Understanding Death- age 26



My 25th Birthday, at Laughing Rock Farm,
aligning with the energies of the goddess, Coatlique

Recorded September 30, 2014

After I left my apartment in Palenville, and just before I met my son’s father, I was invited to live in the spare bedroom at Liza’s house. I was working in Town at Not Fade Away and at the Tinker Street Café. It was February. I was twenty six. I had been obsessed with death since I began to store memories of my life. I suppose that it had come to a “head” and someone(s) had had enough of watching and listening to me obsess and waste nearly my every waking moment fearing and worrying about dying and what was going to happen to me and how sad it would be to leave this life behind.

       One afternoon, I sat on my bed. I didn’t have any particular thing to do. I wasn’t due to work anywhere that day that I can recall. I was in my usual morbid death mode, again in a slightly gothic punk phase of life, infatuated with a humorous and very slacker sexy heroin addict. I with a fresh piercing in my labret.

       Perhaps I was Still, a rare moment when I might have been still inside. I heard a voice, on the left side of my head, as always. There seemed to be two women talking with each other. Actually, they were consulting with one another. One was very chipper and was doing all of the talking, while the other seemed very reserved and reluctant to go with the plan that the first one was suggesting. I had a sense that the first woman who was talking was taller than the other and wore long straight black hair. I had less of an impression of the second as her presence was hanging back a bit. I felt like a window, or rather a door, had been opened onto someone’s home and I was suddenly able to eavesdrop on a conversation that perhaps I wasn’t supposed to hear. Or was I?

       While the second woman had her arms folded over her chest and persisted in doubt, the first woman was certain, and she declared,  “We’re just gunna’ to have to show her what it’s really like.”

       And, with the utterance of that statement, I felt myself falling, falling over sideways from  my waist, still seated with feet on the floor, in slow motion onto the bed.

       I felt a suction like a vacuum cleaner hose sucking me upwards until I hit a sort of ceiling. There was what felt like some resistance there, and harder suction was applied until I was whisked up through a sort of hole into a black place where there seemed like there was nothing. I stayed there for a short while it seemed.

       Then another suction force felt applied to me and I was sucked up through another opening. This time I had an odd feeling that I was expanding, like my edges were expanding, like I was getting bigger. I could see in this place and all around me was a nebulae of stars, but not individual stars in a black sky. The background and all around me looked and seemed like the texture and colors of pink and blue cotton candy. Lots of different colors of pinks and blues; soft baby pinks and salmon colors and baby blues with some threads of deep Montana sky blues- all swirled together like a twist ice cream cone and blended at the edges/color changes like a pastel drawing. And interspersed within all of this were diamond points of starlights. All over and within this cotton candy. And every point of light was twinkling.

       In my feeling of becoming larger, I also began to feel that I was every tree on Earth, every thing- I mean Every-THING. I was the sky I was every blade of grass, I was all of the trees and the birds- I couldn’t catalogue everything because it was also so nonconsequential. And after of feeling this expansion for an undetermined length of time, something began to happen that frightened me- I felt my Self dissolving. It felt as if I was a drink mix powder and someone had poured me into this large glass of water and started to stir me. At first it appears that the drink mix is getting more expanded, then crystal by crystal, molecule by molecule- it begins to disappear into the water. I was disappearing into the water. I was rapidly losing the substance I knew as myself- Ursula Carrie was fading, and fast! I could not comprehend what was happening except that I had a knowing somewhere, in whatever I had left of “me’, that I was becoming an undefined part of the All. I began to struggle like I was drowning, to fight my way back to the surface of the consciousness that I recognized.

       And like one would slap down a basketball- that is how I arrived back into my body.

       I opened my eyes- bolted upright, looked around. My entire torso felt open like the sky- I was elated! I said low in case anyone could hear, “Oh my God, this is the only time I’m gonna’ be Ursula Carrie!” For two solid weeks I held this feeling perfectly within me. I was determined to be the most fabulous Ursula Carrie I could be!