zephyrblu - Tumblr blog

zephyrblu · 1 year ago

Text

Most alive in the twilight (an essay)

I always knew I was an odd one based on my early, unequivocal, and undying love for The Twilight Zone.

In 1994, my parents were rear-ended while I was in the womb. My mom was rushed to the hospital in a flurry of panic for the unborn (look where we are now) - my father sustained a back injury that went virtually unnoticed in the commotion. He loves to remind people of that.

During my childhood, every year from New Year’s Eve into New Year’s Day there would be a Twilight Zone marathon on tv, channel 38 (no cable). I would binge endlessly, captivated by the irony, the curiosity, the humanity, the penchant for the uncanny. I recognized even then that each episode touched on the deepest truths of life and death, and of course, the space in between them.

To this day every time the camera clumsily and endearingly shifts over to Rod Serling’s unmistakable image, cig in hand, a literary Don Draper at his best, all I can hear in my mind is my dad mimicking his voice and inflection with emphasis. I wish I could write the sound of his impression into this essay so you could hear it. It’s pretty good.

My aunt Mary had a lengthy DVD collection, including all of the show’s seasons. I was never sure whether she had so many DVDs before Mattie got sick or because he got sick. I suppose we were only on the cusp of the VHS to DVD transition when that particular manifestation of the in-between-ness of living and dying began to seed itself. (2000? 2001?)

My parents…being cheap, would borrow what they could as far as movies. We borrowed the Twilight Zone box set, and again I binged over those sweet indulgent winter breaks you still get in middle school when you don’t have a job yet but you’re old enough to stay home alone. As a child I found myself somewhat bored by the episodes about elderly life and 20th century wars - things I had little entry-point to relate to at the time. (“if it doesn’t involve me I just have to remove it”-Lauryn Hill in self-critique).

On the Eve of 2023, I found myself with a hankering for the nostalgia of a Twilight Zone marathon. As if it were a friend from my past that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Someone long forgotten that I’d only briefly checked in with on social media a couple times, but didn’t really know what their life was like these days. I found a place to stream it online, and with just a hit I felt my life-blood flow and my infatuation with the show re-invigorate. I realized more and more how much its aethetics, storylines, acute observations, and brutal irony had been woven into the fabric of my worldview.

I “discovered” the word liminal during college. 2015 or so. Joan Watson (bless her chaotic heart) opened my eyes to the siginiface of etymology in the language we use. As I was struggling to find my Art and searching for ways to describe the things in my heart, mind, and spirit that words could not (such is the point of making art) I would leisurely look up etymology of different words that I found interesting or relevant. At some point I stumbled upon this miraculous word that held within its grasp everything I felt life was about. (My path of truly understanding the weight of this would take years - until I decided in 2020 to name my art practice in this word and my beloved material’s honor.) Liminal - a threshhold. An in-between. Comes from the same etymology as the words line, limit. It’s true it is used in calculus, eg, “the limit does not exist!” (I waited so long from the Mean Girls hayday of 2004 until I finally got to calculus in 2011 to find out that I still didn’t get what she meant when she said that, meaning they just phrased it that way for cinematic and quotable effect. What a disappointment.) To me the concept of liminal was very real and very expansive.

I had always been fascinated by that space in the early evening sky just after sunset where it transitioned from the clouds being lighter than the background - white on blue - to them appearing darker than it - darker grey on light blue. Was it just an appearance? An optical illusion? An Albers style color instability? Much like the sky being perceived as blue in the first place? Regardless - it looked real, it was potent, it was inspiring, it was magnificently beautiful, and most of all it was repeatable. It was not a one-time fluke. I began to see it many evenings in the sky. Then I began to see it in other things. Everywhere.

This in-between-ness or transitional space became louder in my awareness until I had to put a name to it. Liminal space.

The time between night and day, day and night. Twilight is liminal space.

The time between summer and winter, the extremes of climate - spring and fall are liminal space. Things being born and things dying. Not yet fully alive or fully dead.

The full moon and the new moon are liminal space. When it’s full it has a brief moment from growing to being full before its starts shrinking again, and same in reverse for the new moon.

The organ that serves dutifully as the barrier between our inner and outer worlds - our skin - is liminal space.

The state of gestation for both carrier and child (pregnancy) is liminal space. For the carrier: not just one person, but not yet two. For the child: not not alive, but also not an independent living being just yet.

Water is a liminal medium. It is the amniotic fluid, it is the ocean, it is the baptism, the cleansing, the life-blood. It carries and nourishes its own liminal spaces. The space between the container and the overflow of the container, where the water stays due to surface tension.

Every threshold, every transtion, every moment of change, of growth or decay - is liminal space. It is everything. It could be god. (I've heard that god is change.)

At some point it dawned on me that my formative years watching The Twilight Zone and imbibing its concepts and subtleties had prepared me for this later synthesis of understanding. It had formulated this idea in my mind before I had the capacity or life experience to recognize or contextualize it. Now, when describing the liminal space to askers, I often refer back to the Twilight Zone. Some folks get the reference, others don’t.

