Friendship | Crone Story

Pluto’s 1st House Renovation

A Tale of Losses and Esoteric Gains

**The nature of Pluto’s transits is unique to a Soul’s natal chart. No single aspect defines or predicts which choices we make, nor the the impact of others with millions of their own choices.** This transit has become easier as I expanded my spiritual practice with rituals and learned astrology. If you read something here that doesn’t sit well, I suggest giving it time to marinate.

As the planet of transformation begins it’s transit into Aquarius on March 25, Pluto asks me to reflect on it’s time in my first house and as a Crone-share what I’ve learned.

Capricorn is the energy of traditions, religion, discipline, government, authorities, military, and career. When Pluto, named after a Roman god of death and the underworld, began transforming all things Capricorn in 2008 I recall several transformative culture and political shifts including:

Stock market crash/Great Recession began with bank fails
Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals
Heath Ledger’s death from sleeping pills when he played the role of The Joker in The Dark Knight
Twilight series launch by Stephanie Myer, and in the United States
The first African-American President, Barack Obama, was elected and changed the face of politics forever.
Miley Cyrus announced that Hannah Montana grew up when she wore a backless gown and sent protective Moms into a tizzy.
Britney Spears was placed in a conservatorship that lasted until November, 2021.

On the surface, Pluto’s influence may appear as fate, but I’d have jigged where I jagged a few times if I knew then what I know now. Revealing these personal truths is not about victimhood or blame. Chiron at the zero Aries Point indicates my “unhealable wound” is showing who I really am, underneath the personas I create for acceptance. Like many souls, my complex history didn’t grant me tools of self-confidence, self-worth and emotional regulation. In 2008, I still looked to the world to tell me what kind of day I was going to have.

Pluto entered Capricorn at 0° in January, 2008 in a wide conjunction with my Moon at 8°, and my Ascendant (represents physical body and public rep) at 14° Capricorn. A planet’s expression in a sign is most pure at zero degrees of any sign, as evidenced by Pluto’s dramatic influence on 2008 and 2009.

I gave a successful talk at a National Conference and became a resource for others in my profession.
I was given a big raise in pay.
My daughter, an only child, graduated college and got engaged.
I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis/disease from a biopsy of a nodule. I began an anti-malarial medication for it.
My daughter’s first job began at The U.S. Dept. of Defense and she moved six hours away.
I worked from home occasionally if my RA flared, with my Director’s, but not my supervisor’s knowledge.
I also started working on weekends in order to keep up with an increasing workload.
I often felt like 2 people.

In the 1st house, Pluto slowly chipped away at my identity by both giving and taking away power and wealth starting with foundational aspects such as being a Mother of an adult student, and being a respected coordinator in medical education. My ego was methodically dismantled from 2008 to 20015. I knew what made me feel good about myself and fought losing any of it, especially after my daughter became fully independent.

In 2009 Pluto started his long game, moving from 1° to 3° Capricorn. In the collective & my career, we can see Pluto’s secretive influence, as well as big ambition and self-destruction:

President Obama was sworn into office as the 44th President of the United States and a ruthless campaign began in Congress and among U.S. business leaders to disempower him.
Michael Jackson, The King of Pop, died from an overdose of propofol, a surgical anesthetic given by his personal physician because he couldn’t sleep while creating This Is It, a show he considered his masterpiece.
Avatar was released.
I gave another successful presentation at a national conference of medical education program directors, and was elected to a board position by my National Coordinators organization.
I continued to hide my disease from my supervisor and HR, having reason to fear for my job and most importantly-insurance. I witnessed two other coordinators lose their jobs after gaining a national reputation in their respective specialties, and one of them warned me about taking the board position. I accepted it, anyway.
I became friends with an older gentleman who volunteered for me; a cerebral, yet light-hearted, friendship that often took me out of my comfort zone, in a way that changed how I view friendships, food, and gratitude.
I took and passed a certification exam which qualified me as an expert in my field, one of only twelve in a field of over 200.

Archetypically, Pluto is Lord of the Underworld and our worst fear-Death

Nothing transforms us more powerfully than death. In my immediate world these loved ones left, each unexpectedly and dramatic:

Grandma, Flossie Blocher, 2009
Dad, Greg Blocher, 2010
Son of friend who committed suicide in 2007 did the same, 2012
Dear Friend, David Garvey, 2013
Husband’s old friend, a teen counselor, is murdered, 2013
Furry Friend of 20 yrs, Jack, 2014
Father-in-law, Ronald Schultz, 2015
Other Father-in-law, Dick, 2017
Another much-loved cat Kiki in 2021

My husband and I lost childhood friends, and I lost cousins, in unexpected & tragic ways, death dancing in our periphery, each loss hurting and changing people we love. Each refining what I value most.

1st House of Self/Life

Rheumatism and bone/spine diseases are Capricorn’s territory in the physical body, an earth sign which is foundational. While the Capricorn energy of hard work and ambition were familiar to me, secrecy and calculated plotting in the work place lay in my unconscious fears about losing my job. My need for security drove me forward despite painful rheumatoid joint inflammation. Ten years prior, I was a waitress and single mother. I was proud of how far I’d come.

In 2010 Pluto squares Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, and became extra:

WikiLeaks Julian Assange released millions of classified documents detailing U.S. military operations, toxic waste dumping in Africa and executions at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp along with hundreds of other secrets.
Chile has one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded (Pluto rules the deep earth and mined resources).
The tallest building ever is opened in Dubai on January 4, 2010 (AMBITION).
Polish President Lech Kaczyinski dies in a plane crash (change in government).
Haiti has a 7.0 earthquake killing approximately a quarter of a million people.
My Program Director announced his resignation and my workload continues to increase.
The new Program Director doesn’t allow me to work at home and expects 10-hour days, even at Christmas time.
In December, 2010, I’m diagnosed with fibromyalgia and given Xanax by my doctor when I claim powerlessness over my stress.

Elementary Plutonic Lessons

It’s just as important to be liked at work as it is to be competent (see The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene). Being likeable is often MORE beneficial to success than work output or innovative ideas.
I engaged in a power-struggle with the new Program Director I couldn’t win because I felt like I was “right” and it made me much sicker.
Power corrupts.
Incompetent physicians are propped up/covered for sometimes by their colleagues. It’s a powerful “club”.
Pluto is harsh when we refuse to let go of what is clearly departing. I regret giving fear of the unknown any power.
Always listen to your gut, especially when it comes to people.
When I was offered severance in 2011, I should’ve taken it rather than the offer to work with someone I knew was horribly dishonest and manipulative. The toxicity and plotting that ensued cost me mentally and physically, while I suspect it was a game to her. When I received a copy of my employee file a few months later, the last of my naivete “exited the building” of my psyche. My file read like Shakespeare, and some betrayals hurt like hell. They’d padded it because I filed a complaint with the EEOC when I was denied an accommodation to continue working at home (ironic, I know) when needed. It was small consolation when I heard the two liars primarily responsible for my termination were found out a year later; management not only planned it, but negatively coached them. I remembered the manipulator asking me before I was fired, “What would you do if you didn’t work here”? There’s no amount of money that’s worth working with snakes.
When in doubt, do what you were put here to do. In August, 2011 I started my blog “The Fifth Decade”, my answer to what I’d do if I didn’t work there.

During this time there are two good friends I am very grateful for (both disabled themselves), as well as my husband. Ableism isolates people like me. I felt as though people thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough; such feelings are common among disabled folks. I continued to push myself for the next few years, even starting my own virtual assistant business and working online for mTurk with microtasks. Multiple rounds of physical therapy resulted, my tendons swelling with repetitive tasks, my mind often foggy from inflammation.

Financial losses and windfalls (also Pluto’s domain):

Loss of work income several times, working for $2/hr at one point
Extended unemployment benefits in 2011, 2012, and 2014
401k used in entirety for living and medical expenses
Social Security Disability approved in 2018 using a “less than sedentary” work ability after 2 yrs of no income

Highlights

In 2012, David and I went to see Cinema Paradiso, a 1988 Italian film where he broke down crying next to me in the tiny art museum theater. When I asked what was wrong, he whispered he was just so happy to have such a good friend. He changed something for me in that moment.
In January, 2013, Pluto squared my Venus in Aries and I quit smoking cigarettes.
In 2014, despite finances, we took a week-long trip to Ireland, a true dream where I felt well right up to when we arrived at the airport to leave. Lines for Customs or anything else aren’t RA-friendly, I learned.
In 2016, I found an online support group where new friends are amazingly empathetic and loving. A few of us in this area of the country get together in-person once or twice a year.
My flower garden, although much smaller, is a sanctuary. Nature is a balm.
My parents have always been supportive and share their cabin in a wooded island paradise.
I have time to write.
My first and only grandchild was born in 2016.
Our daughter, who lives here now, is thriving.

In 2018, when Pluto was at 18° Capricorn squaring my N. Node in Aries (symbolic of life’s mission) exactly, Rheumatoid Disease attacked my lungs and resulted in a cytokine storm which almost killed me because the doctors only heard the “arthritis” part of RA, unwilling to even consider my suggestion that it was a catalyst. For several days they ordered tests, which came back negative, except for C-reactive Protein, an inflammation marker. A huge dose of IV steroids saved my life after one hospitalist finally called my rheumatologist. There were at least 4 others who ignored me. I fought for my life, and won that year.

After having what they term “critical hallucinations” during my hospital stay, I started meditating and reading a book I inherited from my old friend David, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph. D. I facilitated a women’s New Moon circle centered around sisterhood for a year, and began studying astrology. Five years later I know a little bit and can feel the energies around me and in the collective.

I feel like I’ve been given another chance at life, so now I write and take better care of my heart and mind. Over the past few years my vision of myself as a writer has changed. The hustle-culture of poorly-paid traditional publishing doesn’t fit my needs, nor my gifts. While I’m unsure where this road leads, I’m confident and emotionally mature enough to take the wheel now, with my spirit guides and ancestor’s blessings. While life proved how cruel it was long ago, the past fifteen years has shown me deeper darkness and grace than I imagined possible. Every day I anchor myself in the knowledge that everything, except love, is temporary .

