grandma is home

Just a quick and grateful update to say that grandma is home from the hospital!!! ❤❤❤ She is resting today; it's good to have her back with us.

Thank you all so, so much for your continued prayers. They mean the world to us both. God has heard the cries of our hearts, and He answered in tender compassion to carry her through.

May He continue to bless both grandma and all of you. 🙏❤

chechnya, 1995

This is one of my all-time favorite photographs. There’s so much raw evocative humanity to it.

The concept of an abandoned piano is, in and of itself, poignant. Here is a beautiful instrument, painstakingly constructed, each wire tuned to a specific note, each key fashioned for its particular purpose… the entire object exists solely to create music. It exists to be touched. And here it is abandoned. Here it is, decomposing instead of composing, torn by cold rains and bitter winds, by insects and animals who do not understand. Here it is, dying as only an instrument can die, alone and unheard, with no soul to speak through it.

And then a man appears.

But this is no concert pianist. This is no eager schoolboy plunking through his primer books. This is no sweet reunion of creative mind and creating force. This is a man long stripped of the luxury of cultural finesse. This is a soldier, blood-spat and battle-shook, stumbling upon a foreign object, at odds with the gun strapped like a babe to his back.

And yet, he stops.

That is the moment, the prelude to this bulletless shot, that resounds as silently as distant lightning in my own heart. What did his own heart feel– what response of spirit did this relic of peace awaken in him? Did he hear the lingering notes of an old beloved tune, a reminder of happier times, a dulcet echo he had buried unknowingly? Did he remember a time when he, perhaps, had even spent joyful hours seated at similar keys? Had he perhaps loved someone else who had? How close was this wooden alien to his soul? How deep was his recognition?

Nevertheless, he stops. He approaches the pitiable thing.

And he touches the keys.

There is the moment, the golden moment, the timeless moment immortalized beyond the patina of tears for generations yet to cherish. There it is– the relaxing of posture, the weight of war falling from his shoulders and lifting up his legs as he leans into an ivory hope. He is terribly vulnerable in this moment, but the promise of music before him– music! Music, however old, however hindered, it is still music, a beauty clear undying– it is enough to soothe every fear for just a heartbeat. Just a quarter rest. Just a note.

He touches the keys.

And the piano lives again.

We cannot hear it. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps it coughed, sputtered, struggled to remember the last time it breathed, rattled, feebly offered a D instead of a C. But whatever it did, it sang. It opened its rusted mouldering heart and gave all it had left to this hesitant human, both of them staring death in the face, yet both of them brazenly (brokenly) triumphing in mutual life, cooperative beauty, transcendent purpose. Perhaps the soldier laughed. What was he thinking, expecting, dreaming– the gilded voice of a baby grand? No. He knew this poor shell-shocked creature was a mirror of himself. It was superb and unsullied, once. But now…

Now they together stand amid shattered ruins, splintered wood, fractured tin. Posts and beams and branches lay like flung bones about their feet. There is no sense or sanity in this hellscape studded by sounding sirens, by the horror-symphony of shrapnel fire and gurgling red screams. There is no loveliness here. Except…

Except even a man and a piano wrecked by war do not cease to be a man and a piano. As long as there are heart-strings to touch, they can still be touched, and there will be music.

And so there is music.

And the shutter clicks.

 

And the man, too, lives again, forever.

032822

I've been browsing the "weird" religious tumblr blog ring for about two solid hours now, trying to distract myself from the terror of accidentally eating too much salad and the physical sensation of it, but after reading one too many posts about "sacred eroticism" and how cannibalism and sexuality keep getting tangled up I am literally sobbing to Infinitii because God help us we still have SO MUCH UNRESOLVED TRAUMA.

I've gotta be blunt. Infi can't speak for me here; there is no velvet-guttural-black voice(s) giving speech to the awful terror I cannot hide from hir. I've gotta feed it to the autopilot and just… let it hit the digital paper. And there's that word again, this bloody topic, this inexplicably unkillable curse of sex and food that has been haunting us since childhood and is apparently a metastasized cancer at this point. God please don't let it be terminal.

