The Mindful Migraine

Dear Mother,

I hope this letter finds you well, and certainly better than it leaves me.

Finding my way in the world has been more difficult than I envisioned.  After three years of floating across the globe, I thought I had found my haven, my own personal slice of paradise in the form of a tiny house at the water’s edge.  Perhaps you were also able to use your mother’s intuition and read between the wavy lines of my cursive writing to see that I had fallen in love.

Our tiny home was our sanctuary.  We had very little, due to age and circumstance, but all that we had was ours, hard earned and treasured.  Our most valued possession, by far, was the small garden in the backyard, located at the spot where the sand met the grass.  We grew vegetables and flowers, such that our garden was both practical and beautiful.  As the garden grew, so did we.

Unfortunately, as I have often lamented, the temperature of the world has been steadily increasing, literally and figuratively.  Stress, anger and bitterness have merged with the rising tide to make even our patch of heaven more treacherous.  Each month it seemed, there were more battle lines being drawn, more arguments between neighbors, more punches thrown… less grace, less tolerance, less forgiveness. 

Equally concerning was the waterline which seemed to constantly come at us, creeping inch by inch up the shore each evening as we slept.  Its progress was almost imperceptible, yet certainly, the water was moving higher, higher, higher… closer, closer, closer.

The weather has also altered since we arrived.  As if reading the collective mood of the planet, it responded in kind.  And by in kind, I mean, without kindness.  In the past months, there have been more and more storms, each worse than the one before.  We lost parts of our house to wild winds more times than I can recall.  Always, the next day, we would walk the beach with our neighbors, looking for our planking and sheeting, pinning it back in place with prayers and nails, hoping it would hold tighter next time.

Labor’s love, however, seems to have been in vain.

Last Friday there was a storm, the worst in living memory.  The sort of storm they say should not arrive for 100 hundred years… although they said that about the last one too… each storm worse than before, as I said… competing in some sort of strange cosmic challenge…

We knew it was coming.  Where we live is remote, but the town inland is connected to the wider world and its machines of divination.  We were told to ‘prepare’.  What a word.  Prepare.  Pre-pare.  Reduce your life to the bare minimum while you still can…

And that is what we did.  I placed the most precious things in a box at the bank, and my partner and I moved what was manageable to a mutual friend’s house.  Together we filled sandbags and placed them around our fragile garden, laughing and crying at the potential futility of it all.  Already, the waves were increasing in size and their impact was apparent; the curves and bends of our boundary line were being eroded as the water ate the sand from the shore.

The rain became heavier, and more aggressive, lashing us as we lashed the house down.  Soon, it became too much, and we agreed to move away from the coast and hope for the best.  My partner rushed to stay with our friend, and I stood on the veranda for one last look as the waves came in. 

When the weather suddenly developed a tone of retribution, I realized I had left it too late to escape and took my chance in a tree.  All night I held onto the trunk, my legs wrapped around it like a lover, my fingers torn bloody from the bark as the pummeling wind tried to dislodge me like a giant coconut, hoping to split the hairy husk of my skull.

From my place perched in the tree, I prayed.  You would have been proud of me Mother.  Although I suspect you would also call me reckless and lazy for leaving it so late to re-find God.  And you would be right, as always.  I am not sure if God heard my prayers as… I am here… I survived… but every other aspect of my life did not.

You see, my house was swallowed in its entirety by the sea.

My home is no more.

Many hours passed before it was safe for me to come down from my perch, and when I did, it was to plant my feet amongst absolute wreckage.

Not the first Robinson Crusoe to arrive on this beach, I looked for what might have once belonged to me, and as best I could, made a pile of debris where my house once stood.  Without picket fences, would I be able to determine what land was mine? 

My fellow pickers moved through the flotsam and jetsam, and more than one fight broke out over whose dining chair had miraculously survived the storm.  I avoided the tug of war as much as possible, and kept building my own stockpile, tall enough that perhaps I could make a new home from the elements.

I then paid one of the local boys to sit on my pile and promised I would be back by tomorrow morning at the latest.

First to the bank, where I found out that the manager was a scoundrel and had used the chaos of the storm to make off with the town’s treasures.

Second to my friend’s house which, thankfully, I found still standing.  Inside the neat house, however; nothing.  Neither friend nor lover was at home.  The neighbors came out to my banging and told me ‘the couple’ were gone.  They had moved further inland, to higher ground.  I stared over their shoulder at the landscape they pointed to, but saw no moral high ground there, literally or figuratively.

Back to my pile of debris I went, and to my dismay, but not surprise, I discovered the local boy was gone, and with him, half my pile of debris.

I confess Mother, in that moment I cried.

Life has been much harder than I could have anticipated and has left me with nothing to show… even this headache I have, which feels tighter than a vice, is invisible.

With my life swept away, my existential sense of solid-self has also evaporated, melted into the shoreline where water meets land… or land meets water… or, or…

With the tide rising to new heights, it is time to acknowledge that I have at last gone under.

And at the risk of laboring a metaphor too long, too deep, the despair I feel is… oceanic.

How does one rebuild a life from the rubble, when even the rubble is restless?

How does one start again when there is nothing left, literally or figuratively, to support it?

The Bible told us of the futility of building on sand, and now, too late, as my headache gets ever worse, I sense the rocks in my head, and realize the sages were right…

It has taken me a long time to find paper and pen in this waterlogged world.  Please know that the delay in writing to you was the result of impracticability, not a lack of intention.  And try not to think too poorly of poor me when I tell you that I sold the shirt off my back, literally not figuratively, to obtain the stamps so that this letter could cross the seas from my hand to yours.

God willing, you will also receive the two gifts that I have enclosed in this letter for you. 

The first is something of mine; a flower I have pressed flat.  It is all that remains of my gardener’s life on the water’s edge.  “Bloom where you are planted” you once told me.  It was good advice, but it did not seem to work for me…

The second gift is something of yours; the rosary that you wrapped around my wrist when I left home.  As you can see – it is broken – make of that what you will, but know that it was never my intention to fail…

With love and regret,

Your own.

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Take care taking care, Linda x

[PS – if you enjoyed the story and want to download the ebook with all 13 stories, pop over to the GOTHIC tab!]