October 1st Portal

**Note to reader** The following essay touches on a deeply personal experience with death and losing a partner.

Every year, I look forward to October. Every year, I cringe thinking about October.

The season is shifting and something feels lighter, finally. The air is thinner. My birthday is here again. My creativity gets to take a new breath, which is always a relief after the slog of summer. While the sense of renewal is all around me there is always something wedged in the middle. The ripples of an event that forever changed me are still rippling. Nowhere near as intense, but it still has it’s own type of silent wave.

Anyone who has experienced sudden loss knows this cycle. The environment that you were in when you hear life changing news sticks to your bones forever. The smells. The way the sun was casting shadows on the coffee shop floor. While it’s been many years since life as I knew it was pulled out from under me, the familiar sight of new fall growth and the temperature taking the tiniest dip to something pleasant has since put me in a place of both cozy familiarity intertwined with the anxiety of knowing that everything could end/change once again.

I was about to turn 21 when I lost him. We had moved to NYC a couple years before to pull our creative threads. I was incredibly insecure and codependent, but hopeful. He was a whirling tornado with everything he touched, but he was full of light. We had no money nor a clue, but we loved each other. For reasons I cannot explain, I knew our time together wasn’t long for this earth. I had a silent knowing that somehow, for some reason, it was all going to end soon. But even still, the shock waves of the phone call that catapulted me into an upside down world is still being explored today, 18 years later.

And there’s something just so very rude about someone you love dying so close to your own birthday, ya know? The universe didn’t consult my calendar, and it didn’t ask if I was prepared. The universe is impartial, neutral, in some sort of rhythmic chaos, and my boyfriend was just a tiny part of its song that day. I think this was the biggest reveal for me while trying to navigate my new perspective. Something so simple and obvious but I couldn’t understand it until then:

Yes, death is real. Yes it will even happen to me. No, I am not in control.

There’s just no way to talk about death or its after effects without bumming everyone out, because well, it is technically the ending. Some believe it’s the ultimate beginning. Most of us don’t know how to even go there and we swat away the thought completely. Our minds have an aversion to that deep and natural truth. I know that at that point in my life, fresh out of high school, I had barely even begun to get my life going. I was a baby faced adult imposter. I had known people to die, but they were old. So what to do with this new information of deep and intimate loss that had been sprung on me so rudely that Saturday morning, October 1st, in 2005?

I was a mess. I immediately uprooted the next day and moved back to my hometown of Augusta, GA. I assumed the position of submissive robot and did whatever I thought would make me feel better. I jumped into a new relationship way too soon, with someone way too old for me. I drank. I tucked my pain away into the recesses of my body and only took it out when I was alone and couldn’t make anyone feel too uncomfortable. I people pleased. I felt darker inside, and like a total weirdo because I didn’t know anyone else in their 20s who had lost a partner. I worried that I would always be known for being the girl whose boyfriend died. I longed for someone to find me and say “I completely understand”.

But time is always the medicine.

All in all, I would say it took me about 10 years to “get over” it. It was even confirmed by a shaman one day when I went to him for some guidance. I thought I was still needing to work through something from that loss, something from that fated day, but at that point I somehow knew I was just clinging. I wasn’t allowing myself to fully let it go and accept that it happened. I needed to hear the words “I think you’ve moved past that” from someone who could see into my heart. His deep, clear eyes and kind words were the permission slip I needed to finally express other parts of myself. To be back in my own life, to take that piece of my soul back from New York. It was what I needed to hear so that I could allow myself to feel loved again.

It was OK to not grieve anymore.

*photo of me right before moving to New York, 2003*

The way that this event of loss has shaped me as a person and an artist has no measurable parameters. It was like a supernova in my world that at the time had felt so small. The new, raw awareness of how fleeting time is has propelled me in everything I do since. I absorbed my deceased boyfriend’s mission to make as much art as possible while I can. I would forever take things a little more seriously than some of my peers. I guess it made me a little more intense in my convictions about art and life too, which for a long time has made me feel like a bit of an outlier. But at that big moment, my sense of time was squashed and warped, and I no longer felt like time could be wasted. I could never go back to the world that existed on September 30th, 2005.

My new awareness of time was the ultimate gift of that exploding star I suppose, whose ripples can still be felt, even today.

Perhaps this is why I love to champion other artists. This is probably why I feel so strongly about trying to help someone see past their own self-limiting beliefs about what their art can be. I understand that feeling of pointlessness, exhaustion, and disbelief. I also understand how easy it can be to stay there, because yes; we are just a tiny blip in the chaos of the universe. But isn’t that also freeing? We aren’t here for a long time, we are here for a good time, as they say. We don’t need to wait for a permission slip, or for the perfect note to ring out. Life is a continuous song. We are allowed to feel and do and express and experience as much as we are willing, but we do actually have to be willing.

I’ll forever know October as the portal I was pushed through. I would continue to feel a bit of that blunt force for years after, every time October would roll around. Now the force has turned into a bit of a dance; a collaborative understanding between me and the hidden world. While I indulge in an overpriced pumpkin spice latte and obsess over Halloween squash I simultaneously know that my life will be upheaved again one day, somehow. There will once again be a new awareness of the universe’s possibilities and harsh limitations. A new layer of the onion revealed. This is everyone’s inevitable truth, and it is OK. It’s ok to laugh at the chaos and darkness of it all. I am grateful for my great experience of loss on October 1st 2005, because without its ripples I wouldn’t see how much of a miracle my life is. I don’t know if I would believe in myself quite the same way, or feel the preciousness of time going by.

I don’t know if I would have heard the universe’s song as loudly as I do now.

The Absolute Freedom of Smallness