I am aware that I am trading in someone else’s favors when I ask the lady to drown me.
This is, increasingly, the way my magic works. The pond I find is fetid and still, scum thick across it in dull greens and browns. The lady sitting next to it wears the same colors. She is bare chested, so that the blues of her skin contrast to the scum caught in her hair and the fuzzed, mossy shape of her teeth as she smiles at me. Her eyes are bottles filled with the hazy water of the pond itself. We know each other, a little, through a mutual acquaintance. I know it is because of that acquaintance that we are meeting pleasantly, on the edge of the pond, rather than unpleasantly within it.
Which is, I suppose, why she seems surprised when I sit down across from her and say, very plainly, “Granny, I’d like you to drown me, please.”
Her laugh, when it comes, is pleasant – a wet burble of amusement. “That’s not something people often ask for, child.”
I shrug. “I need to feel grief,” I say. “I have a lot of things I need to grieve, and…” I gesture toward my chest, my throat. “I can’t find it. It’s stoppered up, somewhere. I thought you could help.”
She regards me – it is impossible to read her expression in the moving depths that are her eyes. It is not long before she nods. “Come and kneel at the edge of the water,” she says. “Hands on the bank, as close as you can get.”
I do as I’m told, and I feel her hand with its impossibly long fingers on my shoulders, across my neck. They are the thing about her that is least human, stick-like and impossibly strong.
“Do you want me to…” I start to say, but –
She pushes me under the water quickly, but there’s no violence to it. Still, I panic. I hold my breath, struggle against her, but this is what she does. This is the sort of thing she is. This is her calling. I am the sort of thing that breathes, and so, despite my body’s stubborn refusal, eventually my lungs pull in and I taste the water in the back of my throat.
On the couch, where I’m sitting, I feel my breathing change. It goes shallow and compressed and I pause superstitiously to make sure I am still able to take a deep breath – and then turn my attention back to the pond, where I am not. I am not even on the shore, anymore. I am down in the murk and mud of it, nearly blind, still struggling. There is nobody with me. There is no way I can reach the surface. This is, I remind myself, what I wanted.
My chest is all fire and air. I need earth and water. I want to remember how to cry. My lungs take in silt and muck, and I go still, placid, as the amount of me that is taken up by the pond outweighs the part of me that is anything else.
I am not the only person in the water, but I think I am one of the few here by choice. I am left alone as I follow the course of it through my body, flooding chambers that I am only now aware of. I know what happens to a body in the water – I try to force the gasses out, to become as permeable to the pond as her eyes. I want the emotions that I associate with water. I want to be able to close my eyes and have them leak again, to take the great sobbing gasps of a drowning thing, to feel my body in its grief as inexorably as the silt that pulls my ankles down.
When I climb out of the pond, shedding water from my hair and disappointed, she greets me again. “It will take time, child. Unlocking things always does.”
Scum on a pond in Bendix Woods County Park, St. Joseph County, Indiana [Chris Light, CC 4.0, Wikimedia Commons]
She isn’t the first lady I’ve met under similar circumstances. I remember strong, clean hands tilting my chin to give the beak-like kitchen shears room as they snipped my trachea neatly in two, and then again, as they did then did it a little lower. “This is not a favor I owed you,” I was told as I coughed out blockages so old I did not know how to swallow without them. “You owe me no thanks.”
At the time I barely managed a polite “Ma’am” around the painless pressure in my throat. That pressure is there still, if I think about it, a blockage that erodes every time I take a drink of water, every time I say something instead of swallowing it down. It is a physical echo of a metaphysical surgery, a reminder to myself that I am determined to honor. I have a handful of these phantom aches, now. At times they have been so strong that I have gone to doctors, only to be told that there’s nothing wrong, that there’s nothing to be worried about. That it’s all in my head.
There are a dozen models from different cultures that contextualize situations like this. Spirit workers are taken apart and put back together in order to access their true powers. Organs are altered or replaced as gifts from the gods. Pieces of the soul are damaged or go missing through traumatic acts, and must be retrieved. I have not yet met anyone else who pursues the experiences, signs up for them the way I might sign up for another tattoo. I need to learn to be angry – is there someone that will reshape my joints until I remember how to scream? I need to learn to grieve – is there a spirit who can fill me up with the tears I cannot access?
“Anger is a part of grieving,” my therapist tells me, looking concerned and almost amused. “It’s not just sitting in sadness. It’s feeling whatever your emotions are right now. It’s hoping that they will get… Softer, maybe, but not hoping that they will end. Being angry is just as much a part of that.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “But I have a lot of things to mourn. Why can’t I feel sad about them?”
She frowns, considering how to say it. “I think it takes time,” she offers. “Sometimes we need to feel angry, first, to get there.”
Espaliered Kemp’s apple tree, in the walled garden of Ardgillan Castle [Leslie Noelle Sullivan, CC 4.0, Wikimedia Commons]
I have done nothing to earn the help of the spirits that aid me in remaking myself. There are some gods that I have built relationships with over decades, carefully tending our connections until my life shines with their reflected light. They have offered comfort and strength through my difficulties and pruned me to grow in certain ways. I love them with all that I am. But they have their own goals and their own plans for me. When I overlay wood and roots into the fragile tangle of nerves that laces up my backbone and spread it in an espalier across my ribs, I am interested in my plans for myself.
The spirits who help me, who teach me to remake myself, are not quite strangers. We have both been vouched for. I know that I can appear at their door and ask for help. They know that helping me will be payment against some other debt they owe. I come in seeking courage, strength, compassion, patience, anger, relief, sustenance.
They cut and bite and bury me, flay muscle from bone, kill me in a dozen ways that give me room to remake myself with vines and thread and someone else’s sinew. It is bloody work that no friend of mine would ever consent to do, as I am remade into something of my own design.
At some point, healing around veins that leak sap and syrup, I remember how to cry.
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