A Coral Room

Sometimes things hurt too much to talk about directly, so you have to talk about them by coming at them from an angle, by talking about something else. So after a grievous loss, when you’ve wrapped yourself up in layers of protection and enough time goes by, and then you see a thing connected to the loss – the jug. You notice the pain but you can stand it. You decide to peel back one layer of protection and take up the jug in your hands and see if you can stand it. What does she feel? The boat holds you up safe out of the water, the unconscious ocean of feelings, you can ride above the feelings and be safe from them… but after a while you need to put your hand over the side of the boat – what do you feel? Right there, right off the side of the boat, is the pain – her mother. She toys with the pain, holds it in her fingers, examining it gingerly, carefully, the way she’d handle the jug, considering it. Her mind reels and for a moment she sees…. What does she see? A little town somewhere on the coast where people once lived busy, happy lives, raised their children, watched other men die… The little village saw a lot: It was in the path of the bombers during the war, and the men of the village tried to rescue the drowning pilots. Time marches on, things change, and now the village is abandoned… the local economy collapsed. The fishermen could no longer make a living, moved on, retired elsewhere, and now the place is empty, full only of echoes, of the memories of past lives. Maybe it’s the village where her mother grew up. Or maybe this place is down under the water, like a village drowned when a dam broke or some terribly earthquake heaved up the ocean and changed the lay of the land, so that all was lost beneath the waves, like Atlantis. If you swam down to it, you’d find everything unchanged, only coated with soft moss or drifting seaweed, tables with chairs, a cradle, a child’s doll, draped with old abandoned fishermen’s nets. The drowned pilots would sink down into this other world and become part of it, while the speedboats flew up above in another world. The little brown jug that holds her memories. Does she take her mother’s ashes out in a boat in this jug and drop it over the side of the boat, to float down to this drowned village, to come to rest there? Or maybe this jug lives now with her in her own home, where she sees it every day, watches a spider climb over it, remembers her mother, her mother’s lost childhood, the village she heard stories about when she was a little girl, which seemed so long ago, like another world, a magical world, someplace far away. She takes a breath and puts her hand over the side of the boat… and takes a look at the pain, very gingerly, very delicately… and sees her mother in the kitchen as they come in the back door, and then the pain is too much, and her mind jumps back to the jug, seeing it in the water, drifting down to the magic world under the water. Putting her hand over the side of the boat, taking the jug in her hands is like allowing herself for just one moment to openly feel the pain of her mother’s death, carefully, to see if she can stand it. We all have pain like this, we protect ourselves from. Kate invites you to put your hand over the side of the boat. What do you feel?