8-2-18
I’m in New Jersey, and at my request, Dad and I are going to the Franklin Mineral Museum, a place I loved as a child because visitors can pick rocks from a huge outdoor pile, hold them under a special lamp, watch them glow neon, and keep them. Inside the museum, there’s a zinc mine replica where I start feeling low on oxygen. There’s not even any ore dust in the air, but I have to escape before I faint. Dad and I pick out rocks and look at the rows of bright split stones in display cases. The fossils from Dad’s hometown of St. Clair surprise us, because it’s not exactly nearby.
We go home by way of Dark Moon Road, which I told Dad I’d like to see after reading about it in Weird NJ. The book says a man known as the White Pilgrim was buried here. Born in Ohio, he came east dressed in white and riding a white horse to protect himself from evil as he preached about the wickedness he saw. Smallpox killed him in 1835. He was buried not in the good Christian cemetery, but in the Dark Moon Burying Ground, and so now, upset about it, he haunts the road, an all-white figure of horse and saddle and man. None of this is apparent as Dad drives me down the road. I see only wilds and clearings.
Twin Peaks
LOG LADY: We don’t know what will happen, or when. But there are owls in the roadhouse.
COOPER: The roadhouse. Something is happening, isn’t it, Margaret?
8-3-16
In the afternoon, an email from Kevin. He remembers that years ago, when we were together, I saw myself from the future a few times; lately, he’s been seeing me from the past, sitting in an alley, smoking, wearing pajama pants and a wool hat and boots even though it’s hot. The girl he describes reminds me of the version of myself he knew years ago, smoking in Madison Park alleys and hoping Henry wouldn’t find out, getting wasted stumble-distance from home. It didn’t occur to me that I might have left that sloughed-off self somewhere. How can a living person have so many ghosts?
In the evening, a visit from Carl. He recoils from my kisses and presses himself into the couch when I climb onto his lap. He turns his head to the side and says he can’t be with me anymore. He needs to work on himself, by himself. He finds the idea of me intimidating. The breakup was his therapist’s idea, for his self-care. But I love him, I tell him. Can we take a break and start again later? “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says, so I let him leave. I drive down to Lake Washington, wade into the dark water reflecting bright beams, and tell the serpent spirit that if it’s there, I will sacrifice myself to it tonight. Nothing takes me.
The Prestige
Spoiler alert, sorry: in the end, Borden the magician is revealed to be a pair of identical twins switching roles as magician and ingénieur (stage engineer, builder of illusions). Of course he was: a man can’t disappear from one cabinet and appear in another.
Except the magician Angier can. Over and over, he doubles himself onstage. In the end: a pile of top hats, rows of water-filled boxes a magician is meant to escape. The last lines are spoken to us in a voice-over from Angier’s ingénieur, the same words that opened the film. He told us what we were about to see, and now he tells us what we have seen, a magic trick. “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”
I had to watch the film twice to understand what I’d seen.
8-4-16
Instead of sleeping, I scroll through Facebook, where some woman who looks like me is telling Carl she loves him, and he’s liking her tweet, and a feeling hits me that scares me so much I fill a bottle of trazodone pills with used cat litter and throw it in the dumpster, just in case, because even though I’m sure my heart will never be safe, I’m living out a promise to keep it running. In the morning, I sob through my massage, and I feel the radiant warmth of Reiki-charged hands oozing through me like hot glue. Afterward, I drive. I drive up Aurora to the psychic whose shuttered shop I pass on my way to my Monday recovery meeting. The door is locked; from the parking lot, I call to make an appointment for five minutes into the future, and when the clock turns over to the hour mark, a man opens the door and invites me in.
The psychic herself is in a dark room with heavy, shut curtains. “Where did you come here from?” she asks as soon as I sit down. “Someone worked with your energy. Your aura has been changed. What work did you have done?”
“I came from a massage,” I say. “I had Reiki.”
“That’s not going to fix you,” she says. She can see I’m sick, and it’s because of men. They use me because I was a womanizer in a past life, and now, my karma is coming to me. “You are empty inside,” she says. “Did you know that?”
I nod.
She says that I don’t know whether I’m a man or a woman, and my man energy pushes men away, making my relationships short; that I look twenty, not thirty-one, but I have the soul of a ninety-one-year-old; that I was a healer in a past life; that something traumatic closed my third eye; that I sleep poorly; that I bottle up my emotions; that I need to pay her a thousand dollars to fix everything. Crystals, smoke, prayers, water, she doesn’t know what it will take, but it should cost about a thousand dollars. When I tell her I don’t have that, after we argue, she sells me a tall red candle to attract a man.
Hours later, my therapist sees me for an emergency session. She tells me to throw out the candle, because that energy is wicked. She says I’m not empty. And together we are going to cut this cord Carl and I spun between our souls.
Twin Peaks: The Return
Cooper comes out of a coma. MIKE appears.
MIKE: You are awake.
COOPER: One hundred percent.
