Last night about 9pm I realised that I was, in fact, on the wrong train. I’d done just what I thought I was supposed to do, went to the right track, the right car, even stopped to ask directions to my car of a man in a train workers costume. Right car, wrong train, apparently. No one scanned my ticket, not before I boarded nor while on the train. Once I did realise I was headed to Strasbourg, there was no one to be found to speak to about it, not like it would have changed anything. I missed going home, the only place I wanted to be, and ended up spending a restless night in a corporate hotel across from the station in Strasbourg.

It was restless not because I was alone with my thoughts, but because I avoided them, I think. I indulged in my last remaining numbing practice – binge TV watching. My preference is horror shows. I think this is because they give a place to my anxiety and fears, they house them in gore and death, murder and evil. I also enjoy murder documentaries; no matter how bad I feel in my head, at least I’m not Alec Murdoch. He must have had a real terrible time in his head. Still is having, probably. I watch these shows until I am sleeping while falling asleep and then, in that brief moment after I turn them off, I am wide awake again. Last night it was just before 2am when I entered into the silence. I was, for a moment, terrified to be back in reality and then, I felt a small miracle. I was no longer holding the fear and trepidation in my body as I once did. The overwhelming feeling of a sadness that I can’t manage, can’t integrate, is gone. The work I’m doing, it’s working. How wonderful, I thought, as I drifted off to sleep instead of just passing into unconsciousness. I realised in this haze that I have been holding a fear, deep inside my unconsciousness, of dreaming terrible dreams and so have avoided going to sleep. Avoided through binge watching, lately, again, as I’ve fallen back into this comfortable pattern of existing, avoiding my feelings, in hopes that they will just go away. Or, perhaps my dreams will deal in horrors of a lesser kind, like hauntings of evil spirits that are not my own, evil spirits from another story that prove less terrifying than mine. Do I find a strange solace in a tale of someone descending into madness, facing death with regrets, haunted by the spirits that are waiting for them to cross over and spend eternity in purgatory, with them? Why yes, I think I do. I must not be alone, considering the supply of these shows, there must be a demand. The most recent of which, The Fall of the House of Usher, is rooted in the tales of Poe, a gothic master of darkness that honestly I know little more about than what I’ve just written. Perhaps a deeper dive into the when, how, and why of this era would prove satisfying to me, perhaps I will report back on this, later.

For now, I will let this darkness in, seep into my body and being, and revel in it, rot in it just a little. Why not? It is an always has been a part of me. I remember scaring myself as young as 10, perhaps, with tales of vampires and hauntings by terrible evils. I remember being afraid of the swooping of vampires in the afternoon, alone, outside of my house, in the barren autumn countryside with the licking of the crisp air around me and its threat of the cold winter to come. I remember the tales of an evil spirit that lived in a boarding house in London, it must have been in the east, that was so terrifying and evil that it drove patrons to their death, as they would throw themselves out of an upper story window to escape it. I think this was the first time that I really wanted to go to London, to find this place and to see if I could make it through a night there. In these tales it wasn’t just the spirit that was terrifying, but the social warning implied, as this place was not a hotel but more of a poor house, as I saw it. If you lived here, or stayed here, you were very close to having nothing, having no money nor social standing. You were close to destitute and this was perhaps the most frightening prospect of all. Perhaps these poor souls jumped to their deaths not to flee the evil spirit but their own hopeless, endless lives of destitution. Maybe they’d just had enough. Maybe the sprit just tempted them with eternal sleep and rest and no more problems nor the shame of being poor.

Always, it was this time of year, especially, that laid the background for these tales. In this season of mid-October the earth is dying, once again. The leaves, in golden, brown, and bloody tones, fall like tears from the trees. Their gentle rustling is punctuated by the dull thumping of dropping chestnuts, too. We pile them up and jump into the dead as an act of celebration and then we pile them up again and burn them once we are tired of their charm. The dust and seedlings in the air make me sleepy, always have. The light lengthens and wanes, as though giving out its best, last, joyful breath before becoming blue and sad for the winter. Persephone retreats once more, to sleep in the darkness of the underworld. To finally rest from all the eyes of the world looking upon her, devouring her. She is tired and welcomes the repose. It is in this changing of the seasons that I have always felt the heaviness of the passing of time. The lengthening of the light, the slowing of time, a time to reflect and to mourn, to feel our own mortality as the leaves fall, the plants seed and die, resigned to their own mortality as well. They have enjoyed the summer too, their flowering, their brief lives. They have made their seeds and will come again but now, they know, they must, too, rest. Resigned to their fate, they must rest.

