Holidays and shadows.

A few days ago I returned home after my usual holiday season (the first of this year) at the beach. I have been quite hectic: exercise in the morning, preparing part of the lunch in advance, a couple of hours lying in the sun, walking along the shore or swimming in the water, a short break, and then more time out, relaxing both mind and body. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Lately I have been enjoying these holiday seasons more than ever before. When I was young I used to feel melancholic when I was near the beach, too many past life memories in the back of my mind, struggling to go out: my long-gone days as a British Navy officer, my days waiting for my Norwegian sailor almost in despair, the feelings of being already dead in a very different beach... No wonder holidays always depressed me.

Now those memories are not hidden, they are clear and very present, and they don’t depress me so much. Now I still love the sound of the wooden planks beneath my feet as I step on them, when I walk down the sea wall. It feels as if I am aboard a ship... a real ship manned by real men. I love to wear hats that resemble cowboy hats, because that makes me think of Colorado and the sun hurting my eyes. I also wear a beach dress with Native American people drawn on it, in memory of my family who was massacred by white men, and if I have a chance, I will gladly buy a pair of earrings with the shape of dreamcatchers for the same reason. I pretend to watch a ghostly Norwegian merchant ship on the horizon, getting near, bringing my love home again. I do all this hoping I will get more memories, something new I don’t know, or maybe some happy scene I had forgotten.

But, who knows why, this year it was the turn of the widow, so she turned up unexpectedly in the middle of my holidays, maybe reminding me I can’t escape, not yet. I have a slight idea of what could have triggered these new memories. Nothing I saw, heard, wore or watched... but just a weird feeling related to a decision: should I stay or should I go? The feeling of knowing you have to go, but not being sure what is best for you. The feeling of having no past, no option to come back to what is familiar to you, because you screwed it up and no one wants to have you near, ashamed of what they say you did, no matter if it is true or not, no matter you were declared not guilty by a judge. Being so scared of the future ahead of you, wondering if it can get any worse, as it eventually did.

So, I am suddenly in this filthy inn where a charitable couple agreed to give me a job and a bed, making clear to me that “This is no brothel”. But the meager pay they give me for serving the tables and cleaning the living room is not enough for my goals (just having a home and money to raise the daughter I had to leave behind, for God’s sake!) and I have to ignore their warning. Of course clients whisper and the charitable couple found out in the end. This is when they came to visit me in my room and told me I must go. My crying wasn’t enough to convince them otherwise, though at least it served me to buy me a week or two, so that I can think what to do next and look for another place. The worst part is I seemed to decide I’d better look for another man to give me the money and house I would never be able to have as a poor widowed woman who could barely read. Did I really think I would find a decent man in such a filthy inn, soldier and all? And would I be able to feign love for him? Well, why not, when I had been forced to fake that same love for my late husband in public for so long?

He is dead but I still hate him so much. He is the one to blame for my current situation. He is the one who turned my life into a living hell. It could have been fine: such a beautiful house, those gardens and the mare, those beautiful dresses and social meetings. But then came the slapping, the harsh words, locking me up in a bedroom, the black eye, the bathtub and the hairpin, the broken rib, the silence, the white powder. “I should be happy and this is where I am”, are my last thoughts.

When my current self had a thought about how many lies I was forced to tell, the widow almost shouted inside of me, saying that I shouldn’t judge. She won’t show me anymore if I judge, as that is what everyone does. And I know. And I do want her to bring me deep into that hell, as I feel there is so much rage and sadness and suffering down there, beyond the coldness and the falseness. Unlike Katrina, the widow is made up of so many layers, it is hard to get to the bottom. Still today it is so hard to know where the victim ends and where the murderess begins.

Coincidence or not, right after these bitter memories, I read one of the best chapters of Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3. Jamie was telling Brienne everyone is quick to judge him for slaying the mad king without even knowing what really happened. I think I must have felt like that for so long in my past life.  

A hairpin and a bathtub.

Day after day I have to bear superficial analyses and preconceived notions from newbies or, even worse, people without past life memories. I’ve talked about the frustration this causes me at great length, so there is no need to rub more salt in the wound. Then, one day comes when, unexpectedly, a new forum member posts something related to his own research that makes me remember an old memory. In this case, a blurred image with deep emotions that left me with some doubts. Well, not real doubts, it’s hard to have doubts at this point of the game, so I’ll just say “memories I left unverified”, but for no special reason, apart from laziness or other things keeping me busy.

