Search and Rescue Mission

The weekend was liberation. My spirit crawled to California, tired and dull with slight rain but not enough water to be news. My body was in pain, my entire left side aching with sciatica. My mind was wandering, aware of all the tasks but unable to lock and deploy towards anything aside from a rough but nevertheless alluring thought refrain of escapes and retaliations.

After breakfast on Friday the pain peaked with spasms in my calf.

ME: I think the wild therapy I am doing is manifesting as shooting pain in my hips, gathering in my left knee and calf, shooting out through my feet back to the earth.

NADIA: It’s sciatica. Do the Figure 4 stretch and take Ibuprofen.

And with that we set off on a half-day drive from Oakland to Reno, over the Sierra Nevada’s. Nadia’s stories of the early Burning Man events on the beaches of San Francisco made me forget about my past and become curious about hers. Unfolding conversation into our experiments and adventures and devastations in creating other kinds of societies. We couldn’t spend enough time discussing the nature of love, sex, attachment, and loss or stopping to to smell the butterscotch pines in the mountains of California, approaching the Nevada border.

It’s been some weeks since I’ve had a break from the past lives search and rescue mission that has been bringing the rawness. Back through my formative memories that reinforce our story that we do not belong. And I say we because this feeling of separation is universal, living perhaps through the loneliest time in human history, collectively lost.

The EMDR treatments bring me to tears even when my mind is blank, that choking feeling which I think I’ve just learned to work around my whole life. At work I think I figured out how it as a performance enhancer, the constricting pressure. That tightness in my chest, like a leafy green vine is wrapping itself around my ribs and heart. Surely this will release some day. 

NADIA: It’s too early for tequila.

ME: Fine.

Lunch stop and then onwards to the Biggest Little City, the sun is setting by the time we check into the casino. Orange twilight filled the room as I lay on the floor stretching through the pain. Combing through the past is so burdensome, my mind was tired and numb and having a hard time accepting why we are here. 

We are traveling to Reno, NV to see our friend Felicia Perez’s art installation Still Here which is about living with cancer. Art built from the artifacts of cancer – the pill bottles, wrist bands, chemo selfies (Still Here, the topic of a promised future post) – opening on Dia de los Muertos, complete with tamales and the neighborhood Mariachi band.

The art show brought back my tears. Felicia called it a living funeral. It is all happening at once, the hours of jokes and joyful conversation alongside incredible fear of loss – past, present, and future. It’s competing screens in my mind, playing out contrasting scenarios, as if stimulating these experiences will emotionally prepare me for what is coming, for all of us. Exposing myself to the pain before it comes.

ME: It’s not too late for free whiskey.

NADIA: Let’s play Black Jack.

It’s got to be a dark job, dealing cards in the early hours of the morning. The dealers change often. Roxann was our favorite. At the $5 table we had Johnny who got out of hand with the $100 bills but really it was Marie who left the biggest impression. Stacked with chips at the beginning of the night, everyone at the table said she was the expert. It turned on her though, to the point where to cocktail waitresses would no longer accept her triple threat order for red wine, tequila, and whiskey. Nobody walked away with chips.

Felicia’s Still Here, her living funeral, was a good time. It reminded me to let go of the past and pay attention to the present. Come back from imagining the future, and be here with your friends. There is no amount of jackpots or complimentary beverages that can erase our destiny as humans to have our hearts continuously broken. We can numb and hide or we can turn our pain into inspiration, like Felicia, whose work continues. 

My life has taught me that there may be no tomorrow to say what I really meant or be who I really am. I left some burdens in those passages over the Sierras with Nadia that I have been carrying for a long time. It is amazing what human connection can liberate. This is something we can always choose to do for each other, however long we are here.