STORY ABOUT A GOTH GIRL.
by Rewired
7/28/04
What is this, you ask? This is meditation. This is the story about
how I met Terra. A story about a goth girl.
It's all too obvious that I adore her, but in some ways I just hate
her. That may indicate something; these passionate reactions of
hate, fear, and desire she seems to elicit in me may be screaming
out messages I'm too blind to read and too deaf to hear. Perhaps
I’m just projecting on her . Perhaps she's just acting as a mirror for
parts of myself that I refuse to acknowledge. Maybe that accounts
for the consistency in the women I've been attracted to, a
consistency that she is a part of.
Carl Jung talked about how we store latent parts of ourselves in our
Shadow, which is like this evil twin, this dark side of our personality residing outside our conscious awareness. It is the same sex as the ego we identify with. He also spoke of another part of our unconscious, however, another archetype common to all human beings. He called them collectively the sygzy: for a man, it is his anima, or the feminine side of his personality that he projects onto women, and for a woman, it is her animus, or the masculine side of her personality that she projects onto men. The man meet the anima and the woman meets her animus when they have ventured far enough into their Shadow.
It seems I have ventured far enough into my shadow, for my
Phantom Girl is haunting me. One girl she like to possess and haunt
me through is Terra, the goth girl.
I've noticed my anima showing her face across the women of my
life. I call her my Phantom Girl. Many men I know seem to have
Phantom Girls, and many women I know also certainly have their
Phantom Boys. Basically, what happens is you find yourself falling
for similar women with similar histories, and between her and you
develop familiar situations with predictable beginnings and endings.
It's as if there's some continuity error in life; as if the same story is
being played over and over with some light modifications and with
new actors playing old roles, or old actors playing
different roles, changing faces, switching roles or masks.
Personally, over the years I have noted remarkable similarities in the
girls I found myself attracted to. Some of these were blatantly
obvious things that could be easily explainable by the instincts that
make sense now thanks to evolutionary psychology: many were
slender women at about my height, bright, beautiful eyes, and
things of that nature. But a great many other things were very
`hidden' -- things I didn't discover, at least consciously, until well
after I was attracted to them and had engaged in lengthy
conversation with them. And though not all of the qualities
consistent in the girls I've been insatiably attracted to were initially
`hidden' ones, enough of them were for me to note the apparent
synchronicity and to begin questioning the reasons behind all this.
While everyone on your list of previous fixations or relationships
may not have all the same things in common, so many strange
things seem to tie them together. It's like certain groups of them
hold pieces to a puzzle, and if you put the pieces together you find
your projected `other half' -- your phantom mate, if you will; your
animus or your anima. So we seek in significant members of the
opposite sex, through projection, the contrasexual aspects that we
have buried in ourselves: our `other half'.
When I look at her, I fear I don't really see her, but only the
reflection of my anima in her eyes. I fear that in my perceptions, my
Phantom Girl has in a sense possessed her. So it comes to be that
my fixation on her could be a clever psychological strategy that
allows me to be a narcissist without realizing it. If so, perhaps by
understanding my perspective on her I can come to better
understand myself, even this complex situation that's developed
between her and I over the years. She has inspired so much poetry,
and for so long I’ve wanted to sit down and weave it all together,
to try and put together the puzzle that surrounds her. To introduce
her to the world of my writing. To just write a story about her -- a
story about a goth girl.
Terra is her real name, or in my writing life, anyway. I call her the
Goth Girl now because, well, she fits the title pretty damned well.
Way back I used to call her the Queen of Darkness or the Dark
Maiden in a half-joking fashion -- and prior to that, before she went
goth, before she became who she is today, I habitually referred to
her as the Evil One. The joke, when I first met her when she was
circa thirteen years old, was that evil always hid behind a cute face,
and a girl as cute as her couldn't possibly be anything less than pure
fucking evil. I have demolished all belief in an absolute morality
since then, but in a purely subjective, relative, personal sense, she
would be the personification of emotional chaos in my life -- the
temptress.
I met her, fitting enough, on Halloween, 1998. I think it was either
shortly before or shortly after Claire and I broke up for the last
time. I had heard Sandra and Nick refer to their little cousin before,
but I'd never met her. It wasn't much of a meeting that night, either,
not really. I don't recall any official introductions, no hi or hello, she
just kind of appeared out of the woodwork.
I think I had gotten off of work, and they'd just come back from
seeing the movie Spawn. We had gone driving around for a bit, in
the middle of nowhere of course, when we noticed the gas gauge
was on E. Nathan was driving, and it was Sandra's car. She said he
had no reason to worry, because it had just gotten to E and it
would get us a good ways before the gas tank was really empty.
She said this just as the car coasted to a stop and Nathan burst out
laughing.
So there we were, a herd of teens and twenty-something’s walking
around deserted roads in the middle of nowhere at three in the
morning, without a gas station in sight. We took the opportunity to
be loud and obnoxious, as we were all tired and wired, and I
remembered doing my usual. For some reason around that time I'd
developed this odd taste for talking about pretty much anything that
made people squirm, and that evening I was speaking at a rather
high volume about how my ass itched. I caught a few giggles from
her. I was sure that made a great first impression.
I saw her a few more times after that. Sandra and Nick and I would
stop by her house sometimes before going to our usual hangout -- a
24-7 restaurant not that far away -- and I noticed she had changed a
lot from when I had first met her. Not that I had known her all that
well right away, mind you: it just seemed as if there was something
brewing in her. Rotting, dying, changing in her.
Her parents house was really cool, really big. She had an
above-ground pool and a huge trampoline in her backyard. She had
a pretty good size yard, too, and she enjoyed riding around in her
go-cart in the middle of the night. As we were all on it with her one
evening, and she was talking with Sandra and cutting a turn, I
happened to look over at her. I think that's the first real time I ever
really looked into her, and her face just kind of burned into my
memory. She had this long, black, frizzy hair tied back, these really
girlie cloths with bright colors -- and then this dog collar around her
neck. It kind of threw me off. It was one of those things in a picture
that didn't seem to belong at first, but only for a brief instant, until
you really look into the picture.
And I look into her eyes -- her dark, vibrant eyes -- and I see so
many
contradictions. I see this war going on in her. This raw emotion
unable to break free. Intense chaos. Brutal war. I was stuck by her
that night; it was like a bolt of lightning. And the more I saw of her,
the more she intrigued me. Even at the beginning, she had come
across as this cute, quiet little girl. A dark little mystery. She
seemed mature well beyond her age; her dark eyes glowed with a
curiosity, a deep intelligence, a rich and vicious kind of emotion
that was incredibly stunning. The more I got to know her, the more
intrigued I became. The other side of her, it seemed to be
blossoming. It was a bitter taste, however. She seemed to be
growing pessimistic. Cynical. Even sinister.
If she was any older, it would have been very easy to admit she was
incredibly good-looking, but her age kept popping up in my mind
between me and my dirty thoughts, and it was building up to be a
hefty dose of guilt. It wasn’t just that she was thirteen, though, but
another reason -- one which may require some explaining.
You see, around that time, Sandra and I had a `thing'. I don't know
quite what you would describe it as, exactly, but she thought she
had feelings for me, and I thought I might have feelings for her, as
well as another girl, Anne, but I was still hopelessly chasing after
the unachievable, Claire. In short, things were very ambiguous
between Sandra and I, not easily classifiable, and the situation was
uneasy enough already with her that I was pretty damn sure that
pursuing her cousin, even if she had been of acceptable age, would
be the most destructive and unethical choice as of yet. And those
around me were perceiving me as destructive and unethical enough
as it was. So I tried my very best to keep a lid on my quiet
infatuation. I put it on the back-burner.
It got more difficult to ignore it, though. Soon she was hanging out
with the rest of the clique at the all-night restaurant on routine. She
got her hair cut short, she began dressing differently. By that time
she had gone pretty goth. She wore black cloths, fishnets, dark
make-up. Not the kind of cheesy goth you see a lot of nowadays.
She was simply being herself. Her outer persona was more in
synchrony with her inner self and the change she was experiencing.
She had found an image of comfort, and it was incredibly alluring.
Too alluring.
And I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either.
At first, that was kind of a comfort, because at least I wasn’t the
only pervert. But it didn’t remain comfortable for long. It started at
the all-night restaurants with the rest of the insomniacs. Countless
guys would come up to us and ask about her. They would come up
and try to talk to her, or just blatantly hit on her. Then either
Sandra, Nick or I would ask them, judging by looks alone just how
old they thought she was. It became sort of a game with us. Their
guess, no matter how young, was always far enough off the mark
that when we told them her real age their eyes would grow large
and round, their faces would go pale, their jaw to drop and they’d
let out the exasperated, "what?" or "you're fucking with me, right?"
or the ever-so-popular "holy shit" that we’d quickly grow tired of.
