The whisper, urgent and fierce, came to me in a blackness so dense I couldn’t be sure it was from another human being. For all I knew, and for all I could see in that night, it came from some feral being that was part ghost, part manifestation, and part spirit. But I felt its heat, felt its fetid moisture, and every once in a while I heard the click and grinding of teeth. Then, the ice cold essence of absence, as if its breath crystallized into tiny daggers of ice which fell to the earth like the delicate, barely-heard rustling of snow falling on hard ground.
“Do you hear me? Do you know what I’m saying?”
In that first semester at Brandeis, I was hearing voices in my head. Looking back, it was just the one voice, and it was less an actual voice and more a manifestation of all my doubts and disbeliefs in myself. But it repeated itself, growing more vicious and more relentless as the days turned colder. At the time, I simply wasn’t listening to my heart, and so it spoke for itself. I couldn’t see it then. I couldn’t hear it then. All I felt was confusion.
And the whispers grew increasingly ferocious.
IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND LOVE
WHAT A TALE MY THOUGHTS COULD TELL
JUST LIKE AN OLD TIME MOVIE
ABOUT A GHOST FROM A WISHING WELL
IN A CASTLE DARK OR A FORTRESS STRONG
WITH CHAINS UPON MY FEET
YOU KNOW THAT GHOST IS ME
AND I WILL NEVER BE SET FREE
AS LONG AS I’M A GHOST YOU CAN SEE
In the family station wagon, I was probably ten years old when this song played over the easy listening station my parents favored. The melody was sweet, the hook was catchy, and the tinge of folksy accessibility made it a natural choice for people who introduced their kids to music through Peter, Paul and Mary. As our wagon careened through the streets of Amsterdam, I sat in the backseat looking out at the world of fall.
I remember passing McNulty Elementary School, where I would attend kindergarten through sixth grade – the formative childhood years that feel simultaneously sweet and dangerous, innocent and somehow teeming with terror. Seeing it in my mind through the lens I’ve chiseled in the past year, I mourn that I couldn’t put voice to my social anxiety and the issues it caused. It was a thread that ran throughout all of my schooling, including that first semester at Brandeis when I was already a young adult. Fall was always terrifying that way, and I went through it all without fully understanding or grasping what was going on behind the scenes.
IF I COULD READ YOUR MIND LOVE
WHAT A TALE YOUR THOUGHTS COULD TELL
JUST LIKE A PAPERBACK NOVEL
THE KIND THE DRUGSTORE SELLS
WHEN YOU REACH THE PART WHERE THE HEARTACHES
COME THE HERO WOULD BE ME
HEROES OFTEN FAIL
AND YOU WON’T READ THAT BOOK AGAIN
BECAUSE THE ENDING’S JUST TOO HARD TO TAKE
In this, the fall of my 45thyear on earth, I’m beginning to hear that little voice, but unlike it sounded on those fall school days, it comes with nothing frightening or fearful. Instead, it is a gentle guide, nudging me this way or turning me slightly that way, so that I’m always on the right path. The message is finally being heard, even if I don’t always like what is being said, even if it’s going to mean more work, more effort, more confronting those difficult demons so deeply embedded from so many years ago.
Fall is the ideal time for such a reconfiguration: a moment to reset and restart. Right after every restart, the screen has to go dark for a bit. In the past, I would have turned away from the darkness, and possibly offered something lighter and frivolous to counteract the lack of illumination. This year – the wretched beast that is 2020 – I’m not going that traditional route. I’m going to embrace the darkness. I’m going to walk with it, and try to understand it better. I’m going to befriend it and fold it into my life. There is no true daylight without a night that comes before it.
I WALK AWAY LIKE A MOVIE STAR
WHO GETS BURNED IN A THREE WAY SCRIPT
ENTER NUMBER TWO, A MOVIE QUEEN
TO PLAY THE SCENE OF BRINGING ALL THE GOOD THINGS OUT IN ME
BUT FOR NOW LOVE LETS BE REAL
I NEVER THOUGHT I COULD ACT THIS WAY
AND I’VE GOT TO SAY THAT I JUST DON’T GET IT
I DON’T KNOW WHERE WE WENT WRONG
BUT THE FEELINGS GONE AND I JUST CAN’T GET IT BACK
Not gonna lie, this fall is likely to be brutal, and in all bluntness I don’t know how we are going to do it. How do you heal a nation so divided? How do you repair and mend all the emotional damage that is still being rendered? How do you socially distance for an entire holiday season?
But everything that has already happened in 2020 has revealed that we can do it, even if nothing is stable, even if there is nothing of which we can be certain anymore. There is something terrifying about that. Something incredibly freeing too. When the notions of safety and security turn out to be tethers, sometimes it’s better that they break.
Into that darkness, may we fall with freely-given abandon, and let it bring about something more beautiful, more colorful, more enriching and more empowering.
Fall begins again…
IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND LOVE
WHAT A TALE MY THOUGHTS COULD TELL
JUST LIKE AN OLD TIME MOVIE ABOUT A GHOST FROM A WISHING WELL
IN A CASTLE DARK OR A FORTRESS STRONG
WITH CHAINS UPON MY FEET
THE STORY ALWAYS ENDS
AND IF YOU READ BETWEEN THE LINES
YOU’LL KNOW THAT I’M JUST TRYING TO UNDERSTAND
THE FEELING THAT YOU LEFT
I NEVER THOUGHT I COULD FEEL THIS WAY
AND I’VE GOT TO SAY THAT I JUST DON’T GET IT
I DON’T KNOW WHERE WE WENT WRONG
BUT THE FEELING’S GONE
AND I JUST CAN’T GET IT BACK
