She Knows The Devil

When consumed by darkness, animal instinct demands a search for light. Tachycardia sets in and breaths become ragged as pupils dilate, frantically seeking distant brightness. Fickle, formidable hope will hang you from her promises in this inauspicious arena.

Such was the nature of my thoughts as I sat, half listening, beside my doe-eyed toddler.

“Go faster, Mama! Faster!”

I looked from him to the smartwatch my husband had gifted me for my thirty-fifth birthday—if I fell in isolation again, I could get help no matter where I'd absently left my smartphone.

Twenty minutes left.

“Sorry, love. That’s hard for Mama.” I slowly, animatedly moved the sticky red car around the table.

My darkness was not the absence of visible light, but rather one of constant, crippling pain. I had not been afforded a moment of bodily peace in years, nor had my son experienced a present mother.

“MAMA, come on, faster! Please?” His words burst through my fog. I offered a small grin and tried in earnest to keep up with him.

At all times, just beneath the smiling facade, I was screaming for relief, certain strangers could taste my suffering on their lips and feel my despair leaching into our shared space.

Shifting my focus fully to my son, his long brown curls unbound in honor of a favorite cartoon superhero, I grinned. “Your car is supercharged! How’d you manage that, clever kid?”

The compliment lit him up from within as he continued maneuvering through the endless sea of toys in our living room. “VROOM!”

“One last race, then it’s shower time, stinky!” Just a little longer, and I can stop pretending.

As I moved with him, lightning shot ceaselessly up from my soles, seeking out the soulless places CT scans, MRIs, and experts could not see. The top specialists insisted my case was unique and had a range of theories, each an empty echo of the next and last. “It’s a very unique case, hang in there,” was their song’s sad refrain.

The pain could have stemmed from deteriorating joints, a faulty screw within a failing lumbar fusion, or poor protoplasm. Worse yet, I may have gone insane and built the cage around myself, at once the perpetrator and victim. “Neuroplastic pain,” one clinician had named the prison-wall phenomenon. “It’s probably all in your head.”

After his bedtime routine, I tucked my darling three-year-old into bed beside his dad and filled his mind with goodness. Mine might be broken, but his was brand new and oh-so-spongy. I offered knowledge of our love, his safety, and the precious role he played in our family. It was the best I could do. With a kiss, I watched him snuggle into my husband’s frame before blowing out the light on the count of “one, two, THREE!”

I spun out of the room, swallowed the last ten of the day’s pills in a single gulp, and deflated.

The quality of my darkness was exquisite. My waking hours were spent seeking refuge from images my medical mind reflexively conjured: quadriceps twisted by an invisible hand, an incision making way for the scooping out of all anatomy integral to my hip, barbed wire wrapped around bones and digging deeper into adjacent structures with each movement. The hope of rest was whisked away either by the type of insomnia unique to the chronically pained or on the wings of doomed REM cycles.

I was simultaneously desperate for respite and terrified to cede consciousness—my circadian rhythm a demented ouroboros, a toxin-toothed serpent eating its own poisonous tail.

Without warning, once again, my body was being dipped in Hell. I hovered above something akin to the ocean’s surface for a time, and was then plunged up to my navel. As in the seconds after a gruesome injury you might look upon the damage in a painless state, I noticed that the depths of this sea had become a charred, scarred landscape upon which ghastly figures were either administering or enduring all manner of torture. Finally, adrenaline having given way, nothing but the mind-boggling extent of the pain could register. My bones reverberated as though I’d jumped from a too-tall building onto concrete, acid replaced synovial fluid in joints that were surely on the verge of erosion, and steel rods spun through the flesh of my thighs, all unheeded by my pleas or personhood. When I finally escaped the nightmare, it was only to find that its satanic sensations paled in comparison to those of my waking nervous system.

“Good morning, Mama!” On a sour wave of morning breath—mixed with blessed notes of coffee wafting from the kitchen—the cycle began again.