And I'd
just nod: I know, I know, I’d say. And they would shy away,
feeling like perverts.
And I hate to be the one to say it, but who could blame them for
their
confusion? It first struck me with Terra, but it certainly didn’t end
there. It was happening everywhere, and it has since continued: the
phenomenon of girls developing into women a hell of a lot earlier
than they used to. It seems strange enough on the surface, but the
more deeply you ponder it the less sense it makes. Think about it: in
our advanced human society, with all our vitamins, surgeries, and
all our other sorts of high technology that are helping us to live
longer, healthier lives, it would make sense that kids would take a
longer time, not a shorter time, to want to grow up.
Why? Because they’ve got so much more time in which to do so.
They could really take it easy and take their time on life's path,
because there really is no reason to hurry -- you've got more time
than your ancestors could have ever dreamed of. Yet it should be
clear to anyone that its just not working that way at all. We’re
living longer, but we’re growing up and developing more quickly,
too. Women start menstruating earlier, their breasts bud earlier, the
need to separate from their parents and escape the `second womb'
develops earlier than ever. And that’s not all: kids are marrying
earlier, getting pregnant earlier. They’re like rabbits on
amphetamines fucking like mad and getting pregnant and having
babies and getting married by the time they’re seventeen. No one's
taking time on the path of life anymore, no matter how much longer
it is stretching. Instead, they're running down it like crazy monkeys
on speed on some race from the womb to the tomb. Like a bat out
of hell, last one there's a rotten egg. This just
never made sense to me, and it makes less all the time.
The leap to maturity wasn’t a major source of comfort for her, it
seemed. When we would tell the guys what her real age was and
she saw their reaction, it was so obvious that she simply hated it.
She hated being reminded of her age; she hated that being a turn-off
for guys. I think she was really trying to find her place with us, or
through us, and I personally think she belonged with us, at least in
comparison to the kids her age. It wasn’t just even her maturity
level or that she looked older, either -- there were deeper reasons, I
think, that she belonged in our group. She was just different,
period. Not conventional at all.
Some time later I would explain to my psychologist that I had
always felt different from most other people in my general vicinity;
that I seemed to work on a wavelength not necessarily higher or
lower, but undeniably different. That I thought in a different
fashion, a different way; that I processed my emotions differently.
That though I could fit in by outward appearance, within I was
utterly alien -- in some sense or another. And in Terra, I found that
likeness.
She seems so nervous and awkward sometimes, as if she doesn’t
feel comfortable in her own surroundings, even within the confines
of her own skin -- and then other times she talks and moves with
such beautiful ease, such amazing elegance. I like watching her
when she doesn’t know I am; but eventually, her eyes look up to
meet my own. Its as if she can feel my stare. To me, she seemed to
be of the same inner `species'; I could feel it in her vibe, I could
taste it in her dark eyes. I was at first silent about what I'd noticed
about her and how very much she was like me. I wouldn't wish
likeness with me upon anyone. But the way she thought and felt,
the way she talked and expressed herself, the way she wrote and did
her artwork, the way she approached people when she did and the
way she ran away to be by herself when she didn't -- it all seemed to
cry out to me that she was of a like nature. An upgrade perhaps, a
few further mutations, maybe a few less -- but remarkably similar,
and of the same kind, the same breed.
She didn't seem to belong anywhere, really, so she definitely
belonged with us -- she belonged around me -- around people who,
to greater or
lesser degree, in one way or the other, didn't really belong
anywhere, either. I think we could’ve done so much better, though,
and I can’t help but feel that we were in a major part to blame for
what eventually transpired. We should’ve seen the signs that shit
inside her was going
down. We should have noticed that as she continued hanging
around us her problems in school seemed to be amplifying. That her
grades were dropping. That she stopped doing sports. That she
started arguing with her parents, hanging out with reject kids her
own age and smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, drinking, popping
pills. I certainly don’t think we were the sole cause of it all, but we
didn’t exactly provide the best examples we could have.
As for her and I, we began to bond. I remember us sitting together
in my shitty blue Mercury Topaz and us sharing a smoke. It was the
first time I'd ever seen her smoke a cigarette; apparently she had
been doing so for awhile. The moments like that one, those times
we had together, just me and her -- as few and far between as those
times were -- they were something I really looked forward to. Her
brain was a beautiful thing to watch spill before me; a waterfall of
rich intellect and raw emotion. She would be silent forever and then
talk really low, really fast, and you could tell when she really began
letting go and getting into what she was saying. She'd get all
animated with her hands and her face would contort. Her words,
too, simply amazed me; they revealed the complex web-work of
thought behind them. She saw the forest and the trees, the big
picture and the details. I truly enjoyed our little talks, and it felt
good to see that she trusted me to such an apparently high degree.
I came to truly hate myself for liking this girl so much, constantly
reminding myself of the round-about half-a-decade’s worth of years
between us. She knew I liked her, and she liked me -- but as close
as we got sometimes, I wouldn't even kiss her. It was just simple
rules. A line you don't cross.
Then one kid in our group, Nathan, disregarded those rules. He
crossed that line, the lines drawn by that whole absolute morality
bullshit I sort of believed in at the time. He went for Terra, and that
pissed off a lot of people in the group. It pissed me off doubly, for
obvious reasons. I wanted to strangle the little prick, to tell you the
truth. And of course it pissed him off when he learned of the
bonding between her and I. Nathan always had a bit of a jealousy
problem, and for some reason he tended to focus a shit load of this
on me -- something that led to our eventual falling out. Anyway,
Terra and Nathan didn't last very long.
Then she went out with Kirk. Things between Terra and him grew
distant, however, and it kind of faded out. A lot of his friends were
bashing on him for going out with a girl so young, and he agreed
that as mature as she was for her age, her experience didn’t exactly
match his own. Kirk was really gung-ho about sex, and for Terra at
the time, this was still foreign territory. With that and the recurring
presence of an old ex-girlfriend of his, with which he would
eventually reunite to have a child, it finally ended. I don’t recall if it
ended officially or just sort of faded out, but I do remember how
hurt Terra was over the whole thing. I remember how I sort of
envied what Nathan and Kirk had the courage to do, though, no
matter how culturally incorrect it was considered. I was older than
both of them, though -- not by much, but it just made it that much
more wrong for me to feel that way about her.
It sort of came to a tee one evening between her and I. Terra and
Nick came over to my parents house unexpectedly one night to
come see me. My friends often do this, as I'm usually awake and
we're all big night owls. But it was just him and her this time
around, and he ended up just dosing off on the sofa. Her and I
somehow ended up in my bed, laying beside each other. I think we
held one another. That was the first time anything like that
happened, and it would be the last time in a long while.
Nothing happened in the sense that many are probably assuming
about
now; we didn't even kiss -- but I suddenly noticed a tension there
that
I'd always felt below the surface, but which had never been
permitted
to dance in the foreground before. And there it was, in all it's dark,
insatiable intensity. This incredible comfort with her, but this raging
desire to get closer, and the profound guilt for feeling that way, and
the deep paranoia about how she might be feeling, what she might
be thinking.
I don't even remember how we got from my room to downstairs.
All I remember is us standing outside in the driveway. I don't even
remember us talking; all memory about that night is emotion and
quick flashes of images. I remember us looking at each other a lot;
those long, devouring looks where you don't seem to blink at all,
were you seem to swallow each other whole through the black
vortices of your pupils. Almost electric, almost psychic. And as
much as I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to be free of this. It
wasn't the first time I'd felt that way, and it'd become a
characteristic element in my ongoing friendship with her.
Reasons for this ambivalence, in time, would change. Obstacles
between her and I would change; given time, even the roles we
played towards one another would change. But ever-present was
the torture: any way you sliced it, she was close enough to see, but
too far too reach. And so it began that night: the torture.
The seed had fallen to me that Halloween night we met, it had been
planted when I looked at her that night on her go-cart, and it began
to sprout that night we lay beside each other in my bed and
swallowed each other whole with our eyes in my parent's driveway.
In time, this undefined thing between us would smother me. It was
a long time coming, but it would come to smother me.
We saw Terra a lot less when Nick, Sandra and I all decided to
move into an apartment in a nearby college town in May of 1999.
We'd been there only a little over a month when the terrifying event
occurred, and it was a day or two until the news finally reached us.
The news of the near-fatal tragedy. On June 6, 1999, the day of
Nick’s graduation ceremony, Terra had overdosed. Upon hearing of
this tragedy, my head began doing flip-flops. And not only out of
worry: the odd coincidence here was astounding, as Claire had just
recently overdosed on pills in the attempts to numb the pain her
husband was subjecting her to. She made it through just fine, but
this was not the first time Claire had done it. It just triggered
memories of the tale she'd once told me about what had happened a
year before I'd met her, when she'd overdosed and ended up in a
mental ward. I feared what might come for Terra. All of us were
terrified of what permanent consequences there might be.
