The Laboratory Blew Up

Aphrodite wishes me to share this experience that I am undertaking in these fragile world-shocking moments, and sometimes there are mistakes when the alchemist is working. She wants me to share that, too, so that you know even a priest can fuck up their magical workings, even a priest can falter in the face of zir own history, and the truth of that history.

This is part of what made me, what molded me, a memory that came so clear in recent days that it cries out to be shared. Content warning: I brush up against the topic of sexual assault, but I do not mention details.

I was in my Laboratory I was working the dangerous materials to alchemize them into positive memories and an experience that could have fed my soul, once, once, once. But yes, aforementioned dangerous chemicals, things that I shouldn’t be exposed to, still radioactive after all these years. Still able to lay me low if handled incorrectly.

But I took every precaution.

It didn’t matter. Old dynamite sweats nitroglycerin. Haven’t you heard?

Right, so other old reagents become toxic and explosive, other old reagents can tear out your heart if you’re not careful, and I faltered for but a moment alone, and found myself irreparably scraped by memory.

Once upon a time, a thing happened to me that was not so good, a thing that I didn’t even consider bad at the time, just scary, and that it was something to be buried buried buried beneath layers and layers of negation and denial. No, this horrible thing did not happen to me when I was tremendously vulnerable. No, I did not experience this cruel betrayal that I lied about so as to preserve ultimate peace.

If my father had known there would have been war.

SO TO SPARE ALL THAT, the nascent genderfluid pixy who would one day in the fullness of time become the Oracle J covered over it with earth and sand and stone and rebar and steel and lead and any other barriers I could devise, especially those that obscured memory of words and hands and desperation.

But in trying to open the sealed package on the shelf in the farthest reaches of my mind, I found myself assailed by the immune system I had created for it, I felt sick and sad and scared again, bewildered and confused and hurt again, ugly and dirty and besmirched again. Blisters erupted on my fingers, my lips, my heart in response to the radioactive material I meant to alchemize to something harmless and holy.

This happens, I say to myself soothingly, as if every alchemist has experienced this in their own laboratories and have sat, slathered in radioactive sludge and clinging, searing acids, their eyes unable to focus. I drew four cards to make sense of it all.

Aether, The Void

Within this mystical riddle I have held this secret for a long time. It has no bearing on the now, I said. It will change nothing, I said. I never worked through it in therapy except to mention it in passing. Yes, this thing happened to me. Let’s move on. The Void explains that I can’t do that anymore. The Void cannot be known but it can make its wishes known with little opportunity for recourse. This card appears when something has been released. I let this secret out and it’s running rampant, everywhere. It must be dealt with. Destiny shifts in the darkness. It is for me to meditate, breathe, and sit with memory, get comfortable with ghosts, before I can do the true work of alchemizing the story to a positive one.

Autumnus, Autumn

In the falling action of this movement, I’ve been in the falling action for thirty years. Dredge it up and let it rest in as much peace as we can muster. The grand narrative of the earth is repeated in our little lives. I can find closure through this Work, if I can hold on, if my hands can withstand the heat. (bring forge mittens!) Flow with the spirits of gratitude and generosity, open my heart to forgiveness? Can I forgive what was probably a compounded misunderstanding on both our parts? What is his ultimate gift to me, if there is one? Let this come to fruition and then release it.

Iosis, The Reddening

Everything in the work is alive, roiling just under the surface of one layer of skin. You can see it move, you can see it twist and yearn to birth itself from its prison. What was dormant has now been awakened. Aches and pains are integrated, and my body feels each one. This signified a climax of The Work, a brilliantly alive climax that should coat me in protection as I delve deeper into memory. What occurs in the body is reflected in the world. The land is one with the J and the J is one with the land. My cheeks reddened when they looked at me and my body, judging me as only teen boys can judge. Even now I feel myself blushing hotly at the memory. To be judged… and found wanting. A terrible thing for an insecure person to bear at just fourteen.

Azure Vault, The Blue Temple

In this, the home of the alchemist’s imagination, I find depths I never thought were possible. It begs me to be willing to see, to penetrate with my eyes, to connect my ocular nerves to the environment so that nothing is missed, everything is scanned, and all is familiar. I will be opening myself to the great heavy moods induced by this card, as deep as the Marianas, as shallow as the shore, shades both grim and glorious. Blue is an eternal mystery, and that must be accepted to walk the halls of the Azure Vault. I will cloak myself the sapphire robe of my spiritual ancestors and sit in these sacred halls.

Memory, oh memory, how long must you stay to haunt my days?

In the summer of 1993 I am a mature-looking fourteen year old and for the most part I am femme but I like to wear my dads’ clothes whenever I can, especially their ties and suspenders. These things please me, but I don’t have the language for the why yet.

I am cute for the first time in my life, by which I mean thinner than I’ve ever been. It’s always been drummed into me that pretty cannot be achieved without skinny, so for the past year I have been on a heavily restricted diet and forced to do exercise that I despite. I hate it all, in fact. I want full bodily freedom but I don’t have the language for that yet, either.

My figure is still what society then called full, at size eight. No, it did not make sense to me either. Having been fat for the majority of my life, I do not know how to handle the sexual attention of men, and this comes into play later. Besides, I had come out as bisexual earlier that year, and thought that was sword and shield enough to keep the worst of it away.

It wasn’t.

But I am not thinking of that, when one day at the pool in high summer I see unfamiliar boys my age. I remain aloof but I watch from behind my sunglasses. I have music on via headphones, and in that monumental summer I am primarily listening to Duran Duran. I am not sexually interested in these boys or as boyfriends, but one is at the very least cute and I want to be regular friends. 

I am too shy to do it, to say something to them, especially in my bathing suit. There’s a vulnerability there that you don’t want to display when you are meeting new people, and I was not at all confident in my appearance because again, I was “full-figured” and full figured in the early nineties meant fat. Not wanting to be embarrassed in front of a full community pool, I left in sudden haste.

But at home, it ate at me. I could not countenance my cowardice, this is not who I was raised to be! I had struggled the year before in making friends, but I was destined to attend an entirely new school where I knew no one. If I had done it once before, even uphill, then I could do it again.

Oh how I agonized over trying to meet them on friendly terms. After a lot of self-soothing and inspirational motivational talk, I went back to the pool to see if they were still there. I felt it was imperative, imperative, a fulcrum upon which I must be turned, a critical moment required to proceed in life. I still do not know the why of it all, when all it got me was confusion and pain.

I discovered they were brothers, in town to visit family who lived in our condo complex. But the one I thought was cute - and maybe he looked a little like Simon Le Bon, I don’t have his face in full memory - rebuffed me and foisted me to his brother. I suppose I wasn’t cute enough for him. But I got on well enough with his brother, as friends, and we determined to write each other. In truth I didn’t expect to hear from him.

But letters came frequently and I wrote back frequently, in an age before computers claimed our communication protocols entirely. I wrote of mundane things. The novel I was working on. My hopes for my academic future, which was rapidly approaching as the summer ripened through that July and into August. I never felt that anything we said was flirty, or even hinted at that angle of interpreting the relationship.

He felt differently and I found out the hard way when he came back to visit his family again.

So I meant to bring this whole thing to surface, mold it into the desired shape as if it were clay, and turn it from something of terror into a source of heat and light, healing the wounded J-ling. I think I can do it. But first I needed to write this out, open the way, lift my lamp at the darkened portal.

I can cleanse my past self of shame, of pain, of hiding. I can hope. I can heal.

And so can we all. May it ever be so, my loves. I send all of you my affection, my support, my unending care. We can make it through this, together.