Fast forward (or rewind, not sure where we are at present) to 2017. A vision for a life I’d be truly content with and inspired by was budding in my heart for the very first time. I was sleeping in a tent in Marshall, NC on Josh’s property.

In the liminal space between sleep and waking - hypnopompia (a great word) - I looked up blurrily at a very real and crisp pink moon, a waning gibbous. A guy I’d met over the past few days said to me, as if out of the sky, “you have a good moon for your drive,” referring to the 500 mile journey home to Baltimore that lay ahead of me that day. The moon was definitely there in “real life” - but was his voice? Why was it him? He had no significance to me. Was it a hypnopompic hallucination, as they call it? Or was the message just as real as the moon? I didn’t know, but decided to take it as a good omen.

I awoke; everyone else was already gone. Having the place to myself, I went up the hill and blissfully picked blueberries, filling one of my newly fired baskets with their bounty. That ceramic basket of blueberries was on the floor of my passenger seat when it happened. The basket survived. The blueberries didn’t.

Had I not stopped for gas, to do a quick and dirty duct tape job on part of my bumper that was coming loose, would it not have happened? Would it have happened to someone else? Would it still have happened to me in a different way? The liminal space of time passing, moment to moment, and the infinite possibilities, permutations, and forking paths hung heavy. This haunted me for a while.

If I had died, would there have been some sign? Like in the episodes Mr. Death, or The Hunt, or The Hitch-Hiker - the deceased witness their loved ones mourning, or their still body on the bed. They eventually stumble upon the messengers of death who clarify everything and sweep them away wistfully to eternity. In my case, life went on as usual for those around me and I never had what they call an “out of body” experience of seeing myself from the outside.

I was unconscious for an unknown amount of time. Seconds, minutes? I'll never know. Maybe that was when I left my body and my heart won't let me remember.

He had earbuds in. All the times my dad had taught me to not be afraid to use my horn when necessary ran through my mind as I leaned on my horn and the noise deafened me and I looked up to my right and he kept on going as if he heard nothing and saw nothing and felt nothing. He was heartless, soul-less - from my view - in those seconds. Was he Mr. Death?

It was a roller coaster. I haven’t been on a roller coaster since, though I used to love the thrill and the dropping in my stomach. Now sometimes I panic that one day, I will find myself at an amusement park, and briefly, blissfully, forgetting my trauma I will step down into the car of a roller coaster, be strapped in, only to remember at the last moment, when the car starts moving, it’s too late to get off, and find myself reliving my own pseudo-death. It sounds like the worst of nightmares and I don’t know why I put myself through imagining the reality of it and the utter fear and pain I imagine I would feel. (Although…what if it de-sensitized me? I don’t really want to find out.)

The stand-in mother who'd been driving behind me and saw the whole thing play out thought I was dead. My therapist said she was my angel. Does that mean I really was dead? And that’s why she could see me? Did she bring me back to life with that water and that hug?

I had no way to know that she saw what was unfolding and would have been prepared to stop. Certainly the cars behind her wouldn’t have. Cars in the fast lane are brutal. They literally don’t seem to care if someone dies as long as they get to their destination “on time” while achieving the adrenaline rush of driving 90 mph.

I also knew my parents had taught me that a sudden stop could cause a rear-ending (when I would stop for a squirrel). And I knew from driver’s ed that you should keep at least a 6-second following distance when driving at highway speeds at all times. I also knew that no one actually follows that rule. Somehow in that moment I envisioned a pile-up if I stepped on my brakes. A disastrous one. The kind where 20 cars get piled up because everyone was going over 80 with a 1-3 second following distance. A recipe for disaster. I thought the only way out was forward (see Don Draper).

It may have been, but the way it happened, that’s when I lost control.

I was alone. But when I awoke I saw Kaity in my passenger seat, dead from not having her seatbelt on. She wasn’t really there. Her pots were all dead though.

One never realizes the muscle memory of the every-day minute activities we ask our bodies to do, like clicking the button to remove your seatbelt. When you are right-side up and gravity is working in your favor, it’s nothing to press that red rectangle with your thumb and it just pops out and you’re free. But when you’re upside-down, and gravity is against you, and you don’t know what the fuck just happened, that car became my prision the seatbelt my cell and the button the key that was hanging just a couple inches farther than my arm’s length away. I panicked, seeing the whole car blow up with me and Kaity inside of it. Why is this so hard? Why can’t I click it? Until I did click it and slid gently up the seat to rest my head on the ceiling. The window was half open. I managed to escape through it before the inevitable explosion (that never ended up happening). Once free, I ran. Shoeless, scared, I fought to get out and then I flew. I needed to get as far away as possible.

“Ma’am… please sit down ma’am,” the trooper patronized me with hands on hips. (When did he get there? How long was I out? Who called 911?)

He froze me. I would have kept going as long as the adrenaline would take me. I could have run miles in that instant. The crabby grass and highway shards beneath my feet held no bearing on my personal marathon for survival. I didn’t think I had made it out alive yet.

“You’re so stoic,” they said in the ambulance.

“You look like you’ve been mud-wrestling,” they said in the hospital.

Another angel, a nurse, let me use her phone. I still didn’t call my parents. Theirs were the only numbers I knew by heart.

