She was born an only child to a midwestern family. Parents educated and with means. She wanted for nothing, lacked nothing. Though later she might mourn the absence of a sister to confide in, or a brother’s playful banter, she did not regret her solitary childhood in the eccentric house made of pine and cedar, adorned with trumpet vine, hidden in a lush suburbia. Its bay windows framed by white lace curtains that billowed in the breeze, opening onto a garden where she spent barefooted afternoons amid the rosemary and irises, beebalm and comfrey, the flowers and herbs divided by a reddish, crumbling brick path punctured by weeds. For hours, she waded in fantasy below the shelter of arthritic oaks and cool, velvety spruce—arboreal gods watching over her fondly. The roar of the adjacent highway mistaken for a gurgling river.
Four acres of yard, garden, and orchard made up her world. The humid attic bedroom, a fan humming contentedly in the windowsill, shelves spilling with toys and books, the house overflowing with potted plants and assorted pets. She could begrudge nothing of her parents, of this childhood free of want or fear, which cultivated her sensitive spirit. Her father, with his thick fingers and broad palms, his giant, frenzied hands filling the blue living room with the tumbling rush of the piano—in the mornings before work and the evenings, anticipating dinner. The canary in the adjoining greenhouse accompanied him, some three octaves above, in jubilant song.
Weekdays, she dressed in plaid skirts that covered bruised shins, stiff collared shirts and patent leather shoes, daydreaming through math lessons and Bible stories. Recess on the asphalt playground bordered by hemlock, decorated with squirrels and garrulous crows. She joined the other children, led in hushed lines to midday masses in the somber, barn-like church, her clothes absorbing incense and candles, her ears welcoming the bells, mesmerized by the intertwining tones of voices. Hips ached with the standing, the sitting, the kneeling in wooden pews. While fidgety boys were chastised by the nuns, she vibrated in the silence, and then the music, and once more the stillness. And home again to the beloved cats, birds, the dog, the garden and the trees, the books.
Winter evenings were spent by the fireplace, in the faded cloth armchair matted with cat hair, or in the library with the droning television news, or reading together under dim, orange lamplight, her father crushing walnuts and skimming medical journals, the shy dog curled loyally at her mother’s feet. Her mother—broad, steady, affectionate—always present, always talking, a stream of words like a comforting hum, the familiar engine that fueled the family’s days and sewed up its silences. Her father, tall and lumbering, bushy-eyebrowed and mustached, dark and reserved. His voice, an endearing soft-spoken bass.
Yet years of warmth and devotion could not shield her from the violent shock of adolescence, from its curse of self-consciousness. It hit her simultaneously with the first fall. The first falling in love, which emerged gradually from the body, from the back of her mind.
The first boy: the drum-playing, Tolkien-reading one, with freckles and sticks of brown hair that poked his eyes, blocking his gaze. She came to anticipate the shuffling, stilted gait of his approach with a strange knot in her chest. It took some time to recognize it for what it was—
the longing, at first a trickle, then a small stream. It widened and opened her body like a vessel, thickening and congealing, interrupting her breath, flooding her thoughts. A waterfall cascading from her center, submerging her, her form floundering in sudden seas. Love came in bouts of insomnia—the soaked sheets, twisting and burning, nights of ice and flame, reveling in this newfound pain, this delicious intensity. It overtook her mind, overwhelmed her body, still thin and lanky with girlhood.
The love for the boy was followed by a growing shame, a rubbery embarrassment, a profound inadequacy: the glasses, the acne and awkwardness, the fear of stupidity. Emerging from the cheerful obliviousness of childhood, self-consciousness folded her in upon herself, boxed her into her own form, reticent and withdrawn, a mirror reflecting her repulsion.
Her mind wrestled each night with dark and layered thoughts. Thoughts that the world was on fire with suffering, and she, in her frail and inept form, could make no dent in it. In books, in the nightly news, the cruelty of the world revealed itself to her abruptly. It was like the solid earth crumbled beneath her feet. How to embrace a world with such ugliness, such savagery?
At thirteen, she dreamt her elderly aunt invited her for tea, which she poured in delicate porcelain cups while making polite conversation, while the house around them raged and burned, flames leaping and beams collapsing. How could we go about our mundane lives amid the world’s destruction?
And that love—even if by some miracle she could earn the boy’s devotion, it would never last. As they aged it would fade; more beautiful faces would tempt him. The pointlessness of it all, this ridiculous dance of bonding and un-bonding. Pure love couldn’t exist among men. God could be the only true groom. Yet her fervent prayers provided little comfort.
It didn’t take much to drop into the pit, the place of mud and dread, of drab days and sleepless nights, of slime and humiliation, of self-loathing. Hard to know which came first – anxiety or despair— but the sinister couple bickered in the basement of her mind.
The pattern of falling in love repeated itself again and again, next with the Italian boy who played guitar in a punk bad, who was baggy-jeaned and intellectual and sang with a confident, tender tenor, making her throat clench with yearning. She remembered briefly touching his hand, remembered it over and over again, but was incapable of looking him directly in his face, of speaking to him. Words came out mumbled and obscure; he quickly turned his eyes away.
It culminated in a fateful day when she couldn’t bring herself to face another morning without love. Another morning of waking up at dawn, dragging her ugly body under the shower, of the sullen car ride with the mother, who deposited her at the grey cement building resembling a jail, the soulless high school with its fluorescent-lighted hallways and ruthless teenagers. Where failure lurked in classrooms and under grimy, gum-choked desks.
No, instead that day she took the pills. Emptied the bottle full in her mouth, swallowing them in a hot furor and a gush of tears. And when the pain began—the real pain she had never experienced, the ache at the base of her skull burgeoning and enveloping her brain, the fear sinking in her abdomen, it was only then she relinquished, and in cowardice confessed to the mother, whose anger and incredulity washed over her. The rush of words, the tears, the pouring rain blurring together as they drove in tense silence with the strident beat of windshield wipers. In the sterile hospital room, pointed questions from the middle-aged nurse. Falling in and out of consciousness, the mind foggy, the mother absent—perhaps weeping the corner.
Senses blurred, but her father remained at her side, holding her hand, its fingernails stained with chalky blackness, as the sobs shook her lungs, her body retched and heaved, as the lights in her brain flickered on and off, as the vomit came: as she puked up her love and her shame, bitterness and anguish, despair and longing, her hysteria, her desire, her wish to die. Each time she drifted back, he was there, still enveloping her hand in his soft, benevolent palms.
When unity is lost, in that slippery, violent time in between childhood and adulthood, when we cross that bridge, we can falter in that vulnerable place, that dangerous place, the weakest part where fragile wooden slats may give way, sweeping us down into the rushing, merciless current.
In tribal cultures, there is a ceremony for this passage, which is like leaping from a cliff over an abyss. We need a guide to help us through, to propel us forward, a ritual to perform, the wisdom of generations to uphold us. All we have now is modernity and emptiness.
When we are born to our adult selves, the contentedness of childhood falls away, the love of our parents no longer satisfies us. A hole is torn in the fabric of our being, and we search relentlessly to fill it. Our harried search begins for the other, as we realize our half-ness and seek out our whole. This quest for romantic love is encased in a journey of the spirit toward God.
Persephone, at the depth of the cave, dank and foul, in her blind fumbling, in muck and grime, may still find the seeds. The seeds to return and replenish the barren earth, for the flowers to spring forth, for the sweet fruit to grow once more. The sacred earth absorbing our pain, the soil’s richness renewing plant, animal, and human hearts.
Vincent Van Gogh