The last dawn.

That dawn was not like any other dawn. The Sun barely could be seen far away in the horizon as an orange-coloured ball partially covered by the clouds, some sponge clouds of a grey cotton which didn’t let the blue of the sky be seen. The wind was blowing as never before in the mist of times, and pushed the clouds until they disappeared in the distance, being replaced for others as grey as them. The sea waves, boisterous like they had not been from years ago, brutally charged against the rocks.

There were no seagulls soaring through the air in search of food. Nor swam fish in the rough sea waters, nor there were crabs buried in the sand. There was not a living being to be seen anywhere. That morning the beach sand had appeared totally clean and pure. No shells, no seaweeds... only sand.

The scream of the waves crashing against the rocks was the only sound in that silence, and the wind was now the master of Nature, making the sea angry and dragging the clouds after him. Only the Earth was left.

But then in the immensity of the beach a point that moved getting close to the seashore turned up. Who or what could still be alive? It soon reached the water, and went on walking along the shore. She barely could stand. Her body, almost naked, was covered by the tatters of what had been a simple but beautiful dress. Her long and dark hair was battered by that horrible wind which was becoming more and more violent with each passing minute. She had her shoes hanging from her shoulder, tied up to walk comfortably on the sand. Her legs failed her with each step, and she fell to the sand, nearly fainting, fearing she wouldn’t be able to get up ever again. But the last thing she would lose would be her hope.

Her green eyes gazed at infinity, and now and then they let a tear, half courage, half sadness, run down. She wouldn’t stop until her last drop of strength fell down and broke in a thousand pieces. She had to reach that place... only a few metres were left. She had waited for that encounter since she was a child, and finally the day they would meet had arrived.

A spark shone in her eyes, and her rosy lips let out a sad smile. Then she stopped, and stared at the line where sky and sea joined together.

Suddenly the clouds calmed down and disappeared abandoning their grey color in the sky. The sea became still and the waves transformed themselves in a layer of smooth and uniform water. Silence filled everything. Her heart beat slower. The Sun disappeared, and with it the light. From afar a thunder boomed and from the depth of the sea a muffled murmur started to surge, like a cascade falling into the space.

She fainted due to the fear, the joy and the exhaustion. The murmur grew... grew even more, and then the sea waters were pierced by a huge blinding moon that illuminated a hundred times more than the Sun. That light filled everything: the beach, the sky, the sun... She disappeared first. Then the light swept everything else. And afterwards the void carried the light away. Silence and darkness reigned for evermore.  

  

I wrote this when I was 13 or 14, according to my notes, though I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now. I’ve translated it for this blog and I’m amazed at how past life memories get unconsciously reflected on all we do... More than thirty years have passed for me to realize where this short story was coming from. Now I’m trying to work through the emotions and to remember in detail the events that led me to that day in the beach where darkness threatened to take away my life... and eventually did. When I started to write this blog I said I wanted to go inside, there where it really hurts... well, this hurts more than I can say, but if I force it I feel it slips through my fingers and I can’t do anything. I mean, emotions don’t come out when I want them to come out. I wish I could sit down, do some self-reiki like the other day, and let all the stuck emotions flood and get me like a tsunami, but it looks like it doesn’t work that way. They come just when they want: when I’m listening to a certain song with certain lyrics, when I’m with my boyfriend and something triggers something, when I’m typing on my laptop and suddenly I can see the same images in my mind, playing over and over again, making me feel sad and wretched.

Yesterday I listened to some binaural recordings again but it didn’t feel as right as before, I could gather some fragments together because I wanted to relive it all again, to the very second of what happened, but I wonder... do the details matter so much? When do emotional wounds exactly occur? What makes the deepest wound? The fear, the helplessness, the realization you just can’t fight and you have to let the man do with you whatever he wants, the nausea, the weakness, is it all at the same time? Is it the stab in itself, or the bleeding through days and weeks, piercing your soul like a sword through your heart that stays there making a zombie out of you? The only thing I’m sure of is that I killed myself while I was still paralyzed, I chose death to get rid of all that suffering, never knowing the pain follows you to the next lives, until you learn to deal with it, until you learn to get over it.... if you ever do.