Eudaimonia- Part 3

Posted on March 10 by K.S. Schultz

Dusan

“Who is it, Scotia? Where did they come from, Scotia? Did they communicate, yet? Why are they here?” Leaders of Eudaimonia gather at the sea wall, each of them with weapons in their hands and worry on their faces, each asking me questions before they’d even stopped walking. While a few are in their defense overalls, most are still in their night shifts, a glaring sign of recently neglected drills. My Lab Assistant Preeky Kala, barefoot and rumpled in an unevenly buttoned lab coat over her prized soft bamboo sleep shift, afro flat on one side and braided on the other, catches my eye as she calmy cuts through the garden and simply stands next to me assessing the scene before us. I’m not surprised she isn’t carrying a weapon like the others. “Told you you were exhausted”, I said to her, “You fell asleep before you finished, huh?” My only friend left on Eudaimonia says somberly, “woke up slobbering, too”, as if it is a crime. “Wonder how heavy those things are. They should beach any minute, Sco”. One of her best traits is that she doesn’t ask me nonsense questions.

“Always the optimist, aren’t you? Thanks, Preeky”, impulsively I put one arm around her in a brief half hug. The trio of re-entry capsules no longer glowed, but bobbed like silver buoys in the lake/sea/ocean a mere fifty yards from our diminishing sea wall. Whoever pops their head up through the hatch of one raindrop-shaped vessel is unrecognizable, moonlight casting their face in shadow as they hoist half their body out and wave with their whole right arm. Rage stirs in my guts and I can’t help feeling a bit woozy as I peer at this New Earther. “At least it is human”, I intuit to Haff, who jumps a little at my voice inside his mind.

Realizing not only can I hear Haff’s heart racing, but mine is speeding up to catch his, I’m distracted by the implication for a second before he replies, “Only one capsule is open. What’s in the others? How does it feel to you? Quarantine would buy us time, even if it’s all good… Remember who they are”. It’s not hard for us to believe we were talking about salsa and eggplant less than two hours ago, high on our love and new telepathic gift. I’m unsure when exactly we accepted unpredictability as the norm. Perhaps it was gradual during those first few weeks after they left us here and made me Culler. Of course, I fought it, but no one else wanted it, either. They argued that it was MY family who performed the hated role for generations. “Good to see you, Preeky, as always”, Haff gives her a brief one-armed squeeze. “Let’s just hope low tide is low enough to keep them from hitting the wall. Spring tide… I don’t want to think about it”. Preeky nods in understanding. Haff doesn’t know I know about the two of them.

“Thought this might be handy, Scotia”, Garvey, his sun-baked face friendly, shouts over a vibration of wind and energetic chatter from our growing crowd, and offers me a vintage pliable plastic mega phone I know he prizes. Smiling at him, I take the cone from one of my biggest critics. The figure in the capsule retreated below and out of sight. “Can we harvest some, give people something to do? We could put a few things in the cellar and pull up the sun shade canopies over the rest if you think that’s a good idea?”, I rapidly ask the Master Gardener and he agrees to my multiple queries with a nod and by tapping one finger against his temple. Yes, I nod back, we could all use a task to slow down our cortisol-marinated minds.

Hoisting the megaphone, I hope Haff is right and take a deep breath, “Thank you for getting here so fast and at the ready to defend Eudaimonia, Everyone! We don’t know a lot for sure, but Garvey got a glimpse of a globe on one of the parachutes, so they probably are from Parnus. We have at least one human, but only one capsule open, as you can all see. We also have ripe food in our gardens which needs securing quickly”. The last part caused some pushback, “If they kill us, what good will eggplant do, Scotia?” and “Shouldn’t we guard the shore”? and “Yeah!” and “What if they attack while we’re in the garden?”. At times like this, I’ve found their leadership fluctuates, and it’s best to let their fears vomit forth for a few minutes. Exhausting, but most of the time I am surprised they haven’t killed me, yet.

Myself, I cannot keep my thoughts from Zehmy. I wonder if he is shy like me or friendly like his father. Or maybe, our son is nothing like us. The sky turns from black to purple before my eyes and pulls my attention to approaching daylight. We have 5 hours from purple sky to get indoors out of the sun, with the last hour requiring protective gear. While it is possible to wear the gear for longer, it isn’t advisable with solar flares. No one has even tried since one of Garvey’s Planters (Walco Prist) fried in his suit. I notice Garvey speaking with a couple of Material Science Gardeners and then they head in the direction of our ever-ripening vegetables, much of it in danger if left for one more sun period. Re-entry capsules and our curiosity would have to wait. Small plant canopies lay assembled and waiting for late spring.

“No matter what happens during the next hour, we all need to be actively engaged in surviving! Those capsules probably don’t contain food for us, but they may need protein.” There; now they shut up. Although I hated causing panic, it was the tool they responded to best. Taking another big breath, I prodded their fear, “If many return, make no mistake-they WILL take”, I paused for effect, “Everything. Do you hear me? Every. Single. Thing. Now, please! Help Garvey secure some of the harvest. We must use our time wisely! Haff and Preeky will stay here and wait for Dr. Gronne and any others. Let’s go!” I march purposefully to our garden without looking back, not feeling half as confident as Haff often tells me I look. Hoping the work might provide my mind with some respite from picking at my most tender motherhood wound, I found myself almost running.

Grabbing an ancient wheelbarrow with worn wooden handles from the long gardening shed/greenhouse, I nodded to a few of those who followed me on my way back out, “Thanks, Adanni and Pesha. Thanks, Jory and Visset.” Not as many as I’d hoped, but I never knew who I could count on in Eudaimonia, except Haff and Preeky. Heading for the squash, I heard Haff’s voice in my mind, “Sco? Can you hear me Sco? I love you, Baby. I’m in this with you”.

“I love you, Haffney”, I imagine this zipping back and settling beneath his copper head of curls, both relief and hope tempering my aura of dread a bit. If there was any chance of us seeing Zehmy again, Haff would make it happen, I knew. Picking up the largest squash in the garden, a waft of citrusy floral teases me as I whisper, “thank you”, right before I cut it’s vine a few inches from the top with my pocket knife and place it in the wheelbarrow, quickly turning to express my appreciation to another. We were hungry sometimes, mostly at the end of summer when our stores in the caves ran thin. Pressure behind my eyes comes along with the effort to concentrate on only squash. I sqeeze them shut tightly then reopened them. A cool soup, made by Preeky and a few others came to mind, with my fried millet cakes in the caves this summer. My mind circled back to wonder about the person in the capsule, and if there are others. Why? As I placed the 6th squash in the wheelbarrow, I paused to make note of who else picked this year’s harvest, but couldn’t make out everyone in the predawn shadowy light. Drs. Kilgore and Alfonso, partners and colleagues of Haff’s in Bio-C, had almost a full wheelbarrow of eggplant, the two dressed in yellow coveralls and talking low in a steady murmur. Seriously academic, and older than most of the Eudaimonia Leaders, they mostly kept to themselves, just as Haff and I do. They didn’t notice me until I rolled up behind them with my wheelbarrow of a dozen large squash. As descendants of Elites, Haff and I felt we must frequently prove ourselves not only valuable, but likeable. Haff is much better at the second part than I. “Thank you Dr. Alfonso, Dr. Kilgore”. A quick and simultaneous nod on their way toward the cellars makes me think they might appreciate our precarious position. Or, they may just be afraid of me.

“Baby, I need you to listen to me. You need to hide, Scotia. It was Dusan we saw in that capsule. Dusan came back, Sco! He came back for… “, Haff’s increasingly tense message faded to silence, our connection cut off somehow.

“Haff? Haff! Tell me you’re ok, Haffney”! Instinctively, I left the wheelbarrow and slid between the container that served as our gardening storage shed and another which housed seeds, harvest, and Garvey’s personal living space. Dusan and I were betrothed at thirteen, which everyone knows. But no one knows Dusan is also my nightmare, not even Haffney. Shit. Even leaning against solid metal, the world is spinning. I have to move. Panic is driving me as I race to our container and my S-bag hanging just inside on a hook next to Haff’s. Slipping rubbers I’ve only worn once in the past two years over thin wool socks, Dusan’s hawkish face fills my vision and memories threaten me from several directions. My racing heart won’t let me stop, has no space for logic or love or anything other than getting as far from the shore as I can. Spoiled by my parents, I didn’t consider what my relationship with Haff would do to Dusan’s reputation, to his pride. But, he’d punished me enough.

Alt Journey-Untethered

Posted on January 2 by K.S. Schultz

Part 13

Phoebe stepped off the elevator of her building into a creek bed of soft silt, her bare feet slightly sunk as cool water and shock took her breath and almost toppled her. Her size nines helped her balance, not for the first time. Above, an eagle soared on a robust wind that blew her untrimmed cap of hair away from her face and made her eyes water, wings edged in white tilted this way, then that, as the eagle swooped over distant pointy pines on a hill covered with heather, briars and bent grasses. Her eyes landed on twinkling stars against a blinding sapphire sky. Except, these stars had wings. Pulled forward by her curiosity, hope bloomed and she craned her neck to search for signs of Shana. A whorl of starlings appeared like a spinning iridescent spiral, their whistles and trills vying for Phoebe’s attention, but her eyes were glued on the circling Eagle, who finally dove into the dark-needled towers, and did not ascend. Phoebe could almost feel a rush of adrenaline from a victory she presumed; prey consumed piece by piece until the eagle was sated. “They cannot hide you from me”, Kaz laced his whisper into the high-pitched starling noise and broke her reverie, “You belong with ussss. Your friend begs for her Anam Chara, her sworn blood sister, to join her, to soothe her tortured soul. Can you hear her cries?” A flurry of feathered recriminations momentarily smothered Phoebe and she heard Shana’s plea, “Don’t you love me anymore, Phoebe? Phoebe, Pleee… aghhhh!”, Shana’s scream ripped through Phoebe’s heart and brought her to her knees in the cold stream. A spiral descended with her crumpled body at the center. Bluish black wings battered her head and blocked her view of the sky and silvery winged stars that weren’t stars. When Phoebe tried to raise her arms they pecked her with what felt like dull needles.

