Chapter 35
I’m worried the feeling will wear off once I’m back in the city, but it doesn’t. It’s not as potent as it was under the stars,
but there’s this quiet understanding that the divine woman will never leave me, no pact needed.
Tara can sense something different about me right away when I walk into the Inn. “What happened to you?” she asks, tossing
leftovers in the skillet to give them a makeover. “Are you still high?”
“I climbed outside of myself,” I tell her. “Only I burrowed down deeper too. It’s all very meta.” I give her the gist of what
happened on the hiking trip.
“Who are you and what have you done with EJ?” Tara says once I’m done, appraising me like I’ve been abducted by aliens, which
I pretty much have been.
“I’m the same EJ I’ve always been,” I say. “Just without all the parasites inside.” I lay a hug on her and hold on longer
than usual. “Thanks for sticking by me all this time, Tara,” I say. “Even with all my tyrannical antics.”
Still looking uncertain, Tara softens and reciprocates the hug. “You don’t have to thank me,” she mutters. “You’ve stuck by
me too.”
“Guess that’s true,” I say with a grin. “We’re both pretty great. And the best part is that it isn’t even bragging because we can’t take credit for our greatness. Only the divine woman can. So it’s not hubris; it’s humility.”
“Sounds like you found the perfect religion for you,” Tara says.
“Oh no, it’s not a religion,” I say. “It’s the exact opposite really, a living and breathing spirit. No dusty old dogma for
me.”
Tara frowns. “I don’t think I’m really following.”
“Of course you’re not following,” I say. “You’re leading. We all are.” I pause. If it were anyone but Tara, I would probably
just stop there, but I keep going, just a little. “Also, I realized or rather remembered something else in the woods. I’m
not ready to talk about it now, but I will be soon.”
Tara tucks my half-grown-out bangs behind my ears so she can see my eyes. “I think I might already know.”
I tense up at that. “What do you mean?”
She takes a beat, then answers. “When we shared the bunk bed, you would talk in your sleep a lot,” Tara says, her voice measured.
“A lot of times you would be telling someone to get away, to stop touching you, to just let you play.” Tara’s jaw stiffens
and I can tell there’s a lump in her throat. “You’re a survivor, EJ. Isn’t that right?”
I probably shouldn’t be shocked that Tara has seen me more clearly than I’ve seen myself, but I still am. “Why did you never
bring it up?” I ask.
“I thought about it,” Tara says. “But I just felt like it was something you needed to process on your own timeline. Pushing
things out isn’t really my style.”
“That’s not why you’re still living with me, is it?” I ask, half scared to hear the answer. “Because you feel sorry for me?”
“No, I’m here because you’re my platonic soulmate,” Tara says, which is exactly the answer I didn’t know I was craving. “And
because you know how to bargain the prices down at Tony’s Pizza so we get two pies and garlic knots for $9.99.” She grins
at me, her whole face alive with the same light I feel splashing onto my own.
“It really is one of my specialties, isn’t it?
” I say proudly. My eyes are damp. Everything is big and warm.
Tara knows, or at least knows enough, and she’s not running away.
Maybe other people won’t run away either.
And more than that—maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll stay.
Here in this body, with all its traumas and its tantrums, all its flaws and its fears, all its beauty and its bandages.
Maybe the very definition of power is to not let the past define you.
To write your own ending, or non-ending, to this crazy script called life.
The next time I’m at Mother Zion, I try to find the old lady who sent me into the woods so I can thank her and let her know
what grand success I had.
She’s not there so I ask around. Someone informs me that she died last week, had a heart attack while tending to her vegetable
patch. My eyes fill up because apparently I’m just a watering can these days now that all my valves are open. But I get the
feeling the woman knows that she helped me, that she’s got some awareness of it. I can pretty much hear her talking to me,
wagging her cane. I told you so.
My awakening doesn’t give me a whole new personality or anything. I’m still just as hilarious and endearingly obnoxious as
ever. It’s just helped unearth the old me, the real me, and it grounds me in the roots that I tried to rip out for so many
years.
I used to think that having roots meant you were tethered to the same spot forever, stuck there with no escape. But now I
see that to grow tall and thrash your branches wherever they want to go, you have to grow deep too. Otherwise you’ll tip over
or snap in the wind. I’ve done both.