The story was that Terra had swallowed 13 over-the-counter pills
with a friend of hers the day before. Strange, as thirteen was her
favorite number. Strange, too, that the date it all occurred was
6/6/99, which reminds one of a double yin/yang symbol. Later on, I
got the specifics regarding what had happened. She told me that the
pills she’d taken were Coricidin D Cold and Flu tablets. She had
taken them before; pretty much on routine for about a month or so
when partying with her friends. It had taken until about nightfall
when she began feeling things were taking a turn for the horrific,
and that’s when she began to freak. She’d tried to puke the pills up,
but it didn’t work. She didn’t sleep. Couldn't sleep.
The way she explained it to me, the way she wrote about it later on,
she was riddled with paranoid delusions. She wrote a lot about how
she worried about her family being dead. It seemed as if all she had
buried in herself in her attempts to distance from her family through
her rebellion came back to her with three times the force, like some
lethal, psychological karmic boomerang from the depths of her
personal, unconscious, psychological hells. She plunged into her
Shadow.
She finally broke down and told her parents what had happened,
what she’d done. Her mother called the poison hot line, and she
then took her daughter to the hospital. She spilled about the booze,
about smoking pot, about doing all the drugs. The doctors at the
hospital suggested taking her to A nearby mental ward, and the
doctors at A nearby mental ward wanted to keep her overnight, but
her mother brought her home. I think it was a day or two later
when her mother decided that her daughter needed to get out of the
house, and she brought her over to the apartment.
From the moment she stepped in the room, I think we all
immediately knew something was wrong, but we never took into
consideration how strange everything in the world might seem for
her. The room was dark, for one thing, and were also in the middle
of watching the movie, Pi, which, if you've seen it, you know
is strange enough in a mundane state of consciousness, let alone a
drug-induced psychosis. To top it off, Sandra and Nick had gone to
get their eyebrows pierced earlier that day, and she expressed a
good degree of paranoia about that.
I tried talking with her, but she was, of course, as wary and
suspicious of me as she was with everyone else. I suggested we go
to Eat-N-Park, maybe to get her to eat something and find some
ground in what had become, over the years, a well-worn path of
routine. Familiarity offers a sense of security. But what we couldn’t
see at first is that for her, the familiar wasn’t familiar anymore. The
whole way there she asked where we were really taking her, what
we were really doing, why were were conspiring against her.
Once we were there, she was whole-heatedly convinced that the
place had somehow changed since she had been there last.
Everything was the same to us and everyone else in the world, but
nothing was familiar to her. This is the experience of Jamais vu, the
reverse of deja vu. Its where you see familiar things as if for the
first time. Where the everyday world seems alien, and your best
friends are strangers, even enemies.
Nothing was familiar. No one was trusted. Everything seemed
threatening. Everyone was out to get her. Everything was chaos.
We convinced her to order food, but when her plate of scrambled
eggs arrived, she just stared at them for awhile, using her fork to
play with them. We talked and drew and acted as we usually did, as
if nothing at all was wrong, but she didn’t seem to be in the groove
of things at all. When I finally brought her outside the restaurant for
a cigarette and tried to get her to tell me what she was
experiencing, what she was thinking and feeling, it seemed as
though the entire world was unfamiliar to her. It was as if the entire
universe, once so familiar and safe to her, had been overtaken by a
menacing, alien cloud. I tried to tell her that it was just her mind
that had changed and not the world around her, but she wouldn't
listen to reason. It was no more productive than trying to convince
myself out of my own morbid, dismantled delusions -- all I could
do, as usual, was document and contemplate. I could only provoke
her to express so that I might capture -- there would be no
complete circuit, no feedback, because nothing I said changed her
or penetrated through her thick cocoon of maya. In her mind, there
was too much noise. Too much static.
We eventually went back to our apartment, and her mother came to
get her. Our goth girl left our place for her home that day as she
had come: a
stranger in a strange land. I found myself identifying with her
completely: she was at a level where I had once been, and still
occasionally, spontaneously visit. When I received the letter in the
mail she had sent me the day she overdosed, it reinforced my beliefs
that she was in that place. In the letter she had attempted to
describe to the best of her ability what she was feeling and how she
was thinking. She explained how she saw that everything was
interconnected in this web (echoing the words I'd heard from an
unconventional female figure from my youth, which present logic
often insists I must have hallucinated). At the asylum, she had
brought her sketch pad, and in it she had drawn an eye, just as I had
routinely did in my high school years on napkins in coffee shops, a
habit I continue to this day.
Years later, she would tell me how she had written down in her
room at that time the words `I AM TIM'. She felt that in her
drug-induced psychosis that she was not only in the same place I
was, or had been, but that she had in some sense become me
-- that she was one with me.
Some time later I learned of Terra’s affinity with the stories Alice in
Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ, and due to the fact that she
experienced a psychotic break as I do occasionally, it is no wonder.
She found herself in a world completely flipped upside down,
struggling to come to grips with it as her personal demons came
alive right before her as her world was enveloped in ominous,
dreary, twisted, frightening, insane, and malevolent Shadow. All she
wanted now was to go home, to find that security, that identity,
that familiarity, but she scarcely remembered the place. She could
not remember who she was. That’s how it is on the other side of
the mirror. Once you go there, you're never the same. You're never
as certain about anything.
In the weeks that followed, we heard a few other frightening
stories, but after awhile we caught word that she was slowly
approximating the little goth girl we all knew. So luckily, there
seemed to be no permanent damage. She had changed, however:
her grades in school improved and she had reconnected with her
family. None the less, after the whole overdose episode a distance
formed between her and the group. I think a lot of that was her
doing, but we certainly contributed. We felt it kind of necessary. I
think we all kind of felt that we may have contributed to her
problems, and the guilt we had inspired us to do the best thing we
could after the fact. While we didn't want to abandon her, we felt
that she might benefit from some space and time.
And over time, thankfully, the space diminished. I'm not certain
when Terra re-emerged, perhaps almost a year later. She came back
into our lives seeming a lot more together than she had been in
exiting it. She wasn't popping pills anymore, she mostly just smoked
cigarettes and pot now and the occasional alcohol. She had been
doing better in school, she had gotten her license, grown out her
hair -- but she was still the dark, confused girl I'd known. It was as
if she had been that bright personality, then the dark personality,
and through the drug overdose she had somehow managed a new
personality that was a fusion of the two. She still dressed in her
alluring, gothic get-ups, she still had that insatiable look in her eyes.
She still wrote, too, but she admitted to doing so less and less often
-- she was more focused on her artwork, now, and it was terrific
artwork. I told her how I had gone the other way, drifting from my
artwork and finding my place a lot more in writing, though I still
drew from time to time.
I'd go and visit Nick and Sandra at their grandfathers house, where
they were living at the time, and she'd come over there, too. It felt
really good having her around again. I still felt that tension between
us. Apparently she did, too: she always said that when she was
eighteen she'd do all these naughty things to me, because all the
restraints would be gone. What that meant to me was that the
promise of all those years of torture, of not being able to be
affectionate with her without feeling guilty about her age, without
feeling like a pervert -- all that would be relieved in the future; there
was a promise of resolution. And the tension grew as we began to
all hang out again. As her and I began talking again.
Which brings us to the cutting. I’m not entirely sure when she
revealed to me that she was a cutter, but I think it was shortly after
she re-emerged. Almost as instinctual reaction, the question pops
up: why on earth would you cut yourself? I was more intrigued
than I was worried or disgusted, which made me curious, and even
concerned me. My reactions were certainly not what I'd expected.
She’s talked with me about it, and she's told me how she knows its
a symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder. That was very
interesting to me, as when I had read the book Girl,
Interrupted, after the main character in the movie had reminded
me so much of her for some reason, I found that the book version
reminded me even more of her. Strangely enough, the word
`ambivalence’ comes up in the story and is used to explain the girl’s
nature, and she was, in fact, diagnosed with Borderline Personality
Disorder.
I know from my own reading that cutting has also been mentioned
in association with schizophrenia. Allegedly it can be the
schizophrenic’s way of battling against the experience of
derealisation and depersonalization; the sense that you and the
world around you are dream-like or somehow not real. Symptoms
that characterize particular disorders meld disorders together in the
psychological literature, however, and one wrestles to define
oneself within the definitions of this years DSM, forgetting entirely
that these are man-made categories to begin with.
I say fuck categories, we should take each case independently.
Unfortunately, she didn't seem to have a clue as to why she did it.
Then the fateful event occurred. It was when Nick finally agreed to
go visit his grandmother at her grave site; the kind of thing only
people like Nick, Terra and I would become inspired to do at
round-about four in the morning. The problem was, we weren't
entirely sure where the graveyard was. Eventually I talked Nick into
stopping at a nearby Dairy Mart, where we asked the clerk where
the nearest cemetery was. He warily gave us directions. Walking
out of the place, I couldn't help that he looked at us and figured we
were seeking out a place of the dead to conduct some horrific
satanic rituals or something. In the very least, I'm sure we made an
impression.
