Day 6.
I.
"What does it mean to write about trauma in real time? Instead of going to work to avoid processing the loss, The Finder makes the processing her work. She's lost her narrative, but she's writing her story. She lets the loss touch everything, as if she has a choice."
I am in the forensic process of autopsying a cadaver. The event in front of me, laying flat, disgusting, beaten up, bruised, is another version of me that had perished, expired out of my present, some time ago. She had taken up a huge load of the wounds inflicted over the years by the stalker, the scars of which glisten on me now. I suppose I thought wearing beautiful coats would mask these damages. For a while it worked. But the ghost has rapped on my doors incessantly. The dead wants to be buried, it pleads. So here I am, looking down at her. She had demanded me to honour her. To celebrate her sacrifices and her pain. And so now, two years later, I am down in this basement, and I will.
II.
"I'm out with lanterns, looking."
It is a timeless fact of life - that the best way to move forward is to be at peace with the past. I've spent so much of these past two years looking for a way back. To my former, jubilant self. To a time pre-problem, pre-pain, pre-divorce from my former self. I had liked her, I had enjoyed her life. Yet she had gone through a brutal experience and has passed beyond my ability to resuscitate.
In the wake of this passing I am looking for guidance, for answers, for an easier path to remedy. I have tried sound healing, somatic exercises, counselling, sports, shopping, travelling, talking to the public about the experience, staying in my grandmother's rural village, hijama, writing, therapy, praying; All of which has helped easing the pain. But this time I am required to do the dirty work, to walk through the dark recesses of my own thoughts. This journey I am required to do alone.
I am out with lanterns, looking. I need to meet her ghost and tell her it's time to move on.
III.
The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa writes about torma and don. Don - a ghost that causes misfortune, anger, fear, sickness. Torma means 'offering cake'. You offer the torma to your don // The pain forces your hand.
My don turns to me, implores me to look at her and tell her all that she has not died for nothing. I tell her I am sorry for not being able to look her, to even acknowledge her, because her visage has repels me so. I have refused, again and again, even as she was being hacked to pieces, to look at her pain.
Now I step into the cobwebbed room, and hold out a hand. I tell her it wasn't her fault. I tell her she had been so brave. I tell her she did so well. I tell her she is beautiful. I tell her she is kind. I tell her she has not died in vain. I tell her, ultimately, thank you. This gratitude, this torma, is my offering cake. I watch her eat, parts disappearing.
IV.
Why are you telling these stories? Why air your dirty laundry?
The truth is: The only way to clean it is to take it out and wash it.
The other truth is that: It wasn't just my dirty laundry, it was the dirty laundry of a failed social system.
The third simple truth is that: My laundry gave others hope.
V.
I keep trying to make sense of our history - as if sense is something to be fashioned, and from what? Notions of the truth, or time, or experience?
The questions why and how keep swirling inside my head, like a water in a sink that refuses to drain, clogging up the system. "It didn't have to be like that," I thud my head against the wall. Yet I know there was no other way. The only way was to flood the entire thing and wait it out to flush away. "The only way to save me was to tell my story to the world." This is the only life I know in which I am saved. There is no alternate.
VI.
Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.
It's a letter, as it always is. For now this letter is to myself.
VII.
What is my unanswerable question? How to remain myself.
The astrological sign Pisces, reputably the most empathetic, self-sacrificing star in the zodiac, is comprised of two fishes swimming in opposite directions. Like the fishes I have pulled myself into contradictions, hiding away from my past emotions even as I rap about my healing journey forward. I have deluded myself with distance, coercing her into a part unrelated to who I 'really' am. My attempts to out-swim my shadow fish, my twin fish, is a fool’s errand, if we were all honest. It is cowardly because I wanted to be spared the burden of her pain. How to remain myself when all I feel is disgust and blame?
My ghost hovers, hesitant. She touched our twin scars. Continuations of the same story. To remain myself is to wear these scars with honesty. To remain myself is to embrace all versions. Especially this one, the one I have denied, hated, and feared. The one whom I brushed away as weak, wanting, and emotional. I remind myself that she was the only one brave enough to throw everything in jeopardy so that I could be reborn. I remind myself that our shared wounds are two sides of the same story. I remind myself that even though to my eyes I am tarnished, it is the markings of a fighter. The astrological sign Pisces is a survivor, a winner and a warrior.
VIII.
I thought that I was vanishing, but instead I was only coming true.
- Clive James
I thought that to accept my dead variation would be to die, but instead it has given me a new breath.
VIX.
I wish to forgive, so this is aspirational. I write this aspirationally. The way you'll be remembered is the way you're living now, I tell myself. If you don't like it, change it.
I want to forgive, but first i need to feel everything that stands between me and forgiveness.
The frank truth of it is that it didn't strike me until last week that I needed to forgive myself. I had shrouded myself in such a thick layer of denial that it wasn't an occurrence at all. Now as I look down at the cadaver, writing these notes, my ghost is sitting next to me, conspiratorially nodding along and cracking a few smiles with her bloodied lips. I am not so scared of her now, I think, I could look her in the eye and not flinch. I could cradle her and we could weep together, and I could accept that she existed, exists, that she is a part of me that was perhaps one of the bests of me. No fight in this world leaves us unscarred, no wins exist where we are unscathed or unaltered. The ghost will hang for a little while yet, at least to see the cadaver be fully buried, somehow - this small ceremony I must find a way to do. For now I am feeling everything that stands between me and forgiveness. For now I am honouring her life.
IV.
So much of my shame has come from this notion to suffer in silence. This stoic, stiff upper lip response to being presented with a sickening situation. Even now there is still a strand of disdain when I encounter a sensationalised story. The truth is, I did overplay mine. I did use phrases and turns of words that I knew could later became soundbites and headlines to maximise my play. It was how I kept control of the situation, even when it was unravelling. I suppose this was partially why in some ways it felt like it was happening to another social media victim, instead of me
VII.
I have hated and feared and blamed my ghost so much for destroying the good out of our lives. She deserves it, I reminded myself, for putting our peace at jeopardy. For cracking the whole shebang, for revealing the worms gnawing in our otherwise pristine, unblemished public life. For someone whose astrological sign is the most empathetic of the zodiac, I sure harboured no mercy for her, my other fish, swirling in the opposite direction. This hate has separated me from her for two years.
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