8-8-16
I show up at my therapist’s office having googled. All weekend, I watched Lemonade, drank Ensure, and read about this thing called the twin flame relationship. My therapist is not only a master of deep trauma work, she’s also a professional astrologer, so I’m eager to ask what she knows about this. Twin flames, according to the internet, result when a soul is split in two. The halves arrive at their incarnations tasked with becoming whole alone, reuniting, and raising the vibrations of the universe. Once they meet in a particular incarnation, they recognize their own soul. But the powerful energetic connection starts a purge, and as layers of rot are stripped from the soul, it spasms in pain. One twin runs, the other chases. The point is to push the souls to purification so they can reach their higher calling; if they do the work, they’ll ascend and reach reunion. Twin flame separation, as the internet calls it, feels evil: the soul glimpsed itself, began to glue itself to the other half, was torn away, and hangs bleeding alone.
In the middle of the night, my body felt his body against another body as I smelled his dank sweat.
I tell my therapist I’ve figured it out. She sort of smiles. “I do know that some people are into the twin flame thing,” she says. “I don’t know. All those times you stared into each other’s eyes for minutes at a time—you deliberately created a bond that won’t be easy to sever.” She doesn’t want to talk about twin flames. She doesn’t want me to have a solution. She wants me to say I’m scared.
Later, on the phone, I don’t ask Carl the question I want to ask, but I ask a better one: “Why did you really break up with me?”
“I told you why.”
“Why did things change when you went on tour?”
“If you’re asking if I cheated on you, I didn’t, but you’re very insightful, and yes, there was something.”
Just feelings, he says. I’ve seen the Facebook photos: his arm around a woman with a face that looks like mine before the last ten years of fear. He’d prefer to talk about why I’m upset. “You need to be more in your body,” he says. “You need to meditate.”
“It’s not safe in there,” I say.
“That’s the only place it’s safe, actually. Are your thoughts safe?”
“My body—it hasn’t been safe in there for a long time.”
“It doesn’t seem li
ke your thoughts are safe.”
“Nothing is safe in here.”
He says this is the saddest conversation he’s ever had. I want to believe it. I kind of want him to suffer. I’m tired of being the feeler while he gets to be the performer.
8-8-18
Via text:
CARL: Thinking of you these days
CARL: When is the Oregon teaching gig?
ELISSA: Hey, hope you’re doing well, Rachel just mentioned you guys playing music, that’s great. It’s in February
ELISSA: I have been thinking of you too actually, had been thinking for the past few days of letting you know that I’m thinking differently about the things we talked about when we last talked in person, I feel like you don’t need to feel any pressure or responsibility to me, don’t worry about it and no hard feelings. I’m moving on from the desires I had and you don’t need to keep me in the loop about the ways you’re moving on too. If you get involved with somebody and disconnect from me, it’s ok. I think you’re right, our energies just don’t work, and that’s fine.
Delivered
I feel the cord cut, his freedom granted. Will he give me mine?
8-9-18
I wake up to a text from my friend Nick, who dreamed we found a portal but I was too afraid to enter it. He says it looked like a liquid mirror. This is significant. We’re between eclipses now, on the threshold, in the portal, about to be transformed. I have been dreaming, too. At night. All day. My memory of the past two months is filled with holes and I worry I may have been sleeping, traveling through the land of the dead in the sweaty afternoon, thick with dread and desire. I burned off the make-believe when I stepped out into the sun. Carl is gone.
Twin Peaks: The Return
FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch) learns that there are two Coopers: the real one and the doppelgänger. He recounts a dream he had in which he sat at a café with the actress Monica Bellucci (played by Monica Bellucci), and she said, “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside a dream.” He says he told her he understood, and she replied, “But. Who is the dreamer?”
Jung, “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man”
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.”
Gurdjieff, source unknown, except it’s from the internet
“In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.”
Twin Peaks, Log Lady intros
LOG LADY: All that we see in this world is based on someone’s ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream.
8-13-17
I dream I’m in the Black Lodge. A good spirit tells me, Your house is the key. When I wake up, I know the spirit meant my house, one in the future, not the little house I’m renting. I’ve been planning to live here a long time. Something is happening.
8-13-18
Late at night, I drive into the Ohio countryside to watch the Perseids. I’ve never seen a meteor shower. I walk to a lake so dark it could be Lake Washington or Mountain Lake or any lake. The owls sing to one another. A meteor shoots across the sky so quickly I barely see it. I think I can love it.
8-17-16
As soon as I pay real money for the twin flame mastery course e-book, I want to delete not only the pdf but also myself. Even if twin flames are real, Carl is not mine. It’s supposed to feel like coming home. The vibrations are supposed to match, and while I don’t know what that means, I know his and mine don’t. Still. Something must explain this intensity. This feeling I’ve had all my life that I’m missing somebody.
