WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (51 page)

***

I sit in the waiting room, biting my fingernails, my mind crashing, banging and spilling out epistles of drama. I haven’t needed to see
Doc in a long time. 
I was good on my own, for so long, journaling, dealing, confronting, all that, but now…

“Willodean.” Doc said peeking out the door. “Co
me on in.” She smiles. I jump up nervous and follow her inside, closing the door behind me.  Immediately I am assaulted by smells.  S
ucculent angels, drops of heaven make me weepy and intoxicated until my eyes are blinded by the white brill
iance.  A
tall vase
of white flowers sits inside the bay window.  The luminous scent is aching to my soul and
a sword in my heart.

“Have a seat Willodean. By the way, you look great.”

“Thank you.” I
said smiling trying to hide my pain inside.  I sit in my usual place and grab
the square pillow, holding it next to me, a replacement for my man pillow. 
Need. Yearn. Want.
 Doc grabs her notebook off the shelf along with my thick, encyclopedia file.

“So…let’s see.” She rambled through my crazy log. “You haven’t been here in a while. Last time we spoke you were doing great. The meds were working. Right?” Sh
e looks up at me. 
I nod. “Oh, and you found a job. You moved into your own house. All good. So…” she taps her pen and pauses a long time. “What brings you here today, Willodean?”

I gulp and sigh. 
Why can’t I answer?
 My lips instantly clamp down as if holding back a lifetime of words that refuse to eradicate themselves. Doc waits calm, cozy and collected as if she could drink tea and stare down Charles Manson without so much as a blink. Why 
am
 I here? My eyes focus on the tapping sound of her pen when I notice
the silver ring on her finger.  Instantly it
trigger memories.

“I—I found a ring.” I said like a gust of wind.

“You found a ring?” She scribbled curiously and glanced up. “Okay.”

I told her about the jacket demon, the ring, Branson’s pictures, and all the unfinished projects I started but never finished. The hope chest that didn’t hold an ounce of hope, my instability, the visions, the little girl that haunts me, Maw Sue’s bedroom, her three husbands, her strange rituals, Aunt Raven’s death, the Mason jar and the rose petal people, the shock therapy, the old stories, legends, curses, my birth, the shadows, the house inside me, the rooms I built and the voices that live there. Doc wrote so fast and furious you’d thought she was recording history. As for me, my head spun as if I had just vomited, excretions, bile and bitter juices.

When I began therapy, the thought of letting a stranger into my head for examination was terrifying. All I could think of was Maw Sue, going to the crazy house, torture, madness, shock therapy. I waited for the wires to come out and hook me up. I vehemently refused to talk, or budge an inch. I would sit and stare and listen to D
oc talk. 
Sometimes, I imagined her as Maw Sue telling stories and I was at her feet listening and learning. Then,
out of nowhere, I agreed to talk but it had to be on my terms. 
I would agree to the therapy if I could record the sessions.
It was for my own personal need. 
I had never truly felt I owned my own voice—as if by some force beyond me, out of my control, it had been taken, stolen from me and the only way I was going to let words out, from the house inside me, was to put them somewhere, where I could find them. Th
ings in my life, personal and material had a way of getting lost and I wasn’t going to let this happen again.  If I recorded the sessions, the words would be
accessible and mine. And plus, the recordings gave me a word-by-word analog so I could go back and examine them, try them on, search them out. Doc thought it was a great idea and would help me to know myself, the person I was, or had become, or had left behind.

Once the recording sessions began
, I didn’t realize how painful they would be. 
I felt emptied with no recollection of what I’d just dumped out. It was mass quantities of accumulation held up inside me, stashed and hidden in the house for so long, to speak them from my lips was comparative to pulling off flesh in tiny strips. Excruciating pain. Maddening, leaving me torn, naked and displaced. I played back the first sessions a few weeks later and thought, 
who the hell is that?
 
Is that me?
I’d listen, rewind, and listen again. It was like discovering a new person. At Doc’s suggestion, I transcribed the words into a journal so I could go back on my own accord and read, take notes, observe my progress, or regression. 
Yeah. There was a lot of regression.

“Willodean. We never get rid of our demons.” Doc said. “We learn to live with them. We endure and suffer with them. We outsmart them, we learn their habits, their weakness, and their strengths just as they do ours. We confront them. In doing so—we know the enemy. We engage them as they engage us. They wi
ll not be able to destroy us unless we let them. 
The enemy learns about you—so you must learn the enemy.”

Doc not only taught me how to live
my
life, she provided a listening ear. She heard me, gave validation to who I was in the crazy, who I was in the crying, who I was in the enemy, who I was as a child and who I could become as a new woman. I would learn new things every week. When the little bell went off signaling my session was over—I went into panic mode. I didn’t know how to stop talking once I started. I couldn’t find the knob inside my head to turn off. It was then, I learned I had no boundaries.
Boundaries?  What are they?
 
I didn’t know what they were or that I was
supposed to have them.  I told her
I clearly lived in two dimensions, all or nothing.
Love or hate. Black or white. Child and crazy woman.
And that was the problem. 
 

The next session we worked on boundaries and balance. Doc made me realize it wasn’t the end of the world if I didn’t get to finish talking. In fact, waiting was a virtue, a powerful tool to establish one’s patience and discipline. I neither as it turns out, but I was willing to work to 
establish them in my life. 
Slowly,
and painfully, I learned more and more each day.  I was hungry for life. 
My life.
 
I didn’t do everything perfect. I failed numerous times but each was an improvement over the former. I learned from my failures, when all the times before, I w
ould just high tail it and run and repeating the same pattern of failure. 
Each day was a challenge, and each day I drug myself out of the bed, even when the shadows convinced me to
numb it out, I resisted. 
I would push myself up. Screaming with pain, mindless and frantic, but up. I would walk to my bathroom mirror and speak to the many reflections I saw there. The red li
pstick scribbled on its surface. 
 
