Secret Letter

I never told anyone but Mark, an alter and Spiritual ground, what happened to me those first two years after brain surgery between 1998 and 2000. In the gentle year of the Rabbit (1999), a year after the surgery, I came in contact with the natural and kind demon known to Catholism as Michael. What had happend was small and uninteresting to the surface, but for the inside of my head, it was a war ready to be layered over and at the soft age of seven, forgotten about.

What I remember and what happened have blurred a bit over the years, but the fact found, remains. I was raped in this timeline. It took me years to fully grapple what that had done to me, for me, because of me; but I was rape.

I was raped.

I know in this mini-series of posts I have made under the title Secret Letter, I've grown comfortable dancing around this web I've woven about my journey through Witchcraft: Natural healing, that created a world of raw wonder and trauma I was unwilling to let go of.

What I remember

What I did hold onto for many years was my introduction to Michael. It was over the course of a school year where most of this took place, a fragment, held onto as a single moment in time when the kindergarden playground, seporating the big playground from the smaller one, where I had most of my seizures two and a half years before that, held most of the dialog and narration of what most spiritual believers call Michaelmas or The Feast of St. Michael. In this moment, my second coming was pulled up to the surface as information on my mother about the closest name Michael could hold onto to keep themselves from fading away while my trauma was in review. Michael's introduction was "I killed Lucifer" and mine was "No, you didn't." Which stopped everything in Mark and began again.

In that curfuckal, a few moments I had forgotten about, a fall so important it had me named, and a moment in first grade where all eyes were on me because my beanie had flown off my head and onto the ground exposing the staples in my head and left me shocked and afraid to move had been called into question. St. Michael left no stone unturned as we went through each fold I had buried in the 'soft launch' era of my recovery (1998-1999, respectfully.)

I was going to be fine.

But then I whispered a name, unvoluntarily, and hidden from the surface, calling on the very being I had told Michael he had not killed.

And it all started again.

This time more alters rose for it. I was witness to several attempts to get me to lay back down. And let myself play in Michael as a respectful age I was being re-educated to be again. A sharp pain errupted from the right side of my head and trickled into every inch of me painfully, as my body explored a name that was no longer human but not yet dead to obligation. An anger errupted somewhere in my process and it all started again.

Like a really painful reenactment of Groundhog Day or Happy Death Day, over the course of a year, I experienced names twice. Holes began to form where trauma had sat and my ideal pleasure was filling those holes kindly. To explain to me what it was that was being lived through elsewhere as experience in a name that still related to mine, my imagination in a state I called Tunnelverse, created such events like Pokemon Gym Training which was very abstract and with timeline at the time. Which I hadn't fully understood until I was in my twenties and held my first Pokemon game ever.

The Tunnelverse saved me when reality couldn't hold what was happening. My seven-year-old brain built entire worlds to survive what I couldn't yet name. It would take years before I understood what those abstract Pokemon gyms were training me for—not a game, but the weight of living through what happened and still becoming someone on the other side of it.

I'm still learning what that year taught me. Still learning how to hold Michael's kindness and my own anger in the same hand. Still learning that the names we whisper, even involuntarily, have power—and that surviving them does too.