For some minutes rage wanted to go out as well, but then it subdued and went into hiding again. I was going to write some words about it and then I just couldn’t, but I know it keeps being there somewhere in the inside... Sometimes I am told I have a lot of accumulated anger, but they don’t know to which extent... My theory is that anger comes from pain that goes beyond words, but once again, what can you do with that anger? I could have killed whoever was around me back then, they surely believed me nuts anyway, and I wouldn’t have been the first one to go mad during a war, but once I had the gun in my hand I only killed myself... And now the only way to get that anger out is through music, tears and... once more, writing. But honestly, I’m not sure if I’ll ever get somewhere...

1942: Rage.

The scene where I’m standing on an empty beach, a cloudy and windy day, though not too cold, comes back over and over again. I’m quite sure it was the day I woke up from the sedation and went out to take some fresh air. Johann was dead. And I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t talk, couldn’t cry, couldn’t shout. We had dreams. We often talked about our future, “when the war is over”. I was utterly alone, hopeless, scared to death. Didn’t want to live in a world where I could get killed any moment, and not only by the enemies, but also by the hand of people who had invaded my dear Prague. I was nothing to them. They had forced me to join the Army. But I didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t be there, in a strange country where they looked at me the same way I had looked at the Germans in their tanks, with their rifles and their threats.  

I was just a shadow, a ghost. I was already dead, long before I was shot in the belly.

I feel I’m back in 1942. August, to be more exact. Anniversary of Johann’s death, as I mentioned in my last entry. When I had no specific memories, the only thing I could say was “I am depressed and I don’t know why. Probably it’s only the end of the summer”. Well, no, the end of the summer is not reason enough to be depressed. Today, I not only know the cause of this depression, I also have constant flashbacks in my mind of fragmented scenes of things that should never have happened. They come and go, they almost disappear while I’m reading something on the Internet or someone takes me out for a bit of exercise... but those memories keep being there. It’s like these plastic small televisions we had when we were kids: you look through the hole and you find the slides there, pushing a button, one after the other, pieces of a life that once were. Now it’s gone, all the people are gone, but the emotions linger and hurt, just like the first day.

Sadness. A hole in my soul. But deep inside there’s a lot of rage as well, very similar to the widow’s rage, only Katrina lacked the will to take it out. Rage is pain. A reaction to pain. But it’s no good to use violence to express your pain, violence doesn’t free you of pain, maybe it soothes pain for a while, but it has no any healing effect. I wish I knew how you get rid of pain and rage though, the secret of emotions’ alchemy. It’s a process, they say, like those stages of mourning. But it looks like it’s a damn long process, to keep affecting me eighty years later. I am still standing in that beach, staring at the sea, paralyzed, watching the darkness grow in my heart, stealing away my will to live. I let the darkness win, I didn’t fight the pain and I ignored the rage, and they never went away. And now I only have words to get it all out... words and tears that more oft than not pile in my throat just like Katrina did back then. How can I get over it? Like I once said, I’m afraid the only way to do it is to let the wounds bleed... bleed until the last drop of my blood is shed, until there’s no more pus inside... there is no other way.

Suicide (The Great Escape).

(As I promised in my latest blog entry, here is the piece I have translated regarding sexual abuse and suicide. It contains the Marillion song in full).

Sometimes I get surprised of the superficiality some talk about suicide and how some judge people who have committed suicide or have been about to do it. “Everyone gets what they deserve” or “Killing yourself is cowardice” are phrases I’ve had to hear more than once and I hope they are only a consequence of not reflecting or not knowing how to put oneself in the others’ shoes. And there are people who still think that killing yourself is equivalent to being an undefined number of years lost in the astral or facing some kind of trial in the other side for having committed an unforgivable sin.

It is likely that 90% of these people think I am insane, but I use to reply to them: “Do you remember having killed yourselves? Have you ever considered it some time? Have you fallen into such a deep depression you couldn’t see another way out? Because I do remember to have committed suicide. And I know many people who also did it. And not all of us remember what happened afterwards, between one life and the next, but obviously we came back and we didn’t burn in Hell, nor we were condemned to wander in the astral”.

