Chapter 1

The night I became like Scheherazade I was desperate to captivate and to navigate a way free. I got caught in a tangled mess of unlove and a terrifying alternate substitute which offered an attenuated love which was thinly disguised as like. The story I told for hours was a narrative circuitously woven like a reading – straight from my lips. I was sensational and salacious, and I held court with all the juicy details. I must have felt abandoned and desolate to become fodder for some unknowable plan and then to lay down in green pastures because I felt unloved. I was hollowed out by an empty kind of love which only gives to get in kind. I found myself starting to reach out to other people to fill the void I felt. I became more talkative in my everyday errands to people at the stores I visited – just friendly short conversations harmless but a bit outside my usual behavior. This is how the conversation with the fishmonger started, which is what I have come to call him. I was a victim but, in the end, I had to become the rescuer of myself because I had stepped in it, and I was hip deep. The way it happened is not believable and I write about it to remember so I will not doubt myself later! I was an innocent, a dupe, and I walked into the trap like a spider’s web but in this case, it was the lobster that got me.

I needed to tell the story and my audience became the people who picked me up from my house under orders to haul me to a local emergency room for a Psychiatric hold. I was under their command, and I knew had to befriend each one of them. My initial recalcitrance and resistance had earned me enemies and my tack quickly changed when they had me secured in the transport vehicle. I became sweetness and light – making jokes and making myself friendly. The words started to tumble out of me unlike at any time I can remember. The agency of my story telling was in the preservation of the core of myself and the truthful words no matter how crazy they sounded even to myself – directed me and they felt like a lifeline. The walls of my conceived self were moving in directions unseen – I was unmoored but I was not unhinged. There was power in the narrative which poured out of me and it felt like ambrosia because I was mesmerizing and beguiling at the same time. In telling what I should have held more closely than any other secret I ever had – I spoke to release myself from the spell – like a purgative, cathartic, expunging. The circular and revolving story kept spinning, unwinding, and was intoxicating and imbibing at the same time. The freakishly accidental meeting with the malefactors’ deceitful intentions and my nebulous intentions had somehow become the opening for me to squeeze into and realign the stars and adjust the constellations but I needed an audience to reveal what was churning nonsensically within me. In the telling I could come out on the other side. Intuitively I knew the story had to come out; I was in fight or flight and my autonomous nervous system was fully in control and had been for a while. Being the queen of secrets and having a penchant for hiding the truth did not prevent me from spilling the unsavory story. Like never before I had become the purveyor of truth, and my motto was the first idea is the best idea (in allegiance to Allen Ginsburg) and truth found me that night. The gates had opened, and I did not even know what words were going to come out next. The story spilled from my mouth unsolicited and uncensored, and it sounded like a tall tale! It was a relief not to have to monitor every thought and every word and to have faith that life could lead, and I still might find a way if I could steer openly – empty of conclusions and expectations.

The Social Worker Mike – his mouth was agape; he was attentive until he disappeared without a goodbye after I had laid myself bare. I blinked and he was gone when he had been so enthralled. It was all too much but it had to come out and not only one person could take it in. The truth will out but the place where that takes place is important. We were outside in the cold night air. I was on a gurney backed up on a covered cement ramp with other patients waiting in line also on gurneys for admittance into the E.R. The story had to be aired – not contained between walls; it had to dissipate and breathe in the cold night air to attenuate the numinous power I was holding. I was ostentatious, and I realized I had to make friends fast and not to brag but there was a power in my personality which I was trying to wield justly. I needed to share – to expunge and attenuate the uncanny experiences which had tagged me by happenstance. The moment made me, and I held court that night! I had company – two staffers from two back-to-back shifts of E.M. T’s respectively who became the foil for my feeble parlay. These witnesses were obliged to stay with me, and I felt obligated to entertain them because of their forced indenture. Caught together – me being directed by the past week’s bizarre and life-disrupting occurrences which had appliqued and glued to my mind, and they were rapt in attention. I was orchestrating and conducting a cacophony of unreasonable expositions and navigating through suspended reason and superseding unreason. Entrapped by my fitful expressions I was flailing at the boundaries of all my previous experiences.

Psychic possession is what I can call it now and it started with a rifling of my brain and memories. A full audit which I experienced as a flowing of memories and visionary vignettes which was bizarrely revelatory because information flowed my way too. I was able to determine that the perpetrator was married, and this information upset me. I saw dark bayous and flowing black water like oil from when I worked in the oil fields of Louisiana as a deckhand, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and inland on the Intercoastal Canal. I saw and felt the byways and backwaters of my years in the wilderness of Southwest Louisiana where I lived for six years. I saw a bouquet of lilacs I remembered seeing at retreats on Palomar Mountain at Yoga retreats in the Springtime. I confabulated that the lilacs and the pure goodness I associated with those healing retreats with this interloper. Later when my thinking mind started to kick in and I began to question the source of the pleasure which had found and uncovered me in bed so ravenously – I had to choose which way I would go. I had to steel myself and forge a plan of escape though it was seat of the pants planning. Yes, I was on the run and running to catch up! How many of them were there, I started to wonder and what had they seen in me that alarmed them so much? They were all questions and phone calls and attentiveness. I was basking in the attention in a way. I was also feeling cautious and wary about this other world I had stepped into, and which suddenly was so interested in me. My personality was becoming effusive and outrageously over the top. I was frightening people my granddaughter told me because I was laughing so much when we went out to dinner. They began monitoring me and coaxing me back to a decent level of containment. I felt empowered and loved in a strange, disembodied way and it was because I had been pushed to the brink by lack of love and proper care. I realized I had to take back what was mine; they might already be entrenched and think they owned me. I had to muster my resources to fight back! I had angels come to my aide I am certain. I have always had angels as guardians now that I look back and realize the synchronicity of certain events in my life. In the end it was my early and persistent reading habits which also helped to save me because I had the words to find the truth of my baffling experiences. The layering of knowledge as rendered from books which are armor and ammunition. In the end, it is the constant prayer whence lies salvation; I now recognized how truth had been forbearing and had waited for me. The weaponry of education which can be wielded for good or malign ends; I have supped enough to garner some advantage applied to the good and with some in account I was forced to do battle with the dark side alone. The wearing away of options and the diminishing avenues of escape forced my hand and got my back up and I began to fight back!

Because I was able to determine that he was married this set off a mini crisis within them and I had an emotional reaction to the discovery that he was married. He had made an unusual proclamation to me to begin with which I initially recoiled from – that he loved me and would do anything for me, across the fish counter! I had made a quick retreat, but I was shaken by his unexpected words. The words started to percolate in my mind over time and I started to question what he could have meant by saying that to me a total stranger except for light banter before over the same counter? My feelings of being unloved became more pronounced and my imagination started to concoct a deeper meaning in his empty words.

I was caught in the rush, but it started with bells – it felt like bells – bells ringing.  There were bells and I attended to the bells and the beauty of the feeling of the ringing of the bells. They caught me; I was caught in the maelstrom of them – by the tidal wave of the ringing. Reading about Turkmen in medieval times onward and the nomadic life they lived in the desert with tents and how they invested all their wealth from silver coinage earned in the trading lanes of the Silk Roads, in jewelry for their women to wear. Bells – tiny bells were a repeating theme in their jewelry; each bell forged to emit a different pitch. The tinkling bells were the musicality in the deserts expansive silence evocatively suggestive of deep nights in breathing tents on desert sands – breaking the silence of loneliness with love and its kinship – love making. I had been looking for love only to find a facsimile and a dangerous liaison. Could I come out the other side whole and could I still find love?