned the love of those people who truly cared for me. My husband. His family. My friends. My own family. I never believed in it, let alone felt it. I felt alone.

And the hole inside me gnawed, never filled, always hungry.

Till the day it consumed my entire world, my marriage, and all I had known. Gone.

Only then did I realise that something needed to change.

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SWIMMING UPWARDS WITH GEMS

Where I go, will you still follow?

Will you leave your shaded hollow?

Will you greet the daylight looming,

Learn to love without consuming?

~ ‘Thus Always to Tyrants,’ The Oh Hellos

Since then, I have been trying to unravel the knotty clump at the heart of it all. I have learned to love myself, but I am still learning to love and be loved. It is not easy. There have been missteps and setbacks, all of which have helped me to grow. I am the fool, bumbling along the road, unsure of the way but never faltering for all my ignorance. I am determined. I will not let my heart calcify around the hurts. I continue to feel, despite it all. Loss is intimately wrapped up in love; to love is to lose. For so long, I wanted to keep myself from feeling the pain and the loss that I associated with love, (my innermost fear is that I am slowly losing every single person I love - that the more they get to know me, the less and less they love me). I thought that if I guarded my heart from caring, if I stopped caring altogether, I would be safe. My motto, without realising it, had become “Whatever. I don’t care.”

However, I can see now that the real work is to hold my pain with care, so that I do not pass it on to others. I don’t want to create any more hungry ghosts. I can be the point at which the pain stops.

My motto for the last 2 years has been this:

What happened to me is not my fault, but it is now my responsibility.

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RESURFACING

The greatest thing

You'll ever learn

Is just to love

And be loved in return.

~ ‘Nature Boy,’ Nat King Cole

I wish, in writing this, to take responsibility for my part in this sad story. I wish to tell the story, and in the telling, have it be touched by that magic that happens when one weaves their experience into words: to sooth, to process, to put it in the past, place it in the fabric, counting the threads that make up the picture before moving forward to weave some more. This section is part of the tapestry of my life, and although it is unsavoury, it is real.

So often, we want to turn away from what is hard to look at. I believe it is a difficult but worthy practice to face the darkness in ourselves and to name it. In doing so we may open the door to change. And so it was - this time was filled with the power of great change. I have had to change, in order to stop hurting those I love so much. This time was the rich black wormy soil from which I grew. The soil itself is unpalatable, stomach churning, but the fruits… they have been beautiful.

My greatest fear has come to pass. I have lost love. At the core of it, this little story has been about the love I lost when I lost a part of my family: Oliver and all of his family, the people who had taken me in and cared for me - people with whom I had shared hundreds of meals, laughs, and cherished experiences. In many ways, my fear of losing love was the very force that drove me to push their love away. My fear of pain lead me to callousness, and a “whatever” attitude, and in this way, I was like a starved wolf. Hungry and dangerous. Slow to trust. Apt to lash out.

Yet, my greatest wish still lives on. Underneath it all, I know my heart yearns for one thing: to love and be loved.

And I am on my way, opening a little more each day. I am taking care of my hurts. And I have been allowing myself to feel the love that already surrounds me. In my palm is a tiny seed of hope that I hold as I walk.

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For you, at last, to comprehend

the kind of love of which I speak.

~ ‘This Will End,’ The Oh Hellos

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For Oliver.

Who stuck around, and continued to care for me, even after I started to push him away. I am so sorry. You are enough. I hope that you will go on being your wonderful self, unburdened by any fear or doubt. I wish you only love.