Sunday Scribblings - Deepest, Darkest

This is my first Sunday Scribblings. My motivation to write, once potent and unstoppable, has waned dramaticall in recent years. As I wrote this I did not intent to post it. But when I finished I liked it so much I decided to anyway. It still has rough edges, the grammer is nowhere near perfect. But it's honest.


Deepest, darkest. Ten years ago that would have evoked a putrid, slick black fear. Just that phrase - hinting at something frightening and unknowable - would bring fourth a nausea, hard hitting and thorough; it would make me want to simultaneously shrivel from existence and burst with unspoken need, urgent and bleeding, gracelessly plowing into the listening space of anyone who would stop long enough for me to erupt. I had a lot of secrets that I had been oh-so-carefully trained to keep. Secrets that burned me from the inside. Secrets begging to be known, secrets bursting forth in coded messages. Didn't the doctor see it in my consistent high blood pressure when I was eight years old? Didn't the teachers get it when they complained of me being "socially inept?" Didn't anyone get it when I was made to listen to subliminal tapes telling me I was a "giant, red balloon" in order to correct my cryptically named "self-esteem problems" when I was still only, merely six years old? Wasn't anyone listening?

In my middle teens, when permission was grudgingly granted, I attempted to put those secrets into words. I made stuttered, halting, embarrassing in-roads to the lair of those deep, dark secrets. Those who took the (paid) time to listen did so valiantly, patiently filling in the words I simply could not not speak. They waited as my throat would temporarily unclog, as I wiped the steady river of tears off my checks. Most of what I remember from those long sessions is the tired weight of my head hanging off my shoulders and the look of non descript grey industrial carpeting through the longest, heaviest stream of tears that could possibly come from me. I also remember leaving those offices, exhausted, spent, in the lightest of air. I remembering feeling as though I had never seen the sun shine until that day, feeling as though suddenly the whole world felt possible. Of course, it was many years, many more tears, and many, many more long tiring sessions of speaking, remembering, diagraming to put those, the deepest and darkest of my memories, into a state of suspended animation. I had to learn to live my life without the constant burdening weight. To unfold my spine and erect, for the first time, an identity apart from the darkness. It was a long process learning to live in the sunshine I was only then learning to see.

But deepest, darkest no longer elicits those experiences. It pans by them, offering a trip down memory lane should I need it (and sometimes I do). But thinking isn't gobbled up by those experiences anymore. Ironically, deepest, darkest gives me a warm feeling, an enveloping sense of comfort. A gentle reminder that my deepest and darkest places have been reclaimed, have become hermitages into which I can retreat should the outside world be too much.

My deepest places are my best refuges and the darkest are where I rest without worry. It's all very nondescript beyond those vague feelings, the general impressions. But I know it exists and I know it's mine and I use it often. I have claimed my life, my memories, my being - even the deepest and darkest places.