Split

While the circumstances are blurry, after all it’s been 40 years or more, the split itself is still crystal clear. This memory has been quietly sitting in the still corners, watching, waiting to remind me that it was real. I did not make it up. It was not a fabrication.

This time the yelling was too much, the name calling to unkind, the dehumanizing too complete and final. I could hold no more. Around me all became quiet and still, a subtle grey softness covered sharp edges. My eyes stopped swimming, all emotion ended. I had conjured another, or so I thought.

This Other was the part of me and part of the cobwebbed corners and dusty sunlight that finds you on autumn days. The Other was night time fires and all the cold emptiness between the stars, She was dark forests carpeted with moss, and speaking trees too ancient to remember anything but seasons. She was feral and tattered. A strange ageless beauty who was at once a child and a crone. She backed up into the darkest corridors with a physical pull. All parts of me both perfect and profane tore off little pieces and offered themselves with desperate abandon. “No one can get to me” I thought. I looked at the screaming face in front of me naming me with such vile impunity. It was twisted and red but it did not touch the soft places in me. Not anymore. I stared ahead, through the screaming and the rapes and the beatings. I made it hard for them to get at me, that is true. But when the finally did, I felt nothing. Saw nothing. I ran to the arms of the Other and She sat there with me. She held me as I had never been held and whispered such dark velvety thoughts in a language both understandable and unknowable. She smelled of old leaves and damp logs. She cracked as she moved to me like the last chapter of a book, begging to be opened. Only in this space did I know love. Dark and soft and cool. Only here did I know safety.

He would come to me in the dark, and as he searched and mined my little broken body I hid in the shadows, with Her. We cursed him endlessly. All the broken bits of me would catch the moonlight and glint silver petals that floated and writhed around me. Even as I was ripped opened again and again, I was not touchable.

Every time my mother slapped me to the floor, the Other came for me. Every time I was locked in a room, She was there. She taught the shell to be numb, to bury all things sacred so deep they would not be unearthed. She taught me silence, and observation. She taught me sacred words, sacred symbols, and the secrets of green and growing things. She taught me quiet dignity and helped build walls around all things that were true in me. And I did. And I still do.

Some would say that I had a “personality split”, or a “psychotic break,” or a disassociation,” or even an imaginary friend. Some would say this is all made up in my mind to keep me alive. Some would medicate me, lock me away, force me into therapy after therapy. Maybe it was just a survival instinct. Maybe. But maybe it wasn’t.

All these many years later, I have become Her. All of Her, and all of me one and the same. I am the one with open arms and soft comfort for those who are injured. I am the quiet space for the broken ones. I am the teacher of secrets. I am the healer of the heart sick. I am the Other.

I was split. Ripped open. In all ways. The frayed edges still show.