The self-help book says we face a paradox: relationships inflame the wound, but it’s only through relationships that we’ll heal it. It is not the relationship that fixes us, but the reclamation process we enact through it. We are carrying the picture of the person who can take us through the final movement in our failing search for wholeness. We keep falling for them. But as long as we face them with imperfect courage, “we are in a waking sleep, fated to repeat the same mistakes over and over.”
Tinder’s founders liked the idea of the spark that starts the fire. My phone is a portal to an otherworld of strangers stretched out next to zoo tigers or scaling mountains I’ll never visit. The book says I’m looking for someone whose fingers fit into my wounds. The author thinks this is a good thing, a way to heal. But I won’t know which wound opener I need by the species of fish he shows the camera. We have to meet.
The author tries to coax me toward the site of my original wounding, but I won’t go. A scene repeats in an infinite memory loop: In a bar with sticker-caked walls, a man sits down. He looks just like his pictures. I know he can see the hole. I try to fill it with whatever he wants to see. I can see his teeth when he speaks. He drinks whiskey. I drink soda. I look at his hands and imagine them inside my chest. I swear he’s looking at me like he’s going to be the one who saves me.
The self-help book says our reality is a fabrication of our own making, formed from our thoughts and actions. And yet—the book says thinking alone is no fix. Changing our beliefs isn’t as easy as wanting them changed. We’ll only let go when we can no longer stand the pain.
The day after Carl broke up with me, I saw a psychic in a blinds-down building between the Cash America Pawn and the discount gas station. She brought her brow toward mine and froze me. “You were a man in a past life, and you were a womanizer. That is why you are being punished. That is why they use you.”
I nodded.
“You are five years behind where you should be in love,” she said. “Did you know that?”
I nodded.
“You are empty inside,” she said. “Did you know that?”
I nodded.
At a meditation-based sobriety meeting, a woman talks about the hole. I didn’t know she could see it, but it turns out she has one too. She tells me she saw the hole once she stopped drinking. The only thing that can fill the hole, she says, is God. I don’t even know what that means. When I think of God, I think of Catholic grade school and the laminated cards of Jesus opening his robe to show his cloth-draped chest burning with a heart on fire, ringed with a thorn rope, staked down the middle with a cross.
I imagine the hole like a yellow plastic ring full of iridescent bubble solution catching light. I try to keep God in the hole but God is a bag of sand, and the hole gets empty before it can get half full. I fill the hole with crystals, candle wax, handwritten affirmations, auspiciously shaped stones, tarot cards, spent matches, shells, photos of ancestors, herbs, astrological charts, shiny pennies, essential oils. I wedge a cauldron into the hole.
The woman at the meeting says, “We all have a hole inside us, and we’re supposed to show it to others.”
Mary, like her son, showed her heart, radiating light, encircled by roses, lanced with a knife.
Every night, I draw the same tarot card, THREE OF SWORDS: a trio of blades through a red heart.
I touch my hands to my skull and ribs. I try to find the hole so I can show it to anyone who will look, but my hands grow hotter and hotter against my skin as they search. The current rips down my spine and I feel it: not a hole but a channel, a tube filling with light. In my mind, I line up all the holes I’ve ever reached into, holes cut into everyone I’ve ever tried to love, and I just look at them.
The self-help book asks itself what happens to the parts of ourselves we deny. The book answers right away: this self disappears underground. We recognize it in the partners we try to love. It looks like a fight.
To make a paper fortune-teller, you have to cut a piece of loose-leaf into a square, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, unfold, fold, unfold, put your fingers inside, push out, write your desires and fears all over it. That is how I love. I give a softboy the pen and tell him to write about his hole and how he thinks he can fill it. A paper fortune-teller gets old fast. You have to move on, play MASH, divine whom you’re going to marry and how cool your house will be and how many babies you’ll have. You have to keep playing until you get your perfect life.
Some people don’t identify abandonment as their deepest fear. I don’t understand. When I sit down at a small bar table and take in a date, before he even speaks, I can tell how deeply he could wound me—when he stays, when he leaves. This, the book says, is chemistry: knowing he’ll disappear and I’ll cling because pulling away would let his fishhooks tear my flesh. To survive, I fold myself into the small thing he couldn’t object to. I am the infant relying on her Kindchenschema, baby-cuteness, to evoke an adult’s caretaking impulse. I curl my spine forward around my heart, steering conversations away from my accomplishments, asking, “But how about you, how are things going for you?”
The thing a softboy does must be survival, too: as soon as I find his hole and insert all of me, he stops speaking, starts drinking, never leaves his phone faceup on the coffee table while my mouth latches onto his mouth and my eyes try to read his mind but his eyes shift to the side before his lids close me out.
Can I really say his way of tending the fear is worse? Is hurting the one you love a worse offense than gouging out your own soul so you can stuff your brittle husk full of whatever you think he wants to feel when he delves inside you?