The "Julie days" were one thing. The "daemon days" were another. BOTH stopped dead cold in October 2018 when we bailed out of Charlotte in the back of a blue Chevy and left half our life sitting on the curbstones as twilight sunk into our spinal cord. In an instant, a horrible instant, the cords were cut-- sickeningly cleanly, with a surgical blade, cauterizing on impact. Or so we thought.
I want to expand that metaphor but all I can say is that now, looking back, they cut the wrong thing. They severed some superfluous sinew and we falsely thought that everything was cool, fine, it's gone, it's over. But the mental image and feeling I keep getting is that of hysterically sawing at bloody tendons with a dull kitchen knife and there's red everywhere and I can feel it in my skin even now, God knows I remember, Laurie my beloved murderous knight I remember your hands holding me down as you dug the first graves, I remember the bathroom mirror, I remember the red, the red--
everything smells like iron and olive oil, like too-soft strawberries and sunburnt tomatoes, like red, like my heart, like the porcine organs I would rip apart with my teeth on that inconsolable balcony as the air turned to ice. I can still taste them, in someone else's memory. someone else is still hungry.

and there's our point. what the heck is hunger. I don't get hungry. someone else in this system craves salad, stuffs her face with it because she wants the green inside her, because we're still a celebi at the core and we want to be the forest, to be the leaves, and you are what you eat so there's someone else who douses everything in oil because it's chrism, isn't it, it's anointing and they don't even see it as food they see it as religion, as last rites, as preparing to meet God but the problem is oil tastes like blood and that wakes up ANOTHER inner soul who hungers for the guts of things, for hearts and livers and kidneys and skin and brains and tendons and bones and marrow and blood, always blood, why do we want SO BADLY to eat so viscerally, pun intended, it's the only kind of eating that feels real and pure but only on paper. the concept is what we want, but no amount of dead animals will ever satisfy. "I want love, not sacrifice," and lo and behold isn't that the most perfect segue you've ever seen?

daemons are what we love to call "splanchnivores." as in, they only eat viscera. they themselves are visceral after all. and my deep love of that word betrays the fact that, like it or not, the nature of daemons speaks to the nature of our subconscious fathoms far too clearly.

we hunger for what we love. our heart is a cannibal. what the hell do we do with that.

and that's why I'm having a minor existential meltdown at 10pm on a monday, surrounded by red light and snowflakes and I'm trying to just… get a hold on this whole thing; it's SO intensely dissociative even now it's unreal.
I put a peppermint in our mouth and instinctively crush it to pieces with the teeth but I don't taste it, I don't feel it, I don't swallow it, I don't even have a mouth and yet the body is doing what all bodies do with food. it just does not register in the psyche. the very act of eating makes us dissociate by default. even now. even with the bulimia ACTUALLY IN REMISSION for the first time in YEARS, thank God, thank God Almighty we prayed for this for SO LONG and all it took was leaving that house.

I'm rambling. let it happen.
that house was where all the rape happened too.

…I ran to Infi in absolute lunatic terror because I'm reading about saints who were so in love with God that their desire for Christ literally became eroticized and I'm vaguely aware of this being important to us back before 2018 but now it's all cut off with that bloody blade. how ironic that Knife is the one that gets pinged by the taste of blood. the priest. the repentant vampire. the one who sliced open our shoulders with a literal steak knife. kitchen tools carving up our body just to watch it bleed, before he pressed his lips to the washcloths in some instinct we were forced to confess and possess as ours, not just his, just like deep down razor wasn't the only one who savored the sight of that lilac-white layer below the surface of our skin. before it flooded red. before her brother stepped in to not-drink it. once again, the wires get crossed, but nothing is turning on.

I get so dizzy at night. is it our glucose? is it dehydration? is it just because we aren't sleeping? I don't know. I'm just so, so tired and I want to weep, I'm scared, scared because I feel how HUGE and TERRIFYING this ancient monstrosity of a mental war is, and I don't have the strength to face it right now, I don't even know what my name is, or do I, God only knows.