It was in that graveyard we eventually found where Terra and I
kissed for the first time. I can't remember exactly how it happened,
or who kissed who, but it was a great moment. A long-awaited one.
It was an electric kiss, a consciousness-altering experience. After
we kissed in the back seat of his car, Nick drove out of the
graveyard in the twilight of the morning. It was such an beautifully
surreal experience. My desires for that girl ran deep, deeper than
the flesh but not without sight of it. I was lured in by the darkness
in her, the similar energies we shared, and the fact that our first kiss
was in a graveyard was so fitting.
I wanted her badly, but discovered afterward that she had a
boyfriend. This I found frustrating. She had told me that when she
was eighteen that she'd do all these nasty, dirty, terrific things to
me. Now it had become when she was single that she'd do all that.
The date was always being pushed back. Put off. Occasionally, she
brought up the fact that I could have had her years ago, but I was
always quick to bring up the factor of her age. I think we did
enough to contribute to her downfall when she was young;
throwing a sexual experience with me in the mix would've been the
ultimate excersize in stupidity. Reflecting on that, I felt old. I mean,
I'd met her when she was thirteen, and now here she was in her
senior year, planning on going to college.
When she told me at one point that she was considering becoming a
mortician, I must admit I was more than slightly amused. A goth
girl as the mortician: how fitting. She told me she believed she’d
feel ill at ease around the dead, however, and that’s why she
eventually backed out of it. I must admit, though, that this got me
thinking. I knew that her gothic attire was in tune with who she
really was; it reflected her inner state. But the whole death theme
with her didn’t strike me hard until about then. That was when I
really started thinking about what it all meant, and why I was so
insatiably attracted to it.
I'd began noting odd coincidences in girls I became attracted to a
few years back, and one of the first major things that caught my
attention was the fact that many of them eventually went into the
military, or at least attempted to. This was extremely strange, I
thought, because I absolutely hated the military. I knew it wasn't
something even vaguely conscious, because the first two women
that went in the military did so long after I'd met them and first
pursued something with them.
The thing I hated most about the military in general was the
philosophy behind it: to kill people to show that killing people will
not be tolerated. That and dominance of the land and resources.
What I didn't immediately realize was that my issues with the
military generally came down to: death and control. The military
was really there to control death -- to postpone our own as a
people and deliver it to those we felt deserved it.
And as I look across at the other women in my life that I've had a
deep, emotional involvement with, I find the theme of joining the
military to be pretty prominent. In the cases were it is not
prominent, however, there is still the underlying theme of which the
military is a manifestation: the themes of control and death. They
were always women wrestling with a deep pain, struggling with
their own personal demons, unwilling to give into the life that
seemed, in a contradictory sense, to be sucking the life right out of
them. Their attraction to the military, perhaps, manifested out of a
desire of these women of my life to overpower death in a new way.
I feel in Terra specifically an ambivalent stance towards death: a
fear of it, and at the same time a deep curiosity. This ambivalence
explains her approach to death quite nicely. For instance, drugs
could be seen as one way to enter into the liminal zone between life
and death. With certain chemicals, you can glimpse something akin
to death, if nothing else. One gets the feeling of being detached
from one's common world and one's usual sense of self. One gets to
rehearse death in a way, feel it out, and have a good chance of
returning safely. The danger is going too far, the danger is sinking
too deep. In some cases, such as the case of Terra's overdose, there
is good reason to fear death because in the extreme use of some
drugs it can be a likely result. As Terra faced the undeniable fact,
during her overdose, that she has an expiration date, albeit
unknown, she came face to face with many facts about herself: she
is dependent on her family. That was why she was haunted with the
idea of their demise that night.
As much as she might argue, I also think her on-again, off-again
ritual of cutting has a lot to do with her simultaneous curiosity and
fear of death, and her desire to summon the high feeling of life that
results from the threat of death -- something she tasted in full
intensity during her overdose experience. Let me make clear that I
do not think her cutting or her overdose stemmed from any desire
to commit suicide, however. As for the cutting, the cuts aren’t
often on her wrists, at least not so far as I’ve known. And the way
she explains it, this ritual with the blade seems to balance her out.
Her addiction to the blade doesn't bring to my mind suicide, but,
strangely enough, meditation.
In meditation, they usually ask you to clear away all thoughts and
focus on a single thing. To silence the mind. The problem, of
course, is all the intrusive thoughts. Memories of guilt slip into the
haze. The bills you have to pay. How much he pissed you off. The
naughty things you’d like to do to her. In short, to clear the mind
and focus the will is never easy. Silence is never easy, as the mind is
always riddled with static. With chaos and noise. The knife, then,
may be a way not of just cutting her skin, but cutting through the
static; cutting through the haze.
This knife pressed to her skin, the way it shimmers from the 60 watt
bulb, the way it’s sharp, cold edge feels against her skin -- this is
silencing all thought. This isn’t toying with suicide, she’s smart
enough that she knows how to do it right. This isn’t an interest in
death, this is really about an interest in life, in really living. This is
an interest in feeling again. This is being here and now again.
This is focus. This is meditation.
This is escaping her complexity by collapsing consciousness into a
single point that for a moment reconciles all opposing forces within
her, makes everything stand at attention and become united and
aimed at a single point -- because the most fundamental instinct of
all organisms is survival. The blade helps her bring herself down to
the most simple, basic thing.
When life is threatened, when you’re reminded how fragile it is,
how easily it could end, all thoughts withdraw from the past and
from complex analysis and speculation. Awareness, consciousness,
it all collapses to the present moment in a tight, vivid, unerring
focus. The knife to your skin, cutting your skin, it demands your
attention, it literally grabs it. People watch scary movies for a jolt.
They ride roller coasters. This gives them a taste of life, but the
element that elicits that is the vision of your own mortality, the
threat of annihilation. Graham Greene was playing Russian Roulette
and when he pulled the trigger with the gun to his temple and felt
the sharp push of air against his skin he was suddenly overcome
with a sense of meaning in life. Reality is amplified. Simplified. You
are pinched awake from your slumber through life, your awareness
is kicked into gear. You break out of your trance. You can feel
again. You can concentrate.
This is living. This is life as verb. This is meditation.
At first it sounds rather contradictory, how one could only feel life
so intensely, taste all its flavor, awaken the senses to such heights in
the threat of life, in the face of death -- but it works. It seems
paradoxical, that pain and pleasure could be so related. That one
could become the other. That passed a certain point, the distinction
disappears. But I for one know it does.
And if I'm wrong, if she's wrong -- if the overdose and the cutting is
really part of some obsession with death -- why in this way?
Because by suicide you can choose when you die; you can control
death, summon him. Perhaps slowly approach him, then back away.
Visit him, but just knock on his door, and be able to run away again
and return to something resembling life.
Either way, the theme of death runs through her -- the overdose,
the cutting, our meeting at Halloween, our first kiss in a graveyard,
her act of considering becoming a mortician, her gothic get-ups.
But if what I'm seeing here is not really her, but a buried part of
myself, why is this theme of death and control so prominent? Why
would this theme of death tag along with my anima? In general, the
theme of life and death may be very tied to man's collective image
of woman. Think about it: for man, woman is his biological
beginning, that from which he is born, and she is, in the end, his
only means of genetic survival: the female is the only natural
weapon against biological death, the only means of defeating it. She
is necessary for him to reproduce, and reproduction is the only
means by which this organism can achieve some sort of genetic
immortality -- the biological, instinctual drive of his life. Which is
why we spend nine months trying to get out, the rest of our lives
trying to get back in. She is, in this sense, a symbol of birth and
death, of beginning and end, of alpha and omega. On this instinctual
basis, perhaps more developed issues with death and survival
became associated with the image of the female, personally and
collectively.
One should also take into account how women make men feel: no
matter how long we try to convince ourselves otherwise outside of
her presence, as soon as she stands before us we feel the need, the
desire, the pull, and we are forced to face the fact that we are
incomplete and any sense of ultimate self-sufficiency is an illusion.
We fear the power she has over us; we hate our dependence upon
her. This could also explain my issues with females in positions of
authority -- my disputes with them, and my attraction to them.
Their power, once we are faced with it, is a turn-on because the
energy we've invested in its denial is released: we are full of life in
the presence of something that threatens our sense of control -- in
the presence of someone that means death to us. But could we be
facing not something external, but some reflection from within?
Something we buried and left for dead in the graveyard of our
minds, but is haunting us through feminine faces? Could the
death-like threat she brings, the one that inspires life, really be the
threat of our disowned selves? Could she be like a blade I hold to
my skin?
