Before we started officially dating, Lloyd and I did the all-important dance of the souls: We exchanged mixed CDs.
To pop that CD in and drive around town listening to songs someone had chosen just for you–to reveal part of themselves that they wanted you to see–felt as intimate as staying up all night talking about our childhood.
A few days later, I asked him, “What did you think of the CD I made?”
“Those songs are sad,” he said matter-of-factly. Not like he didn’t like them or like the sadness scared him. But he had given me They Might Be Giants, U2, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I gave him Neutral Milk Hotel, Joni Mitchell, and Arcade Fire.
Shit. He was telling me I was sad. I was too intense. I was basically darkness incarnated. I was a downer. I could hear all those voices from my past: “Lighten up”, “Are you ok?”, “Have some fun”.
The thing was, to me my songs weren’t really sad. There was a light in them. Hearing the sadness in others’ voices made me feel less alone, like my own sadness wasn’t particular to me but was a universal part of this human experience. Our stories didn’t need to be the same for me to see my emotions reflected back to me and to feel relief in that recognition.
When I started to fall in love with Lloyd, one of my best friends asked me, “Do you think he can really understand you? I mean, has his life been difficult enough?”
In other words, has he been sad enough? Could our souls ever touch if the bottom had never dropped out of him? Could he find the bottom of me and search me through and through?
No, I didn’t think he would touch the bottom of my pain and trauma, but I didn’t know if he needed to. What I knew was that he wasn’t afraid of it. He could look at it head-on.
The night I told him about the rape, he cried and looked straight in my eyes. He didn’t look away. He didn’t even brush his tears off his cheeks. He let them carve a wet path all the way down his face until they took the leap off his chin and left a dark mark on his t-shirt. I asked him if he wanted me to stop telling the story. No, whatever I needed to share, he wanted to know.
He had been marked by my sadness, too. He was willing to hold some of it. I wasn’t sure if he could understand me, but he could see me. That was enough.
Besides, I had spent years in love with someone whose pain was as big as mine. I ended up more desperate and battered than when we began. I came out with wounds that stayed soggy, red, never seemed to scab like I thought they should.
…
I’ve always drawn pain to me. Like a moth to a bulb.
People saw the light of sadness in me, and they came. They banged against me with their own sadness. And I stayed lit up. I stayed. I wasn’t going anywhere. I could be present to their pain. I could witness their darkness and not look away.
And so, to my friends, I was like the oracle of sadness. Everyone visited and left their sadness at my feet. Even my mother. Even my aunt. Even my grandmothers. I held the sadness of three generations. I even held the sorrow of family members that I had never met, like my great-grandmother Rose who lost her husband in a mining accident and raised five kids on her own. Or my Cambodian great-grandmother who birthed two children from a French soldier and gave them up to a government-run French boarding school, never to really know them.
Strangely, even my elders sought counsel from me. It was as if they trusted the purity of my youth, a wisdom born in me and not yet faded by the rough elements. “An old soul” is what they said.
I was sometimes a mediator, sometimes a peacemaker, sometimes the place where people went to make peace with themselves or their ghosts. I was twelve years old and, without knowing it, practicing the Tibetan Buddhist meditation, “Breathe in the world’s pain, breathe out love.” I opened to feel others’ pain, and I moved through it with them until we both felt the relief of compassion and companionship, until we both felt our hearts fill with enough light to hold the pain and move forward.
When we share our sorrow, it feels more like light, like I’m holding my candle out to light yours, and we pass that light around the circle, one little wick catching fire at a time until the whole ring is aglow, and we can see each other’s faces illuminated. We can see each other for the first time.
Did I have powers like my great-great-grandmother Francisca Josefa Picon, an old Spaniard who wore black always? She saw visions of the future, predicted bad things before they happened to people. Her dreams told truth. She was a dark clairvoyant.
Was I like her? But instead of seeing the future, I could open the present, I could release the past, I could help people transform pain into collective power.
“You have a purple aura,” Nana told me. Purple means healing and cleansing, soothing of pain.
…
As a college student in Corinth, Greece, I lead a small group of travelers down slippery steps into a cave of some Biblical significance.