That night, I watched helplessly from a high-rise window as an explosion rocked my city. The mushroom cloud’s intense heat and pressure moved toward me in slow motion, but no amount of preparation could have readied my senses. I was obliterated, unhurriedly, inch by fleshy inch. At once inside and outside myself, I was shielded from no piece of the experience. My gut-wrenching fragility was set in stark, startling relief as pale skin was flayed from muscle and sinew. At long last, I was nothing. My mind, though, got stuck, playing on repeat a particularly gruesome moment. Half of my blonde curls were singed against bony skull, the entire mess awash in blood mixed with black and grey ash. Horrifically, the other half of my head held an ocean blue eye paralyzed in fear as heartbreaking agony swam through its depths. When I was finally wrenched from that image into the waking world, the ironic focus became that of my bodily tether to the hurt fueling the nightmares.

“Honey, are you okay? You were screaming. I-I couldn’t wake you.” My husband saw so much more than I hoped.

Knowing I had to talk to someone, I offered a therapist graphic excerpts from my journal, hopeful the agony might be exorcised along with my words.

“Imagine meeting a demon, all teeth and terror, who shrieks a promise to come for your only child when you’re least expecting it. Or instead of your kid serving as monster food, you realize that your friends, in light of some demented curse, have chosen you as an unwitting sacrifice to one of Hell’s children. Once, I relived the moment my miscarriage was confirmed, wading through pools of my own blood and devastation on an endless loop until morning came to end my mourning. Another night, I was chased for what felt like an eternity by an abusive ex whose murderous intent was made clear only when his knife met my stern–.”

I stopped at the sight of her face, her silence deafening. What do you say to someone who intimately knows the devil?

My sweet child found me after the session. “Did she help your back?” He always wanted to know if I’d been healed by any appointment that took me from him—I couldn’t possibly let on what they took from me.

After many meetings with an ancestral healer—a Hail Mary from rock bottom—I finally surrendered to his wisdom. Somehow, he led me into a state of connectedness with long-passed kin and a well version of my body. In that space, a few non-apoplectic brain cells began to sense dissonance. Urged to resist the siren’s song of darkness, I was, unbelievably, kept from crashing upon pain’s undeserving rocks.

I was shown that it—the darkness, Pain—was an entity, a heavy fog encircling my muchness. It did not belong to me, rather I existed within and beside it. While I was trapped nonetheless, this small distinction was powerful.

Defiant, desperate to reintroduce myself to my son, I continued to shut my seeing eyes tight.

That particular darkness was controlled and chosen by me, and so I made time to regularly meet myself in that way. There I would occasionally find myself able to wield magic born in a fiery kiln of misery and mindfulness. Where numbness and burning had constantly clouded my nerve-endings, I could sometimes summon sensation. While to most the ability to distinguish between their toes may have seemed trivial, for me it was everything. It was power, relief, normalcy. Those fleeting moments often birthed tears of radiant joy. I’d let the salty droplets cascade down my face, choosing to focus on their cold, wet trails versus dwelling on the dwindling spell in my digits.

“Why you cryin’, Mama?” I hadn’t heard him come in.

“I just love you so much, sweetheart.”

I loved my family, so when the best I could do was settle back into the inky black, I would remind myself this was for them and feel no shame in hiding amongst my people from that which lurked beyond my lids. Try as Pain might to lure me out, pledging peace if I peeked, I refused to fall prey to false promises.

After several months, the nutrients of this powerful practice pulled ancient truths to the forefront. First, I am made of stardust, the stuff of the universe is the stuff of my fabric. Thus, my belief in my internal light will be the very source from which it draws power into eternity—the toxic ouroboros turned luminescent. Second, I can tune in to stardust-laden spirit guides willing to illuminate my life from the core of my being, the edge of the universe, and eons ago all at once.

I can tune in, and so I do. Thanks to them, I wield magic with my eyes open. I can light up my mind and the world and the galaxy if I so choose. It matters not what tries to come for me or what lies my nervous system is told. I can slam the gate shut or rip it wide open and teach Pain a lesson or two.

“Mama, you really okay? You hurtin’?” Perfect, sunshine child, you have no idea.

“I’m fine, little love. The pain is still there, but it’s going to be okay.” My smile was incandescent.

It will be okay, because I am a nightmare-eater, and I am inconsumable.