I was talking to Infinitii because everything in our body is shut down but spiritually things still happen and no one knows what to do. there is no desire anymore, no capacity for intimacy, no want of touch, nothing. except there is. except it's utterly flipping dissociated from to the point where it’s as insubstantial as tracing paper. it's a concept. it's not real.
except it's still there, even as a feeble pencil sketch on onion skins. there's still an attempt to express some larger thought. something we haven't looked at since 2018 and refuse to.
that's the kicker. refuse to.

we might still have the capacity for love and intimacy and yes even "sacred eroticism" like the entire almost-annihilated "jay" bloodline had-- a bloodline I APPARENTLY AM STILL PART OF-- but that capacity has been smothered, buried, beaten to shit and erased from written history. or, more accurately, it was deleted. just one tap of a button and blip, there it goes! data erased! like nothing ever happened.
except it did.
except infinitii didn't stay dead either.
except in some ugly terrifying part of my skull there is this awful thought that I confessed to hir, that our mouth is in the wrong place and God only knows what we should do with that.

"eating" does not register on the face. sexuality does.
guess what goes between the ribs? both.
and most horrifically of all, what should be used for sexuality is just teeth.

we're all mixed up. I don't know what to do.
…I WANT to love again. I want to love GOD. but I am SO FREAKING TERRIFIED of sexuality AND eating AND the too-frequent fusion of them in my religion that I don't know what to do anymore. I feel like I need to heal this RIGHT NOW or I will never have genuine religion. like my faith is hollow, a trust and a belief but without care. I… I cannot get close.
except SOMEONE keeps kissing the jesus statues on the mouth whenever we go to church. almost like play-acting. there's a hope there, but no feeling. not a compulsion, but a wish? like, this is something they "should do" so they do it, but they want to "want to" in some different way? I don't know. it's frightening on some deeper level. I'm not sure what they want or what they're doing. I'll have to talk to them. I couldn't do it, and weirdly that breaks my heart. I want to be able to do that more than they do, arguably, shockingly, because I'm built TO love and I can't.
I'm terrified. God help me.

And then I have dreams.
Oh God knows all about the dreams.
Every once in a while, my blue angel will show up, and it is the ONLY TIME in all existence that I will not only feel love, but become love, and I feel alive and real and then I wake up and… I'm not me. I'm in this body, and someone else is sharing it, and physicality feels wrong and broken and dirty and "we" are ashamed and guilty and angry and sick about the dreams but I can't stop thinking about them and trying to remember what it felt like, those blue claws around my waist, emerald teeth against my lips, and this wanting like I could have swallowed the entire ocean-- but not with my mouth. never that way. it's so strange. I want to kiss him but I don't. I don't want anything to do with 2018. my mouth is open. my eyes are hot with tears. I'm holding on to him like a drowning man but I want the salt water in my lungs, in my chest, I want to swallow it but I don't want to drink it, my stomach is not involved, I want to melt into him like snow in a bonfire.
and then there's this bloody candle flame that I get in the body that has nothing to do with sex and yet it is, it has nothing to do with flesh and yet it's physical, it's unitive, it's what God made that drive to be about and God knows there's something going on here but it's still not sexual.
I guess that's why the saints use the term "eroticism" it's that divine "eros" we always used to talk about. the merge-drive. the desire to become one. but no legs, no movement, none of the terrors and trauma of the rape nightmare days that we still cannot look at without wanting to die and scream and sob forever. none of that.

but it's also tangled.
if we have eros but not sex, then what the heck do we have with "eating" that isn't eating? it's the same thing to our brain. at the deepest level it's the same bloody thing and that's why we fast for so long and then completely and utterly dissociate when we do have to eat salad, even though someone genuinely loves having her bible-study breakfast in front of the window every morning, and God bless her, but even she complains sadly that she never tastes it and cannot remember it afterwards, let alone even during. our brain just… shuts it all out, because if it didn't, I think the bulimia would start all over again. it's why we will fast for 18 hours without even trying because even if we're starving and want to eat we don't want to EAT. it's why we won't even get food out to prepare, let alone sit down to eat it, without hypercleaning the kitchen and living room first because if there's a speck of fluff on the rug or a crumb on the floor it feels like being violated and EVERYTHING must be SPOTLESS before those chopsticks are even touched because otherwise it feels like we're eating dirt. and Lord knows how ACTUALLY TRAUMATIC it is when we eat and God forbid we drop something, because the INSTANT food leaves the "safe place" of a bowl or a utensil-- the MOMENT it is "out of the proper place" and onto a counter or rug or other surface-- it becomes dirt. it becomes filth. and that sudden, absolute, irreversible, ACCIDENTAL transformation of food into garbage is the most disturbing thing in the world. we will actually panic and cry hysterically if we're unstable enough and we drop a lettuce leaf on the floor. it feels like the world is ending. it is existentially terrifying. we CANNOT COPE with it somehow. those events occur at the very intersection of sex and food for some reason and it is enough to make us want to throw up. I don't know how the girls do it, get through a meal after dropping something on the table. I really don't.

