Melisinka

Hellllllllllooooooooooo………Wow. This feels so very weird, like tiptoeing around an abandoned mansion. Grassy weeds and wildflowers creeping through the cracks. Bits of plaster fallen and faded wallpaper hanging off what’s left of the walls. I used to live here…. but now it seems like a long-ago dream. Where the ceiling once was I now look up into the sky. I sit down in a patch of sun and watch the lacy shadowplay of flowers and ivy kissed by light. I have avoided coming back here, this place I unintentionally abandoned a year and a half ago.

Nevertheless, I find myself  at the same big old desk, with the black feather quill and ornate brass curlicues ready to rest my gaze upon. Tame Impala plays in the kitchen and filters down the hallway..”feels like we always go backwards…” – which strikes  me as a rather amusing and ironic omen at this stage in the proceedings. If there has been one recurring lesson that I have been forced to learn over and over again in this lifetime, it has been the good old “letting go and not looking back”. I am notoriously bad at letting go of anything, and have a house full of treasures (read:op-shop junk) to prove it. I confess to being a terrible hoarder. I hide things I know I should throw away. I used to be in the habit of tricking myself like this until finally, in an alcohol- induced frenzy of intense destruction and abandon I would,  in a single night,  end a relationship, delete half my ‘friends’ from facebook and/or ruthlessly discard aforementioned treasures from overstocked cupboards, leaving me hungover  and blinking in the morning light at randomly stacked garbage bags for charity and the smouldering ashes of past diaries. Very slash and burn, onwards and upwards, to the future we ride!

When I finally, with tremulous fingers, bring up my website  it looks like the starving, abandoned child it is. Oh dear lord, the guilt! So this is what my dream of the drowning kitten was about, the one where I was off galavanting in South East Asia whilst a shark had entered the fish bowl at home and was about to eat my beloved little kitty! I force myself to look at the ragged photo gallery that has been endlessly rotating decade-old paintings to no-one,  like some sad ancient slideshow lost in cyberspace. The Witch’s Hall of Fame that had been so much fun creating at the time but now looks like a chipboard coffin full of cut-out celebrities. I silently cringe and castigate myself for not dealing properly with the dead. Where’s the dignity, Melisinka, the dignity of proper deletion?!    My last blog was rather aptly titled “Dead End Detour” and had a picture of a Mexican Day of the Dead skull. Did I subconsciously realize I would not be coming back for so long? Was I preparing myself for the great ritual of death and rebirth that was about to occur, perhaps WAS in the midst of occurring at that time?

It’s hard to say, but what I do know is that like with anything in life, but particularly with any artistic creation, it is all about the feeling- that deep knowing that comes when you are connected to the life-force, the energy which births creation. There are times when it is so strong and you are so connected that it is almost impossible to hold it back, and the act of creation is like riding a great, euphoric wave. Then there are the periods of what feels like nothing, when the vastness of possibility just looks like a desert and there you are, all weak and dehydrated without a map or a bottle of water or a camel. Not giving a shit about the pyramids. Just wanting a tap and a tree.

Not that my hiatus has been terrible, nor even desert-like. There was merely a much needed  tangent of pure indulgence into living and not writing about living. I had spent one too many mornings in my local cafe hunched over my big black leather-bound book scribbling like a mad woman and hiding my mysterious, obviously highly-secretive and valuable scrawl behind my hand when my latte was delivered. Ummmm, impending descent into rocking chair ruminations and crazy cat-lady status. One of the most acute signs that it was indeed time to let go of the writing habit was when I lost my big black diary at a tram stop. Mmmmm. The absolute horror that emblazoned through every fibre of my being upon that particular realization I will not soon forget. Flashes of what I had written that morning etched themselves behind my retinas. Private things. Petty things. Unworthy thoughts and bitchy purgings. Then there were the witchy things. The skeleton rituals, Aleister Crowley quotes and notes on sex magic. All I could imagine was some skinny uni student finding this black leather book with a massive pentacle on it and taking it home, the king of trash- trophies,  to his smart-arse second year arts and commerce house mates and taking turns in spluttering up their VB  while they passed around the bong and had a good laugh. Oh, too, too awful! I desperately scanned my memory for any trace of my name within the pages of that now despised journal…prayed that I would not have been so stupid as to earmark myself for potential public humiliation should the unthinkable happen and I leave my precious at the tram stop. It never came back and I learned once more – this time with major enthusiasm – to let go and not look back! I never wanted to see or think about that book again.

My writing, I began to think, should take on a new form, and until I knew what that form would be, I would allow myself the time to let it all go. I didn’t want to over-analyze everything, to always be the observer, the scribe. I wanted to live amongst it and be a part of things, and most of all I wanted to deconstruct whatever it was my ego had made me into, who I thought I was, and allow something new to emerge. When I stopped blogging,  I liked not being public, not putting words out there. Words  that have the power to shape how you are perceived and  create a Frankenstein-like avatar existence that has varying degrees of likeness to the “real” you -depending entirely on the choice of what  you choose to write at any given time. There is something incredibly beautiful and sacred about silence in a world full of clatter and noise. The cacophony of the masses is sometimes too much to bear in this age of technology where everyone has their own soap box to stand on and  has been given a free loudspeaker – and when you begin to feel like you are just adding to the global noise-mess, it is time to step off and go play somewhere quiet for a while.

To be honest, there is still very much a part of me which questions what it is I have to offer that justifies coming back to blog. Aren’t there enough opinions and stories and blogs out there already, for chrissakes? Yes, there are, and I have no real justification for coming back except that I trust my instinct and it feels right. To Blossom and Jasmine (two little flowers, and these are actually their real names!) thankyou for appreciating my writing and continuing to harass me on a not-too-regular but regular enough basis to start blogging again. Knowing that even after all this time, there was someone occasionally dropping into the abandoned mansion of Melisinka to see if there was anyone there, made me feel like I could move through the ghostly invisibility I’d chosen and reappear like a Dickensian specter when the right time had come, when the bells had rung out and the dark clouds descended. It all had a lovely dark touch of the gothic about it, actually, and I found myself ever drawn closer to the idea that perhaps I didn’t have to over-analyze why I should write again, nor painstakingly dissect inspiration and ideas for worthiness of content before allowing myself to reappear in words once more.  Maybe just being here and doing what I do, for fun, is enough! How’s that for a freakin’ breakthrough that was worth taking a year and a half to try and comprehend. (I blame it on my Virgo south node control freak aspect that I am in this lifetime grappling with, in order better to connect to the whole flowing, expansive and oceanic Piscean north node moon thingy that I’ve recently discovered and have been reading about in an awesome book called  “Astrology for the Soul”  by Jan Spiller).

I should go now. It is a strange pleasure to be back. I hope my wanderings will allow me to climb through a broken window and out onto a rather hazardous, rusty wrought-iron balcony  every now and again to share my view…  of what and whom, I do not know nor wish to know until that moment is once more upon us.