Could this be -- meditation?
by Rewired
7/28/04
What is this, you ask? This is meditation. This is the story about
how I met Terra. A story about a goth girl.
It's all too obvious that I adore her, but in some ways I just hate
her. That may indicate something; these passionate reactions of
hate, fear, and desire she seems to elicit in me may be screaming
out messages I'm too blind to read and too deaf to hear. Perhaps
I’m just projecting on her . Perhaps she's just acting as a mirror for
parts of myself that I refuse to acknowledge. Maybe that accounts
for the consistency in the women I've been attracted to, a
consistency that she is a part of.
Carl Jung talked about how we store latent parts of ourselves in our
Shadow, which is like this evil twin, this dark side of our personality residing outside our conscious awareness. It is the same sex as the ego we identify with. He also spoke of another part of our unconscious, however, another archetype common to all human beings. He called them collectively the sygzy: for a man, it is his anima, or the feminine side of his personality that he projects onto women, and for a woman, it is her animus, or the masculine side of her personality that she projects onto men. The man meet the anima and the woman meets her animus when they have ventured far enough into their Shadow.
It seems I have ventured far enough into my shadow, for my
Phantom Girl is haunting me. One girl she like to possess and haunt
me through is Terra, the goth girl.
I've noticed my anima showing her face across the women of my
life. I call her my Phantom Girl. Many men I know seem to have
Phantom Girls, and many women I know also certainly have their
Phantom Boys. Basically, what happens is you find yourself falling
for similar women with similar histories, and between her and you
develop familiar situations with predictable beginnings and endings.
It's as if there's some continuity error in life; as if the same story is
being played over and over with some light modifications and with
new actors playing old roles, or old actors playing
different roles, changing faces, switching roles or masks.
Personally, over the years I have noted remarkable similarities in the
girls I found myself attracted to. Some of these were blatantly
obvious things that could be easily explainable by the instincts that
make sense now thanks to evolutionary psychology: many were
slender women at about my height, bright, beautiful eyes, and
things of that nature. But a great many other things were very
`hidden' -- things I didn't discover, at least consciously, until well
after I was attracted to them and had engaged in lengthy
conversation with them. And though not all of the qualities
consistent in the girls I've been insatiably attracted to were initially
`hidden' ones, enough of them were for me to note the apparent
synchronicity and to begin questioning the reasons behind all this.
While everyone on your list of previous fixations or relationships
may not have all the same things in common, so many strange
things seem to tie them together. It's like certain groups of them
hold pieces to a puzzle, and if you put the pieces together you find
your projected `other half' -- your phantom mate, if you will; your
animus or your anima. So we seek in significant members of the
opposite sex, through projection, the contrasexual aspects that we
have buried in ourselves: our `other half'.
When I look at her, I fear I don't really see her, but only the
reflection of my anima in her eyes. I fear that in my perceptions, my
Phantom Girl has in a sense possessed her. So it comes to be that
my fixation on her could be a clever psychological strategy that
allows me to be a narcissist without realizing it. If so, perhaps by
understanding my perspective on her I can come to better
understand myself, even this complex situation that's developed
between her and I over the years. She has inspired so much poetry,
and for so long I’ve wanted to sit down and weave it all together,
to try and put together the puzzle that surrounds her. To introduce
her to the world of my writing. To just write a story about her -- a
story about a goth girl.
Terra is her real name, or in my writing life, anyway. I call her the
Goth Girl now because, well, she fits the title pretty damned well.
Way back I used to call her the Queen of Darkness or the Dark
Maiden in a half-joking fashion -- and prior to that, before she went
goth, before she became who she is today, I habitually referred to
her as the Evil One. The joke, when I first met her when she was
circa thirteen years old, was that evil always hid behind a cute face,
and a girl as cute as her couldn't possibly be anything less than pure
fucking evil. I have demolished all belief in an absolute morality
since then, but in a purely subjective, relative, personal sense, she
would be the personification of emotional chaos in my life -- the
temptress.
I met her, fitting enough, on Halloween, 1998. I think it was either
shortly before or shortly after Claire and I broke up for the last
time. I had heard Sandra and Nick refer to their little cousin before,
but I'd never met her. It wasn't much of a meeting that night, either,
not really. I don't recall any official introductions, no hi or hello, she
just kind of appeared out of the woodwork.
I think I had gotten off of work, and they'd just come back from
seeing the movie Spawn. We had gone driving around for a bit, in
the middle of nowhere of course, when we noticed the gas gauge
was on E. Nathan was driving, and it was Sandra's car. She said he
had no reason to worry, because it had just gotten to E and it
would get us a good ways before the gas tank was really empty.
She said this just as the car coasted to a stop and Nathan burst out
laughing.
So there we were, a herd of teens and twenty-something’s walking
around deserted roads in the middle of nowhere at three in the
morning, without a gas station in sight. We took the opportunity to
be loud and obnoxious, as we were all tired and wired, and I
remembered doing my usual. For some reason around that time I'd
developed this odd taste for talking about pretty much anything that
made people squirm, and that evening I was speaking at a rather
high volume about how my ass itched. I caught a few giggles from
her. I was sure that made a great first impression.
I saw her a few more times after that. Sandra and Nick and I would
stop by her house sometimes before going to our usual hangout -- a
24-7 restaurant not that far away -- and I noticed she had changed a
lot from when I had first met her. Not that I had known her all that
well right away, mind you: it just seemed as if there was something
brewing in her. Rotting, dying, changing in her.
Her parents house was really cool, really big. She had an
above-ground pool and a huge trampoline in her backyard. She had
a pretty good size yard, too, and she enjoyed riding around in her
go-cart in the middle of the night. As we were all on it with her one
evening, and she was talking with Sandra and cutting a turn, I
happened to look over at her. I think that's the first real time I ever
really looked into her, and her face just kind of burned into my
memory. She had this long, black, frizzy hair tied back, these really
girlie cloths with bright colors -- and then this dog collar around her
neck. It kind of threw me off. It was one of those things in a picture
that didn't seem to belong at first, but only for a brief instant, until
you really look into the picture.
And I look into her eyes -- her dark, vibrant eyes -- and I see so
many
contradictions. I see this war going on in her. This raw emotion
unable to break free. Intense chaos. Brutal war. I was stuck by her
that night; it was like a bolt of lightning. And the more I saw of her,
the more she intrigued me. Even at the beginning, she had come
across as this cute, quiet little girl. A dark little mystery. She
seemed mature well beyond her age; her dark eyes glowed with a
curiosity, a deep intelligence, a rich and vicious kind of emotion
that was incredibly stunning. The more I got to know her, the more
intrigued I became. The other side of her, it seemed to be
blossoming. It was a bitter taste, however. She seemed to be
growing pessimistic. Cynical. Even sinister.
If she was any older, it would have been very easy to admit she was
incredibly good-looking, but her age kept popping up in my mind
between me and my dirty thoughts, and it was building up to be a
hefty dose of guilt. It wasn’t just that she was thirteen, though, but
another reason -- one which may require some explaining.
You see, around that time, Sandra and I had a `thing'. I don't know
quite what you would describe it as, exactly, but she thought she
had feelings for me, and I thought I might have feelings for her, as
well as another girl, Anne, but I was still hopelessly chasing after
the unachievable, Claire. In short, things were very ambiguous
between Sandra and I, not easily classifiable, and the situation was
uneasy enough already with her that I was pretty damn sure that
pursuing her cousin, even if she had been of acceptable age, would
be the most destructive and unethical choice as of yet. And those
around me were perceiving me as destructive and unethical enough
as it was. So I tried my very best to keep a lid on my quiet
infatuation. I put it on the back-burner.
It got more difficult to ignore it, though. Soon she was hanging out
with the rest of the clique at the all-night restaurant on routine. She
got her hair cut short, she began dressing differently. By that time
she had gone pretty goth. She wore black cloths, fishnets, dark
make-up. Not the kind of cheesy goth you see a lot of nowadays.
She was simply being herself. Her outer persona was more in
synchrony with her inner self and the change she was experiencing.
She had found an image of comfort, and it was incredibly alluring.
Too alluring.
And I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either.
At first, that was kind of a comfort, because at least I wasn’t the
only pervert. But it didn’t remain comfortable for long. It started at
the all-night restaurants with the rest of the insomniacs. Countless
guys would come up to us and ask about her. They would come up
and try to talk to her, or just blatantly hit on her. Then either
Sandra, Nick or I would ask them, judging by looks alone just how
old they thought she was. It became sort of a game with us. Their
guess, no matter how young, was always far enough off the mark
that when we told them her real age their eyes would grow large
and round, their faces would go pale, their jaw to drop and they’d
let out the exasperated, "what?" or "you're fucking with me, right?"
or the ever-so-popular "holy shit" that we’d quickly grow tired of.