In my notebook-made-workbook, jumbled memories refuse to connect like dots. The self-help book says the remembering of childhood hurts will get us to ourselves, but I get to a mess of ill-fitting labels. Childhood didn’t wound me and my parents didn’t fail: they made a house where I could hide out. The site of my wounding can’t be reached because it disappeared under the dammed river’s water clot long before I was born into the nightmare. I took it in before a breath. The self-help book says we seek relationships that recreate the theft of our joy. If I never find what was lost, what then?
The self-help book knows we don’t like the work of healing. We’d prefer an easier way. The book promises us that its worksheets are less painful than other people are. There is a self that just wants to find its way back to us. It fears death and wants to live. “Tell me where to go and I will,” I hear it asking me, but from where?
I calcify into my mattress’s divot. I believe the pain really will kill me. The hole offers to hold the pain. This, it tells me, is what it lives for.
I keep pulling the DEATH card, a skeleton on a white horse, armor-clad like a conquistador, stepping over fallen and swooning bodies, headed for sunrise. DEATH: sudden change, the old self’s death, transformation, loss, failure, debacle, disaster, ruin, end, beginning.
The only way out is through the land of the dead, opposite land; the author says I must break patterns. So I take up my fencing weapon, open my third eye, cast releasing spells, summon friends with my mind while walking around the city, dress like the Virgin Mary in vintage robes, speak with the dead, pray over candles, get a second opinion from a psychic who tells me, “He is weak, Elissa, and you are strong with the power in your blood.” I heal myself with my own hands. I have no other choice. I was gaping in that bed. I could fill the hole only with work and energy.
And even full, the hole remains, but now, with him dislodged, I can see it isn’t a void—it’s a portal through which things can enter to make me strong.
The self-help book says, “You will know you are almost to the gates of paradise when you feel like you are falling into the pits of hell.” The structure of your entire self shifts and falls to pieces. Love turns to chaos. The paradise ahead goes dark, and you can try to push on toward it, but its gates are locked. The book has a promise: in this wreck, your lost self can find you.
I’m told to list the qualities of my ideal partner. No. First, I have something I need to say. Fuckboys, you are not special. This is worse for me than it is for you, because I’m the one stuck in a GIF in which I sit at a bar and smile while you tell me about this one time you were drinking with your buddies and this one thing happened. I want you—I want to listen to your collarbones and lick the skin over your ribs and slide my fingers along your iliac crests—but I don’t need you the way the women of my great-great-grandmother’s generation needed the men who slid in and out of their lives after the whites hustled the Cascade people onto reservations, hanged their leaders, and upended the ways of living that had been shaped over ten thousand years. One hundred and fifty years ago, the women in my maternal line learned to complete themselves because white men had broken the world in which men and women fed each other what they needed to become whole.
Softboys of Tinder, hear me: I have my own car my own cash my own large exotic zoo animals with which to recline. I cook my own meals catch my own fish write my own inspirational quotes. I am the substance I use to intoxicate myself, moving my bones for the mirror, over and over making and unmaking a cup of my collarbone and trapezius. I come from women whose dresses drip with the dentalium shells that were pulled from deep water and used like cash. I come from high-status women with cradleboard-flattened heads. From women with their own canoes, their own land in the place where they’d lived for ten thousand years.
Men of my history, hear me: When you talk down to me, fuck around on me, disappear from me, lie to me, that’s an interesting perspective but actually me, you disrespect a woman made of women knotted in a long string stretching back before massacre. The egg that would become my mother was in my grandmother’s ovary when her mother severed the cord. The first of us came from eggs the Thunderbird laid near the mouth of the river. I have my own blade my own wings my own lanced heart that might never heal but will never need your salve. I do not want you badly enough to let you grip the rim of the hole, climb in, and leave it full of emojis and cum. The hole is perfect and you cannot touch it. I delete the app.
THE SPIRIT CABINET
“The stars turn. And a time presents itself. Hawk, watch carefully.”
—The Log Lady, Twin Peaks: The Return
“Are you watching closely?”
—Alfred Borden, The Prestige
CARL JUNG NEVER WROTE, AS the internet says he did, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung did write, “The real mystery does not act mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it suggests itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature.” Synchronicity is Jung’s term for “a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity,” “a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time.” He wrote, “in relation to the psyche space and time are, so to speak, ‘elastic’ and can apparently be reduced almost to vanishing point, as though they were dependent on psychic conditions and did not exist in themselves but were only ‘postulated’ by the conscious mind.”
I’ve observed that when Carl is near—not Jung, I mean, my Carl, or rather, the other Carl, the one that I used to think was mine—I feel time folding like a piece of paper creased into one of the fortune-tellers I learned to make in grade school. I’ve always known time to be sloppy, sludgy, full of holes. A sleep doctor diagnosed me with a circadian rhythm disorder and said, “Your clock is off,” as though clocks were even real.
