Maria Mocerino

Surrounded by a cosmos on columns in tiles, Death never led me astray. A flock of birds glided over our heads in a palace in Fez, Morocco. “Time flies,” he said. My friend said once to me that the universe was really my parent, and I thought that it was a large statement to make. We had gone through quite a journey—the Oldest Storyteller and I to get here: a new beginning. When I couldn’t make it out of my little room isnide a portal decorated with symbols of the cosmos, sacred geometry, I saw him a little further away on tiles of flowers as if they had just fallen from the sky onto diamonds. A fountain carved from ivory, he helped me through the toughest feelings, got me moving across a courtyard of a former prime minister with imported crystal on the windows …and sometimes, I would have dance like she did, the woman took me home. Sometimes, I couldn’t eat, but he told me to take it slow.

A couple of years before, Death stepped into my living room with a large bay window and a fireplace boarded up. It was grand, old, a shade of blue on the walls deep, bright, and rich. He turned in the last original apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. “An unusual color.” His eyes were the fiercest hallucination I ever had. The furniture covered in sheets, a Renaissance painting on the wall, this house wasn’t mine.

“The last stand,” he looked up to find holes in the ceiling.

“Many people have seen their death coming,” Death said.

But Death wasn’t coming, he was just there.

“True,” he said.

Death had been a part of every story ever told: fiction, nonfiction, and that was true. With my finger, I shook it at him. He was the oldest storyteller. What hadn’t he seen? I laughed, smiled. It was relieving to me. I took a deep breath.

“I don’t have to die young…”

I said.

“I am going to die…regardless…”

That was definitely true. But what did that mean?

I didn’t need to know.

“I could change, instead. I could heal…”

“True.”

Yes, he could assist me on that path.

“Ah,” he said. A person I once knew walked into the room.

“Deathly afraid of me, this one,” Death said.

“True,” I said.

He was on the couch covered in sheets with a Moroccan stool by his feet against a sensuous blue, by the window, everywhere I turned. Death was there. He was in every moment, in every breath, in every cell. He didn’t have to move. It was true…looking at candelabras of cobras and dragons in the next room with hand-carved wood detailing and mustard ceramics on top of another fireplace boarded up.

“You have too many people in your head…”

Death was a blade, but that truth took time to change, didn’t it, once I started considering my point of view?

I felt better.

“Good,” he said. He was sitting in a chair. Beside her. In front of her.

Death’s eyes saw right through me—just dazzling: what a large perspective. Deep. He was the kindest, which was a great surprise, wasn’t it? Not to me. He was not a liar. He wasn’t going to get affected, attached, or manipulate a soul.

“That you were…”

“Was I?”

“Manipulated? That we know.”

Was I? I refused to be. But I was four. It took a long time for me to understand that.

That, he promised, he would never do. But, “it’s true, you manipulate energy. You shape it. Your imagination doesn’t have to turn against you, that’s just an idea people have, but then, what are you seeing? You don’t know.” We were going to bridge some gaps. He wasn’t a human character. He wasn’t wrapped up, embodied, he was a fact of life, which was mysterious, too. Death had no agenda.

“Get this person out of your head.”

Integrity, truth, and duty—it was a sacred thing, wasn’t it? “Death. I mean, I, too, am confused.” He was only mirroring my feelings back to me, again, he wasn’t a human character, but he was inseparable from life. He had played many roles; Death. He agreed, though. It should be respected.

“What did Camille Paglia say?”

“We are not nature’s favorites.” I laughed.

He wasn’t the least bit interested in Man’s power trips.

Power meant nothing to him.

It was soothing.

The second I felt a gender question come into her head, Death changed shape. He, she, they—I could move with that, and Death took on many shapes. He suggested that, eventually, I might pick a consistent face. Again, it was not his/her/their issue. Death was quite clear about that. He moved through the apartment, paint ripping from the corner of a pink bedroom, and paint chipping and falling from the ceiling onto a hallway with photographs of artists towards a back room. There was much to learn from Death.

There was. Many know that. Most.

