On the banks of the Seine, my father in a state wandered off into a brilliant bath of orange, the sun lingering at the height of the summer as if it would never set.
I slowed down my steps at nine.
“What is happening?”
“Oh,” I said, “time is bending.”
It was obvious, which shocked me.
“Time is what?! How do I know this?!”
But that’s what I was experiencing.
Curves and bends in the air, the feeling I had that day was unforgettable—time, time, time. I was out of time, in a little jewel, just gorgeous, called the present moment. All time, all times were present? I was at one, filled with divine awe, without any worries. Turning around myself, out there were points in time? “Probable futures exist?” I was just taking in the information I was receiving. “As ideas? No matter how improbable…it can exist…as an idea…it can.” Time was a glittering fabric, points illuminated, blazing. The sound of children playing swooped over me—from what time?! I was disoriented, looking up at orange geraniums cascading off a balcony bathed in orange. A sunbeam bounced off the window and into my eyes. I saw a slit, like a dark eye. Strong winds blew my focus to a point across the Seine. I was standing there, and what were these corners barely perceptible? I had to seriously ask myself…is that the future? Is that the future across the Seine? I didn’t know why, but it appeared as if I was looking at a future point. I was getting clear feelings and information and the experience broke like a spell. I allowed that to settle…I was going to live here one day? It was a revelation at nine—time bends. What a feeling.
.Thus, at thirty years old, I was writing on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, pink stars lining the boulevard, and my understanding of time was never linear, and I still hadn’t gone through my childhood, in a sense. I had never stopped to seriously consider this experience though I had talked about it. I was in a state of despair, and I didn’t know that either. My story was a little like a ghost following me and showing up in different costumes. I was breaking the ceiling—bending time to bring the past into the present to resolve it, looking for a way out of Wonderland. If souls can rise on Halloween…if the dead walked among the living on this day, then I would conduct this experiment at a Halloween office party on twelve stories high. I was breaking down the boundaries of time and space; it was my intention. In theater school, I learned you could show a life passing from beginning to end in three steps…and so, I found myself in heaven—my adopted sister’s floor….her place of employment. “I am breaking down the boundaries of time and space,” I said, wanting to make my experiment real. I had to anchor it. I was warmly received. The elevator broke down, and we had to take the stairs…with an endless stream of people going up and down….snow began to fall in my mind.
About a year later, I was still writing, searching for an end to this never-ending story. It was a wildly imaginative world on the heels of my adopted sister dressed as an elephant. A wall rolled away, finally, to a real memory I could walk back into. I submerged. I was coming out of Shakespeare in the Park, intermission ending, the final act beginning. I was on hold with the hospital, my father was no longer able to deny his illness, and I stood at the top of the dark path toward his death and the end of another family. Green eyes opened glittering large neither man nor animal. I was a little stunned. From swirling patterns, just off the path I took, the Oldest Storyteller emerged a man on the road—Death. All those years with my father back there already felt like they made sense. He took me to what happened the next day. When I was twenty, I found out that my father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s ten years prior, though it was Alzheimer’s. At thirty-three, remembering it with Death by the UHAUL, I was going through the bare motion of it—hearing the angry words of the doctor. I was not connected to this moment nor the previous ten years. Time bends…Death continued to lead the way home. I didn’t want to go home, but even that took time to realize. I didn’t know where I was going. Up the steps of my old house, suddenly, he moved through a thick black. “This is all material.” I had no idea what that meant. My house was empty. Even the mirrors on my mother’s office walls were gone because they were at this point in the past. “There’s nothing here,” I said. Death’s eyes were dazzling, the fiercest hallucination I had ever had. I was in the dark about my past. I had no clue what my feelings were in the last original apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. When I moved out because of quarantine, I found myself in a swanky flatiron pad facing the flatiron building, and the Oldest Storyteller guided me through the telling of my story from top to finish for 12 hours. Death was a higher perspective, a point in the future I could get to. Up the stairs to my old house, once again, the mirrors were back on the walls, and I saw myself at four before I left for the first house as if that moment still existed.
