Author’s note:
I wrote this a year ago tomorrow, with the intention of pulling out my laptop and publishing it. i am navigating the twists and turns of a new laptop, bought last May and not cracked open until December.
It isn’t a diamond. I suspect there will be a lack of those until I figure out a new routine.
But I am trying.
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Well.
It seems I have hit an interesting point in my life.
I just stopped dealing with trauma.
I once wrote, and still believe, that I will always come to a point in the future where I have accepted the traumatic events in my life and learned how to work around them. I can choose when that is for myself.
Apparently, that process is now as instant as Nescafe.
I don’t believe we should examine our kinks and fetishes too deeply. Sure, scratch the surface a bit but no vivisections allowed. I mean you can if you want. I prefer not to. For the same reason my level of sex work always stopped at stripping, I love sex, I don’t want to do it for a living, nor do I want an in-depth analysis as to why being degraded in bed makes me into a happy little wet puddle of a girl shaking from multiple orgasms. Too much of a good thing and it stops being good, this includes information. I don’t want a why, I just want him to choke me and love me.
Which begs the question, should I really take a deep dive into why I, the girl who is/was known for crying way too much and being super emotional suddenly just accepts change, death and loss as a part of life?
I can cross reference almost anything at the drop of a hat and predict future behavior patterns. It’s a trauma response to unpredictability and abandonment. The abandonment also lends itself to hyper independence, and I feel like this is a layer of that.
Then we add the plague and minus the man I believed to be the love of my life and here we are. Nothing fucking phases me. It feels both like a superpower and a double-edged sword. I am waiting for the alternate article of footwear to succumb to gravity. Like is this gonna hit me all at once and put me into an emotional coma? Am I already in an emotional coma?
Who am I and what is happening?
I remember the girl I was like a character from a comforting TV show that I watched endlessly before bed until I didn’t.
She cried a LOT. Like to the point where my roommate/bartender/DJ in Newfoundland would call out loudly, “somebody grab Sarah, she is going to cry” every time he played a sad/triggering song. Which begs the question why did he play those ones?
That is another story for another day, or never. It is done.
But how did I get here?
I haven’t felt the “same” since the DMT. I had to rebuild myself from the rubble of an earth-shattering ego death. Did I leave out the part where I react to things when I put myself back together? I still feel overwhelming comfort and joy, often actually. I remember the day of a million rainbows, a day where I had to drive to the city from the farm and I followed the tail end of a storm front and there were too many rainbows to count over lush farmer’s fields and winding roads and my heart swelled with the beauty of it and my soul felt relieved after 72 days of rain. I remember feeling profoundly grateful to be alive in that moment, grateful for my car and my license which were still relatively new. Grateful for the task at hand which had gotten me out of the house and out on the road to bear witness to something so magnificent as the juxtaposition of black rainclouds, sundrenched wheat fields and prisms in the sky.
That was my first lesson in core memories and living in the moment.
Have I perfected this?
I mean, I know all we have is now. I suspect that time is an illusion, and everything is happening all at once. I stopped being a prisoner of my past simply by recognizing that I don’t live there anymore. Memories are not tangible, they don’t have words that hurt, they don’t throw keys or punches, they only exist in my mind and that belongs to me and me alone, so why would I hurt myself.
When I speak on past trauma, historically, I have always done so in a rote, even manner, no emotion to it, just an itemized list of facts and events laid out with the dashes in the point form audible in my voice as I start at the beginning and end at the ending. There are no pregnant pauses where I collect myself, I am collected. I am a collection. But as the curator of the museum that is me, I keep what I want and footnote/archive the rest.
I still don’t know how all of this adds up.
I recalled, earlier, the story of Giant and how I was so enamored of him that for several visits to a diner called Big Top, I failed to notice the mural of a circus on the wall. I remember being the girl who was vexed and hurt when he chose someone that wasn’t me, then validated when he came back, crushed when he left again etc. etc. ad nauseum. It wasn’t an overly dramatic period in my life, more inquisitive if anything. He left and I summoned the courage to ask why. Which lead to continued communication, a solid friendship peppered with sex and a pot rack both made with love. But what I am questioning now, and cannot for the life of me remember, is why I got so worked up about it. And why, in the time since then I stopped getting worked up about things.