The only real change to my appearance is that my eyes are gray all the time—no more colored contacts.
It’s still uncomfortable to show myself like that, but there are these occasions that make me glad to be ocularly bare, like I’ll be whistling my way down Knickerbocker Avenue and then out of the blue, blue sky, someone at the crosswalk will meet my gaze straight on for a second or two.
And suddenly we’re both inhabiting each other’s spirits and I’m feeling all their hopes and all their holes.
There’s nothing like it. It’s vulnerable and achy but pure veneration and ascension too.
The high isn’t always fun and games. It hurts a lot. Every texture scrapes. I get scraped by the homeless man curled up on
his cardboard bed. Scraped by a group of friends going out for the night hooting with laughter like the Redstockings used
to. Scraped by an Australian shepherd tugging on his leash. Scraped by the new moon and scraped by the full moon and scraped
by all the slivers of moon in between. Scraped by the sunrise and scraped by the sunset and scraped by the miracle of how
the sun does it all over again the next day. Scraped by the past and scraped by the future. Scraped because I got to be born
and scraped because I have to die. And scraped because maybe I won’t have made it all count.
I complain to the divine woman about how much the scraping hurts, and she says she didn’t promise this way of life was going
to be easier; she just said it was going to be more beautiful. I can’t exactly argue with that because of this feeling of
dancing inside my own body and not wanting to claw my way out. Well, it’s beautiful—that’s what it is. I wouldn’t trade it,
not a chance.
“Shila has bronchitis,” Tara tells me the night before the opening performance for the Jarena Lee show. “She can’t sing, so
I have to fill in.” She asks if this was my doing, if I cursed her.
“Of course I didn’t,” I say, though I wonder if I did subconsciously manipulate the energetics a bit. It’s not a serious illness—Shila will recover just fine—so I don’t feel bad about my witchy talents. I just help Tara step into her confidence, let it wash over her like a monsoon.
Tara commands the stage, not with her volume or her movement so much as her tranquility, her stillness. It makes everyone
hold on tightly, desperate not to miss a word. The audience starts off expecting it to be a parody of the church. This is
New York City after all, and people seem to be hoping for that kind of comedy show; that’s why they bought the tickets. But
as the play goes on, there’s this shift in the theater as it becomes clear that this isn’t a satire at all. It’s a redemption
story that makes God look pretty good. At first it doesn’t seem to sit well with the audience. It’s like they feel duped.
But by the end they’re on their feet hooting and hollering. They’ve had a taste and now they want more.
I throw Tara a dinner party in the garden the weekend after the show wraps. Hal and Jenni are there, and Peter and Astrid
too. Niles the director comes too. He’s a last-minute invite from me because I can tell how obsessed Tara is with him. Now
with the show over, I get the feeling they’d be dating if Tara wasn’t worried about disappointing me. But the idea of Tara
getting into a relationship or even getting married one day doesn’t threaten me like it used to, and I feel myself wanting
to let her know that. I hope that’s what inviting Niles does.
I serve vegan calzones. Everyone’s drinking except me. I’ve gone cold turkey on the drugs too. The clarity I got on substances
was always rimmed with an artificial haze. I never really noticed it before but can’t unsee it now. And now that I’m not blocking
out all the memories, blacking out isn’t needed. It’s not that I’m over the trauma—I might never be—it’s just that I no longer
have to contort myself into broken shapes to prove that I’m okay. I know I’m whole even with all the holes.
I find myself wishing Chris were here at the dinner.
It’s not just that I want another person at the table so I won’t be the awkward ninth wheel.
I want Chris in particular. And I want Arnie too, tugging on the garden vines like rope.
I’m not suppressing those feelings—they’re worthy of recognition—but I try not to linger on them.
No point missing someone who doesn’t miss you.
The night wraps up early. It’s not even midnight by the time the married couples trot on home. Tara asks if I want to go out
to the House of Yes with her and Niles, but just picturing all those strobe lights gives me a headache. I tell her I’m just
going to stay in, get to bed.
“But are you sure you don’t mind if Niles and I go?” Tara asks, like she’s walking on eggshells. It’s statements like these
that make me realize what an autocrat I was back in my pre-liberated or rather faux-liberated days.
“Do whatever you want,” I assure her, with none of the old passive-aggressiveness that I used to wield so well. “It’s all
good, really.”