Keep Going!

I have written this post because I feel that spiritual experience has to be talked about to be valued, and if people are not talking about their unexplainable times then it slips right out of their consciousness. And then they stop noticing when these things happen.

Hopefully this clears up my intentions.

I've no idea what woke me up. But it was always the same- the rush, the panic, the gasping for breath, as if I'd been running. Later on I'd discover I had sleep apnea. Whether this shortness of breath was it or not is up for conjecture, but I always felt like I'd been running somewhere, somewhere dark and lonely.

And there she was.

Black-haired.

Blank-eyed.

Staring at me.

I'd scream. She'd be gone. It's so hazy, nowadays, but that was the reality of college life in Atchison. I'd wake up in the morning, trying to find something in me that wasn't filled with hatred and exhaustion. Maybe, just maybe, today would be a day I'd find something. I'd open up my prayerbook, grasping for anything that could soothe my soul. There was a perpetual sound in my soul, of fingernails on a chalkboard, of the screaming that a woman makes as she's being gutted. Maybe today prayer would drown that out.

It never worked. Not once.

I'd grit my teeth, take a deep breath, and try to say the words again. Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us!

Just more screaming. 

Keep going, I heard in my heart. This is going somewhere! Don't quit! This voice had never been wrong. Ever. I'd heard it before in my life, but louder since I'd come to Atchison. I was where I was supposed to be. Hell if I knew why.

So I'd grab my headphones and blast loud music over the cacophony. People could hear This Will Destroy You for well over a dozen feet away from me. I'd go, paint, hate what I'd made but keep it, try and smile through another dinner with the woman who would be my wife, and trudge wearily back to my apartment and hoped I could sleep that night. I kept waking up screaming. The little girl with black hair was still there. Night after night after night, for a year and a half.

Eventually I left. I don't think the little girl followed? It's hard to say. But I finally got married to the woman who had defined most of my life. I joined the Army; it was that or I couldn't marry. By that point I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't marry. Well, the Army broke my brain much worse. They had to ship me back, because someone else had killed themselves on that deployment and they didn't want to take chances. 

When I got back I was put on a side job, where I was left to my devices, more or less. And of course that included PT. Some mornings I'd do brisk walks by myself, headphones in. It was peaceful. Nobody bothered me. So I did what I thought was right. Which meant nice long walks in the early morning, as the sun rose.

And one day I saw him.

Well, kinda.

I felt him. Coming towards me. I don't know how to tell you how it worked, but I could see him, in my mind's eye. An older man, with a thick white beard and wild white hair, wearing a navy cassock, with a blue chotki poking out from under his sleeve. 

His eyes arrested me. They were laden with a sorrowful joy, a bright sadness, I could never tell you about, not directly. He'd seen Hell, had made it home, and had conquered it, transformed it into Heaven. Peace took sorrow and happiness and fused them together, and that man would have it no other way. He was Home, no matter where he was at. And he'd brought Home with him that day, to my street as the sun came up. He'd always bring Home with him wherever he went, even in the darkest parts of this Vale of Tears.

Why I knew it was me I was looking at I'll never know. But I stood there, in the morning light, stopped from a bone-rattling walk, staring at an empty spot where I knew he was. He looked up as he came to a stop. It looked like he had been on a walk as well.

Our eyes locked.

He smiled, silently reassuring me, filling me with his peace. My knees knocked. I almost fell over. There are times in my life when I can feel the weight of my experiences on me, when I suddenly feel far older than my short life-span, where I feel older than the earth, where my cares and joys are no longer hidden from me and I realize what I've been carrying. It is no small weight on my soul. This was one of those times. Whatever he was doing, he was holding me up, helping me experience it.

And then he was gone. 

Keep going! I heard again. I'd stopped hearing that voice when they had to ship me back from deployment. For months and months I'd experienced horrifying flashbacks of detail and sensation no one would want to know about, filled with lies, rape, sadism, outright torture, and curses coming from the actual depths of Hell.

But I could hear the voice again, even in the midst of it. And it never stopped after that.

Slowly I began to feel better, the interior landscape calmed and cooled, becoming stable. My wife and I went back to the woods of our youth. It's always been a relief to go back, to step foot into a place that, no matter how I change, it stays the same. No, I didn't see the treehouse from the previous post. That year it had snowed, so we took our son out. My wife, after awhile, wanted to go in. Our firstborn didn't, so I stayed out with him while he sledded, watching him.

