just me, gentle & open

what this winter's flu taught me

a note on the VoiceOver: this is my sick voice reading of this, so bear with me. I really wanted to read it like a letter to a friend, so it meant a lot to do it and I felt up to it; but I do sound pretty wretched, so be prepared. <3

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I’m still in the midst of it, body fatigued & chest congested with a wracking cough that ripples across the expanse of my lungs with seismic impact. I feel cracked apart and melted down, reshaped. it’s been an undoing, a kind of darkness retreat without the sensory deprivation but with a stripping away that made me see colors so much more vividly when I emerged from the cave of my sickbed a day ago.

I found myself in a sort of cocoon, put into a vitamix, slushed about, boggified into a dripping heap of tendons and nerves. I grieved for things that still needed grieving for, sobbed out painful wails in fever-induced misery. something in this illness made the grief so present, so ready to be cried: for my grandmother that passed five years ago whom I miss so dearly; for my mother’s unwept grief she has felt since that loss and the cataclysmic health that has befallen her by its burden. I cried for all the parts of myself that have died dramatically over the course of this life, not for their death’s but for the situation that held them in captivity. I grieved that they had to endure that prison.

my helping spirits visited, my once-shadowed ally Prism present through it all, with her most recent wisdom being “gentleness, now.”

but I am a master bypasser. I say this because I bypass even when I am actively not bypassing. there are layers of bypassing so deeply woven into my existence that I fear even an expert might miss at first glance. and the thing is, it is so easy to go about one’s business not seeing it until you’re asked by your teachers to create anew. and you do.

and you get absolutely wasted in the process.

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