“Agree to be mine, Phoebe Monteer”. Her loins stirred as she envisioned Doyle muddy and choking for breathe. Her will submerged his head in a puddle of runny excrement. “I will give you this power over him for lifetimes, I promisssss”, Kaz’s maneuverings tickled her sacral chakra and snaked its way upward to her solar plexus in a steely grey line that sliced it open and spilled her self-esteem into his mouth.

Phoebe saw herself standing over Doyle’s wrecked and miserable form, her eyes golden reptilian bulges rendering her vison into slits; flames of orange and blue crowned her and licked over her hunched shoulders and down her back. Her throat constricted abruptly, a bright yellow utility rope around her neck pulled by demon’s birds. “I can’t breathe! I don’t want to be that, that… fucking monster! Let me go! I said “No”, damn it”, she struggled against the rope, both within and without, and raised her hands palms-up into the murmuration of starlings as far as she could. It was all the invitation they needed. Sprites of light, her stars with wings, zipped between gaps in the spinning murmuration, then entered up her nostrils, into her ears, and through her open mouth. As light energy radiated from her head and neck, the rope faded and loosed until it disappeared all together. A cough of slimy tar erupted as Phoebe regurgitated Kaz’s manipulations. Sprites cut through lesions and dark attachments from her mind to her bruised and abraded heart. She crossed her hands over her chest and brought Doyle’s handsome face and trim athletic body to her mind’s eye, complete with his smug grin, hair and eyelashes so blonde they almost glowed, and haunted eyes she’d not noticed before. Her heart clenched. He truly suffered, Phoebe realized. Maybe not for the same reasons, but he hurt without her help.

Saint Joan arrived as Phoebe retched and led her out of the stream and to the foot of the Eagle’s hill. The Angel smoothed her damp coppery hair away from her face, each touch a blessing. “You are not responsible for Shana’s choice”, Joan instilled in Phoebe’s sacral chakra, a pool of tarry guilt-laden vomit absorbed into rich brown soil and grown over with silvery thistle which bloomed before her eyes. “You are not alone, Phoebe Monteer”, Joan sliced a shallow ruby river in the center of Phoebe’s chest, her blinding blade brisk, and gently worked a mossy orb behind her sternum. Verdant tendrils decorated Phoebe’s heart chakra and instinctively twined between her bony ribs with spongy paddings of life-giving mycelium. Crevices and cracks inflamed with remorse received a trickle of grace.

Phoebe pushed away the light being hands of Saint Joan. “Can you bring her back? to my world, I mean? Or in dreams? like before”? She rubbed the ache in her chest, her eyes desperate and longing.

Joan considered what answer served Phoebe’s soul, and decided to bend the rules. “That soul is being healed, Phoebe, just as you will heal. Some.” The Marys had warned Joan not to speak of her Anam Chara’s location. “You will find your purpose. It will help. Some”.

Sickness swam in Phoebe’s belly, again. Of course there wasn’t any way Shana could come back, return to their future. Her empty mottled yellowing body, with it’s black ring of destruction around her neck, had been reduced to ashes, while her soul was only El-knew-where. All of it, every nightmare aspect, because of Doyle. Except, she couldn’t forget how she felt about Shana those last few weeks, nor forgive herself. “Neither of us will heal without the other, and you know it. You All KNOW”, to which Joan shook her darkly-capped head, her face serious, but her gaze manic with devotion, a happy and infuriating juxtaposition.

“Just leave me then”, she spat at the angel.

Not bothered, Joan pulled her by the hand, “Come. Climb with me”. Chainlink mail in gleaming silver encased Joan’s form from ankles to neck, and tinkled with her steps, while Phoebe found herself clothed in hairy sackcloth and slightly abraded with every movement. The Saint prodded her, “Should you be punished for your failures?” and her bare foot landed in more thistle on the hillside. More slivers needled her soles with every step until she cried from pain and left behind miniscule dots of blood. Her neck chafed against the rough fabric, already raw from Kaz’s rope. Still, Phoebe began to climb without being pulled.

John the Baptist-style penance, she thought. Thistle gave way to rocky ground, cool stones worn almost flat held with ribbons of moss, and roots of thorny bushes. “I don’t know… should I? I feel like I’ve been punished, like my life is a punishment now”. Into a knee-deep hole one of Phoebe’s legs descended. “You could at least guide me, Saint Joan”!

Joan lent her an arm to pull herself up, but did not lend her strength. “You have to pull yourself up, Phoebe Monteer, since the hole is yours. You create them as you go, like your mistaken need to be punished”. As any influencer knows, Joan of Arc included, humans rise to challenges.

Phoebe grunted with effort as her hands climbed the Saint’s arm and pulled on it so hard she fairly flew out of the hole and onto her backside. She yelped as tiny needles pierced her tenderest flesh. It occurred to her that Shana would still be dead no matter how much she punished herself. The sackcloth morphed into a cotton shift of white that blew against her ankles and tops of her feet. Climbing on the rocky ground she found fewer and fewer thorns as she ascended and her long feet seemed to heal the crimson dots as quickly as they were produced until they were not any longer. Her breathe came rapidly as the climb became steeper and the Saint walked a few feet to her right.

“Phoebe Monteer, you will make a difference for many souls on the earth plane”, Saint Joan of Arc placed this truth in a tiny diamond and approached her before she could take the final steps to the apex among the pines. With her fingers pinched, she put the diamond in Phoebe’s Third Eye chakra in the middle of her forehead. “We will guide you, as will a familiar who, although not a replacement for your friend, will bring you comfort in this lifetime”.

Phoebe found herself back in the hallway outside her loft, key in hand, a mewling sound at her feet, just as she took a final step and an eagle alit mere feet in front of her. Anxious, she looked down to find a kitten, black as a moonless night. Her heart pinged with recognition. “Oisin! Welcome, my little Angel”. Shana scooped up softness to look it in neon green eyes she could swear she’d seen before.

“Hello, Phoebe”, Oisin intuited and made her laugh out loud with delight. When she opened the door, Doyle stood in her kitchen, upright and unharmed just as she’d pictured. He smiled like a kid himself when he saw what she carried.

Alt Journey-Igor

Posted on September 13 by K.S. Schultz

Part 12

A growling thunder grew louder outside the loft’s single-pane windows and provided cover for 3 deafening cracks like sniper fire, each earning a jump from Doyle as he grappled with memories played on an incessant reel since he awoke that morning. The tiny jade plant he’d hurled across the loft lay broken on the kitchen counter. “Bad karma for your own evil”, Kazmir whispered in his mind. Had he gone mad himself? His long fingers raked through his unwashed hair and made it stand on end. Phoebe’s channeled anger couldn’t possibly lift him, or rather slam his body, into a beam 12 feet in the air. Except his back sported a bruise the length of his spine, the width of the beam overhead, and his skull throbbed without a touch-a persuasive set of evidence. Then there were the dreams. Doyle remembered all but one of his “research subjects” had expressed doubts about reality, and this gave him a sliver of denial he mistook for a life raft. Phoebe had all but forced him to drink her “tonic”. His scattered mind forgot the exact order of last night’s events. “I don’t feel like myself, like my head’s in the clouds for real”, he remembered Shana had said one afternoon after he’d dosed her with two hits of LSD. She’d not been “herself”, or the Shana from before that trip, ever again. He saw her bare feet swinging over his head and pulled on one, but it was stiff and purplish… wait, that wasn’t Shana. The lace of her nightgown filtered sunlight in a floral pattern on the pink wall behind his mother’s dead body. Doyle slammed his hands on the table as a sob escaped his throat and urine soaked his jeans, just as it had once soaked his Pooh pj pants. Kaz whispered in his ear, “Did you drive her to it?” and “Admit it. You pushed Shana to it”. “Nooo! No! No!”, Doyle yelled, “They did to themselves. They did it! They left me”! Phoebe heard his anguished cries from the landing, unsurprised and unmoved for the most part, except for a sliver of enjoyment, an intriguing new feeling not entirely unwelcome. Thunder clapped and grief made way for anger as she wondered again why Shana hadn’t broken it off with him when it became obvious he had control issues. While the tail-end of Eddie Money’s If I Could Walk on Water streamed through the loft’s heavy security door, Phoebe hesitated a minute then drew back her key as Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love started, and decided to eat in the cafeteria for the first time without Shana. Her urge to distance herself couldn’t be denied, no matter what Dr. Pressman had advised regarding Doyle’s apology and atonement. The stench of pizza puke would likely ruin meals at home for a few days, anyway, and the radio was not her friend lately.