why did we use to throw up LITERALLY every single meal for YEARS at the family home? was that why? that intersection of food and sex? where eating around people felt like rape, and still does? we cannot talk while eating or it feels like being molested. we will immediately start to cry and scream and binge and vomit, violently so, until we are so sick and dizzy and shaken up that we feel like we are literally about to die. I can still taste the stomach lining on our tongue. it's horrible. tripe used to be our brother's favorite food as a kid; I think if we so much as smelled it now we'd have a mental meltdown. we already do if we smell seafood. let's not get into that now. the very vague thought of it has me at the verge of suicidal impulses and physical flashbacks.

ON THAT NOTE.
we are still, STILL, programmed to be "compulsively sexual." like I am not even joking, the WORST part of Lent is the fact that fridays smell like fish everywhere you go, and the INSTANT we get a whiff of it, we DISSOCIATE and our body LITERALLY WAITS FOR THE RAPE.
it's so wrong. it's horrifying. that is the ONLY time we feel that "candle flame" not as a holy thing but as a rotten ragged match, a painful stove-burn that we did on purpose because someone told us to put our hands in there. it hurts and it's nauseating and it's forced and the accompanying thought is "it will be over soon."
GOD I DON'T WANT TO REMEMBER THOSE THINGS. HELP US PLEASE

That wasn't me. Oh God please do help those girls, I didn't mean to wake them up, I'm so sorry.

its okay you didn’t mean to scare them, it's scary no matter who says it and we don't want it said

That's why I'm sorry.

I know but it's
it's something
people keep saying we need to talk about it
WE DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!!!!!! EVER!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE LEAVE IT ALONE LET IT ROT IN HELL WHERE IT BELONGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE

I am genuinely so sorry, I don't think I can cope with it either

NOBODY CAN

that's a good point, in fact that's the whole point of this entry, which is that right beneath the surface of our daily life there is this HELLBOMB just waiting to go off, if the right godforsaken button is pushed. how horribly, horribly ironic that something from the ocean would do it.

I want to die. God help me I cannot cope with this.

I need to talk to some upstairs people. Christ be our light. Please bury this for now. We can't deal with it yet. Please help us. We don't know what to do.

Good night, God willing. We have Adoration tomorrow morning which means we can sleep in until 7.
We need to visit grandma in the afternoon but… we need a more stable mind first. right now, the thought of walking into that house… hoo boy. it'll be like walking into a minefield. I am absolutely cofronting right now, with a manic red social, there's our coping mechanism incarnate, hello there.

Oh by the way mention that at the gym today, two people got onto the treadmills on EITHER SIDE OF US and we nearly had an absolute mental breakdown on the spot. like it was TERRIFYING. our immediate flashback was to the two guys who mugged us on the sidewalk, they were on either side of us just like that, as we ran and listened to spotify on our phone with that same exact brand of headphones, WOW NO WONDER WE THOUGHT WE WERE GONNA DIE, that is UNCANNILY EXACT.
but yeah. awful. RIGHT AFTER almost hitting that lady's car because we dissociated. and she got out of the car and yelled at us. JUST LIKE when that OTHER blonde angry lady hit us at big lots and we almost died. I think we still have a scar on our back from the broken glass. I hope so. and our hand! I'm sure. I will look in a minute, I can't see in the red light. but it's nice.
the red light washes out our skintone somehow where we look safe. less "physical." more of a concept. it's holy, it's good. there's no food in here. but.
too many people associate red light with sex
and there is definitely still that potential for "eros" in here. somehow. like previews before a movie. maybe that's just trauma flashbacks. but oh I'm so sorry please I don't want to ruin the red light in here for you. it's beautiful. it's safe. I don't want to hurt you. I'm sorry everything is just so weird and terrifying tonigght, there are too many flashbkac,s we don’t want to remember this please god no no no n


all right kids let's get our ass to bed. Laurie out. We've gotta fix this. See you around.