Turned Inside Out
I'm turned inside out, everything feels wrong, right, wrong. Finding a tribe where I can move cry dance sing scream my way through grief is a blessing unlike any other. Leaving the land at Wild Basin and this newfound community has left me bereft and hollow.
Focus escapes me. My life feels like a foreign country. I want only to walk the land, write, and sleep. I want to dance my story of dreaming a child into being and then losing that most cherished child to fate. I have a low, deep cough-- my lungs exhausted from the arduous journey I've been on, I want to fall into the deepest sleep and be taken into a dreamscape where Hunter is thriving, and I am nourished by feeling the ways we are still part of one another.
Darkness falls now. Where are you? Will I ever know what happened that night, why you wanted so much to be numb when it seemed the world was turning to greet you with a smile after so many days of dark struggle with being embodied? Was the prospect of happiness too much to bear? There is so much I didn't know about you.
You were the boy that would help a young child who had skinned her knee.
You knew what to say to comfort me if my heart was hurting. You witnessed me grieving the death of Dawnie as well as my mother. Your kindness and presence helped me keep my heart soft.
You felt far more than you showed and suffered from not knowing what was yours and what was not. You believed, I'm not sure how, that you were not worthy of the love that was showered on you.
You always had a hug at the ready. Never did you cut me out of your life, not even for an hour. I'm grateful for the gift of your love.
But I didn't know much about your heartbreaks because I barely knew when you had opened the soft portal of your heart to love.
And I didn't know about the life you hid from me, the way drugs wove a sticky thread of poison through your veins and confused you about what was real and what was not.
And I didn't know, though I tried, just how uncomfortable it was to be in your body, and how you thought it was impossible to feel it all and not die.
And I didn't know that you had been bullied in elementary school for crying, for having thin skin and a tender heart. Could I have done anything to repair the fracture in your heart? Could I?
And I didn't know that you were afraid you would never make it in the world on your own, afraid you didn't know how to grow up, afraid the beast of addiction would never take its claws out of your skin and leave you alone, bleeding but alive.
How is it that a childhood threaded with love and opportunities ended in an overdose? Where did we go wrong? This is the question that haunts me.
Over—1) expressing passage or trajectory across an area. 2) beyond and falling or hanging from a point.
Dose—1) a quantity of medicine taken at a given time, 2) a quantity of something considered necessary but unpleasant.
Overdose: too great a dose (as of a therapeutic agent) also : a lethal or toxic amount (as of a drug); an excessive quantity or amount-- an overdose of fun
You took too much. Your body was different after detoxing from cannabis, perhaps. Or you simply took more than usual. You went over the top, beyond the limit. An excessive quantity. A lethal dose. No turning back. I think of all the people that died young from an overdose-- Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, Prince, Amy Winehouse-- all famous people because I don't know of the ordinary people like you that mimicked the rappers that glorify drug culture and make it look like good safe fun to pour codeine laced cough syrup on ice cream, rather than the fucking game of Russian Roulette that it really is. You were given a loaded gun, Hunter. I thought you were smarter than that. But you kept going back for more, more... you needed your security blanket of prescription drugs, your arsenal of tools to navigate anxiety, physical pain, regret, rejection, and fear of being vulnerable. You took too much. You took too much. Your breathing stopped and you were gone, in a whisper, a young life dashed.
We never got to say goodbye, never got to say goodbye, Hunter. We never said goodbye. Instead, I had to put my hand on your cooling body in the hallway of the home you were raised in. Instead, I had to kiss you goodbye when you were already gone. Instead, you left us to rage against the loss of our only child, the dream-maker wonder boy who made us mothers. Anger flows like lava in my veins when I write this. The word "Why" tries to escape my mouth but I catch it in the act and yell "NO! You have no place here. You only make me crazy and frantic. NO!”
I will walk with you, Hunter. I will walk with you