I AM ENOUGH! I am valuable. I am loved. I am special. I am Willodean Hart.

I found Maw Sue’s poems written in my bible and memorized them, or maybe I had never forgotten them to begin with. I’d say the words out loud and pretend I was in the wondering tree, wondering when I’d be whole, complete, seven. Wondering when all my losses would be made lovely. Would it happen, or was it just a fabricated story from a tic-tac hallucinogenic mad woman. The voice critics
made me doubt, filling my head with all kinds of stuff. 
This is my daily life.
 Since I couldn’t make camp in Doc’s office, the journals became my substitute for therapy. I pretend the paper is my ear to God and I pour out my pa
in, my questions, and my fears but since then, something has changed.  I grow, then hit a brick wall. 

***

Doc waits patiently for me to speak. I glance over at the vase in the bay window. It’s filled with gardenias and the aroma has unlocked a door within the house. I feel as if I am speaking for the first time yet it isn’t my voice. It comes out fast, furious. I choke on hard words, deeply hidden things, now exposed and given light. In the process I lose track of what I’m saying, many times, as if my lips are speeding ahead of me. I had moments of pause, to stop, reflect, and catch up with the vocabulary spilling out. Only then, could I feel every letter, every word, every thought, lingering long in their form, engaging their fluidity, their meaning, their intent while I wrapped my arms around them, emerging with them, to study, feel and acknowledge them. I literally chased my words around the room introducing myself. 
Yes. You are real. Yes. This did happen.
 
It really happened
. It was real. All of it was real, all mine, good and bad, black and white, all or nothing, real. My mind went a zillion places that day but stopped to a screeching halt on a thick, choking crumb I could not consume. My lips locked up and my tongue went dirt dry. The gardenia aroma from the vase in the window, drew me in, and suddenly words flow outward, from another dimension, crushing my heart, my soul.
 
                

I am standing in the kitchen of our home. The divorce is final 
but I can’t say goodbye.
 I fear one more loss, one more heartache, one more meltdown and I will fall off the edge again. I’ll crack and never recover. I have lost so much already—I just—just can’t walk away. I had great expectations, fairy tale dreams, and a futuristic montage of plans, hous
es, kids, a dog, a picket fence and it came down to this.  
Stupid damn hope chest.
 It should have been easy for me to leave but it wasn't. I had an 
exceed death level
tolerance for pain. I hear the ticking of the hell clock, the insidious timekeeper counting down seconds of my life, one slow, morbid, tick-tock at a time. Today is the day. 
I will leave this home. I will leave this land. I will leave this man. I will not make this bed. I will not live this lie.

Outside our front door of the kitchen, a massive gardenia plant blooms. I called it the Gardenia King because it was like kisses from the King, a heavenly scent, so pure, untouched, innocent, childlike, and free of original sins. Sometimes when I couldn’t breathe in another death stench of my life, I’d rush outside and press myself into the spindly arms of the bush, inhaling every drop of delightful musk. 
Survive another day Willodean.
 I’d grab a handful of petals and crush them inside my pillow case or slip them inside my bra, so even if I died i
nside the marriage, I’d still smell like promises.  I’d still smell like hope. 
The drizzling musk of the King’s kisses would revive me.  To get more of my life, I must leave. I will leave this place I’ve know, this terror of comfort, this land, this man—and then what? What shall I do for strength then? 
What will I do without my king’s kisses?
 A th
ink of Maw Sue and Aunt Raven. 
I break off a gardenia stem and press the flower
to my cheeks and I hear the king whisper in my soul. 
“Choose to take the memory with you.
It is a part of you.  It will make you who you are if you l
earn from it.”

Suddenly I felt empowered. A door flings open inside the house and the little girl runs free. I freak out a little. Letting her run around is not what I planned. It is downright dangerous. I hear the King’s voice again. “I
t’s okay.  She wants to show you something.” I hesitate but watch her closely. 
She runs
ahead of me barefoot. 
I feel like I should follow her, just to make sure she comes back. I kick off my shoes and run after her. She frolics through the pasture towards the hilltop.

“Say Goodbye Willodean.” She says, “You must let go. Say goodbye.” She slaps her hand from fence post to fence post rushing past Hawthorne bushes, the tangled brush arbors mixed with an assortment of honeysuckles then down the slope where the steep embankment leads to a creek bed shaded by tall oaks.
It was one of my hideaway places when Branson and I fought and I had to get away.  The girl is as she always was.  G
rit and courage. Stars and moons. Faith and hope.

We make a sweeping exit over the land and she makes me untether myself from all elements, objects, and materials I’ve grown
attached to. 
It is a lot for me to take in, the inexplicable gatherings beneath and above—extensions of her and myself. It makes me think of Mag and I, as kids, exploring the clay pit
s, an abandoned dirt company a few miles behind our house. 
It
was a wonderland of new things, new adventures. 
I can still hear our feet crunching
the sun baked dirt. 
There is laughter—
lots of laughter and then screams.  My heart flinches. 
The little girl glances back at me, wide eyed and frantic as if I wasn’t sup
posed to remember this memory, and I don’t, except the screams, the terrible screams, and darkness, lots of darkness, and water, trickling water.  By this time, the girl rushes over to me, grabs my hand and pull me away.  Her warmth
removes the fear of unknowns. The feelings disperse and I am only caught up with her as she leads me to a patch of bare soil. Together, our feet sinks into the sod as a final farewell. We are grit and courage. Stars and moon. Hope and faith.
It is all I hope to be.  Want to be.