Others think it is a matter of mental illness. Perhaps it is, or at least, there are electrochemical changes in the brain, that’s true. But I think circumstances are the most influential. No one can know in which circumstances a person was to decide to kill themselves. And therefore, no one, save ourselves, can judge.

The circumstances for which I decided to kill myself have to do with war, the death of a loved one, and also sexual abuse. No, it is not easy to say it. But it is much worse to live it. In a society where we are used to violence in distant countries, and bombs, shrapnel or executions of people guilty of rape accompany us while we’re having lunch, we don’t know what this really means. It is as unreal as the latest Disney animation movie. And however, it exists, it existed, and it will keep existing. And it is very likely many of us have been in similar situations and have made exactly the same decision which we are quick to judge now.

I always say it and I’ll never get tired of saying it: if we all recalled our past, the world would be very different. Because when we are talking of yourself or your relatives, then it is not so easy to speak lightly. And we’d be talking first-hand, not for what we are told by the different religions, philosophies or belief systems. 

Now I’ve got over it a bit more and it’s not so hard to talk about it, but when the feelings were burning in my inside and flooded in until they exploded, it was very useful for me to listen to a Marillion song called “The Great Escape”. This song is the culmination of a full album entitled “Brave”. This album begins with a scene which is based on a real piece of news published in the British press: a young woman standing on a bridge, about to throw herself into the space. When a police agent asked her name, the girl couldn’t even answer. Once I told a friend sometimes I had the same face that is displayed in the album cover.

A movie was filmed too, in case someone is interested.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Heading for the great escape
Heading for the rave
Heading for the permanent holiday

Heading for the winter trip
Heading for the slide
Heading for the dignified walk away

Heading for the open road
Goodbye to all that
Heading for the automatic overload

Standing in the open boat
Standing in the swing
Waiting for the ringing and the bright light

Waiting to be recognized
Quiet applause will do
They shower you with flowers when they bury you

You're holding on, you're holding on ...

(i) the last of you
Just when I thought I'd seen the last of you
You come here scratchin' at my door
Your pain and anger's in the howling dark
Of every corridor I walk

So tell me more about the love that you rejected
Tell me more about the trust you disrespected
I still don't know, why did you hurt the very one
Why did you hurt the very one that you should have protected?

(ii) fallin' from the moon
Don't ask me why I'm doing this
You wouldn't understand
You're asking the wrong questions
You couldn't understand

A bridge is not a high place
The fifty-second floor
Icarus would know
A mountain isn't far to fall

When you've fallen from the moon

There's murder on the street
I'm ashes on the water now, somewhere far away

I have fallen, fallen from the moon

The lyrics seem to reveal the one who should protect her betrayed her trust and abused her. And the music and especially Steve Hogarth’s voice keep helping me get rid of the pain and the rage accumulated by something that should have never happened. Although, maybe, if it happens, it is down to some reason I haven’t got to understand yet.

The consequences, who knows how often, no doubt can affect you in the following lives, due to the deep emotional trauma that implies.

ADDITIONAL WORDS.

I believe three months passed since I decided to put an end to my life until I actually did it. The scene where I’m standing on an empty beach, a cloudy and windy day, though not too cold, comes back over and over again. I’m quite sure it was the day I woke up from the sedation and went out to take some fresh air. Johann was dead. And I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t talk, couldn’t cry, couldn’t shout. We had dreams. We often talked about our future together, “when the war is over”. Now I was utterly alone, hopeless, scared to death. Didn’t want to live in a world where I could get killed any moment, and not only by the enemies, but also by the hand of people who had invaded my dear Prague. I was nothing to them. They had forced me to join the Army. But I didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t be there, in a strange country where they looked at me the same way I had looked at the Germans in their tanks, with their rifles and their threats.  

I was just a shadow, a ghost. I was already dead, long before I was shot in the belly.

Music and resonance.

I say this very often: nothing is accidental. Or... coincidence doesn’t exist. We still can go a bit further, and say “We are a product of our experiences”. We reincarnationists know this very well, but sometimes it is astounding when you really corroborate this is absolutely true.