An almost black horizon to the east crackled with bright white jags as Phoebe zipped her jacket, pulled up her hood and made her way south, across the quad still littered with white and pink tree blossoms, colorful flyers and a few Styrofoam cups in the mix. Only a couple others were out, both headed in the same direction as Phoebe- toward the student center and hub of university life outside of classes. They had almost lived there during their freshman year between aerobics, the pool, their freshman dining plan, trivia and ping pong tournaments, T.V. lounges including movie nights, and the acoustically impressive performing arts auditorium where they’d seen P.M. Dawn and Bow Wow Wow. Memories made her smile a little. The girl’s tiny shared room in Lindbergh Hall had been stuffed with coats for every season hung on the end of the bunk, dozens of highlighted worn books in boxes under the bed, multiple mediums of art supplies in copy paper boxes labeled in black marker, records and cassette tapes along with a simple stereo set on the desk, and Shana’s boots and Phoebe’s picture albums scattered and wedged into corners. Thankfully, there were lockers in the communal shower room down the hall where they used one for jeans and sweatshirts-their “uniforms” that first year. Her mother would’ve been proud of how they coped and organized their lives after she died. The few times Phoebe couldn’t summon up her Mother’s voice within, Shana had stepped in with her stories of a better tomorrow. Her heart clutched in her chest and she found it hard to swallow for a moment until someone behind her cleared their throat, “Excuse me”. “Oh, yeah, sorry dude”, Phoebe moved aside and wiped her eyes quickly with her her sleeve. Rumbles overhead muffled what they said next as they turned their heads to reach under the sneeze guard, which was good because she didn’t want to speak to anyone at that moment. She wondered if Shana enjoyed her “better tomorrow” as the two friends wandered away chatting. With long sighs she built what her best friend would’ve called an “emotional mountain of a salad” and watched the storm arrive through a northern wall of glass. Charcoal rivers poured across the sky, painted over golden wisps of daylight, and cast the vast space around her in shadow. Mini cyclones of debris-laden wind bent trees this way and that and stripped them of their final blossoms while rain lashed against the glass. Shana would have loved the impressionist watery view, may have created a charcoal rendition of it in black and white. Perhaps I’ll do it, she thought as she blinked hard. Three golden orbs in the distant dark sky, obscured as if by smoke, moved further away until she could barely notice them. Storms usually reminded her of her mother, of standing at her graveside for hours until the rain ceased and a patch of white sky shone through, backlit by blinding sunlight. Phoebe didn’t think of her mother now, nor the parting clouds that day four years ago. Loneliness abated more and more as she planned Doyle’s metamorphosis in her mind’s eye. Kazmir stoked her anger with visions of Shana in the coroner’s drawer, a single pinprick on the inside of her arm. He’d pay. Each stab of her fork met with a sharp squeal. He’d pay much more than that, she decided, and was rewarded with a deeply pained groan from him as in her mind’s eye Phoebe imagined her hands, strong and pulsing with navy blue veins, painstakingly stretch Igor’s cervical vertebrae and hold the bones apart. Lightning cracked both in the sky before her and in his limbs as the nerve passages narrowed, shocks unlike anything Doyle had ever felt. Thrilling bloodlust throbbed upward from her base and allowed Death himself to will her phantom hands gleefully with a handsaw across bony protrusions, back and forth, back and forth. Flashes of brilliant azure and silver pulled one hand away in a vacuum of energy to her left as her mind appreciated her handiwork and joined her will to flare the smoothed bone outward. Phoebe’s teeth bit down on a carrot as her right hand stabbed a forkful of lettuce, malefic energy alone holding her nemesis in a vengeful stretch. Kaz tickled her heart and Phoebe giggled as Doyle gasped and sucked at the air, his throat constricted. Phoebe willed Shana’s final gasps for breath to play on repeat in his ears, then connected the pieces of bone with tremendous force, Igor’s bones fused with Death’s contribution, Phoebe’s intention and Doyle’s karma. Torturous heart-rending grief rippled across campus and up Budway Avenue to 333C at the top of steep wooden stairs, the loft Shana had insisted was kismet, then flowed back again to the dining hall to form a circlet of deathly energy shot through with daggers of blame, regret and revenge. Death and Kaz had a lot of material to work with for her soul’s imprisonment. The last of Phoebe’s loneliness abated, as did the powerlessness that had hounded her since her ambulance ride. “He thinks you’re weak“, came an unfamiliar voice as she thought of Doyle’s intrusion, his schemes, his selfish pleasure-seeking at Shana’s expense. At her expense. “He wants to control you like he did Shana”, Kazmir planted in her mind, “He plans to steal all your money”. That was crazy, but what if it were true? A poisonous vine sprouted as she realized again she was on her own. Phoebe’s soul stiffened, a golden thread in her star chakra severed even as her ancestors the Tri-Eloh petitioned The Marys for her salvation. “Why show him mercy? Make him earn your forgiveness with service.” The idea of cocky, handsome and brilliant Doyle as Igor took on more life, fed by her friend’s betrayal and absence. She envisioned her hands as they separated the upper trapezius and viewed the levator scapulae behind it. Doyle regretted ever meeting Shana, ever wondering what darkness resided within her. “I don’t deserve this”, he thought right before Phoebe remembered what that particular muscle did. Her thumb and forefinger pinched it resolutely and twisted it an infinitesimal tiny bit, which allowed Igor to take small gulps of air through his mouth. Thunder exploded overhead and the cafeteria emptied as tree limbs and loose lawn furniture hit the glass. Kazmir flashed memories of Shana pale and sickly during the last month of her life. “I should’ve helped her, made her listen, fucking done SOMETHING”, Her own spine tingled when Phoebe’s phantom hand caressed the ligamentum nuchae with her fingernails and left inch-long horizontal slices that deepened with accusation and made Doyle’s soul howl as she tinkered with his voice box. The tickle in her heart increased and spread to her belly. Death laughed and so did Kazmir as Phoebe, entirely given over now to her crude surgical maneuvers, sobbed Shana’s name. Eyes glazed and golden, together they pulled on tendons her probing fingers discovered underneath the fibrous nuchal sheet of cartilage until Doyle’s skull angled to the right at 45 degrees over his shoulder and his arms stiffened straight. “He knows his anatomy even better than me“, Phoebe thought when she realized his heart raced and entire body shook in stark terror, unable to get up from the floor. Drool covered his chin as he mewled, “peeee… sorrreeeee”. Satisfied and a bit excited to see him, she drew her consciousness back to her physical body with a backward count of ten. The storm was all but over, the wind and thunder gone, natural and man-made debris mixed at the bottom of the glass wall. Phoebe wiped her eyes on her wet sleeves, pushed her tray aside and appreciated a pink glow to the west before she said out loud to no one, “I suppose it’s time I go meet MY creature, my Igor.”

The Marys allowed familiar assistance for Phoebe, not the requested Guardian exactly, but the Tri-Eloh thought they might be able to convince a supremely soft-hearted Angel to inhabit a cat for a few years, or maybe a short decade considering how quickly Death and Kazmir corrupted Phoebe. Of course, it was all up to Oisin. The Marys reminded the Tri-Eloh of Doyle’s soul’s merkaba, how close he was to a cage of his ancestor’s bones, and urged them to review both it’s contract and lineage. The Tri agreed to assign a research angel to the task, however Saint Joan asked to be of service as she’d taken an interest in the endurance of the Anam Chara’s soul bond. Free will complicated the universe, however it also led to surprises Death never saw coming.

Alt Journey-Creature

Posted on July 27 by K.S. Schultz

Part 11

“We are fashioned creatures, but half made-up” ~ Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Originally, Frankenstein seemed an easy essay to knock out due to it’s familiarity, Phoebe insisted in her second session with Dr. Pressman since her discharge a week ago. “But it was Shana, not YOU, who was familiar with Mary Shelley’s work. I think it would be productive for us to focus on your enmeshment with Shana so you can move on and successfully finish university. This essay is as good a place to start as any. I’d like you to further make it yours by writing it in your space in the apartment, not you and Shana’s shared space, but yours alone. Do you think you can do that?” As always, Dinah Pressman’s tone remained even and confident, as if no one had ever told her, “No, I will not.” Phoebe would not be the first. Although it had been Shana in their senior year of high school who crafted her first “A” paper, the friends had discussed both the Creature’s and Victor’s motivations and torments at length, to the point of arguing. Only a few years later, death, alchemy, and the nature of the creature weaved a tale beyond imagining in Phoebe’s mind. Kaz’s whispered comparisons between her and Victor, Shana and the Creature, made her question her friendship and true feelings. Was she mindlessly motivated by a savior complex? Shana had saved her many times, and at other times they’d leaned on one another, like when they touched on their grief. Was she “enmeshed”, and where was the line between love and this handicap? “I’ll try. It’s an open loft, ya know? I usually wander around, look out the windows by Shana’s bed ever so often; helps me think.” “No need to be a purist, Phoebe”. “Trust me, Dr. Pressman. I want to get away from everything that reminds me of her, but it’s impossible. Maybe it would help if I start packing up a few of her things this weekend”. Or maybe she’d ask Doyle to do it, but she kept that thought to herself. The psychiatrist looked at her with kindness, but Phoebe didn’t sense pity like she did when they met in Resting Pines. She decided to take it as a good sign despite the doctor’s misunderstanding. She’d never needed Shana for school, but for writing projects they’d excelled by teaming. As her mother used to say, “what one doesn’t think of, the other will”. Shana usually said Phoebe overthought it, just as she currently did. If Mary Shelley could imagine such a psychologically complex tale, surely Phoebe could write an aspirational final essay without Shana’s input. “I’ll see you back here on Friday and you can let me know how it went. From what you’ve told me, I don’t expect any surprises from Mr. Regan’s progress report this week. I’m happy to hear the nightmares have resolved, but don’t be concerned if you have them until your mind is more settled about your new reality.” Phoebe couldn’t tell the doctor about the pain of being eaten alive or what it felt like as she slithered on her snake belly across the bottom of a lake, and certainly not about her recent journeys to unimaginably exquisite or horrifying spaces, nor angelically-guided reunions with Shana’s essence. Her secret existences were still better than her reality. Phoebe felt as if she hauled around a leaden head and heart, despite lighting a candle for Shana every day in a campus chapel. But, disturbed as she was, she still could not imagine how Shana felt in her last moments, couldn’t fathom what lies ran through her friend’s head, but she began to imagine.

Tchaichovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers played vibrantly from her dented and taped boom box and instantly grated on her nerves. Coke cans and Oreo crumbs littered her mother’s silver-flecked formica dining table; what Phoebe recognized as pages-thick advanced chemistry exams along with his rumpled test key covered stains, and by association-memories. Of course he’d set up right where she and Shana normally studied the most. Phoebe tossed a can into the kitchen sink, then another with satisfaction. He’d be up most of the night if he planned on finishing, she thought and heard the shower’s signature pipe rumble as if in agreement. “I’m ordering pizza!”, she yelled through the frosted pane of the bathroom door and stood transfixed as he turned the water off and stepped easily out of the tub. He knows damn well I can see him. Doyle stretched a towel between his hands and slowly sawed it back and forth on his backside. “Russo’s? Will you get onions and mushrooms on half? Sorry about the music, didn’t think you’d be home for a while yet”, he called. Barone’s was right around the corner, but Phoebe thought she could be a little flexible this once. She turned the music off with a shake of her head. Who, other than Shana, listened to The Nutcracker in May? “Please bring a 2-liter of Coke, too” she told the chill voice on the phone. Loose sweat pants and a high school track sweatshirt fraying at the cuffs and neck signaled a trickle of inspirational flow in her mind, the issue of Victor’s responsibility to his creation tugged at a thread of an idea, but it broke, again. Essays required her flavor, but for an “A” they required fresh blood, a profound realization. Professors got off on student’s epiphanies, the more vulnerable the better, unless it crossed into uncomfortable territory and kept going, as she’d mistakenly done only once. Did she have a responsibility to Shana? If so, she’d failed entirely. Phoebe caught her light blue eyes at the moment they turned golden in a star-shaped mirror swinging on a strand of wooden beads in a breeze from nowhere. Shana had held her steady on a wobbly barstool when she hung the mirror, her Christmas gift, from a rusty nail head. She’d called her a star, her very own true north. Am I a monster? Phoebe remembered waves of possessiveness and rejection she was ashamed of when Shana started dating Doyle, similar to the creature’s envy when he spied Dr. Frankenstein with his new wife through the window, the two happy and laughing with no care for him. Her stomach growled in time with a single hard knock. A couple notes to help her pick up this thread of self-reproach and, simultaneously, restrict her personal revelations on the page. Her eyes changed more often when Doyle was near, the only “trigger” she’d figured out, so far. Phoebe stuck her head out from behind a paneled screen painted with golden and bronze wild mustangs in full gallop and smiled at the delivery person before she stuck her tongue out at Doyle’s back. Although they’d settled quickly into a routine, both taking refuge in their schedules, she hated him living here, in her and Shana’s loft. It was perverse, but she reminded herself it was temporary several times a day. Clearly unamused, the pony-tailed teen rolled her eyes at Phoebe then smiled extra wide when Doyle handed her a five. “Have a good one, Dude”, he said distractedly as he flung the door closed and she was forced to step back. At least he was also pressured by finals. “Put it over there on the coffee table”. Phoebe waved at Doyle with a pack of doubly thick paper plates he’d bought when he got her cheerios, bananas and milk before her discharge, his first act as her “guardian”. He’d confessed he hated washing dishes, to which Phoebe gave him no reply. After a couple days, he’d mostly given up talking to her, except when he woke her from night terrors. Phoebe was lost in thought when he cleared his throat. “You can run it past me if you want, your essay. I’ve got a load of papers to correct, but I can’t go back to that right now. I’ll have just as many after tomorrow morning’s exam. Please. You’d be doing me a favor, which might work against me, but if it would help… up to you”, he ended with a shrug. Emotionless, she stared through Doyle, as she’d done dozens of times over the past two weeks. When she looked at him she always thought the same thing, but if she killed him, she’d never write the essay, never receive a final grade for the single class she didn’t drop. Desperate for another viewpoint, she reconsidered her tact and surprised him. “Any thoughts on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? I’m thinking about the doctor’s responsibility to the creature, to his creation” Phoebe wrestled a piece of pizza crust with her back teeth as she forced her eyes to focus on the man who might be responsible for her best friend’s death. “One of the saddest books ever. God, I hated the end. Lemme think. Oh yeah, freshman paper on Mary and Percy toward the end of the semester, so depressing. I cast him as a predatory type and her as a literary genius. Don’t some people believe they were cursed? I think a lot of my classmates took that angle.” He wasn’t an English major, Phoebe reminded herself, but he thought in an orderly, and linear fashion, suited for science. “Yeah, I don’t give a shit about Percy. This essay is about Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in other words-the subtitle’s inference” Phoebe watched Doyle turn Prometheus over in his mind, his hooded eyes slanted away from her and to the ceiling, brows flattened. “Well… what do you have so far? You’re saying Prometheus or Frankenstein’s ambition is the crux your thesis? I can’t remember how he… wait, ok, he was chained and pecked to death by a bird every day, a punishment from Zeus, right? How does that fit?” Phoebe let the question hang in the air for a moment as if she considered what he’d said, when in actuality she pictured Doyle chained to a mountain top, vultures feasting as other flew away with his entrails. Her breath quickened. “Yeah, for stealing fire and giving it to humanity. He over-reached, changed man’s fate. I propose Mary Shelley likened Prometheus to scientific experimentation with unintended consequences. At least that’s what my interpretation is right now.” She had to admit the pizza was better than Barone’s. As she wrapped cheese around her finger, Doyle rose and wandered barefoot over to a narrow window, dusky light . He ran one long-fingered hand through his still-wet blonde mane and let out a loud sigh. “Is that supposed to be directed at me?” His voice let Phoebe know she’d hit her intended target, but she didn’t expect him to hurl the little jade plant he’d given her when they first met against the brick wall behind her with surprising ferocity. Shards of green pottery landed in her hair, but stopped short of the pizza, thank goodness. Phoebe rose quickly, more than a little afraid, but even more angry at this person who had the audacity to insinuate himself into her life after he helped her best friend, her soul sister, self-destruct. Doyle realized his mistake when Phoebe’s eyes changed from blue to golden elliptical-shaped viper eyes, and with a gaze, lifted all two hundred pounds of him quickly until a beam on the loft’s ceiling cut into his back. He froze, suddenly afraid his struggles would plummet him to the hardwood below. “Let me down, Phoebe! I’m sorry; I swear it won’t happen again!” “No, it won’t.” She struggled to hide her shock at this ability, intent on keeping control now that she had it. “You almost had me fooled, you fucker.” Her face twisted with grief as she remembered what this man took from her, took from them. Doyle groaned loudly and doubled over on the ceiling. A voice inside cautioned Phoebe, but a different instinct took over as she envisioned her viper self ‘s hinged jaws take a bite from his center, right below the belly button. No thought existed for her when she entered his thoracic cavity. As the golden viper Doyle knew was Phoebe coiled inside him, it flicked it’s forked tongue like a whip and cut tiny slices in the tissues between his ribs. She slowed within his body and felt his wildly erratic heart call to her from behind a lung. He screamed as her flat head pushed hard against the pinkish lung and pinned it aside. “Noooo, Phoebe, Pleeeee…” his gasp ended, the pain a sudden suffocating blanket of dark mercy he mistook for Death. Kazmir could not be happier with his quick transformation of the girl.

The Merkaba is 2 tetrahedrons resembling a soul’s light body

By the time Phoebe returned from the library with the name of the rock (Caucasus Mountains, likely Mount Elbrus) Prometheus had been chained to, she’d also come up with a solution to the problem of Doyle Regan. His entrails and organs were intact when he awoke on Shana’s bed behind a screen painted with a gloriously colorful garden, complete with birds, bees, a copper fox and Monarch butterflies. The viper was gone and Phoebe’s eyes were blue and intent as she watched him warily. He’d been having nightmares since Shana hung herself, but nothing had prepared him for the experience they’d had earlier. “There’s another one… another version of Frankenstein. Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein gave me an idea.” Doyle felt odd. Slowly he rolled over and put his feet on the floor. Phoebe put two frames and Shana’s fairy cards in a copy paper box she’d also gotten at the library. Doyle sprang up and ran toward the bathroom as three slices of pizza ejected from his roiling belly not only in the open toilet, but all over it. Ten minutes later he still dry-heaved into the bowl, face red as tears and snot flowed. Phoebe handed him a cold wet wash cloth, one of the thick white ones she’d given Shana for Christmas. “Don’t worry, Doyle. I’ll take care of you. And you will take care of me.” His stomach suddenly calmed. He wasn’t sure if he felt afraid or just very sick. “Here you go”, Phoebe handed him a dainty tea cup, “I know you said you didn’t like tea before, but this is like a tonic, a little medicine to help you go along. You see… you are going to be MY Igor. Now, sip it ’cause it’s really hot”. The sweet tea did seem to soothe his nerves and slow down his anxious heart. “What is it?” Phoebe smiled at him placatingly before she slapped him satisfyingly hard, like she’d wanted to for quite some time. “Don’t worry about it. You should get back to those exams, and I have an essay to write. In a couple of hours I want you to help me pack up some of Shana’s things and we’ll move her screen. Then you can have her bed for the rest of the summer.” He wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t feel like arguing with her, of that he was certain. An hour later Phoebe wandered over to the window as Doyle sat at her mother’s formica table and corrected chemistry exams as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Phoebe’s essay flowed like a spring creek on a sunny day.

Alt Journey-Serpents

Posted on June 9 by K.S. Schultz

Part 10

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling – Rumi

Professor Fritsche kindly allowed Phoebe to submit both her and Shana’s essays on the topics of marriage, lust, and consequence, as portrayed in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Their deceased parents served the young women’s purposes as bad examples similar in scope to Anna’s, although they had different opinions about her karma. Professor F peered above his glasses at her and mumbled something about, “a waste of talent” and “Hope you’ve started your final despite everything”. He finds the ground under academics more stable than death‘s abyss of unknowns, Phoebe thought later over a cup of peppermint tea as she sat in the grass and pretended to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the umpteenth time. With her urging, their 19th Century Lit prof agreed to submit a final grade for Shana, minus a final exam essay, if the Dean of the English Department, and one of Shana’s most loved professors, approved. Phoebe simply framed her request as a memorial to Shana, and gave the Dean a copy of her friend’s last and final essay. The Dean found Shana’s ideas about passion versus fidelity especially naïve and moving in light of her suicide. Shana would receive a grade for her favorite class that semester, and Phoebe would remember it as the last course they took together. Classmates gave her shy nods, their sad eyes relaying the words they didn’t find. A few were obviously surprised when she walked into chem lab an hour after being released from Resting Pines, not that they imagined what Phoebe ran up against after her best friend’s painful exit.

