It was at the height of Ghost Month in late August. I had just moved into a two bedroom sublet in Williamsburg after months of going back and forth between North Carolina and New York. It was a Friday night. I fell into a long meditation and this is what I wrote after. —
With the window I have today, I reach into the space and call on Ahma (my maternal grandmother). I feel her wrap her arms around me. I begin to cry. Her embrace is warm and vibrational. She imparts questions and visions on me:
Summer has started to fold into itself. What had been planted in the rain and ice of the year’s earlier days has been birthed past the point of ripeness. Flesh and flower begin to rot, oozing juices and withering petals out onto the streets for all to see. We all lay bare under the pounding sun of August.
My return to New York City is both oddly familiar and entirely novel. One side of my soul sighs with disillusionment, having to tread down streets and tunnels that we’ve already memorized. One side of my soul learns to look twice at everything with a smile. Look twice and fall inward. I meet old faces with new eyes. No longer flaunting my disguise.
Yet past wounds still peak through to haunt me at certain corners. Particularly the wound about not wanting to be seen, and wanting to stay small. In the deepest folds of my body, I feel a sense of danger to reveal these parts of myself. The eternal parts. The ones I see when I close my eyes. I would peel back the layers and they would eat me slice by slice. I know because I’ve seen it. I know because I feel it.
I feel the pain of my grandmother in the tears that roll down my cheeks. Even as she comes to comfort me, she asks to work through me. She asks to hold a light to my family and excavate the pain that follows me. If I told you, would you kill me? Maybe that’s what my mother thought when she held her shame inside as a young girl. Even I became someone who could resent her for her suffering, for the lessons that were out of her control. She let the years of secrets drip out, one by one until my vision was blurred.
Have you wondered what the shadow is that follows you? It is the forgiveness waiting to see the light. It is a clearing where maternal lines hold each other in love. It is the presence of the past that begs to be looked at. Forgive me. Forgive me for the resentment that I aim at your pain. If we are all separate souls then how do the karmic family cycles bleed into the present day? Hand in hand.
I asked and I received the answers. Now I can’t remember what it was like to not know. ///