Music is one example. It is just one more resonance, but for me it is very strong. If some words in a song move me, or stay with me, get ingrained in my brain even when it is not one of my favourite bands... there is a reason. And if I don’t know that reason, it is not because there is no reason, but because I haven’t found it yet.

Months ago I used a Marillion song to illustrate some thoughts about sexual abuse and suicide in another blog (maybe I should translate it and bring it here too). A certain part of that song always meant a lot to me, it says:

So tell me more

about the love that you rejected

Tell me more about the trust you disrespected

I still don’t know

why did you hurt the very one

why did you hurt the very one

that you should have protected

Actually, when I used that song, I was thinking more about a friend who in a past life suffered sexual abuse in childhood, and not so much about my own life in World War II, as my own sexual abuses took place when I was already an adult. Not that there is a lot of difference, but I guess it’s much more heartbreaking when you are just a kid or a teenager and it is your own dad who abuses you. I always take it as the greatest betrayal you can face, and that’s what the song is about.

But there’s another song in the same album that also means a lot to me, and I didn’t know why. It says:

Runaway girl

Too bad, too bad

Runaway girl

A real wild child

So you cower in the town’s forgotten places

and you make your bed with unfamiliar faces

and at last you’ve got your freedom

but that’s all you’ve got

You’re trying to make your mind up

if you’re better off

You pretend to wait for washing in some laundromat

but you’re damned if you’ll give them

the satisfaction of you going back

You’d freeze to death before you’d share a room with them

and you’d starve before you let him

get his hands on you again

Innocent of me, I used to wonder: “Why is it that I keep being so attracted to this word “runaway”?” I also love another song by Bon Jovi that is called like that as well. As far as I can remember, I’ve never had to run away and hide. Yep, as far as I remember... I have the pleasure to remember more than the majority of people, so it’s fun to think how for others memory is really so, so short... that almost leaves them with a fish brain (the same I had before knowing about my past lives). And so, one day, I found out that I did run away, and I had to hide in dark places as the ones depicted in the song. I had to leave behind a life where I had it all... except the love of my husband, the one who should have protected me back then. And now I’ve realized why those words make tears well in my eyes every time I listen to that song... especially in the latest weeks or months when this past life of mine has been so present.

Only yesterday night, after a session of self-reiki, more memories of this past life came to me, but nothing new... just the same pain, the same anger, the same hatred, the same feeling of walls closing in around me, just like Eowyn felt in Edoras. When I asked myself how I was feeling, my answer was “Like a prisoner.” When I do self-reiki I always have this lump in my throat, but not as if you are holding back your tears, it is more as if you are being strangled... which I guess is logical as I’ve been hanged at least twice in my past lives (as far as I remember). But I guess that if I feel it it’s because there’s something else affecting me, and I think it’s not only for the pressure of the ropes or my neck breaking... I think it has to do more with the fact that in a few of my past lives I was unable to express all that pain and anger I had inside. I always remember Katrina and her strong desires of CRY, CRY, CRY, but looking back at my Black Widow life, I see her situation was not too different: I was just a prisoner in my husband’s house, I couldn’t talk to anyone about the hell I was living, the few that knew counseled me not to speak, so I found myself isolated, alone, scared, feeling more and more worthless as I couldn’t love that hideous man and I couldn’t even bear children for him... I never was a submissive woman, maybe that was the only problem I had, that I never accepted the way he treated me or the way society expected me to be. So, I often went to the backyard and sat in that wooden bench looking at the woods, with my heart filled with pain, wondering what to do to end all that suffering... something which wouldn’t mean my own death, of course, I was not up to give up my life for that hideous man my parents chose for me. And I made up my mind...

But this ultimately led me to a path of self-destruction I should have been able to avoid. I had to leave my own daughter and run away from ignorance and gossip in my town, my family’s reputation was ruined even when I was declared innocent, and I only wanted a new life. All secret, all dark, more hideous men and trying to make money far from my comfortable and rich house that could have been mine, if only there had been a little love inside. I don’t wholly understand why I ended up getting married again, probably I had no choice... or maybe I had some dark plans in my head, I wanted so much to raise my daughter and have her close. All went wrong. Terribly wrong.