Her fists slid off it’s slick stark white scales as a serpent with Doyle’s dark eyes fully consumed her. Phoebe discovered herself a golden serpent who slid across symbols carved on tangerine colored walls within her Grandmother tree, an ancient cedar in the Northwoods of Michigan. The symbols pulsed with heat as if alive, but the Ankh is where she fit her slim viper form. Her head rested in the opening of the key of life and Phoebe finally surrendered all she was before Shana’s suicide. Intelligent and witty, her well-crafted college persona came apart at the seams like a sun-bleached scarecrow, mere stuffing of knowledge, sarcasm and friendship scattered, buried, and carried off by crows. Or snakes. Phoebe dreamed of a snowy white python with hinged jaws thanks to Kazmir, Death’s demon who orchestrated these nightly feasts. Warm blood pulsed and squirted into her eyes and mouth as she yelled out, foot, ankle, tibula and fibula crushed like glass in a grinder with each agonizing swallow. Smothered screams with the last gulp of her skull and then nothing until she opened slits and felt her essence in a snake’s condemned existence. “As low as a snake”, Kazmir whispered as she envisioned her cedar sanctuary finally on the third night. In the Ankh, considered in Hebrew as the “Key of Life”, Phoebe’s essence glided among reeds along a lake’s shoreline, her slim serpent body a ribbon of gold amongst the cat tails and lily pads. She dove and swam along the bottom between weeds that rose toward the light above, rocks risen from below, and an occasional clam, the silt velvet against her tender underbelly. Deeper and deeper into the dark she searched and undulated her length as she came to embody the viper and her eyes adjusted to see every shadow. Unsure of what she sought exactly, Phoebe swam until far away she thought she heard a song one only ever sung for her, in private. Ahead, a blushing glow grew and beckoned with a sad melody where only friendship existed before.

“Some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed. Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.” Shana sang Bette Midler’s The Rose for Phoebe not long after their blood sister ritual at the end of 7th grade in 1985. She’d sang it to her countless times over the past seven years, when Phoebe felt like anything but a rose, and it served as a soothing balm. Although she’d never been able to express how special it made her feel, she didn’t have to. For Shana, Phoebe’s patient tutoring, whenever she needed her, felt like acceptance during the years that followed her parent’s abuses. Phoebe had never made her earn love, and forgave easily, but Shana had never skipped out on classes before. Her personal drug usage consisted of a couple puffs during marijuana movie nights at a friend’s apartment last summer. Her parent’s addiction served as a constant reminder of how drugs and alcohol changed people for the worst, hard-won knowledge which kept her straight until Doyle’s manipulations opened the door for Death. During the last weeks of her life, paranoia about losing Phoebe’s love grew as Kaz gleefully watched her create her own scenes of rejection, including burning insults it planted in her psyche. The two friends had never exchanged insults, had never even had a blowup disagreement, but Shana’s artist’s imagination had always been powerful. If they had fought, Phoebe would have explained how it was simply impossible to lose her friendship for a mistake. She would have said “Love forgives”. As Phoebe the golden snake entered the pink glow of a temporary healing chamber, miles deep in a Great Lake, their human essences reformed as womanly silhouettes. Shana and Phoebe hugged and cried dry tears as they held onto one another. No words sufficed, so none were exchanged.

Phoebe awoke to Doyle’s yell from the kitchen, “Time to get up, Phoebe! Gotta fly, but there’s hot water in the kettle. You awake?”. “Yeah” she croaked followed by a stronger, “I’m up! I’m good!”. Her voice squeaked a bit. She prayed Doyle didn’t check on her behind the privacy screen and spy the perfectly shed golden-hued snake skin complete with eyelids stretched out on her bedspread. Doyle flipped the switch on the radio and turned up the volume so she’d get up for sure. Paula Abdul accused her of a being a “Cold Hearted snake”, a dark start to her first day of crafting a final essay about the merits of Dr. Frankenstein.

Alt Journey-Stars

Posted on April 13, 2022 by K.S. Schultz

Part 5

“A great portent appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of 12 stars.”
Revelation 12:1, The Bible

As energy within a healing tetrahedron saturated Phoebe and Shana’s souls they became thoughtless, closer to original than either had been since the first few years of their friendship, when they were new to womanhood, tried on relational influences and found safety with one another. Two green stiches closed the fissure between them, forgiveness barely begun, but Anam Chara remembrance enough to satisfy Tri-Eloh for now. The Tri, having realized a quickly escalating danger to Phoebe’s physical being, gently moved the pair from Mary’s constellation and handed them off to escorts from Michael’s Divine Army for transport to their in-between place. Emboldened by El’s interference, the Tri assumed survival of this Anam Chara link warranted favors from even the most high. The higher the angel or spirit, however, the busier the angel or spirit, as Archangel Michael reminded the Tri of their lengthening line of souls who awaited healing during this deviation from routine cosmic life. Mary’s blessing, however brief, accomplished what would have taken longer than Phoebe’s lifetime and justified the choice even if it did not entirely eradicate Shana’s shame. Tri-Eloh rushed toward their purpose with gratitude that flowed behind them in wide swaths of golden starlight and touched every ethereal being they passed. Visible in the final hour of dark before dawn, a thirty-three-minute meteor shower built upon a Spring Triangle created by the stars Regulus, Spica and Arcturus. Intimate mysteries often revealed themselves to solo audiences on earth.

First they heard “shooosh (pause) shooosh”, then they felt sand beneath their feet at the same time the water came into view, waves shining and dark with frothy remnants when the tide receded. While it possessed key elements of thousands of their summer days, the air was different, shimmering and energetic as if alive and moving on the edge of vision. Shana reached for Phoebe’s hand as a fishy breeze cooled their faces wet with tears. “I am”, they said, “I am you”. “I’ll see you again”, Shana’s whisper landed as Phoebe opened her eyes in a dim cold room. Dry prickly hands rubbed her calves irritatingly, an unidentifiable acrid smell filled her nostrils as she shook her head back and forth on a thin sheet over a plastic mattress that crackled beneath her. “Where am I?”, Phoebe snatched one foot away and kicked at the air. She wanted to go back, to go back to… damn it! She rubbed her nose and noticed the IV in her left hand. “What is going on?” Her heart began to race even as she closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. Formaldehyde and ammonia overlaid with something worse stung her nostrils and throat and made her stomach lurch. Dry Hands let his other hand descend to her foot before she heard, “You are safe under my care at Resting Pines Hospital, Miss Monteer. You’ve been catatonic for a couple days now, so I’m helping the circulation in your legs so you don’t get bed sores.” Back to my beach dream, back to Shana, Phoebe thought, but the ambulance ride, flashes of her dead friend’s neck, questions about heroin and drug dealers crowded her mind instead. Her breath came faster as she remembered it all and wondered if she’d lost her mind, if her mother’s weakness had finally showed up to claim her intelligence and grip on reality. “Water peese”. Dr. Cooper desperately needed composure, but his body betrayed him. It was as though he watched himself rub her foot against his khakis in slow motion. Engrossed, he was blindsided when his dentures clapped loudly as Phoebe’s foot jerked away and met his chin with force. Kazmir bid the Doctor, “Make her pay. Hurt her NOW.” “You will be restrained if you can’t control yourself, Miss Monteer!” “Wow! didn’t think this one was going to come around without ECT, Doc”, a new voice echoed and startled Dr. Cooper out of what he assumed were his own deviant thoughts. “Want me to get the restraints?” Why were they turning off more lights? “Water”, Phoebe croaked. “Yes, good idea at least until she calms down. I don’t know how I would’ve managed if you didn’t come in when you did, Farwin. You are truly indispensable!” The orderly blushed with the doctor’s approval. Dry Hands roughly grabbed Phoebe’s ankles. Hard plastic straps snapped over them at the corners of the bed. She struggled in silence as Kazmir planted images of archaic electroshock methods, biteplate in her mouth, her eyes rolled back in her head. “Give me your hand and I’ll help you with a drink in a second.” Phoebe tried hard not to panic as her arms were restrained. “Go ahead and finish your rounds, Farwin. I’ll take her vitals and give her some water.” “I’m only a little behind, but thanks, Doc. Kinda surprised after that kick, but she’s lucky to have your firm expertise. I’ll check back and make some notes on her status this afternoon. Please page me if you need any assistance before then.” Minutes passed with no sound but breathing from the end of the bed, out of range of sight. A tall thin man in a white coat approached her without a word and pressed a button on the wall behind her. While the bed raised slightly, he clamped his fingers over her nose. “Open your mouth and tilt your head back”, he instructed as he held a cup of water before her face and smiled, thin lips stretched into obvious pleasure as Phoebe opened her mouth. “Further!” he snapped. The doctor let go of her nose and held her head by the hair at her nape as he poured the water. Her nose gurgled then spewed like a fountain as she struggled and the doctor pulled her hair painfully. “Let’s get those vitals now”, he said cheerily as he let her go, brushing her hair from his hands onto the floor. “You really do smell, Miss Monteer. Since your attendant is occupied with other patients now, I know just the man for the job.” Phoebe sputtered and swallowed air as her throat spasmed and her lungs emptied. I have to get out of here, she thought as Dry Hands explained how he might have to take her temperature several times to get an accurate read, but not to worry-he would insure her records were detailed. Regret that he couldn’t report catatonia for a while longer frustrated the doctor. Kazmir plotted out the next few hours for his fully-compliant gadget Dr. Cooper, another fool who’s guilt and unworthiness birthed virgin evil. The doctor opened a drawer on the table next to her where Phoebe saw syringes and a horseshoe-shaped apparatus that he removed and shoved in her mouth before she knew what was happening. She tried to free her tongue to push against it, but it was pinned. “You’ll drool, but we don’t want you to injure yourself during therapy, young lady”, his face moved close enough for her to see flakes of white in bushy brows of grey and black like dirty snow banks in early spring. The doctor moved a machine with gauges next the the bed and flipped a small red switch. He widened her eyelids with his long course fingers, thrilled as his other hand flung the sheet back and exposed her trembling body, bikini underwear her only cover. Both Dr. Cooper and Kazmir delighted at the pure terror evident in her expanded pupils before he blinded her with a tactical light he’d purchased just last week with the demon’s persuasion. Wait a sec. A shiny speck grew in three directions in her left pupil. Surprised and worried he’d damaged her visibly, Dr. Cooper’s breathing quickened and his erection fled. He could lose everything, and all because of one plain girl who hadn’t cooperated, who he’d barely treated yet. A neon green triangle pulsed and cast a glow into the dim room as Phoebe’s body stilled and her soul found itself back on the beach with Shana.