I had heard “remember me” in my head looking into my eyes in my mother’s office of mirrors.
She was still there…at that moment.
“She’s not dead?”
“No,” the Oldest Storyteller said.
Death made me aware of the meaning of the phrase “re-member me.”
We made a plan—Death was a master psychologist, the oldest storyteller. He could bring me to life. Yes, it was also in his credentials.
After the Everything Flows draft, as in nothing stays the same, the wise screenwriter said, I remember, only one thing.
“The topic sentence is…”
I believe he knew that this sentence had never really landed for me.
“My mother gave me away to a total stranger when I was four…”
I hung up the phone.
I sat down on a couch covered in sheets in the last original apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, a bay window behind me.
I typed that first sentence and it landed, it did. I saw columns fall.
I could hardly make it up the steps, this time.
The Oldest Storyteller was at the top of the stairs in vivid, wet colors…he understood the visual aspect of my experience, and we would learn. I would. It was real.
Did I have the right to be hurt? Was I hurt? Was I supposed to pretend that I was not hurt? “Yes, it would make sense that it hurt.” But I hardly knew these people. “Your parents?” Death seriously asked me. Was my pain or hurt, forget attachments, less than, more than? Was this “me being self-involved?” Death was a blade. In his, her, their eyes—every story ever told. Death had seen a lot. He was not going to get wrapped up in all the stories. I was going to make it up the stairs. It was a hard day, but I did it. I made it up the stairs.
“You’ve arrived at the rest of your life,” and he would say it more than once.
I had been given away at four years old, and thirty years later, Death simply walked through this woman’s door.
Just that—it was shocking enough.
“It’s time to go…now…”
My parents didn’t do that.
The few times I went home were still repressed.
Death stood in a foyer under a crystal chandelier casting rainbow colors across the walls in a curve.
He approached me at this age with kindness.
I wasn’t expecting that.
He looked down at me at four, which wasn’t belittling. I was small. It would be part of “the visual point.” Seeing myself as a child.
“The biggest bitch that ever was?”
Death didn’t curse, but it’s how this mother described me, a stranger who took me home one day for four years and did not want to.
The sound of her snap at an exclusive tennis club, Death was beside me four years later under the shade of an umbrella.
Just like that, I started living with her, just like that.
He was in the back of my father’s ‘81 Cutlass Supreme driving down Overland Blvd. heading home.
I flew through this family party on Miracle Mile, a big family dancing that was not mine.
Under a crystal chandelier casting rainbows across the foyer, he could follow me or not.
He was there, regardless, on a living dance floor.
“Was it all grand? Did they save you? Were you really the biggest bitch that ever was?”
Just him asking me that.
I was…
I wanted to stay at the family party that wasn’t mine…
Death understood. He really did.
He didn’t rush me.
My understanding of this story needed a fundamental readjustment.
As an adult in a swanky Flatiron loft that was not mine, I began to identify—for example—distraction. I began seeing this little four-year-old. Anytime this little child needed something, I would stop and spend some time with myself, and I didn’t lose that much time. I had to raise myself, get this part of myself on board—you can trust me. I can trust myself. Instability was a theme, and maybe I didn’t like that. I can give myself what I need. I can get there. I confronted the lie that my father was a child molester, finally, one night, since it was the reason why I was in that house for four years. I had to hold this child inside of me through that, and suddenly, cords snapped off my body, and there was a spot in my underwear the next morning. I know. I slipped into an architect’s chair, and I had no idea what attraction was. Death’s eyes faced the Flatiron building. “Imagine for people who really went through this?” I said. I sat in front of someone for the first time without these cords that I didn’t know were there. And why did I feel so much better…walking away that day?
We were moving uptown to a penthouse with the boxes still unpacked and “The One that was Juan,” a French cat with one eye.
Coming out of these four years, Death was there this time: the day I officially went home at eight, and nine years old.
I said “fuck” many times, and Death could use a few fewer “fucks” in the backseat of the ‘81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, but it made me aware that I wasn’t exactly blank. I was at the time. My father and I didn’t speak the entire ride home. There was such a thing as “a proper end,” Death assured me. “Merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.”