Today, we tell people that if the feel sad at this time of year that they have a disorder, and the doctors have had the audacity to call it SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder. Are we not allowed to feel anything? We have Samhain, Halloween, All Saints Day, and all the other cultural traditions around this time of year, huge bonfires and celebrations of the dead and the spirits that still walk the earth. These celebrations and rituals exist for a reason, we have always needed to explain this death of the earth, to celebrate it, to get out our feelings in a certain debauchery, to ask for protection and hope to get us through the season of death that is upon us. The time of October is a gateway into this darkness, and we have always been sad and afraid, and wary of evil. We have always needed assurance and hope. Why is this now thought of as a disorder? I choose to embrace it, celebrate it, wallow in it for this brief and fleeting window of time while the earth folds in upon itself. Once winter is here, it will be cold and clear and difficult and we will batten down and muddle thorough with earnest conviction and solemnity. But for now, as Persephone reaches out before descending, breathes the last gasps of the warm and golden, intoxicating air, why not burn the fires and revel in it, too? Why have we been made to not feel this, too?

I woke up this morning with a hangover from watching too many episodes of this Usher show. I had its bloody, fleshy images in my mind, its digestible gore. Why do I do this to my self, I thought. Because it’s easier, I answered. Easier than the images and stories on the news of real world horror, with no resolution. Easier that the infinite sadness of my own dreams and loss. Easier than trying to absorb the treatment of random acts of violence as an Islamiste problem in the French press. Easier.

The things we avoid are often just what we need to face to bring about what it is that we are truly seeking. This is an idea that has kept returning to me as of late. It is returning because I see in my life how it is true. The projects I am avoiding are challenging, but conquering them will bring me perhaps success or failure but for sure, resolution. The outcome is not as important as simply reaching an ending. An ending enables the closing of the work, the chapter, and the opening of the next. This is what I truly desire, not the result but the progress, the moving on to the next thing, whatever that is. The death of this season and the birth of the next. The thing that I am avoiding by watching television is the same thing that I was avoiding by drinking or using cannabis – the emotions, the feelings, the pain. Now I know that if I simply sit with them, allow them to happen, they will move through me and be gone, or be integrated. Again, the result is not the even important, the process is, as I know that no matter what, I will be ok and what I will get to on the other side is what I really want – the next season.

As I went to catch the train this morning, on another full-price ticket to get back home, the second in a day, I was annoyed by the fact that here, at this train, were two conductors, scanning tickets and directing passengers to their train car. Where were you last night when I needed you, I thought, as I finalised my purchase while waiting in line. I got on the train and waited to board as a woman older than me came up too close behind me, anxious to get inside the doors of a train that was not at all close to leaving. Ok, enough, pardon, I said as I gently pushed by the tall, younger man in front of me who was not pressed to get inside the cabin to the left. I pushed by towards the stairway on the right. Of course she followed, of course she sat down across from me in the almost empty cabin and of course, she reminded me so much of my dead mother.

I sat there for a few minutes and tried to not look at her. Finally, I realised that I couldn’t sit there anymore, as tears bubbled up from me. Luckily, there was a lone empty seat by the window. I sat there and rested my tired head in my hands and softly cried. I was fine with this, and as I breathed gently through it I heard my mother’s words, It’s ok to cry, as she had reminded me as she prepared to die. It’s ok, she said, as if she somehow knew I would need to hear it. I knew then that she had really come a long way in her own understanding of herself in this world. She knew that her mind had been limited, had been changed by of years of her own sadness, loneliness, chaos, and mistreatment. It as though she’d come to peace with her own, complicated story and had said, ok, it’s ok. I don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t know how to explain – I don’t think I need to, but I do know it will be ok. So cry, let it out of you, you don’t have to hold it anymore.

***

When I was in college, in art school, making these pictures of bodies, with text, there was one that I did where I wrote, on my friend’s back, a little poem, I guess. She had a muscular back and arms, and she held her arms up with her hands on her head, in her dark, shiny hair, in a bun. I cannot remember the words, exactly, and have been trying to remember them, to see them in my head. The picture is not fully there, but he memory of its feeling remains.

This thing once her’s felt not her’s anymore

Her body – tired, bruised, broken, unnecessary

Breathing reminds her of pleasures