Do I want Carl because of what he is, or because of what I think I see flitting in my visual periphery when I look at him? What is the difference between love and a puzzle?
Carl and I met and broke up in 2016. We reconnected in 2017. Now it is July 2018 and something is happening with my blooms of intuition and things falling together in time. In a 1935 lecture, Jung called intuition “a sort of divination, a sort of miraculous faculty,” and said:
I say that intuition is a sort of perception which does not go exactly by the senses, but it goes via the unconscious, and at that I leave it and say “I don’t know how it works.” I do not know what is happening when a man knows something he definitely should not know. I do not know how he has come by it, but he has it all right and he can act on it. For instance, anticipatory dreams, telepathic phenomena, and all that kind of thing are intuitions. I have seen plenty of them, and I am convinced that they do exist.
I’ve begun noticing dates. The time loops are tightening, trying to show me something, and I’m doing my best to obey. Like the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, collecting visions to serve as Sabian Symbols associated with each zodiac degree, I’m using a stack of index cards, but on mine, I’m marking dates and events as I recall and experience them, then arranging the cards the way I think they want me to. I cannot stop putting this puzzle together. The universe keeps dropping clues. I want you to see what I see: the mystery, glimpsed briefly when the veil shifts between Carl’s eyes and mine.
This essay will be the place where I keep the synchronicities safe, a display case for my collection. Is essay the right word? Is it an essay if it doesn’t stand alone? Related: Do I exist if I can’t be independent, can’t follow my north node to my destiny? Hypothesis: meaning sits at the confluence where pieces overlap.
The way in, unfortunately for us—me, who has to explain it, and you, who may not want to hear about it anymore—is Twin Peaks, which, if you don’t know, is a television show about mysteries, murder, and Washington State. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the series premiered in 1990 and was canceled after its second season; a film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me followed soon after. FBI agent Dale Cooper has been sent to the small town of Twin Peaks to solve the murder of teen beauty Laura Palmer. Cooper arrives to find the town full of whimsy and evil. It is a show about the unexplained, the mystical, and the cycles of violence and neglect to which women find themselves tethered.
The killer dumped Laura’s corpse by a body of water. In the show, the water’s body has no name; in real life, it’s the Salish Sea. The opening scene—Laura’s body found wrapped in plastic, abandoned—was filmed on the Port Madison Indian Reservation of the Suquamish Tribe. Three miles up the shore, I’ve walked the beach at the Old Man House site, where a thousands-of-years-old village was displaced when the US War Department wanted the land. A white Indian agent burned the longhouse to the ground. It’s also a place where, according to Suquamish stories cited by Ruth Ludwin et al., a waterway known as Agate Passage was created by “an underwater battle between a water serpent (not specifically identified as a'yahos) and a mythic bird, resulting in ground shaking, churning of the waters, and widening of the channel.”
All around the Salish Sea, there are places like this, where my maps overlap. I know one place where the time loops keep getting stopped up: the portal place where Carl likely still lives. Close to his house, an unremarkable block is home to, among other things, two karaoke bars, a diner called the North Star, the music school where he used to work, and a bar with a back room. I will tell you about these places when the time is right.
In 2017, a new season of Twin Peaks, called The Return, came to Showtime with most of the original cast, about twenty-five years after the original series was canceled and left unfinished. Carl returned to my life the same month. Things became strange.
The Return plays with time: timelines are chopped, shuffled, and overlapped. Moments are drawn out too long for TV: a barkeep sweeps the floor forever, the villain squeezes a man’s face. I become aware that I am watching time, the fourth dimension, the space between the third dimension the New Agers say we inhabit in only a limited way and the fifth dimension they say we’ll reach when our vibrations get high enough. I become aware, too, that I feel that tracking the order in which things happen, and how they happen in relationship to one another, is key to my understanding of the show.
Of the show, of my life. This is what happened when I decided that either everything was
meaningful or nothing was. That I could either destroy myself or live inside a riddle. The internet says Jung said, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” I think I’ve figured it out.
Twin Peaks
MIKE, a spirit dwelling in the Black Lodge, asks Cooper, “Is it future or is it past?”
1-12-18
Carl texts me a video of Phil Collins performing “In the Air Tonight.” Phil Collins skulks around the stage, moist under blue lights. He sings that he can feel it coming in the air tonight. I tell Carl I’m coming to visit next month. The conversation is over.
Twin Peaks
At the heart of the Twin Peaks cosmology lie the Black Lodge and the White Lodge. The Black Lodge’s physical manifestation is the iconic red room: instead of walls and doors, endless red curtains form rooms and corridors. On the dizzying black-and-white-chevron floors sit armchairs, fluted floor lamps, Venus statues, and a Saturn-shaped lamp on an end table. It’s also known as the waiting room.
Deputy Hawk of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office describes the White Lodge as the residence of the spirits that keep the world in order, while the Black Lodge is a place through which all spirits pass for the purification preceding perfection, requiring an encounter with the “shadow self.”
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