I didn’t feel anything, mirrors being smashed off her office walls.
Eventually, I started to, but it started with “the walls were flying off!”
“Death!”
I was eight, nine? On the stairs. “The walls are flying off!”
“That’s what it felt like.”
I ran downstairs and roared at this insane man, Death was on my side. I didn’t have a room.
I got to Christmas in Naples is a Sport in December 2020. I was in a swanky apartment, now, but the last original “dinky” one on Lower Fifth. We had had quite a journey to get here. My friend who had found me this apartment ended up joking on the day I was moving in that he was a drug addict, and I had a panic attack, realizing that my mother was a drug addict. Can I care? Do I care? Who cares? The Oldest Storyteller told me to go outside and take a step for myself. Say it. Say it. My mother was a drug addict.
I was on the plane in Naples, Italy on the page and I was nervous.
Death’s voice pulled me along a lake with rolling clouds of purples and creams until we arrived on the brink of the afternoon, coming alive. I took in the perfume, a faint memory, which seduced me out the door–clementines, pine trees, coffee in the air, a crystal of salt in my mouth, which burst into chills, memories of flames. I arrived on the gravel of a nation that had always been rich and poor, brutal and beautiful. He got into the backseat of the 90s Peugeot about to tell my cousins, finally, this story of all the adopted families…but my perspective was changing, though I still played the fool with Death in the backseat listening to me…
I found myself in the Sistine Chapel coming out of these four years. It was as I was there all over again. I was speaking a little internal monologue not really thinking about it, wondering why I was here. I was looking at The Last Judgment…staring at Michelangelo’s portrait of himself as a loose hanging piece of skin. Death ended up coming up behind me.
I didn’t hear it at first.
”Despair,” he said again in a room full of dynamic forms of paint.
I realized, and it took a second, that I was finally seeing myself at this age. He did it.
He felt it was a good summary point of the next four years all my “undercover investigations.”
”How old are you? How old were you?”
These questions were sharp in my body. I didn’t know. I was not a liar. Different memories were beginning to resurface which made me question my story. “Why are you here?” Death asked. We could be anywhere. Kindergarten. I was given away when I was four, but I was also younger when I started. My story was so confusing to me. Was it even true? We moved through time since I found his divorce file in my 20s. I said to Death, at nine, that the church was my way of seeking justice and meaning. Yes, yes, I was sincere. He wasn’t. Bang your head against the walls, tear it down, the whole room, with your bare hands. In the end, Death suggested that I might leave this portrait behind.
He sliced through my hesitation.
“Did I detect?”
He was showing me a way out through my heart, and I couldn’t move from that spot—a real unknown.
Wow, I thought typing.
My inner nine-year-old was into it, it was true.
Why do people hang onto what they do? Is it true? Was it true?
I left the room with Death with a funny mushroom cut, very seriously telling him that I had met a couple of Delilahs already. I wasn’t Bathsheba, you see, I was Samson heading straight for the columns, the most adult child I have ever met, according to my Big Sister of America. Death was looking at me at this age talking as I was talking, asking the questions that I was asking, and being called “mature.” It made me laugh as an adult. I was clever, but that’s why Death was dashing. No one was clever to Death. I knew that being ‘mature’ would fool adults, though I was. I was. I was beyond my years. It turned out, in Death’s eyes, I would begin to see that I was a rather smart child, but again, it was not the point yet. It worked: the mature angle. We spent some time in these museum halls as my father was off, coming to snap sometimes at where I was and I would snap back. Please, this man…Death was watching all this. We worked on catching feelings like stars…making connections.
Finally, he paused….on his way to take a seat in my pink room.
My house really did come back to life.
Death’s eyes were between the shadows of my pink blinds under a portrait of a lounging lioness….all my “undercover investigations.”
There I was, at this age, all alone looking into the mirrors that were left from my mother’s office: the closet.
I surfed feelings for a moment—time, time was sensational. Time bends…the walls were transparent and home did take on a universal scope that was also so personal. He carried me through a sweeping, moving sensation with his voice. Death would take me through the choices that I made even if I was a child. I realized, I knew, that I had decided “to befriend this concept called death…” because I decided that it was really at the root of whatever was happening to my father. Here he was all these years later to lead me through it. I had never shared these years with a soul.