In holographic embodiments of their most recent vessels, the Anam Chara sat cross-legged and sunk into warm sand within a clear crystalline cube open to a sky bleached innocent by scorchingly bright sun rays. “There’s something I have for you”, Shana said as she took her hand and pressed their palms together. Like most of their peers, in high school Shana and Phoebe experimented with alcohol, boys, and marijuana at house parties of classmates with vacationing parents. Phoebe’s mom’s heart-to-heart talks with the girls about dangerous situations and people made little impact. Then, she hit pay dirt when she restricted them to their respective rooms for a month with a threat of additional time if they spoke to one another. Although the friends lived together, went to school and church together, and even sneaked letters to one another, loneliness for their connection far outweighed any popularity they’d gained. If anything, they yearned for their previous invisibility, rather than being known as stupid freshman who could not hold their alcohol. Cautiously optimistic about the girl’s future afterwards, Phoebe’s mother even gave them a later curfew after improved grades proved their seriousness and they talked openly about everything at dinner-time, often seeming to forget she was even there. They were able to launch their plans in earnest with Phoebe’s talent for planning and foresight and Shana’s boundless imagination. Their futures outlined, hard copies reviewed and agreed on, Shana produced a jack knife from her backpack, opened it and swiftly cut her palm to Phoebe’s astonishment. Phoebe put her hand out with her eyes closed and head turned away. Their blood mingled as they joined hands and vowed to never betray one another, just as she dreamed during their separation. In her dream they wore long cotton nightgowns, and she could not make out the details of their features, but she recognized herself and her best friend in a floral wall-papered room with a high ceiling and tall leaded windows, tree branches and a night sky wavy through thick glass, a bed with four posts she knew they shared. A dagger rather than a kitchen knife sliced their flesh and in the dream they also vowed to protect one another.

Shana’s soul recovered a soul memory of this promise shortly after they departed the in-between. Death howled with outrage at her scrap of redemption.

In this moment, sitting on the sand with Shana, a lake lapping the shore on the other side of the cube, Phoebe felt a calm strength fill her mind as her Anam Chara’s soul energy met with reciprocity, light making their joined hands glow. “See you on the flipside”, Shana smiled.

Phoebe opened her eyes to find herself on the plastic mattress again with a low pillow beneath her head and daylight filling a sterile white room. “Great! You’re awake!”, sang a sunny voice. A youngish woman with smooth skin and golden eyes approached her bedside, poured water from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup and announced, “My name is Carrie I’m going to raise the bed slowly, then help you take a tiny sip of water so you don’t spill, ok Miss Monteer?” Phoebe nodded her head. Cool water trickled down her throat and she smiled a little in appreciation. “There you go. Now you just relax while I go get Dr. Pressman. She will assess if you need any more inpatient help. You’ll like her.” The nurse stopped at the door to turn and smile with the last part before leaving. Phoebe picked up the paper cup from the tray table over her bed and sipped while she took in her surroundings. Outside the window an apple tree budded, white scrolls yet to unwind and blossom. She opened the tray table to find a comb, a toothbrush in cellophane, the smallest tube of toothpaste she’d ever seen, and an attached mirror that slid out and angled back to reflect her tangle of red hair and Shana’s golden eyes, a green speck in the left. “What the… ok, ok, Shana.” Phoebe closed her eyes and made herself take a deep breath. Had it all been a nightmare when she awoke before? As she opened her eyes and stared once again into the golden eyes she’d loved, she realized she needed a new outline for a new future. Tears welled as a sob caught in her throat.

Alt Journey-To Dream

Posted on May 25, 2021 by K.S. Schultz

*Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. – Kahlil Gibran*

Part 3

Tea infusers, filled and ready, sat expectedly in dainty chipped teacups, another dagger of “never again”. As she poured the water, she muttered, “alone again… you promised… you more than promised…”

When Phoebe closed her eyes she heard Shana’s giggle, a drawn out “Gurrrrrl”, a standard intro before she recounted another meet-cute on campus turned weird. Shana coyly promised a reward to admirers who proved they were not “dull”, with hilarious results for the retelling. Phoebe, who shied away from a hormonal trickle of admirers, accused her friend of using people for stories, entertainment purposes only. Shana justified their degradation with a reminder to Phoebe that most of her dates aspired to motorboat her boobs, probably dreamed about it, their “weakness” as Phoebe’s mother would say. For her part, Phoebe failed at Shana’s mockingly serious introductions, one long-fingered hand involuntarily flying up to cover her mouth, but not her repressed laughter, as she envisioned Brad, Kylie, Geri, or whoever barking like a dog. If they were exceptionally fit and handsome, Shana asked them to meow like a pussy cat for the price of a kiss. Merely “placeholders” is how Phoebe thought of them until someone, THE one, arrived and fell madly in love with Shana’s expansive vitality: her corny anecdotes related with sound effects and body movements, her talent for creating poems and sketches in the moment whether they were on a hike or in the grocery store, her insatiable curiosity about large families, her pride of uncombable dark curls that covered her face when she studied. Pale, slight, and often invisible, with Shana by her side Phoebe felt stronger, more capable, even witty at times. Despite Death’s earlier intrusions, THEIR bond was supposed to endure anything. They’d dreamed together since 7th grade, their friendship fertilized with wounds, apologies, manicures, stories, meals, academics, long hugs, gossip, and Phoebe’s mom’s peanut butter cookies. She let herself believe a tale they wove of a city/country life, with fertile gardens and edgy gallery openings, a book shop or small market where Shana could have poetry readings and Phoebe might curate curious treasures, for sale when they needed an adventure to stir their blood/imaginations. Or, they’d travel, be vagabonds for a year, soak up sunny ocean breezes down south while it was freezing in Detroit, meet characters and write their stories. The friends had plenty of time before graduation to figure out their next steps, or so they’d said. Then Shana met Doyle with his deep-set eyes fringed in white blonde like spider legs and wide smile. Doyle with his ambitious load of pre-med courses and enough natural intelligence to render bioengineering “fascinating and fun”. He set himself apart and made her curious when he set a cup of peppermint tea down next to her textbook. “Take a break. I promise I won’t bother you very long”. And he hadn’t bothered her, only staying long enough to tell Shana how he noticed her before in the busy coffee shop, watched her as she studied at one of the small tables outside. “And how did you know I like this?” “I smelled it last Thursday when I walked by. Wanted to catch your eye, but you are always so engrossed”, he’d said before he told her his name and asked for hers. All the while, Doyle’s eyes never wandered from her face, and this detail she repeatedly told Phoebe several times that evening, who thought she should be more concerned about being watched. “Jealous?”, is all her friend replied. Kinda, is what Phoebe thought. A week later, he came over for dinner. A bottle of Shana’s favorite zinfandel and a petite jade tree in a green ceramic pot presented with a memorable line, “A symbol of you and Shana’s friendship that I hope will grow to include me, Phoebe.” Like a dude in a cheesy rom-com, Phoebe thought, although she did appreciate the lucky plant, if not the accompanying sentiment. “How thoughtful. Doyle, right?” When she put her hand out, he beamed at her and gave it a soft shake in his. She hoped Shana made him meow later. “Thank you for inviting me in, Ladies.” Although perfectly charming on the surface, there was something slightly off, too sure, a tiny bit spooky, about him. While the girlfriends typically cooked (and danced) together when they entertained, Shana had eggplant parmesan in the oven and the loft tidied up before Phoebe got home stinky and soaked from a spinning class Shana swore would tone her ass before it killed her. Phoebe wasn’t convinced, but admitted the release had improved her concentration. Even their notebooks, sketch pads, books and plethora of writing tools normally littering the coffee table had disappeared, bean bags thrown behind their respective bedroom screens. She remembered how unusually nervous and quiet Shana had been, how she’d paced between the single tall window that looked out on the street and the loft’s kitchen, peeked in the oven window each time she made a pass. “Why don’t we have a tablecloth, Phoebe?”. Long before, their overexuberance frosting Valentine cookies had left pink stains on the uncovered edges of her mother’s old Formica table that she held on to purely for good memories. “Next time we go to the Salvation Army we’ll get a vintage one, maybe with lace or embroidery if we’re lucky”, she’d yelled as she begrudgingly slipped on her loosest jeans rather than pajamas. Phoebe thrived on predictability and preferred Shana’s detours on weekends, when she felt she’d earned some fun. But, her curiosity didn’t want to wait in this instance. How lit up Shana was as soon as Doyle arrived, her rare insecurities gone right up to the moment her parents were exhumed. His faded black t-shirt, well-worn jeans, and scuffed biker boots belied his piercing after dinner conversation, “How old were you, Shana, when your folks OD’d?” and “Did you ever see them shoot up?” Normally, Shana’s dates were intimidated, but not Doyle. After a half hour of squirming through Shana’s stammered descriptions of a past she rarely spoke of, and never with such detail, Phoebe interrupted, “Sorry, but I have some reading tonight; that last chapter when Anna left Alexei again… I want to understand it better. Professor Fayed stresses me out before I’m even awake”. Despite her earlier promise, she awkwardly excused herself before Doyle’s curiosity turned to her. Looking back, she thought maybe her friend was the one intimidated and she had been too self-involved to notice. Why did she leave her in the middle of that brutal questioning? Did her withdrawal help him create a trauma bond? At the time, she didn’t expect to see Doyle again, didn’t expect life to change because of him. He’d left by nine, and hadn’t called Shana for a week.