I think I’ve talked about that image here before, though I’m not sure of the details I gave. But the scene is clear in my mind: I am in a bathtub, naked. It doesn’t look like a bathtub I’ve ever known in this life. It’s in the middle of the bathroom, it’s white with curves. We don’t have taps, I think we have a jar to fill it. I see the water all around me. I’m holding a sharp hairpin on my right hand, not too long. I use it to inflict some wounds on my left forearm. I see the drops of blood falling down into the water and dissolving, just like my tears. I’m married but my life has become a nightmare. I’m so very young, but I feel so alone and desperate. I feel like dying, with those little bleedings in the white of my eyes and the bruises all over my body.

Back in the waking state, you start to analyze everything with logic and distance. You start to wonder if that was possible or if you are just “fantasizing”, as many of those people who don’t have memories of their own often think. You forget about the emotions, the circumstances you were in, your desires to die. You come convinced that validating a memory is proof of something, if not for you, for everyone else. I’ve never seen a hairpin like that in my whole life, and the ones I have no way could slit anyone’s veins or make deep wounds on the skin. So, you doubt you could have done that in the past, and you doubt your sanity. You don’t give importance to the feel of the instrument in your hand in that memory, the way you gripped it hard with your fingers, with all the tension, pain, rage and hate you were feeling at that moment. It seems the look of it is more important to corroborate that memory and show the world you are not crazy and you really lived that. 

The thing is that months pass, and someone comes and casually talks about hat pins that were used in the Victorian era. You look at them and realize they are really sharp, so much that they were thought to be a good weapon. The truth is it doesn’t matter at all, but you suddenly realize your memory is more likely to be true now: hairpin or hat pin, you did hold that instrument in your hand while you were weeping in a bathtub, feeling like shit, and seriously considering suicide. You were having a quiet day at home, and suddenly such a silly finding, such a small verification, brings tears to your eyes and makes you remember the damned bathtub where you could have lost your life.

I’m not sure which my real intentions were when I hurt myself. Possibly not suicide, even though I did feel I wanted to die. Maybe it was the opposite: I wanted to feel the pain, I wanted to feel alive, as for me living was like being dead. Maybe I thought that’s what I deserved anyway. Probably that’s what my husband had forced me to believe, as I wasn’t the loving wife he wanted me to be.

While I’m thinking about those memories, I also realized a couple of days ago I fell down while I was skating in real life. I could have broken a bone. Luckily, I didn’t, but the following day I was indeed feeling as if someone had beaten me up. Was that the same feeling, the same ache I had when I was in that bathtub, and is that the reason I’m recalling those events?  

If you are unlucky enough, you’ll go to the internet and find some outsiders talking about past life memories, wondering if people just fantasize about it, or discussing the possibility alleged past life memories are just “symbolic stories our mind creates in response to our psychological issues”.

I wonder what kind of symbolism lies on wanting to slit your veins with a hat pin to stop so much suffering and bring oblivion to yourself.

THEN is when you want to cry your heart out.   

Related posts:

Hopeless.

Soul-killing.

  

Hopeless.

I have started this month of August feeling a bit weird. I have come to suspect that every time I feel trapped in my present, without hopes of doing what I really want to do in the job scenario, and slowly sinking in a depression I don’t want, I start to get in a past life mood from my Black Widow life. It wouldn’t be too bad if it was just me and myself, my thoughts, fantasies, emotions and dreams. I could spend a few days lost in my own world, barely talking and pretending I’m interested in some TV show or movie while I stare at the screen, lost in some old scenes coming from my mind and not from the TV set. Then I would decide it’s enough and I would be back in the real world, as if nothing had happened. But it’s not that easy when those past life emotions affect your relationship with your partner, who doesn’t understand why all of a sudden you don’t want to go out or don’t care about the plans for the weekend.

“What’s up with you?”

“Nothing, I’m just imagining myself in an old bathtub thinking how to slit my wrists, as I got married and this is not what I thought it would be”.