Newfoundland tides were higher from the tears I cried. I was depressed and drunk, and I had outstayed when I was supposed to be there. The place that made my soul feel good, stopped doing that thing and nevertheless the girl I was, persisted. I get that now. When something stops bringing you peace, get out, get rid of it, it isn’t going to get any better. You can still visit, but pull up your roots and boogie.
Then there is the matter of Wolf. I think I started mourning him before that first fateful text message a month and a half after our fateful meeting.
Maybe the girl I am who can predict the future, somehow already knew it wasn’t going to work.
I still had hope. Hope can be a beautiful thing, but like all good things, in small doses.
Parts of me absolutely mourned versions of a future that I created in my mind that never came to fruition.
But when I boil it down and distill it, our entire relationship was 100, 000 amazing emails and a few good days in the Palisades. He was there, who he always wanted to be, and it was glorious. Now he is who he is. They are not the same person, we both know this.
But let us backtrack a paragraph.
I mourned versions of a future that I created in my mind that never came to fruition.
I stopped doing this.
This might be a eureka moment, in real time.
I started this article as I have started 90% of every article I have ever written. With zero clue as to how it was going to turn out. I just let it flow, type as fast as I can and try to stay on some kind of track, but anyone who has been with me for long enough knows that never happens. And anyone (talking about me right now) can attest to the fact that life is exactly the same way.
I always assumed I had to keep breaking my heart until it opened, and maybe that is a part of it.
Total loss of my self, and total loss of what I had curated to be the epitome of love.
But it wasn’t, or it would still exist.
That is as broken as I have ever been.
I was wrong.
About both things, and also creating versions of the future in my mind and attaching hope to them.
The future doesn’t exist anymore than the past does.
I think that is it. I don’t play out fantasies of how I want things to go, I just let them unfold as they will.
I am still here.
I love. I am loved.
Had you asked me in 2019 where I would be right now, I would have given you some hopeful romantic story about a trailer on a cliff overlooking the ocean or a condo in Texas.
Had you asked me in 2020 how long I was going to stay in my attic, I could not have given you an answer exactly, but I could not have predicted traveling here there and everywhere all of 2020 and 2021. It was illogical. Still is. But I have plane ticket stubs to show, yes, I was there, I did those things. And as weird as it feels to type this, I am still in the attic.
A year ago, this past Christmas would I have said I’ll have a straight job, won’t write much anymore and Darkling Daddy will still be around?
Nope.
But here I am typing this out on my work laptop because mine needs repair (again) and in 5 minutes when I wrap this up I’ll go back to doing laundry and sending him memes.
And I think the Zen of it is just succumbing to the mindset that I have no idea what is going to happen next. This is the same idea that kept me alive all those years of misery on the farm, that there had to be something better, or even just different if I could just hold on long enough. Or in my teenage years where everything was dark and terrible all of the time until it wasn’t.
I held on long enough.
I have a life now that I don’t feel the need to avoid or escape from.
Spent years building it all by myself. I have done brave things, and foolish things, survived all of them.
I don’t know what is going to happen with Darkling Daddy, I can make a couple of educated guesses based on past experiences, but why bother. I have cherry picked the extra good memories, posted a few pics on Instagram to remind me of moments, and he has blessed me with a folder full of homemade porn.
The thing is, I have never wanted to know what is going to happen with him. I have attained the ability to just enjoy what is. Instead of cultivating some fictional future with him in it. And so far, the truth has been better than anything I could have imagined.
I am comfortable and I am calm.
I like feeling like this.
There is a deep, soul soothing satisfaction in knowing that the bad days end and another one starts.
Today is not the best of days. PMDD is hitting hard, cramping, bleeding, sad and mad in unpredictable intervals. But I have this calm detachment about it, I know this won’t last. Better days will come and I’ll probably fall on my face again at some point.
Is my life perfect? No, but nothing ever is.
But this is pretty fucking close.