And I'd
just nod: I know, I know, I’d say. And they would shy away,
feeling like perverts.
And I hate to be the one to say it, but who could blame them for
their
confusion? It first struck me with Terra, but it certainly didn’t end
there. It was happening everywhere, and it has since continued: the
phenomenon of girls developing into women a hell of a lot earlier
than they used to. It seems strange enough on the surface, but the
more deeply you ponder it the less sense it makes. Think about it: in
our advanced human society, with all our vitamins, surgeries, and
all our other sorts of high technology that are helping us to live
longer, healthier lives, it would make sense that kids would take a
longer time, not a shorter time, to want to grow up.
Why? Because they’ve got so much more time in which to do so.
They could really take it easy and take their time on life's path,
because there really is no reason to hurry -- you've got more time
than your ancestors could have ever dreamed of. Yet it should be
clear to anyone that its just not working that way at all. We’re
living longer, but we’re growing up and developing more quickly,
too. Women start menstruating earlier, their breasts bud earlier, the
need to separate from their parents and escape the `second womb'
develops earlier than ever. And that’s not all: kids are marrying
earlier, getting pregnant earlier. They’re like rabbits on
amphetamines fucking like mad and getting pregnant and having
babies and getting married by the time they’re seventeen. No one's
taking time on the path of life anymore, no matter how much longer
it is stretching. Instead, they're running down it like crazy monkeys
on speed on some race from the womb to the tomb. Like a bat out
of hell, last one there's a rotten egg. This just
never made sense to me, and it makes less all the time.
The leap to maturity wasn’t a major source of comfort for her, it
seemed. When we would tell the guys what her real age was and
she saw their reaction, it was so obvious that she simply hated it.
She hated being reminded of her age; she hated that being a turn-off
for guys. I think she was really trying to find her place with us, or
through us, and I personally think she belonged with us, at least in
comparison to the kids her age. It wasn’t just even her maturity
level or that she looked older, either -- there were deeper reasons, I
think, that she belonged in our group. She was just different,
period. Not conventional at all.
Some time later I would explain to my psychologist that I had
always felt different from most other people in my general vicinity;
that I seemed to work on a wavelength not necessarily higher or
lower, but undeniably different. That I thought in a different
fashion, a different way; that I processed my emotions differently.
That though I could fit in by outward appearance, within I was
utterly alien -- in some sense or another. And in Terra, I found that
likeness.
She seems so nervous and awkward sometimes, as if she doesn’t
feel comfortable in her own surroundings, even within the confines
of her own skin -- and then other times she talks and moves with
such beautiful ease, such amazing elegance. I like watching her
when she doesn’t know I am; but eventually, her eyes look up to
meet my own. Its as if she can feel my stare. To me, she seemed to
be of the same inner `species'; I could feel it in her vibe, I could
taste it in her dark eyes. I was at first silent about what I'd noticed
about her and how very much she was like me. I wouldn't wish
likeness with me upon anyone. But the way she thought and felt,
the way she talked and expressed herself, the way she wrote and did
her artwork, the way she approached people when she did and the
way she ran away to be by herself when she didn't -- it all seemed to
cry out to me that she was of a like nature. An upgrade perhaps, a
few further mutations, maybe a few less -- but remarkably similar,
and of the same kind, the same breed.
She didn't seem to belong anywhere, really, so she definitely
belonged with us -- she belonged around me -- around people who,
to greater or
lesser degree, in one way or the other, didn't really belong
anywhere, either. I think we could’ve done so much better, though,
and I can’t help but feel that we were in a major part to blame for
what eventually transpired. We should’ve seen the signs that shit
inside her was going
down. We should have noticed that as she continued hanging
around us her problems in school seemed to be amplifying. That her
grades were dropping. That she stopped doing sports. That she
started arguing with her parents, hanging out with reject kids her
own age and smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, drinking, popping
pills. I certainly don’t think we were the sole cause of it all, but we
didn’t exactly provide the best examples we could have.
As for her and I, we began to bond. I remember us sitting together
in my shitty blue Mercury Topaz and us sharing a smoke. It was the
first time I'd ever seen her smoke a cigarette; apparently she had
been doing so for awhile. The moments like that one, those times
we had together, just me and her -- as few and far between as those
times were -- they were something I really looked forward to. Her
brain was a beautiful thing to watch spill before me; a waterfall of
rich intellect and raw emotion. She would be silent forever and then
talk really low, really fast, and you could tell when she really began
letting go and getting into what she was saying. She'd get all
animated with her hands and her face would contort. Her words,
too, simply amazed me; they revealed the complex web-work of
thought behind them. She saw the forest and the trees, the big
picture and the details. I truly enjoyed our little talks, and it felt
good to see that she trusted me to such an apparently high degree.
I came to truly hate myself for liking this girl so much, constantly
reminding myself of the round-about half-a-decade’s worth of years
between us. She knew I liked her, and she liked me -- but as close
as we got sometimes, I wouldn't even kiss her. It was just simple
rules. A line you don't cross.
Then one kid in our group, Nathan, disregarded those rules. He
crossed that line, the lines drawn by that whole absolute morality
bullshit I sort of believed in at the time. He went for Terra, and that
pissed off a lot of people in the group. It pissed me off doubly, for
obvious reasons. I wanted to strangle the little prick, to tell you the
truth. And of course it pissed him off when he learned of the
bonding between her and I. Nathan always had a bit of a jealousy
problem, and for some reason he tended to focus a shit load of this
on me -- something that led to our eventual falling out. Anyway,
Terra and Nathan didn't last very long.
Then she went out with Kirk. Things between Terra and him grew
distant, however, and it kind of faded out. A lot of his friends were
bashing on him for going out with a girl so young, and he agreed
that as mature as she was for her age, her experience didn’t exactly
match his own. Kirk was really gung-ho about sex, and for Terra at
the time, this was still foreign territory. With that and the recurring
presence of an old ex-girlfriend of his, with which he would
eventually reunite to have a child, it finally ended. I don’t recall if it
ended officially or just sort of faded out, but I do remember how
hurt Terra was over the whole thing. I remember how I sort of
envied what Nathan and Kirk had the courage to do, though, no
matter how culturally incorrect it was considered. I was older than
both of them, though -- not by much, but it just made it that much
more wrong for me to feel that way about her.
It sort of came to a tee one evening between her and I. Terra and
Nick came over to my parents house unexpectedly one night to
come see me. My friends often do this, as I'm usually awake and
we're all big night owls. But it was just him and her this time
around, and he ended up just dosing off on the sofa. Her and I
somehow ended up in my bed, laying beside each other. I think we
held one another. That was the first time anything like that
happened, and it would be the last time in a long while.
Nothing happened in the sense that many are probably assuming
about
now; we didn't even kiss -- but I suddenly noticed a tension there
that
I'd always felt below the surface, but which had never been
permitted
to dance in the foreground before. And there it was, in all it's dark,
insatiable intensity. This incredible comfort with her, but this raging
desire to get closer, and the profound guilt for feeling that way, and
the deep paranoia about how she might be feeling, what she might
be thinking.
I don't even remember how we got from my room to downstairs.
All I remember is us standing outside in the driveway. I don't even
remember us talking; all memory about that night is emotion and
quick flashes of images. I remember us looking at each other a lot;
those long, devouring looks where you don't seem to blink at all,
were you seem to swallow each other whole through the black
vortices of your pupils. Almost electric, almost psychic. And as
much as I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to be free of this. It
wasn't the first time I'd felt that way, and it'd become a
characteristic element in my ongoing friendship with her.
Reasons for this ambivalence, in time, would change. Obstacles
between her and I would change; given time, even the roles we
played towards one another would change. But ever-present was
the torture: any way you sliced it, she was close enough to see, but
too far too reach. And so it began that night: the torture.
The seed had fallen to me that Halloween night we met, it had been
planted when I looked at her that night on her go-cart, and it began
to sprout that night we lay beside each other in my bed and
swallowed each other whole with our eyes in my parent's driveway.
In time, this undefined thing between us would smother me. It was
a long time coming, but it would come to smother me.
We saw Terra a lot less when Nick, Sandra and I all decided to
move into an apartment in a nearby college town in May of 1999.
We'd been there only a little over a month when the terrifying event
occurred, and it was a day or two until the news finally reached us.
The news of the near-fatal tragedy. On June 6, 1999, the day of
Nick’s graduation ceremony, Terra had overdosed. Upon hearing of
this tragedy, my head began doing flip-flops. And not only out of
worry: the odd coincidence here was astounding, as Claire had just
recently overdosed on pills in the attempts to numb the pain her
husband was subjecting her to. She made it through just fine, but
this was not the first time Claire had done it. It just triggered
memories of the tale she'd once told me about what had happened a
year before I'd met her, when she'd overdosed and ended up in a
mental ward. I feared what might come for Terra. All of us were
terrified of what permanent consequences there might be.