I paved the way into the darkness with my little flashlight, with my group and other visitors following behind. We shuffled down slowly. We held our hands out to touch the rock wall to our side. There was an Italian woman behind me who kept saying “la portatrice di luce, la portatrice di luce” her voice echoing off the wet, shiny walls of the cave, spiraling up to the mouth of light where we had entered.
When we got back on the bus, one of my favorite English professors smiled and said, “’Light bringer.’ You know that’s what Lucifer means, ‘bearer of light.’”
Lightbringer, Lightbringer. I can hear her voice echoing off the damp walls. Lightbringer.
The semester after I carried that light down into the cave in Greece, I would enter one of the darkest periods of my life. A time when I let someone else’s darkness and shadows consume my light. I had fallen in love in Greece. I had fallen in love with myself and tasted a flying, whirling freedom that the man waiting for me at home would not like. I found clarity. I knew I needed to break up with him. I knew I would find love again in this big, beautiful world. I would keep feeding this vibrant woman I had seen in myself abroad. I would protect her. I would return her home. I would light the way. Lightbringer, Lightbringer.
The break-up conversation didn’t go as planned. He punched a hole in the wall. He said he would kill himself. He pinned me to the bed and wouldn’t let me leave. Next thing I remember my clothes were off, and if I didn’t say no, it was because I was frozen. But my tears were not. They came down hot as I stared at the ceiling. Afterwards he probably lay next to me and smoked a cigarette. He may have even asked me why I was crying. He thought everything was fine between us now, issues resolved, conflict settled.
I don’t know where I went after that. I disappeared. The rules in my life changed. I moved off campus to appease my boyfriend, who wanted me to prove that I loved him. I isolated myself from my friends, whom he claimed were a bad influence on me. To help him pay rent, I worked two jobs on top of a full course load. Gradually I gave up more and more of my light. His darkness started to feel more real than my light. I tended to his darkness more than I did to my light. My light couldn’t lead me out of this cave.
“Where is your spark, my sweetie?” my grandma asked. It was less painful to remember I ever had one.
“Remember Greece?” my professor effused when I showed up in her office drained of energy and color, sick all the time. “Remember how free you were? Remember how you stayed up all night and sang on the bus and could still hike up a mountain to see the ruins during the day?”
Lightbringer, Lightbringer. I remembered her. She haunted me. The way she raced across the field in Olympia where the original Olympians triumphed. I saw her under the sun crowned in wreaths of laurel. I remembered her in the moonlight, dashing into the cold Mediterranean, sharp rocks rolling under her feet and squeals echoing off the black water. I remembered her among the closest of new friends, always smiling, laughing, singing, dancing, her long hair blowing behind her like a sail on open sea.
Lightbringer, Lightbringer. Where was she now? She couldn’t even hold her own light in her hand without it burning her. Her light gave away too much. He knew where to find her when she sparked her light in his wilderness. When she stayed dark, she could stay hidden and protected somewhere deep inside.
I left Greece as the goddess crowned in laurel. I returned home as the ruins of who she once was.
…
My great-great-grandmother Francisca could see the future in her dreams. Sometimes she felt herself levitating in bed.
Nana told me another story, about the day that their pet bird flew out from its cage. She and her four sisters couldn’t find the bird all day and thought it must have flown away, escaped through a window or open door. They had given up on finding the bird. Great-great-grandma was very old by that time and spent much of the day sitting in the same chair praying the rosary. When she stood up at evening to retire to bed, there was the bird: flattened in her seat. Dead. Francisca could tell the future, but she couldn’t tell she was sitting on the dying bird. And the bird could escape from its cage but could not escape from the large and slowly smothering derrière of an old woman.
How could something so light and nimble get trapped under a gradually descending weight? How did the bird not see it coming? Why could she not fly away?
After three years, I finally made my break from the abusive relationship. I spent a long time blaming and fearing him, running from him. I spent a long time blaming myself–how could I have gotten so lost? How?
I didn’t trust myself anymore. I doubted my intuition. I stopped seeing my power of empathy and feared it as a danger instead. My deep empathy had betrayed me, had allowed me to abandon my own feelings and well-being. Even a lightbringer can get lost in the darkness.
I entered a long process of rebuilding my inner sense and instincts. In the past year I’ve been rebuilding my vision of who I am. Remembering. Seeing anew. I’ve been reclaiming my power and letting my light grow.