My chotki seemed to appear in my hand. I don't remember reaching into my pocket to take it out. I was just... praying. And then I was looking down, through the snow, into a dark room.

The black-haired ghost sat next to me as I slept, trying to get me to wake up. She wanted to tell me something. I would never hear it. It wasn't mine to carry. I woke up, screaming, and she vanished, frightened. And I was watching, in the snow. Somehow. Like looking into a dollhouse. As I watched, I realized that this little girl's desperate plea for help was destroying me. I couldn't carry myself, nevermind whoever this little girl was. And so I prayed. And prayed. And prayed, in the falling snow of the present.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner!

Every time I prayed that prayer in those woods a bit of my memory cleared from when I was in Atchison, until I realized that the prayers were going backwards, back to me, then. I could hear them, somehow, while I was in college.

And then the words came out of my mouth in the present, while appearing in my mind in the past.

"Keep going! This is going somewhere! Don't quit!" I said, over and over again, as I held my face in my hands and shook as the cacophony of noise that I'd heard while I was  in college appeared in my head. But what came out of me wasn't the cry of a man overwhelmed, but of someone who wished his brother would stop hurting. It was true empathy for myself, something I promise you I do not feel often. Yes, I hate myself so much that God has to break time to get me to feel any sort of genuine pity for myself.

I watched as I attempted to pray in the past, and I prayed for me instead, in the woods of the present, with the snow intermingling with the happy shouts of my firstborn. The prayers of the past were held up by the prayers of the future and fused; a bright grief. An acceptance of all experiences I could fold in, put together with tears. A soul-shaking agony that was also joy in the fact that I could feel that grief, joy in my ability to feel, gratitude I could feel grief, washed over me. Grief somehow became a gift. And I rejoiced in my tears. And then I saw those last two and a half years at college, all at once. And then the entirety of my life, in a whirl. The prayers coming out of my mouth went to every last second and covered them, somehow. 

Again, I'm not going to pretend to know how this works. I keep getting my head examined and people keep telling me I'm sane, whatever the hell that means. I ran out of options to explain a lot of this a long time ago. 

But it was happening; my prayers were being applied where they needed to be. The world was balanced, even if I couldn't see it all the time. The bright sadness enveloped the whole experience. And I shook. I thought I was going to break, that my body would crack open and light would just flash out like a firework on a moonless night. I began to wonder if time would break in myself, and thus all over the world. I became afraid.

All of a sudden I was simply in the woods. Whatever was going on, it had stopped. I found myself looking at the son I'd always needed, standing in a woods that I don't leave voluntarily, with the woman who I love more than life itself, waiting inside a house that has defined my existence, for close to going on thirty years.

I had made it. Somehow. I was here. I was just here. A part of me yearned to go back to the perspective I had, to keep going, to break. A part of me still does. Maybe that's why it stopped? Maybe that's why it hasn't happened again?

My wife was calling my son and I, telling us that the temperature was dropping and we needed to go in. I turned, looked at the lights in that house, and smiled through hot tears I'd only just noticed. I knew past me could somehow feel what I was feeling, could feel my peace and joy in the midst of Hell.

I called out that we were coming in.

And somehow, deep in the recesses of my memory, I saw myself, sitting by the river in college. I remember that night. I'd gone to the river and looked at it with a longing I didn't understand. I wanted whatever Hell I was in to be over, I wanted to move on. Maybe, just maybe, The River would carry me away from it all if I jumped in. But, as usual when I was alone, my headphones in, trying to block out thoughts that I never heard anywhere else but in the haunted town of Atchison, Kansas. Those headphones were the only form of hope I had at the time. I wasn't just trying to block out the continuous screams. I was listening to for something. Something capable of talking over This Will Destroy You.

"Keep going! It's worth it!" I said, as I walked into the house. I didn't try to overpower the song; I knew that would never work. I just said it, simply, letting it drown me out. I knew I would hear myself, back then.

And I was right.

The River flowed on, uninterrupted.

I walked back to the house(s), alone and with my son, who held my hand in one of those times.

It is of note that my firstborn will reach out and take my right hand, randomly. He has a thing for holding my right hand at the oddest of times. He'll reach out, take my hand, and just say randomly "C'mon Daddy". I am always surprised when he does it, but he does it with a firmness I will not deny. It is also of note that sometimes, over the entirety of my life when I walk, I feel a soft warmth in my right hand.

I felt it that night, walking back from The River. It was comforting.