And if he demands some attention it’s even worse, as then he makes me feel as an enslaved wife whose only duty is to make him happy... and that triggers me even more. I go to bed thinking the slight discomfort in my right eye could be due to a reflection of my past life when I got it black. As I fall asleep I can only see the white gown I was wearing in my wedding night. I can still feel the fear of a maiden, the bitterness of a young girl who liked a different suitor, my heart pierced with his first threats. And it seems all this is because the prospect of being “just a wife” for the rest of my life brings me the same feeling of hopelessness, a dark sense of foreboding that tells me “This can’t go right. Don’t let it happen again. Just run!”

Well, it looks like I can’t choose. No matter how much I try, for now my plans are always unattainable. I don’t know whether I dream too much or my wits are not enough to make those dreams come true. Maybe the Universe is punishing me for being evil with my past life husband. In this case I wonder how the Universe is punishing him for being a son of a bitch with me. No need to say I don’t believe in any of these possibilities. Or maybe I chose a crappy country and a crappy profession to ensure I would remain unemployed for half of my life, so that I learn to be imprisoned in my own home and feel happy for being a great cook. Is that something worth learning? No need to say I don’t believe that’s the point. Whatever it is though, the Universe can’t prevent me from wanting to escape through a window again.

It’s hard to come back to reality and remember things are different today: my partner is not a monster and I’m not a victim of female roles or a sexist society. It’s hard to remember I just find myself in certain circumstances and it’s my decision to deal with them one way or the other. Sometimes it feels right to have the wisdom of several past lives on my shoulders. But other times I just feel tempted to follow the same path of self-destruction. When I've become tired of what the world can offer me, does it matter if I decide to get off, even if it's just for a little while? 

Soul-killing.

I described it like a hole in my soul. Someone else said it was soul-killing, and I liked that word. Certain past life experiences leave such deep wounds on your being that you almost feel a part of your soul is missing. And though you try to get it back with all your might, it seems impossible.

It feels great when you are given new pieces of the puzzle to keep building the picture of a past life. It feels like recovering something that was long lost, something that maybe you willingly left behind, ready to start a new chapter, but now you want it back, with all the emotions, all the people you loved, the good and bad things. However, in many cases, you realize there is something you can’t recover, it got destroyed along the way, because some experiences change you and you are no longer the same. It’s like wanting to recover the innocence of childhood.

Yesterday night I meditated. Painful prison scenes turned up. This morning, in a state between wake and sleep, I got plenty of emotions and scenes of one of my hangings, from the moment they took me out of the cell until the very end. Right now I’m still between the past and the present, those images still hanging around in the back of my mind. So much fear and rage, so much shame, so much injustice. I didn’t want to die, I didn’t deserve to die, at least no more than those men. But no one seems to care about what they did. They think I’m a monster. But certainly, I’m not the only monstrous thing to walk on Earth.

Suddenly I realized how different I was then, compared to the way I was only a few years before, when I could hold my baby girl for the first time and caress her tiny fingers with mine. That was after the nightmare of my first marriage, but still there was some love in me. I thought “He destroyed me”. I think I heard my guide whisper: “Not exactly”. I know, though it’s hard to admit. There’s a dark period of time still too blurred, when more awful things must have happened, when I completely lost it. I destroyed myself. It seems I do it quite often in my past lives. Maybe once you’ve got that hole in your soul it’s all a matter of going with the flow. They wronged you, now let’s wrong the world. You started the soul-killing, let’s finish off what you started. Who cares? It’s easier to find excuses and wallow in misery than fight. Maybe I should have taken my baby and run, run faraway, where no one would follow. Abandoning her (even in my sister’s arms) really broke my heart. Another hole in my soul that keeps bleeding, but this time self-inflicted.

And people were so blind.

They only saw a monster, where there was a mistreated woman, beaten and humiliated. A woman who almost killed herself in a bathtub. A mother without a father for her baby, a baby that grew up alone. A woman who had no place in the world anymore. But the time for me to speak was over, as I killed that young, innocent and dreamy lady as well. Now I was just a vengeful woman who knew of other women like her, and thought some crimes shouldn’t go unpunished.

But justice caught her. Caught me.