The story was that Terra had swallowed 13 over-the-counter pills
with a friend of hers the day before. Strange, as thirteen was her
favorite number. Strange, too, that the date it all occurred was
6/6/99, which reminds one of a double yin/yang symbol. Later on, I
got the specifics regarding what had happened. She told me that the
pills she’d taken were Coricidin D Cold and Flu tablets. She had
taken them before; pretty much on routine for about a month or so
when partying with her friends. It had taken until about nightfall
when she began feeling things were taking a turn for the horrific,
and that’s when she began to freak. She’d tried to puke the pills up,
but it didn’t work. She didn’t sleep. Couldn't sleep.
The way she explained it to me, the way she wrote about it later on,
she was riddled with paranoid delusions. She wrote a lot about how
she worried about her family being dead. It seemed as if all she had
buried in herself in her attempts to distance from her family through
her rebellion came back to her with three times the force, like some
lethal, psychological karmic boomerang from the depths of her
personal, unconscious, psychological hells. She plunged into her
Shadow.
She finally broke down and told her parents what had happened,
what she’d done. Her mother called the poison hot line, and she
then took her daughter to the hospital. She spilled about the booze,
about smoking pot, about doing all the drugs. The doctors at the
hospital suggested taking her to A nearby mental ward, and the
doctors at A nearby mental ward wanted to keep her overnight, but
her mother brought her home. I think it was a day or two later
when her mother decided that her daughter needed to get out of the
house, and she brought her over to the apartment.
From the moment she stepped in the room, I think we all
immediately knew something was wrong, but we never took into
consideration how strange everything in the world might seem for
her. The room was dark, for one thing, and were also in the middle
of watching the movie, Pi, which, if you've seen it, you know
is strange enough in a mundane state of consciousness, let alone a
drug-induced psychosis. To top it off, Sandra and Nick had gone to
get their eyebrows pierced earlier that day, and she expressed a
good degree of paranoia about that.
I tried talking with her, but she was, of course, as wary and
suspicious of me as she was with everyone else. I suggested we go
to Eat-N-Park, maybe to get her to eat something and find some
ground in what had become, over the years, a well-worn path of
routine. Familiarity offers a sense of security. But what we couldn’t
see at first is that for her, the familiar wasn’t familiar anymore. The
whole way there she asked where we were really taking her, what
we were really doing, why were were conspiring against her.
Once we were there, she was whole-heatedly convinced that the
place had somehow changed since she had been there last.
Everything was the same to us and everyone else in the world, but
nothing was familiar to her. This is the experience of Jamais vu, the
reverse of deja vu. Its where you see familiar things as if for the
first time. Where the everyday world seems alien, and your best
friends are strangers, even enemies.
Nothing was familiar. No one was trusted. Everything seemed
threatening. Everyone was out to get her. Everything was chaos.
We convinced her to order food, but when her plate of scrambled
eggs arrived, she just stared at them for awhile, using her fork to
play with them. We talked and drew and acted as we usually did, as
if nothing at all was wrong, but she didn’t seem to be in the groove
of things at all. When I finally brought her outside the restaurant for
a cigarette and tried to get her to tell me what she was
experiencing, what she was thinking and feeling, it seemed as
though the entire world was unfamiliar to her. It was as if the entire
universe, once so familiar and safe to her, had been overtaken by a
menacing, alien cloud. I tried to tell her that it was just her mind
that had changed and not the world around her, but she wouldn't
listen to reason. It was no more productive than trying to convince
myself out of my own morbid, dismantled delusions -- all I could
do, as usual, was document and contemplate. I could only provoke
her to express so that I might capture -- there would be no
complete circuit, no feedback, because nothing I said changed her
or penetrated through her thick cocoon of maya. In her mind, there
was too much noise. Too much static.
We eventually went back to our apartment, and her mother came to
get her. Our goth girl left our place for her home that day as she
had come: a
stranger in a strange land. I found myself identifying with her
completely: she was at a level where I had once been, and still
occasionally, spontaneously visit. When I received the letter in the
mail she had sent me the day she overdosed, it reinforced my beliefs
that she was in that place. In the letter she had attempted to
describe to the best of her ability what she was feeling and how she
was thinking. She explained how she saw that everything was
interconnected in this web (echoing the words I'd heard from an
unconventional female figure from my youth, which present logic
often insists I must have hallucinated). At the asylum, she had
brought her sketch pad, and in it she had drawn an eye, just as I had
routinely did in my high school years on napkins in coffee shops, a
habit I continue to this day.
Years later, she would tell me how she had written down in her
room at that time the words `I AM TIM'. She felt that in her
drug-induced psychosis that she was not only in the same place I
was, or had been, but that she had in some sense become me
-- that she was one with me.
Some time later I learned of Terra’s affinity with the stories Alice in
Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ, and due to the fact that she
experienced a psychotic break as I do occasionally, it is no wonder.
She found herself in a world completely flipped upside down,
struggling to come to grips with it as her personal demons came
alive right before her as her world was enveloped in ominous,
dreary, twisted, frightening, insane, and malevolent Shadow. All she
wanted now was to go home, to find that security, that identity,
that familiarity, but she scarcely remembered the place. She could
not remember who she was. That’s how it is on the other side of
the mirror. Once you go there, you're never the same. You're never
as certain about anything.
In the weeks that followed, we heard a few other frightening
stories, but after awhile we caught word that she was slowly
approximating the little goth girl we all knew. So luckily, there
seemed to be no permanent damage. She had changed, however:
her grades in school improved and she had reconnected with her
family. None the less, after the whole overdose episode a distance
formed between her and the group. I think a lot of that was her
doing, but we certainly contributed. We felt it kind of necessary. I
think we all kind of felt that we may have contributed to her
problems, and the guilt we had inspired us to do the best thing we
could after the fact. While we didn't want to abandon her, we felt
that she might benefit from some space and time.
And over time, thankfully, the space diminished. I'm not certain
when Terra re-emerged, perhaps almost a year later. She came back
into our lives seeming a lot more together than she had been in
exiting it. She wasn't popping pills anymore, she mostly just smoked
cigarettes and pot now and the occasional alcohol. She had been
doing better in school, she had gotten her license, grown out her
hair -- but she was still the dark, confused girl I'd known. It was as
if she had been that bright personality, then the dark personality,
and through the drug overdose she had somehow managed a new
personality that was a fusion of the two. She still dressed in her
alluring, gothic get-ups, she still had that insatiable look in her eyes.
She still wrote, too, but she admitted to doing so less and less often
-- she was more focused on her artwork, now, and it was terrific
artwork. I told her how I had gone the other way, drifting from my
artwork and finding my place a lot more in writing, though I still
drew from time to time.
I'd go and visit Nick and Sandra at their grandfathers house, where
they were living at the time, and she'd come over there, too. It felt
really good having her around again. I still felt that tension between
us. Apparently she did, too: she always said that when she was
eighteen she'd do all these naughty things to me, because all the
restraints would be gone. What that meant to me was that the
promise of all those years of torture, of not being able to be
affectionate with her without feeling guilty about her age, without
feeling like a pervert -- all that would be relieved in the future; there
was a promise of resolution. And the tension grew as we began to
all hang out again. As her and I began talking again.
Which brings us to the cutting. I’m not entirely sure when she
revealed to me that she was a cutter, but I think it was shortly after
she re-emerged. Almost as instinctual reaction, the question pops
up: why on earth would you cut yourself? I was more intrigued
than I was worried or disgusted, which made me curious, and even
concerned me. My reactions were certainly not what I'd expected.
She’s talked with me about it, and she's told me how she knows its
a symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder. That was very
interesting to me, as when I had read the book Girl,
Interrupted, after the main character in the movie had reminded
me so much of her for some reason, I found that the book version
reminded me even more of her. Strangely enough, the word
`ambivalence’ comes up in the story and is used to explain the girl’s
nature, and she was, in fact, diagnosed with Borderline Personality
Disorder.
I know from my own reading that cutting has also been mentioned
in association with schizophrenia. Allegedly it can be the
schizophrenic’s way of battling against the experience of
derealisation and depersonalization; the sense that you and the
world around you are dream-like or somehow not real. Symptoms
that characterize particular disorders meld disorders together in the
psychological literature, however, and one wrestles to define
oneself within the definitions of this years DSM, forgetting entirely
that these are man-made categories to begin with.
I say fuck categories, we should take each case independently.
Unfortunately, she didn't seem to have a clue as to why she did it.
Then the fateful event occurred. It was when Nick finally agreed to
go visit his grandmother at her grave site; the kind of thing only
people like Nick, Terra and I would become inspired to do at
round-about four in the morning. The problem was, we weren't
entirely sure where the graveyard was. Eventually I talked Nick into
stopping at a nearby Dairy Mart, where we asked the clerk where
the nearest cemetery was. He warily gave us directions. Walking
out of the place, I couldn't help that he looked at us and figured we
were seeking out a place of the dead to conduct some horrific
satanic rituals or something. In the very least, I'm sure we made an
impression.
