In between all this rememberance and grief, death and rebirth, things started to move at a pace that astounded even me. OCD began to lift, then change, then disappear. During the funeral I felt a profound shift in the very nature of the illness. Perhaps it was there where the barrier between worlds was thinner that my prayers had an effect. Who knows?
At Beth’s urging I did my GED. (General Education Diploma) It was like heaven and hell combined. I remembered all my time in the US and when I just came back, when I was a straight-A student and the world looked so inviting and new. What would I be when I grew up? What did I want to study? What would college be like? So many unanswered questions that maybe now never needed to be answered.
I began to sing again. I had long since abandoned my resistance to singing English (and even Chinese) songs and basically I just sang everything and anything. It wasn’t easy. At certain points it felt like someone was strangling me. Meimei tells me I would walk out of my room after practicing looking like I was half-dead. But I had come this far. The spirit of wind and Yggdrasil were right in front of me. I had only to climb the branches and listen to its song – the song of the wind and the trees.
I used Youtube and Google and looked at the world around me. I thought about all the things that I had wanted to do before – music, translation, art, writing. I thought too about how they might be done in the new world – a world that had always been around, just that I hadn’t realized it.
Everything had changed! Everything was still changing. Why couldn’t I realize that before? I felt so fed up with myself I wanted to punch myself (though I didn’t) But that’s the whole trouble with the Mum Cave – you can never update. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what have you had been around for ages now! This isn’t Myspace and Friendster anymore! And here I was looking through that same glass window feeling envious and upset when I could be out there, kicking ass and taking names.
Amidst all this my work continued unabated (had it ever really stopped?) I could feel something happening, something big. I was getting closer – to what, I didn’t know. The future? This book? The Rapture? You can’t know until you get there.
More therapy, more thinking, more writing. I could feel a deeper integration that anything that had come before. I began to get visions and dreams. I won’t recount everything I experienced here because once again, there is just no space. But my unreasoning fear of cockroaches finally went away. One of the landmarks was seeing Y’shtola(the catgirl from FF14) spear a cockroach with her foreclaws and eat it – because I could totally see her doing that, she being all druidic and back-to-nature and all. The fear did not disappear immediately after but I just felt so much better.
I continued writing. More visions appeared before me. I cried and shook and cried some more. Divine lightning once again coursed through my veins, destroying the perpetual lethargy and tiredness of years before. I dared to hope – to believe! – that this might indeed be the final evolution of the blade.