They’ve promised dreams can come true. But forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.
– Oscar Wilde

Belladonna slowed Phoebe’s racing thoughts, picked up and tucked away her memories, and kicked blame out of her head temporarily. Phoebe thought she heard boots on hardwood in the hallway and wondered if Mom would yell at Daddy; late again. As she tumbled loosely into her underworld, she let go of everything except a prayer, “Hail Mary full of grace…”.

Bare feet cool on smoothly worn stairs carved into the sides of the tree, she climbed round, her eyes trained and face tilted back in search of tell-tale lightening, until one foot met only air. She’d run out of stairs. Although she’d hoped to step out in the forest, a soft peat pathway underfoot, admittedly she’d be sorrowful company for her flying friends. Exhausted was any peace she’d discovered in a stream of liquid crystals meandering around mossy boulders and emptying into a pool lit from below. They’d floated for hours the last time they drank Belladonna tea together, she and Shana; no need for words. It’d happened once before, dozens of stairs not advancing to the top, twice if she counted her initial trip to what she imagined as a base, perhaps HER base, within a cedar tree. In the months following her daddy’s heart attack in his corner office on the 23rd floor, she and her mother lit a candle for him 9 a.m. every Saturday at St. Josephs’ Parish, then prayed for his soul until Father Daniel began readying for Noon mass. Her mother, who’d had to take a front desk job at the Marriot, seemed to find solace during those hours, so Phoebe kept her sore knees and desire to join classmates at the skating rink, or the mall, or the movies, or anywhere other than church, to herself. She often wondered why her daddy’s soul required so many rosaries for so many Saturdays. Deep in the earth at the base of the tree’s unique stairs, is where she found herself one Saturday morning, mesmerized not only by an expansive interior of this mammoth cedar tree, but also by a signature of characters burned black into its’ honey-hued walls. As she did then, Phoebe trailed her fingers over these symbols now, some of which she’d encountered in her studies, most still unrecognizable. A pulsing yellow Sun the size of a dinner plate interrupted the chain and radiated an enveloping warmth, comfort she absorbed for a few seconds before unworthiness prodded her onward. More unknown charry characters passed under her fingers until she reached an infinity symbol, one of five, this one streaming oceanic shades of blue and black. It was the first symbol she’d recognized, and researched it only to find finite understanding by even George Cantor, the famous Set Theory mathematician who classified “absolute infinity equal only to God’s realms”. Unlimited, endless, a brush of her fingertips and she no longer embodied a human, but a sparkling star in the constellation Lyra, not far from Vega the Harp Star, and neighbor of Hercules, Cygnus, and Draco. Eternity was perplexing with Earth’s limited lens, but from here Phoebe remembered Shana could never be entirely erased. An enormous azure and orange ring nebula caught her attention in the distance, neon green twinkling in it’s heart. As she reached for it with her will, a steely vise pulled her forcefully by her head and dumped her naked on an amber resin floor, flat on her back. Just as her breath expelled in a huff, a silver pregnant moon fell from above to pin her motionless. Phoebe sipped the air frantically, unable to expand her lungs as the moon cooled her flattened frame. A frequency emanated from a newly inserted needle at the top of her skull. Hyperventilated and panicked, she stilled finally, spent and empty. Proof of her vileness, her ugliness, played on the moon’s surface like a bad movie, times she made fun of other kids, times she lied, times she wished people dead, like Shana’s parents. I AM vile, she thought, to which Death replied, “Vile, jealous, and ugly. Take whatever love you can because you won’t get much, especially after your ultimate failure as a friend”. A smoky cloud filled the space around her and she felt long hard pinches simultaneously on the sides of her thighs that punctuated every word. “Now repeat it back, you worthless bitch, and I might let you go”. Phoebe repeated the words in her head, over and over. The cloud dissipated, as did the moon, and her breath came easier, just as promised. When she tried to sit up, however, a band encircled her brow and lowered her back to the floor as laughing and attractive faces appeared above her, most unknown, but very familiar. They appeared to make bets with one another, their voices muffled.

Trembling, Phoebe came to with a crowd of paramedics, firemen, and police around her bed, an IV in her arm, an empty syringe on her nightstand. “Wha’ss goin’ on?” “It’s going to be ok, Phoebe. I called them when you didn’t answer the door or your phone. We’re all here to help you.” Doyle stood by the jade tree in the window. The streetlight at his back cast his shadow over her and she thought his platinum hair glowed. “Is thisss a dream?”, Phoebe slurred. “Transporting to the state hospital, repeat, transporting female, age 20, name Phoebe Monteer, to state hospital for evaluation following her self-termination attempt.” In the ambulance when she explained she drank Belladonna tea to meet her friend in her dreams, and that she certainly did not need to be restrained, the paramedic looked at her with a smirk and said, “You’ll get a chance to explain all that, Honey. Don’t worry.” He turned toward the front. “She’s getting agitated. I’m going to give her clozapine. Always easier that way and we get home for dinner”.

My Online Friends = Good Medicine

Posted on September 22, 2019 by K.S. Schultz

During the past decade I’ve tried dozens of traditional and alternative treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. I’ve appreciated pain complexity and adjusted remedies to fit, backed off harsh medications or added steroids, adjusted my diet almost daily along with activity levels (completing a project may take 5X as long as it used to). Consistency vanished along with my life outside disease management until I joined an online support group, but not JUST any online support group. This group is fiercely devoted to humor (you may get ousted for complaining), support served on the side (in heaping portions, if needed). Not long after joining this group, my focus shifted, and I began laughing again. Sometimes I was in horrid pain and unable to walk, but I felt better after connecting and laughing. Sometimes I provided the laughs, and it felt good, like I contributed something positive! I’d almost forgotten that feeling.

Truly understanding the effects of disability and pain on a person’s self-worth when you are healthy is beyond difficult even if temporarily stricken with an illness because you get better. That’s not a judgement (YAY for healing), but reality as much as I cannot possibly understand what it is like to live in (Insert Least Liked Country) for the rest of my life. I can learn as much as possible about (Insert Least Liked Country), even visit, but without being forced to live there when I don’t want to, it is a topical comprehension. Experience is where empathy grows, and from shared experience friendships are born.

My friends are online mostly, but please don’t pity me or assume I’m lonely/depressed. I have people I can be 100% real with, if not in the group, then on messenger. Around-the-clock support is there when steroids keep me up all night because: 1. I have friends across the world. and 2. I’m never the only one on steroids at any given time.

We have regional meetups, where I get to hug a few of these Warriors in person vs. our usual cyber-hug routine and we laugh for hours, and end with promises to meet again. Whether online, or in the flesh, the founding member in my neck of the woods teases mercilessly, tells great stories, and is a pretty good sport when humor boomerangs on him. Some friends have travelled for hours to meet each other, in my city this summer and in Elkhart, Indiana yesterday. These are not only friends I laugh with, but also friends who pray for me and send me positive energy when I’m very sick or just walking with a limp. They are the friends who invite us for a big spaghetti dinner, and add special details like twinkle lights and grapes hanging from the ceiling and little gifts of jasper. And they are the ones at home watching us online, hopefully getting a little ambient flavor through the screen.

I don’t socialize less because of this group, trust me. If anything, they help keep me fit for ~~decent~~ company. 13257

Essential and unsurpassed friendships

Posted on November 7, 2011 by K.S. Schultz

I will ask your forgiveness at the outset of this post for my sentimental remembrances of friendships that have been cornerstones to my uncharacteristic character and offer my advancing age as the only excuse for this mushiness. The time to give credit where credit is due has arrived and I can no longer keep them unvoiced in my head.

She knows who she is, the friend who risked her popularity to befriend me, a clear underdog in a harsh teen landscape. We bonded over cigarettes, painful childhood secrets which had never before been shared, and belly aching laughter that made the tears stream down our faces. I never understood why other girls were intimidated by her, but her protection saved me more than once and bullies steered clear of me for the first time in my life. She made loving gestures, surprising me with cards, posters, and even a birthday party. Her love helped me grow strong, confident, and free to be silly. She has downplayed her impact on my life when I have tried to impart how happy she made me. Have you ever noticed how generous people do that?

She knows who she is, the tenacious friend that I could not shake during the darkest period of my life. She did not run from my overwhelming grief over losing my infant son. It seemed to last forever and I gave her nothing, yet she expressed her love for me every single day of those two years. I wanted to be left alone with my pain, not even answering the phone most of the time. She would leave simple answering machine messages saying, “You don’t have to talk to me, but I am here if you want to. I just wanted to let you know I love you and am thinking of you today. Please let me know if you need anything and I will be there.” And she was there, even though I rarely let her know. She was the friend that loved me out of it, that helped me see that good still existed and it went by her name.

She knows who she is, the friend that shared her creativity and became a safe haven for mine. She encouraged me to write and found value in pieces that I believed were garbage. She is better than Strunk & White and was my first editor. Our visits are an encouraging fix for me that fill my creative well and result in positive forward motion. It is believed that friends are mirrors of our own selves. In her case, she is often my best self.

He knows who he is, the volunteer who recognized how overwhelmed I was and generously offered to help with whatever I allowed. Although he dislikes the term, he IS smart and shares his intelligence with me at a rate that my brain cannot absorb. The most valuable knowledge I have gained from his friendship is how happiness can be derived more so from life’s simple aspects such as nature, food, giving of oneself, camaraderie, and butter pecan ice cream than from temporary material goods. I now treasure my experiences and memories more than I did before I knew him. He is an interesting combination of stimulation and serenity. I hope that one day I can accept myself as wholly as he accepts me (and himself).

Lastly there are my two best friends, the one that gave me life and the other that gave me new life when she was born. Although bonded by blood and mother-daughter love, our friendship was not guaranteed, but we actually like one another. Our similar independent natures require that we each have differing views and personalities, yet no one could tell our cores apart. It is the personification of friends mirroring one another. They are both fiercely loyal, opinionated, and brutally honest. I know them like I know myself. We are like a stout tripod that cannot be tipped.

My public gushing may very well be influenced by my bouncing hormones, but my appreciation of my friends has always been there, unexpressed until now.