Kyle was my Shrek, his volvo, Donkey (a knight and his noble steed). Against all odds, they came and took me home that night. I took a bath. Submerged, I gestated and took stock and prepared for life after.

The following weeks were a cloud of acute PTSD, fooling myself I was well enough to work, not knowing how one deals with a situation like this and the legalities of it, facing a cannabis possession charge in Virginia, being taken advantage of by the other driver's insurance company, and feeling utterly alone. Some of these never stopped.

I don’t even know how I moved back home. I don’t remember that flight. I don’t remember seeing my parents for the first time or other relatives. I don’t remember getting home that day or what I ate or how I felt. I know there was home-ness, comfort, love, support, friends, and gratitude.

That soon became tainted with the sensation that I wasn’t really alive - that all of this was a dream that was happening in the moments of my blackout while still in the overturned car. I never knew how long I’d blacked out for, so it seemed to reason that maybe I was still there, blacked out. Like a dream that feels a lifetime but takes place in a few moments. I moved like a ghost. I got a job, went to work, got in the car and commuted an hour each way every day, including on the highway. I had undiagnosed panic attacks when a truck came close to me on the road, or really any other car. Or when my co-worker came to work with his windshield completely smashed in by a rogue tire that came off a semi and flew straight at the glass and into his back seat…. I didn’t go to counseling or physical therapy. I thought I might lose my license due to having been caught with a gram of weed in my car when the whole thing happened. Couldn’t even smoke because I thought I’d have to get drug-tested. Our household got scabies. It was a dark time. No wonder I thought I was dead.

The feeling never really went away. It wasn’t all that different from earlier experiences of feeling that it’s all part of a matrix. Early knowings of a soul/witness self that exists on a different plane from this physical world. It was and is so easy to shift my lens from presence and living/being to dissociation and the sense of being removed, of watching a movie or dream play out, purporting to be my “life.” It’s much harder to shift back.

A couple of months ago in the midst of my most recent Twilight Zone bender I watched an episode called “The Hitch-Hiker.” It opens with a young woman, around my age, white, blonde, alone, on a road trip. Nothing revolutionary but I identify with her immediately. She is being helped by a man on the side of the road, and they talk about how she’d gone off the road and been very lucky to come out okay and be able to continue on. She does - continue, but things are different. She begins to see an older man, a hitch-hiker, a very average looking man but with a somewhat spooky or unsettling, curious air about him. He always seems to be ahead of her wherever she goes. She begins to panic, facing a reality of being stalked by this man, who says to her, “I think you’re going, my way?” (or something like that). Finally she becomes stuck on railroad tracks in her car while he watches. As a train approaches and she is unable to start the car, she finally exits just in time before the train plows on down the tracks. She goes to a phone booth and calls for her mother. She states who she is to the woman on the line, who seems to have answered because the mother has had a nervous breakdown. The woman on the line questions her, saying that the young woman herself had died in a car crash just days prior, sending her mother into deep sorrow. The young woman drops the phone in disbelief.

I had seen the episode before but did not remember the ending, and I don’t think I’d seen it since my crash. It dawned on me: THAT IS WHAT MY LIFE FEELS LIKE. I had never felt so seen, so understood, had my post-crash experience described so accurately as to arise goosebumps in my maybe ghost/maybe alive arms (liminally alive).

I wrote in a journal during the dark time that the crash and its aftermath had been the loneliest experience of my life. I still feel that way, which is what prompted me to write this. In the hope that maybe, finally, I can communicate what I went through with others in a way they’d understand.

But before today, on watching that episode, I felt, this is it. This is my life. This is going to be the best way to describe to anyone the feeling I’ve had ever since the crash that I’m living as a ghost in some alternate reality or dream or hallucination - that somehow I didn’t fully die but am not fully alive. That I’m living out this version of my life in the twilight, in the shadow, in the impression of what my “real” life once was. Before. (Not to say it’s been lived in the shadow, I have a beautiful life I am extremely grateful for, when I’m able to be present. That’s the duality.)

When I told all of this to Wendy, she found it fascinating. To the proposition that I might be dead, and this all a dream of sorts, she simply said, “maybe you are!” For some reason, that alone was validating and healing like nothing I’d heard before in all the mess of folks not knowing what to say. I finally have begun to understand: maybe I am a ghost or a brain-dead body on the hospital bed, living out a sort of dream version of what my life could have been, noticing tv shows that play on this exact theme and taking great meaning from them. Maybe I did drive straight into the Twilight Zone. Maybe when I woke up that morning with the pink moon I was already in it. But is this liminal space that I may or may not occupy any less real that what I’d previously considered “real life”? Is it any less real than the blue color of the sky, or the pink color of the moon that morning, or the voice telling me I had a good moon for my drive, perhaps forecasting my survival?

It’s all happening in my retinas and that mysterious body/brain/spirit connection - there seems to be no hierarchy of “real.”

#living with ptsd #trauma healing #trauma processing #twilight zone #dissociation #mva #motor vehicle accident #mva survivor #car crash survivor #questioning reality #storytime #creative writing #healing

2 notes · View notes