I’m in a stranger spot than usual today, if you can fathom such a thing.
Would you care (or dare) to join me?
It’s the one place I don’t like to be alone, in fact.
And that’s the strange part.
IN A BROWN STUDY
As I think I mentioned once before, I operate partly at the mercy of quite fierce hormonal forces, which literally color my synesthetic world in ways that are both profoundly noticeable and noticeably profound.
I ride these currents like the swells of a restless ocean, allowing them to subvert my normally rational nature and transport me to some dark kingdom of reverie.
On days like today, my world is nothing but shades of sepia and green and gold.
I see them when I close my eyes for a moment, and feel their vibrations all around me like a soporific drumbeat.
It feels like walking through the woods in the dark, passing my hands very lightly over the sun-warmed bark of sleeping trees, inhaling the musk of the ground that supports them, and feeling their roots – long buried bones and arteries – knitting together the flesh of the planet.
And yet a wild, paradoxical yearning makes me long to yank up my own connections and go running full-speed into places unknown, barefoot, and with hair much longer than my own streaming cometlike behind me.
It’s usually Florence that I’m thinking of.
Or possibly Rome.
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO
This is Daniel’s full-moon cycle as Magician, and mine as High Priestess – but of what long-abandoned religion, I cannot be sure.
During these episodes, the membrane between our worlds grows distinctly thinner, and as I sit and watch his poster across the room, it gains a sudden glow of substance that compels me.
It’s as though he might turn at any moment, unclasp those encompassing hands, and reveal every secret I’ve longed to possess – but only in receipt of some ancient password, as yet still unremembered.
This makes me quite achy and sorrowful.
Thus I fear it, and I long for it, in equal parts that can’t be parted.
And it’s on these days that she wakes for a while, deep in the cell where they’ve walled her away – silenced for the span of this long fevered dream.
But I can hear her down there weeping, shaking the bars, and calling his name.
And this seems ironic, since she no longer knows her own, nor seems to care!
So I sit down, and try to meditate, but all I find is my own catharsis of tears – as unexpected as always, and as predictable as ever.
Daniel tolerates all of this sweetly, of course, and comforts me with extra activity during these sensitive interludes – knowing they will pass in a mere two or three weeks, and then I might have a good full week of feeling “normal.”
Maybe more.
But likely less.
THE PSYCHIC OR THE EGG?
I understand, of course, that much of this is physical, and over the years I’ve learned to separate the orbits of body and mind to some degree.
The names of substances like oxytocin and serotonin flit mothlike through my crumbling brown-sugar brain, accompanied by sensible explanations about the evolutionary imperative to reproduce and sustain the species.
And still I don’t give a hot damn.
Because somehow these sensible sensibilities don’t quite cover the fact that my psychic inclinations clearly increase during the height of my hormonal monsoon season, and that the incidents and oddities that serve as my constant companions huddle even closer in the heat of the blaze I’m producing.
So which is it?
Do these chemicals, through their physical function of increased connection, simply lead me to believe that the unseen world is less removed?
Or does that belief in itself, brought on by a healthy dose of mind-tenderizing neurotransmitters, dissolve the boundaries between our worlds in some true and tangible way?
I will leave you to decide, if that even seems possible.
I feel the tide coming in again, and it’s time to climb to higher ground.
