VIRGO
In Mesoamerican myth, the god Quetzalcoatl journeys to the underworld not to escape death, but to recover old bones needed to create new life. I propose you draw inspiration from this story, Virgo. In recent weeks, you have been gathering pieces of the past, not out of a sense of burdensome obligation, but as a source of raw material. Now comes the time for reassembly. You won’t rebuild the same old thing. You will sculpt visionary gifts for yourself from what was lost. You will use your history to design your future. Be alert for the revelations that the bones sing.
I can't help but think about him/you, reading that. We didn't have a future. We had a hell of a present. Then an end.
I am not dead. It is not time yet for me to haunt. I am here now. And unexpectedly so is he. I live somewhere, but not for long, and him too, and kinda everybody I know too. This shit ain't the fun part yet for everyone (lalala). I am trying to absorb changes like that into my body so the feeling of change feels Better, more like flying (falling with style). Or like swimming. Freedom has to become something Better than nothing left to lose.
He and I have come to be parallel, a different kind of "together" entirely.
Me, I feel like I got dragged behind a moving vehicle, flung around here there and everywhere, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, passing the butter like a motherfucker - career building, getting taken to events and interesting places, giving my mother accomplishments to brag about. Keeping them all alive through a fucking pandemic during which one had a cf baby and another one transitioned. Try that parenting shit on. It worked until it just did not. The last couple years, more and more, No. There is just no getting around my being IN PIECES. I don't want to take it back, I learned a lot (grew up), but it is hard no anymore. Ya don't kill what is truly valued, or watch it die like "meh" either. Kinda all at once in Phoenix, half my hair just fell out like one of those weird scared to death things. Made me so mad. I threw it at the walls all over their workcondo in wet clumps. That's one way to leave. If I doubt the trustfall faceplant pivot I am pulling right now and get scared, I go back to that again, throwing my hair. And leave more.
I don't know what metaphor he would use, how he would to describe the heart of how he came to be in pieces. My tendrils feel like something came flying apart when the kid got sick, something in him already, held together but fragile like a fabragie (sp) egg. And like my partner would watch me die and suck at the bones, what he is in would do the same and convince him he deserves it as punishment besides.
My mother's Good and Beautiful solution of welp he had to have kids so now he got them just resume the honeymoon, while not bad for masturbating, overlooks every reality, such as all these kids we have holy shit and a Denise drone and pretty shattered mental health affecting our physical health because we have (amazing) drama queen bodies. (I have loud orgasms, upside/downside ya know? I am not doing so currently. Even when you do, are you ever inspired enough and free enough to be really loud af?)
Welp. Now that I am thinking about all this - another luxury he has little of, time to think - the NEH grants were about him and me, at the root. About what happens to students who have his barriers, how they get put into chutes of failure altogether or successful moral injury. And I am right there for both/either. And I am not the only one, there are hundreds of us. Many of them are practioners of a high end kind writing these experiences down, and how the traumas land in their real lives. Sometimes they die like When Breath Becomes Air guy. Sometimes they are sexy af, like The People's Hospital guy, whom I got to hang out with and talk about FRAHME. All things I wouldn't have gotten into without an "important white guy" ticket. But I taught those book to students, or a case study or whatever it is, how I would do that Thing. Like I did with that yoga guy. With my full attention.
And now I have taken that off the market. Doing me. It's not for sale. In any form. Only if I really want to can I do so, maybe even on demand (aspirationally).
Somehow saving his ass works to save my own, that much my mother has right, I feel that too. But how? Theory: he has to see me as needing comparable Rescue and turn on / get turned on by being the only him.