It was in that graveyard we eventually found where Terra and I
kissed for the first time. I can't remember exactly how it happened,
or who kissed who, but it was a great moment. A long-awaited one.
It was an electric kiss, a consciousness-altering experience. After
we kissed in the back seat of his car, Nick drove out of the
graveyard in the twilight of the morning. It was such an beautifully
surreal experience. My desires for that girl ran deep, deeper than
the flesh but not without sight of it. I was lured in by the darkness
in her, the similar energies we shared, and the fact that our first kiss
was in a graveyard was so fitting.
I wanted her badly, but discovered afterward that she had a
boyfriend. This I found frustrating. She had told me that when she
was eighteen that she'd do all these nasty, dirty, terrific things to
me. Now it had become when she was single that she'd do all that.
The date was always being pushed back. Put off. Occasionally, she
brought up the fact that I could have had her years ago, but I was
always quick to bring up the factor of her age. I think we did
enough to contribute to her downfall when she was young;
throwing a sexual experience with me in the mix would've been the
ultimate excersize in stupidity. Reflecting on that, I felt old. I mean,
I'd met her when she was thirteen, and now here she was in her
senior year, planning on going to college.
When she told me at one point that she was considering becoming a
mortician, I must admit I was more than slightly amused. A goth
girl as the mortician: how fitting. She told me she believed she’d
feel ill at ease around the dead, however, and that’s why she
eventually backed out of it. I must admit, though, that this got me
thinking. I knew that her gothic attire was in tune with who she
really was; it reflected her inner state. But the whole death theme
with her didn’t strike me hard until about then. That was when I
really started thinking about what it all meant, and why I was so
insatiably attracted to it.
I'd began noting odd coincidences in girls I became attracted to a
few years back, and one of the first major things that caught my
attention was the fact that many of them eventually went into the
military, or at least attempted to. This was extremely strange, I
thought, because I absolutely hated the military. I knew it wasn't
something even vaguely conscious, because the first two women
that went in the military did so long after I'd met them and first
pursued something with them.
The thing I hated most about the military in general was the
philosophy behind it: to kill people to show that killing people will
not be tolerated. That and dominance of the land and resources.
What I didn't immediately realize was that my issues with the
military generally came down to: death and control. The military
was really there to control death -- to postpone our own as a
people and deliver it to those we felt deserved it.
And as I look across at the other women in my life that I've had a
deep, emotional involvement with, I find the theme of joining the
military to be pretty prominent. In the cases were it is not
prominent, however, there is still the underlying theme of which the
military is a manifestation: the themes of control and death. They
were always women wrestling with a deep pain, struggling with
their own personal demons, unwilling to give into the life that
seemed, in a contradictory sense, to be sucking the life right out of
them. Their attraction to the military, perhaps, manifested out of a
desire of these women of my life to overpower death in a new way.
I feel in Terra specifically an ambivalent stance towards death: a
fear of it, and at the same time a deep curiosity. This ambivalence
explains her approach to death quite nicely. For instance, drugs
could be seen as one way to enter into the liminal zone between life
and death. With certain chemicals, you can glimpse something akin
to death, if nothing else. One gets the feeling of being detached
from one's common world and one's usual sense of self. One gets to
rehearse death in a way, feel it out, and have a good chance of
returning safely. The danger is going too far, the danger is sinking
too deep. In some cases, such as the case of Terra's overdose, there
is good reason to fear death because in the extreme use of some
drugs it can be a likely result. As Terra faced the undeniable fact,
during her overdose, that she has an expiration date, albeit
unknown, she came face to face with many facts about herself: she
is dependent on her family. That was why she was haunted with the
idea of their demise that night.
As much as she might argue, I also think her on-again, off-again
ritual of cutting has a lot to do with her simultaneous curiosity and
fear of death, and her desire to summon the high feeling of life that
results from the threat of death -- something she tasted in full
intensity during her overdose experience. Let me make clear that I
do not think her cutting or her overdose stemmed from any desire
to commit suicide, however. As for the cutting, the cuts aren’t
often on her wrists, at least not so far as I’ve known. And the way
she explains it, this ritual with the blade seems to balance her out.
Her addiction to the blade doesn't bring to my mind suicide, but,
strangely enough, meditation.
In meditation, they usually ask you to clear away all thoughts and
focus on a single thing. To silence the mind. The problem, of
course, is all the intrusive thoughts. Memories of guilt slip into the
haze. The bills you have to pay. How much he pissed you off. The
naughty things you’d like to do to her. In short, to clear the mind
and focus the will is never easy. Silence is never easy, as the mind is
always riddled with static. With chaos and noise. The knife, then,
may be a way not of just cutting her skin, but cutting through the
static; cutting through the haze.
This knife pressed to her skin, the way it shimmers from the 60 watt
bulb, the way it’s sharp, cold edge feels against her skin -- this is
silencing all thought. This isn’t toying with suicide, she’s smart
enough that she knows how to do it right. This isn’t an interest in
death, this is really about an interest in life, in really living. This is
an interest in feeling again. This is being here and now again.
This is focus. This is meditation.
This is escaping her complexity by collapsing consciousness into a
single point that for a moment reconciles all opposing forces within
her, makes everything stand at attention and become united and
aimed at a single point -- because the most fundamental instinct of
all organisms is survival. The blade helps her bring herself down to
the most simple, basic thing.
When life is threatened, when you’re reminded how fragile it is,
how easily it could end, all thoughts withdraw from the past and
from complex analysis and speculation. Awareness, consciousness,
it all collapses to the present moment in a tight, vivid, unerring
focus. The knife to your skin, cutting your skin, it demands your
attention, it literally grabs it. People watch scary movies for a jolt.
They ride roller coasters. This gives them a taste of life, but the
element that elicits that is the vision of your own mortality, the
threat of annihilation. Graham Greene was playing Russian Roulette
and when he pulled the trigger with the gun to his temple and felt
the sharp push of air against his skin he was suddenly overcome
with a sense of meaning in life. Reality is amplified. Simplified. You
are pinched awake from your slumber through life, your awareness
is kicked into gear. You break out of your trance. You can feel
again. You can concentrate.
This is living. This is life as verb. This is meditation.
At first it sounds rather contradictory, how one could only feel life
so intensely, taste all its flavor, awaken the senses to such heights in
the threat of life, in the face of death -- but it works. It seems
paradoxical, that pain and pleasure could be so related. That one
could become the other. That passed a certain point, the distinction
disappears. But I for one know it does.
And if I'm wrong, if she's wrong -- if the overdose and the cutting is
really part of some obsession with death -- why in this way?
Because by suicide you can choose when you die; you can control
death, summon him. Perhaps slowly approach him, then back away.
Visit him, but just knock on his door, and be able to run away again
and return to something resembling life.
Either way, the theme of death runs through her -- the overdose,
the cutting, our meeting at Halloween, our first kiss in a graveyard,
her act of considering becoming a mortician, her gothic get-ups.
But if what I'm seeing here is not really her, but a buried part of
myself, why is this theme of death and control so prominent? Why
would this theme of death tag along with my anima? In general, the
theme of life and death may be very tied to man's collective image
of woman. Think about it: for man, woman is his biological
beginning, that from which he is born, and she is, in the end, his
only means of genetic survival: the female is the only natural
weapon against biological death, the only means of defeating it. She
is necessary for him to reproduce, and reproduction is the only
means by which this organism can achieve some sort of genetic
immortality -- the biological, instinctual drive of his life. Which is
why we spend nine months trying to get out, the rest of our lives
trying to get back in. She is, in this sense, a symbol of birth and
death, of beginning and end, of alpha and omega. On this instinctual
basis, perhaps more developed issues with death and survival
became associated with the image of the female, personally and
collectively.
One should also take into account how women make men feel: no
matter how long we try to convince ourselves otherwise outside of
her presence, as soon as she stands before us we feel the need, the
desire, the pull, and we are forced to face the fact that we are
incomplete and any sense of ultimate self-sufficiency is an illusion.
We fear the power she has over us; we hate our dependence upon
her. This could also explain my issues with females in positions of
authority -- my disputes with them, and my attraction to them.
Their power, once we are faced with it, is a turn-on because the
energy we've invested in its denial is released: we are full of life in
the presence of something that threatens our sense of control -- in
the presence of someone that means death to us. But could we be
facing not something external, but some reflection from within?
Something we buried and left for dead in the graveyard of our
minds, but is haunting us through feminine faces? Could the
death-like threat she brings, the one that inspires life, really be the
threat of our disowned selves? Could she be like a blade I hold to
my skin?
Could this be -- meditation?
