Sicily 6/29/24
My home being a former winery (a bulbous, 200 liter glass decanter sits in the corner still), I don’t know that anyone would have lived and died in it. Although, I also don’t know how old the building is and the uses it may have gone through. The house is quiet, nothing creaks or groans, I only hear sounds of life: insects flying in and out, the family across the street with two teenagers, birds singing and plucking elderberries, the mouse that lives under the roof tiles, distant sheep and roosters, the church bells, and sometimes a car.
The upper floor has been stuccoed, the floor is concrete as well as the sleeping platform, which has a small chamber embedded in it for the bucket that holds the water for the gravity shower downstairs. I leave the big window open at night for the cool forest air, which invites in mosquitoes and occasionally a dragonfly, certainly lots of moths, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.
As for an afterlife, I certainly do believe that the soul carries on.
The last week or so, the mosquitoes have been fewer but I’ve been getting that sensation of not being alone. That sensation in itself is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, it only needs to be thought once and then it will keep coming back, so I try not to give it too much credence.
I awake shortly after falling asleep but well after midnight, none too pleased about it, and disturbed by the dream I was having. I try to close my eyes, but keep opening them. The room doesn’t get completely dark because of the warm, orange glow of the village streetlights*, and my eyes scan the room. Of course, it is just an empty room.
I turn over onto my stomach and prop myself on my elbows. Any spirits in this building have to leave, I command you to go back to the light, I think to myself, this being something I learned to do on the internet. At least, it gives me a sense of control over my fear of the dark, like a low wall to climb on to get away from a dog.
A moment later there’s an enormous, dull THUMP directly next to me, like someone has stomped their foot on the concrete floor with all their might.
Of course, it startles me. The thump occurs in the absence of anything physically moving.
Needless to say, I slept with the lights on after that.
And yet, a little poltergeist is just the other side of the coin, isn’t it? For the forest at dusk to be filled with sprites and nearly phosphorescent as the last rays of sun meld with the coming night, our world has to be layered with worlds we can’t see, but can sense in the liminalities of time and consciousness.
Liminal, the space between. Limit, the end of the space. Missed opportunity in not wanting to touch either.
My seamstress’s brain, which has to be able to visualize not only the end, but each step in the right order in all three dimensions, often turned inside out, sees life at this moment being cut and assembled from a flat piece. The cloth, you could say, would be the questions in need of an answer: the flatness of the idea. And then I go into that great void of space and begin to cut and stitch something together to give it form.
How bad is it really, to have a poltergeist? Wouldn’t the muse be the same kind of figure? Does that mean I’m also afraid of the muse? I’ll only know by being alone in a room with them: the liminal.
If my body and soul cannot adapt to a way of life, sapping my will with prolonged, mysterious illnesses and mental turbidity, how will I ever know whether those missing elements of life, which I long for, are not actually necessary, unless I go and seek them? Should I not seek them with my whole being, should I take no risks, there would be no hope of ever knowing: the limit.
I think these are the only two places, so to speak, that truly interest me. Though I seem to be someone who revels in routine, domesticity, and contemplation, they are all in the service of what I cannot see, and what I do not yet know.
*I think the Italians would rather go to war than change out their incandescent bulbs, which lend a magical glow to the villages, within them and from afar, nestled in the dark, distant hills. Thank God.