Children come from many homes, and Death had seen that too, so he could hold that as I struggled about what I did and what I didn’t. He wondered about the stacks of papers that I was piling in my homework room because “I didn’t want to forget my life…” I was stepping back into this house in New Jersey with a new perspective dawning, and no, the feelings weren’t pleasant—sharp, stinging, intense. My father was sick the whole time…I was stumbling back through this house coming to realize that, or beginning to. Across the plush white carpet, Death couldn’t help what the feelings were, but he never lost sight of me. He was really there. That was true. I would get through this, his eyes full of promise.
With vivid colors and sensations across the sea, but I was really underwater, wasn’t I? We reached the shores of New Jersey. We went back to the shore house…I remembered the night that my cousin, a couple of years younger than I was, woke up in the bunk bed above me crying for her grandmother. She had just died. She liked me, I guess, and she didn’t like most people. Her mother like a bird swooped through the darkness and took her. I ran into the living room just trying to hold space. They were seated in a chair on the morning porch. Through the windows, a soft glow mixed with the humidity made for a gauzy shimmering blue-grey atmosphere in the air.
It was a totally foreign image: a mother comforting her daughter. It was a pietà. We stood there for a while. I would never know this. Death really understood. At the time, I felt that, at least, I could appreciate it like that. Was that not true? Did I have to know it? I felt like I had to have a connection to it in some way, but I was also, it turned out, a little confused. I didn’t really want to have a “romantic” relationship with all this. It wasn’t really my perspective. Death didn’t think I lacked anything. I actually felt that way. I felt quite connected in my spiritual life. I didn’t have this, but the “motherless child narrative” totally overshadowed my father and didn’t build me up.
Death’s perspective did: every story ever told….were there awful stories, terrible things? Yes.
It had nothing to do with him. We’re talking about the human experience…the responsibility would fall on us.
That scope in his eyes however was important for that reason, beyond my story.
I couldn’t help that Death’s gaze was—saw right through me—fierce.
Maybe some of my attitudes, which “there was nothing to be ashamed of because it’s a touching moment…”
“I am against shame,” I said to Death in the shadows.
I launched my investigation after these four years because I wanted to blast through the shame with the eyes of a child in search of my mother…Death was waiting…a dead baby back there. I concluded at four that she was a victim of child rape or what was this? Accosting, in the words of an eye-witness, the priest every Sunday with stories of her rapes? ”No filter between realities” came into my head when I was twelve about her. I mean her stories! The only thing my father knew about her was that she was beaten at two years old? Sent away? What were these sick games? It was putrid. No difference between a truth and a lie? What did it mean for other children if I was destined to become her at five, and did anyone hear what they were saying? My mother was barely human.
I actually didn’t really want to do this…
“I was like her kid.”
Or, that’s what I became.
I was contending with all it too when I wasn’t on the page….I was thinking a lot and meditating.
Did I want parents? The “of course you did” wasn’t a part of it. I was dealing with my feelings. I didn’t know how to answer that question, because for me, ultimately, I had to find the power within my own experience. I still dealt with that, though. And you know, as a child, as an adult, I appreciated that about this Death. “How does it go?” He gave me the space to even be a little different. I didn’t have to get sick, okay, and I didn’t want a surprise…in this way. Things happen, but again, it was Death. This was a higher perspective, without a doubt. Miracles? How many stories? Billions, and who knows, years. I was beginning to see through the cracks of this “mask” that I had. I woke up at thirty and realized I was, yet again, in another family. My problems didn’t really go away.
I couldn’t help that this character made sense, you know? I was also reaching for myself at a future point, I think, which could be many. I got focused in that way. This was how I wanted to feel. I wanted to be settled with all this. I wanted to take the good and make a contribution to it and I wanted to get in touch with my wisdom as an old woman who lived… and wrote many books, who knows? Why did I feel so un-talented? Or, I struggled to make a reach in the real because my mother was “a genius.” I wasn’t a “smarts” person. She was obsessed with her genius, and she would end up contacting me when I was in my thirties, indirectly, when I was on the cover of some magazine. I had so many issues with my culture’s obsession with knowledge, I said to Death at nine years old, about to investigate the Catholic Church from the position of “I do not know.” Death thought that it was all relevant.
