I've been trying to blend together the two main directions of my life; the inner one where I spend whole lifetimes in contemplation of quantum everything, and the outer one where I seek employment, buy groceries, and generally suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
The more I contemplate it, the less I am able to mix the two. Still, I am living and breathing, thinking and acting, and it's quite apparent I don't need to understand how they bleed together in order for them to do so. It's kind of like looking in the mirror. The person I see looking back at me doesn't look like I feel. If I feel my way through it, I'm a pretty amorphous ball (blob?) of energy with a core of impenetrable, swirling (!!!). There's no word for that (!!!) in my language. That's part of the mystery, I guess? No matter what it is, I like knowing its there and recognizing that I'd know it if I saw it but can't tell you what it is.
Another thing about my duality. I find so much of what surrounds me to be beautiful and awesome and worthy of a quiet, steady, grateful glow... but also very funny. Wickedly funny. Painfully funny. Sometimes, what I see is just plain vulgar and horrific and I think I don't know how I keep living, but I'm still laughing at some tiny bit of irony amidst the viscera.
When I was twenty, the whole of my awareness came crashing down around me in a cloud of defiant terror and I had a very hard time reassembling my self. All these constructs of thought that I had about the world being basically good and right splattered everywhere around me.
I'll give you the brief version because the long form is useless to me now. I look at it like you might see the history of war on microfiche. It's done, it's gone, it's recorded and its impact no longer makes me gasp for breath. It's just left a sort of gossamer web of understanding and cynicism on me.
I went to the door of a man (boy) I hardly knew to give him a message from a friend. His demeanor, his presence, even his scent set off alarm bells in my marrow. I ignored my fear, confident that nothing could happen to me in the middle of a small town dormitory. I was wrong. I spent the night there, cold and frightened so deep down that I never shook. I did what he asked. I agreed with his raving delusions. I went so far as to wrap him in a blanket when he complained of being cold.
I got out of there with bruises, internal scratches that took weeks to heal, a mild concussion and an utter loss of self. But I got out of there alive. You cannot heal what is dead. I knew that much. I didn't know how to put all those raw and betrayed pieces together.
His behaviour didn't shock me. Every college girl knows the scary man stories. I knew the statistics, I knew the proper responses to prevent rape, I even knew from my own experience how forced sexual contact is something I didn't want. What I didn't know was what happens if you don't get a chance to fight back. I didn't know what to do if screaming and kicking wasn't an option. I learned that I will not die fighting. I will survive however I have to.
My response shocked me. I tried to be proud of myself for knowing that I wasn't going to survive if I fought this former military man tooth and claw, but I was horrified that it didn't kill me to acquiesce. I was angry at myself for my heart continuing to beat despite the crushing weight of what had happened. I wasn't sure that I'd made the right choice in surviving because as time went on, the agony of the entire situation brought me to my knees, soundlessly screaming, too many times to count. I wasn't sure I wanted to live.
That's when I learned that I am a ball of energy. I learned it because the light went out. In the middle, I was utterly dark. From the dark grew a void, tiny but impossibly endlessly powerful. I was going to spend the next ten years dancing with that darkness. All my choices would be either in accordance to or in direct defiance of that empty place.
I used to be a rather disorganized animal. Ask my Mom. My room, my projects, my movement through time caused ripples and a wake of "Amber was here" head shaking.
After that, I had to learn to knit all sorts of incongruous pieces together by means of strict logic and ruthless compartmentalization. Keep the angry away from the hopeless. File that scent under "black hole." Copy and paste little bits of happy, string together silver linings, and move forward.
Fast forward fifteen years. I'm organized. I'm stitched back together on the inside and glowing white hot in the energy department. All the little things you find in offices in the drawers make me feel better because they are all about holding things together, separating other things, and knowing where it all fits.
I've got some wild scars and I think they look great.
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