8-18-18
I walk without purpose in my sweltering neighborhood, trying to remember the difference between lonesome and lonely. One is worse than the other. I am feeling the worse one. I don’t know how much longer I can wait for the feeling to pass. A church sign reads, “A ship in the harbor is safe but that’s not what ships are.”
Twin Peaks
COOPER: Harry, my dream is a code waiting to be broken. Break the code, solve the crime.
Twin Peaks: The Return
LOG LADY: Something is missing and you have to find it. … The way you will find it has something to do with your heritage.
8-21-17
I have a last-minute plane ticket to Nashville and notes in my phone about the eclipse and exactly when it will happen. I’ll fly there and back in the same day; my professor job begins tomorrow. That’s the extent of the plan.
I find a public park by the river. The sky is clear all day until the sun begins to disappear behind the moon. Clouds accumulate. I watch through my special glasses. In the state of Tennessee, nobody loves me. I see Baily’s beads, the celestial necklace, and then the sun and moon slip behind a veil of cloud. While night insects begin to scream, the city lights switch on automatically, and I cry while I run to the river and watch for the eclipse to become visible.
Totality ends and the clouds clear.
I’m sobbing so hard you’d think somebody hurt me. It’s just that I thought I’d been getting good with impermanence, but then the sun went precisely behind the moon for a minute, and the world was so different I couldn’t pay attention to all of it at once, couldn’t take it in, couldn’t take a picture of the feeling, couldn’t pause it and rewind, couldn’t restart. And now it’s over. If I want to see it again soon, I have to go to Argentina. In a few years, it will happen again, and my new city in Ohio is in the path of totality. I have no choice but to wait.
The driver who takes me to the airport asks what brought me here. I tell her I’m writing about the eclipse, but not science writing—I was born within three days of an eclipse, so they have astrological significance for me, and I had a gut feeling that I needed to see it and write about it.
She is quiet for a bit, then says, “You know how they say the moon occults the sun?”
“Yes,” I say.
“So that means the moon conceals the sun.”
“Yes,” I say.
“What I believe is that that’s what the occult is. Astrology. The occult conceals the Word of God.”
“Oh,” I say.
8-23-18
The Seattle Times reports today that an Urban Indian Health Institute survey found that nearly every Native woman respondent had been raped at least once in her life. Nearly half had attempted suicide. A third binge-drank daily or weekly after being raped. The news gets retweeted all day. In the afternoon, I get headshots taken in the park, twinning with my reflection in the pond, alive in front of the lilacs that can’t be funerary because they’re still in the ground, and, somehow, I’m not.
8-26-17
I’m at the movies with Nick to see Wind River, set in Indian Country. Every movie about Natives is a reunion tape: there’s the guy who always plays the cop, the woman who never smiles, the auntie. This harsh place—I was near there. I recognize the shrubs on the grassy hills. Just a month ago, I paused in those grasslands, legs dangling out of the car at a gas station while I fumbled with hot water and instant coffee and masticated another dry bar of nutrition because the only restaurant around displayed a BIKERS WELCOME banner. I looked at the shrubs then, improbable as the backdrop of an early Nintendo game. Later, stopped by roadwork, I locked all my doors against the white men who used their hands to signal whether I could move.
In the theater, I watch a white man and a white woman develop romantic feelings across the corpse of a Native girl. When I’m found kil
led, I’ll look like that. I’m supposed to identify with the white woman with the gun in her hand. All she wants is to help these sorry people. She and the white man wonder why they came to this godforsaken land at all.
Once we reach the climax, I’ve bitten patches of skin off my lips. By now, you’d think I’d know better than to wonder why I’m crying. I don’t like the story I keep hearing: all these white men fracking the frontier, no wives, only work, so some of them rape.
If the oil business is the problem, why did I get raped in the city? The movie kills off a villain. At the end, text on the screen tells us that in real life, Native women are missing. Wind River Reservation is real, but justice is the climax of a white fantasy. Before colonizers fracked, they raped.
8-28-17
In the afternoon, looking through my mom’s cousin Chuck’s book for research, I turn to the photo of Virginia Miller with her canoe in the river. Wind River, reads the caption.
At night, I watch Fire Walk with Me, the Twin Peaks movie. The body of a dead girl is found in a body of water. The detective says it’s Wind River.
8-31-13
My aunties bring me to the mountain where we’ve picked huckleberries for ten thousand years. Indian Heaven Wilderness is a protected area inside a national forest. I don’t pay attention to how we get there, but on a map, it looks like the Wind River Highway goes north into the forest from the Columbia River near where Wind River meets it, near the Bridge of the Gods and Cascade Locks. On the map, I might see the roads but not the Milky Way. If I’m on the land, the galaxy is above me; if I’m looking at the map, it’s behind me, or even inside me.
8-31-17
The little house makes me uneasy. Two weeks ago it shut me out and cut and blistered me when I tried to enter. Now, while I wash dishes, a glass bowl explodes in the drying rack. It is happening again: someone trying to get my attention, telling me I’ve missed something.
White Magic Page 27