I never thought I wanted a family….
Death knew.
I don’t know what that means…
I wanted to meet someone though, or maybe more than one, but something.
There were many ideas or points of view that I had that I came to question and it wasn’t all tumultuous either. I went through an experience thus far. We went along these age lines—4/5, 8/9. 12/13—and it was as if this story drew me to the real person to the surface with my parents being the central focus: I emerged as an adult who went through my real childhood. Other ages would come to the surface—10, especially—interviewing one of my mother’s former lovers with a gap in my teeth. I saw myself with lipstick on, seriously doing it as a part of my “undercover investigation,” and I laughed back then and now. Death was by the water cooler watching me do this. Now, I look into the mirror, and I see myself at these different ages—I can feel that in my body. I got back my childhood, too, and even what I loved. I got support when the feelings got tough. The Oldest Storyteller believed with a flock of children from St. Jerome’s School running to greet me that it was a wonderful environment for a story—this school. And I wouldn’t have thought about it. He is a master storyteller—that’s what Death is, excuse me. He saw nothing but the value in me. A story was a valuable thing. Impact—thousands of years even. There was such a thing as an end, and he assured me that there was, but if you cannot destroy energy, then we, too, cannot be destroyed.
I went down the stairs to my father’s garage…I had to become aware of my language…there was a totally different man there. I didn’t even have to look at the same person. I’m speaking in terms of being a storyteller now, which was also “the path” for me. So many versions of my father were born, so many storylines were possible. I could take this character and do this. I could take this character and do this. And, at least, for me, I really cared about these subjects. Death didn’t tell me to back down. I was always passionate about psychology.
It was part of the discussion between Death and me at nine and forward.
I was a “rookie psychologist, PI.”
With my time-bending experiences, I never had a linear perception of time. Death was able to deal with a child like this: totally unphased with him appearing as a character all these years later. Everything is energy and there is nothing without spirit in it. I had mysterious experiences, too, which to Death wasn’t “strange and unreal.” My mother did frighten me. I didn’t want to end up like her, and at the same time, there was so much that Man didn’t understand or was totally off about. “Reality…” He could meet me there. “Lies that are true, truths that are lies…how our knowledge limits us…we were more than any definition.”
Directions change…Death said in the car.
“We’re navigating.”
But how do we navigate through time?
I felt time bend at nine and Death was fine.
“It’s true,” he said with no issue with my spirit in the hallway of my cousin’s house.
“Probable future events can affect the real past.”
We could move through time as my life began opening up and reorganizing and I was discovering and rediscovering and finding new avenues of experience —points in time. I went through a lot in my body, just to be real, but it was a feeling of freedom I was reaching for — real freedom. Points in time that held so much weight softened and they also changed. Some points weren’t “bright” either, you see, but it didn’t make my direction negative, it was positive to say that it was not bright, too, to not make-believe. It wasn’t the point here, either. “Bright and light” was my mother to the max with brutal stories falling out of her mouth, just a difficult woman to digest. These points might…not hold so much power and weight….they will not define my life….and I didn’t have to be afraid, and that took real effort sometimes. New moments took on new significance, the two of us falling back into cafe chairs in Paris, France.
“Time flies…”
“Your whole life flashes before your eyes…which one? Which life?”
Why do I always find myself back here in these chairs with him? Meaning. Who knows? But this time, I got through it, and I am physically relieved. I didn’t even need to go down the road, the one that brought me here. I wanted to “sit in spirit,” and what did that mean? Even if this moment was subtle, it resonated with so much feeling, and it was transformed. I got small moments, too, intimate moments with myself, and with others, too, but again, it was my heartbeat. In the end, it was a life, and it was mine. It meant something.
So, yes, it began at 4 AM. At the last original apartment at the Chelsea Hotel.