Elisabeth Writing

I was talking to a friend this week about our inner darkness. About how some people don’t acknowledge that piece of themselves, about how they want to point the finger of blame and justice at the ones who speak in wine-soaked epitaphs and mournful letters. And those people? The finger pointing ones? Those aren’t my people. Give me the sadness, the shame, the secrets. Bare yours and I’ll bare mine. This is what I’ve been working (obsessing) on. It’s an introduction to my memoir. It’s not sweet. It’s fucking brutal and painful in a lot of ways to write. But here it is. And this is for J. May you always remember you are a geode.

Introduction:

This is my story. And, like me, it might not be easily digestible. Even when I was a little girl, I felt like I was too much: too sensitive, too intense, too weird, too, too, too… And that led me to some strange places, toxic people, and straight into too many bottles of whiskey. But most of all? It led me, sparkly tulle trailing behind me, straight into the derelict, dark, and disturbing tunnel of “love.”
This is my story about love.

There were moments in my stories where I was a damsel in distress, and there were moments in my stories where I was the one doing the distressing. I made the damsels.
The naive view of a child: playing in the sand with the crabs, shuffling them into the sand castles my father built for me, my heart full of my love for him. Spinning stories with my fumbling fingers about unicorn princesses and the men who stumbled upon them in the wilderness, losing the thread; breaking the spindle. The ache of being misunderstood and bullied, retreating to the trees in my yard that held me with their scratchy limbs and soothed me with their slow voices.
The once-in-a-lifetime experience of falling in love for the first time. A lion with amber eyes, a girl with teeth I’d sharpened to tear into tender hearts. The need for that sweet injection of more, and more, and still more, until his pelt was stretched over skin and bones and I was stuffed to bursting with fruits and pleasure.
A troubadour with his lute, who heard the tale of the maiden in the tower and thought to sing her captors to sleep, so that he could steal her away under the sweet blackberry-stained night sky. The way he didn’t realize that I was not a maiden, or a captive, but chained by my own love, my own pain, to the past.
The men that came, in shadows and in the guise of friends, to hurt me. The scream in the dark. The bitterness. The fury. The misplaced shame.
Dragon wings that caught the twilight as I crouched between them, my thighs tightening around his red and blue scales. How we roared into the night, together, and thought that wildness, that freedom, would be forever. And how, somehow, one day, I realized that it was only another cage.
Death, and the rattle in my father’s chest. Watching the light slowly leave his eyes. Grappling with life, and myself, when it finally fled completely. Our family, trying to reconcile a life without his gentle soul. Flirting with the Grim Reaper as if that might call him back.
When Hades came for me in his chariot, and I said… yes. How in the underworld he also worked at his dark forge, welding souls to their own torture. And I was his fucked up Persephone, cutting my own feet on the glassy pathways and laughing hysterically, barely acknowledging the tears streaming down my cheeks.
The long fall, backwards, from Hell into… healing. Rituals, deities, shadow work, ghosts, baking. Learning.
A small step in the spring foliage, a cracked branch that nearly startled me into the sky with my new wings. And there: a quiet Faun with tender eyes, still; and smiling sweetly. Soft love that burned like a welcoming, warming hearth.
Will you join me, in this strange and twisted fairytale? Will you try to enter, and stay, in my monster-girl-heart?