I had no clue what her feelings were. He knew that. It was just beginning to dawn on me, and it scared me. My question, in the dark about my own past but very bright, was how to bring about change. Even in the context of trauma…how to evolve past patterns? Once again, Death said: get this person out of your head. I had felt time bend at nine years old. Yes, and it was sensational. Death moved around this point in time in a sunset sky: orange. The highest high of the summer. This experience I had took time; I was nine, and Death was fine, points in time illuminated. Every probable future exists as an idea? Death was looking at her father in a state…wandering off…

“Call it fiction,” Death said.

“I am a fiction in this context, Maria,” he said.

“There is no doubt about it, I must be, but then,” he tapped his foot over the line.

“Doubt an essential part of faith? An element? What am I? I am just a door.”

And through many doors real and imagined and even in memory, he would lead me.

“You are a personifier of energy. It’s a completely legitimate profession.”

I thought about it.

“Energy,” he said.

“Put aside alive or dead, a moment. It was energy and it cannot be destroyed. That’s your idea. So, neither can you.”

“If you want change, you have to start with yourself…”

Death looked at me. I would see, I would see what he meant. No one, and he meant it, was clever to him. And it’s true, one’s cleverness could work against them. There was no hiding. Everything from your perspective, wasn’t that the idea? Flash. Suddenly on small feet, Death took me back to a point in time that I never thought about since: watching starlings fly in a stunning formation, in waves, around ancient columns in a sunset sky at the Roman forum. “Time flies,” I had reflected back to my father his phrase. It could fly in different ways and at different speeds…Death agreed. I appreciated that as a kid, though I had no connection to my inner child yet. I was discovering that following this character with eyes that glittered full of feeling.

In a back room, I was touched by that memory though I was feeling a little lost. Death eyed her clothes on racks. I would change. I wanted to. I really did. I was stuck in a story, and I didn’t really know what it was. Death looked outside a grand window in a storage room with a fireplace. I wanted a long, healthy life.

“Alive and well,” he said.

I didn’t want to turn into my parents.

Yes, he understood that. He had no issue with any of it, again. He had seen everything, and even he wouldn’t say that, so he didn’t. Death wouldn’t say that. Right. Not true. “There is no limitation to the self.” And he suggested that I never forget it. It was really going to change. My life. “You’d be surprised.” He regarded the room with a child’s tricycle and boxes of taxes on the floor. Good and bad were never my perspective.

“True,” and he wondered… walking back down the hall with a wall covered in brown fleur-de-lis and an antique lamp with a screen by the front door.

”Years later, would you say that was true?”

We could anywhere in time. Real or imagined, he was there. What’s a life?

Into the middle room, he peered at the designs on the frosted glass, the seashells down the seashore on the commode. Hard to dust, he thought, a portrait of an alien and a swirling mind in the corner, an old desk and chair, and a window behind him downing him with light.

“Why is the word ‘mystical’ triggering (not to me) but not the word triggering?”

He suggested that I put the word aside. “Trigger.”

It didn’t seem to be helping me.

“You can be stuck, though, can’t you? Though everything flows and nothing stays the same, which is true. The same story over and over again…”

Death knew it well. It’s true. But it didn’t have to be true. That was also true. My mother taught her that. My world was turning…the fairytale was coming to an end. I was about to get hit and have no clue why it would knock me into an abyss that would bring my early childhood to the surface.

“But yes,” to Death, there were truths that were unarguable. He thought it was a good idea.

Death pointed to a person.

”Get that person out of your head.”

And one day, they would all be gone, actually. No more people in my body claiming to be an authority….saying “this is who you are and change is not possible.” Death could play roles, see through it “because at the end of the day…”

Death wasn’t superior.

“It’s not over.”

And wasn’t that something? He was the one to tell me.

This story of mine wasn’t helping me.

That took time.

He could pin me as if on the tip of a needle—tiny, minuscule—at any point without any room to wiggle.

“Step one,” he said. 

“Put the story about the adopted families aside a moment…”

“Out, out, out,” Death got all of them out of my head.

I wanted to heal instead, and he found that to be a good idea indeed. Where does illness begin? We were talking about my foundation. Nobody could say that it was healthy. Not to say it was all bad, but then, Death got a little sharp with this energy. Death was a blade. He was there just for me. He was patient. Time? Time flies. Right. How I died had nothing to do with him. It was never my perspective. I could heal, and my life was going to change. I would never be the same.