I’ve held my vision on the fearless, curious, independent little girl I was before I was taught that my voice wasn’t valued, wanted, or to be trusted. I’ve held my vision on the challenging, probing teenager who stood on the stage at her Christian school and read her own spoken-word poem challenging the institution of the Church. A girl who stood up to her family’s traditions and decided she would not be confirmed in the Catholic Church, declaring, “I cannot confirm what I do not believe.”
And I remember. As a little girl, this was my power, too: To see to the center of a person and let her open. To let her open from the tight place where she was holding the secrets. To watch her pull open her chest from the middle and show me her bleeding, beating heart. To witness her heart pumping the stories out of her body, like poison sucked from a wound.
All my life people have opened in my presence. In notes passed in algebra class. In parking lots after work. On porch swings after the rest of the party has gone to bed. In high-heeled walks on Bourbon Street between karaoke and sex shops. I’ve sat in the middle of a loud and colorful drag brunch and watched tears come down my friend’s face as she talked to me about her fears. Any time, any place. I am an opener. I open into darkness. I am the dark clearing in the wilderness where we drop to our knees, where our heads tilt back as we cry to the sky, and we open our eyes and see the stars. I am the place where we gnash our teeth and howl in the darkness until we laugh on our backs in the tall grass.
I’m not afraid to walk into the darkness. I let it cover me. It’s what allows me to revisit my past and share my stories in writing. But I don’t sit in the darkness without eventually leaving holding light in my hand. It doesn’t make the darkness disappear, but it changes it forever.
…
For too long I let that one story tell me who I was. Yielding, weak, secretive.
I let him give me my name and my story. I let him become the voice I heard in my head.
But now I open. I open in my own presence, and I let the poison drain out. I give to myself what I have given to so many before me: the presence to listen, to trust, to believe, to witness. Now I see that what I gave to everyone else I would not give myself.
The stories that I used to cling to privately that brought me shame I am now releasing to the world. In telling those stories, I am at once making them part of my public identity and taking away the power they have over my internal identity. The moment I tell them, they become less true. As I step out of one story, I am already on my way to another understanding.
From the ruins, from the shards of fragmented memory, from the unwrapping of mummified feelings, I build a city. Each story is a city that doesn’t exist until I travel there. Each ceases to exist to me when I leave. The memory and the feelings change and become something new. And yet, they stay standing in my words–this building here, that building there. They exist forever, frozen in time. But I will travel there no more; they are dead cities, only memories.
I’ve spent years in some cities, in other cities minutes.
The new city resembles the last city because what I know of cities doesn’t completely change, but the air smells like licorice there and lavender here, or that building was painted ochre there and is mustard here. The woman in that city carried onions in a basket and this woman walking by carries pomegranates. The details shift slowly until my understanding of reality changes. I learn of different building materials and architectural features that exist, and now that I know, they become part of my city. Adobe is introduced. Doric columns. Flying buttresses. They go up around me, and each time, the city changes. My story never stays the same.
And if as child in a much earlier city I were to see the buildings and feel the breeze of the current city I am in, I may not even recognize it as a city. “That is Heaven,” I would say.
Each time I move forward to another city, there is a woman behind me visiting the last city I was in. And a child visiting the first city. And there is a woman ahead of me in a city I don’t even know exists.
So I will keep telling my story. Because you might live in a city I once moved through, and I may tell you just the right detail to help you find your way to the next city that is already waiting for you.
I cannot tell you if you are standing still in your sadness, being wound in the same story over and over again, like a hand driving a needle through the same stitch on eternal repeat. If you are stuck in one story that never changes, one story that fills you with the same feelings every time you face it, then you may need help finding your way to the next stage of that story. But please do not let anyone rush you out. You need to stay there until you have learned everything that city needed to teach you. Walk through the whole city. Find the door that sets you free to the next one.
Lightbringer, lightbringer, lightbringer.
Hand in hand, we will leave this city. We will find a new world. We will step through the door and find ourselves squinting in the sun, feet blistered and our heads crowned with laurel.
Our sorrows will be the well we stand over, where we drop our buckets into darkness and pull them back up full into the light. We will share a deep, long drink. And we will continue our journey.
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