By age ten, I had rebelled against the religion my parents believed in. They were Lutheran, which isn’t exactly known for being harsh. As far as denominations of Christianity go, it tends to fit in pretty well with our small-town-ish Scandinavian-descended lutefisk and “bars” “Minnesota nice” stereotypes.
(In case you’re wondering, lutefisk is a kind of fermented fish thing we joke about but don’t usually eat, and “bars” are a name we give to a wide variety of desserts which can be made in a sheet pan, cut into little rectangles, and held in your hand while you mingle at whatever gathering has brought you all together to eat them–probably a funeral.)
The rebellion came in phases. Phase one: lose someone you love.
I always supposed that my interest in the supernatural was in some part due to the deaths I had encountered early on in my life. First, there was my grandpa Alden, who passed when I was around two years old. I still have a mental image of myself standing on a chair beside his casket, watching over him. The casket in my memory is mint, the rose is red, and he is stoic at rest. The only memory I can recall earlier than that is a whimsical image of carrots, freshly pulled from a garden and rinsed in a steel kitchen sink by window-light. The archaic filing system in my brain is certain this was at my grandpa’s house. I can only assume, then, that I had been sitting on the counter, and that it had been his hands washing the dark earth off of those roots.
But his wasn’t the death that made me question everything. It wasn’t the deaths of my great grandmothers, who I’d also had the pleasure of briefly knowing. I had been too young, or the attachments were not as well-formed. No, the first death–the one that really felt, deep down, like death–came with the passing of our family cat. Bigfoot, nick-named “Footie”, was an orange tabby cat with extra toes (polydactyl).
Footie had just been a kitten when my dad’s family found him. By the time my mom had joined the two of them at the kitchen table, and I was born, Footie had already lived ten years, himself. He’d already survived a scare with a sewing needle and some thread. Had already developed a taste for delicacies like fresh green peas, and peanut-butter on toast. He had a favorite blanket, crocheted in scalloped rows of autumn colors, which my mom would lay across her lap while she read her many books.
My most vivid memory of Footie is when he made the rounds about the house at bedtime, prowling dutifully past my bedroom door each night and looking in on me. He was the first being I considered my Guardian. He made me feel safe.
The old boy had lived a pretty long life, then, when I was eight and a half, and his body was giving out on him. It was November 14th, 2002, when my parents pulled me out of school and we went together as a family to the veterinarian. I formed a new memory there. All of us surrounding Footie, petting his soft fur and telling him we loved him and it was okay, our faces wet with tears.
I picture it in two ways: One, where I see Footie lying on the table, feeling the breath leave his body under the tips of my fingers. And another, where it seems like I’m the one lying there, looking up at the bleary faces of my family against the bright white of the ceiling above.
That night was the first time I’d kept a journal.
That poem–about the rainbow bridge–still makes me cry.
I went through many stages of grief, and I did so slowly.
Stage two of my religious rebellion was Bargaining. And who does one bargain with in the Christian faith if not with God himself? Who else could hold the very power of creation? As I mentioned, Lutheranism isn’t a particularly fierce religion. Our pastors didn’t rain down on us threats of the devil. So, “prove to me you’re real,” I pleaded with the maker of miracles. “Bring Footie back to us.” I had been taught such things could be possible.
But no force [in] heaven or on earth did reconstitute the ashen remains of my old sentinel into the beloved feline he had once been. I grieved again. I was belligerent. I hated God.
I still talked to the powers that be, at that point. It’s hard to fully dismiss something you’ve believed in your whole young life. I felt the cruel sting of betrayal, but I was also afraid to admit that kind of loneliness. If there was a presence looking down on us, who was good to us sometimes, at least, wasn’t that still better than having no protection at all?
If nothing else, I wanted to believe in angels.
With the absence of Bigfoot, I turned to my half-sister Anna Leah, who had only ever been a spirit to me. She was stillborn, in an era when my mother was young and had not yet married my father. She’d been built with a deficit of bones, and was named for the red-headed doll Raggedy Ann. I imagined her grown up some, older than me by an appropriate margin. A familiar soul who I could talk to. When I finally refused to address God directly, I prayed only in her direction. During the Christmas season, I had a paper wall decoration in the form of an angel in a pink dress, with pose-able arms, who would hover at my bedside. I used this decoration–this idol, as it were–to visualize my ethereal sister and feel comforted by her presence watching over me.
Eventually, though, the contention between a fading belief in a higher power and the cloying desire for connection was too great to ignore. Reality continued to fail me. Stage three was when I lost my friends.
No, they didn’t die. But I still felt the suffering of loss and abandonment.
Friendship, much like religion, aims to fulfill an emotional, psychological need for connection, to something bigger than yourself.
I’d had a neighborhood friend, who I considered my first. Her name was Marin. She lived in the house behind mine on our little suburban block. Our two backyards were separated by a chain-link fence that wasn’t difficult to circumvent. I remember playing together, at her house or mine, or at the park down the way. She and Bigfoot had existed in the same span of time, but I don’t remember how old I was when she faded from my life. There’s no real end to that timeline. No closure. No goodbyes. Just an ellipsis… a baited breath.
I still feel a slow rise of panic in my chest when I think about using the phone. The anticipation. The disappointment. The lack of comprehension and rise of adrenaline as the cogs of my brain grate together in a monumental effort to find the answers that just won’t come. What critical detail had I missed?
I used to pick up the phone without this fear, I think, though usually from the privacy of the extra landline my dad had hooked up in the garage outside. I would ask Marin if I could come over, or if she wanted to play. Sometimes I would simply run the short distance to her door and knock. But there came a time when I was the only one reaching out, and every call I made was met with excuses. I don’t even remember the nature of the excuses. The only pattern that I could identify was the blank feeling of rejection after rejection; a montage of line clicks and closing doors. Until, eventually… I learned to give up.
I was around twelve years old when I became isolated from my elementary school friends. Best friends, forever… or so we claimed.
Other factors were at play with us, though. Puberty had gotten to me, despite my obstinate wish to avoid its physical consequences. Hormones were changing the chemical makeup of everything, including my mind and my emotions. Beyond this, I had some new sensory experiences to adjust to, like glasses squeezing my temples and orthodontics pulling my teeth. And, we were transitioning to a new external environment: a new school.
I described in Episode 02 how I went to this weird middle school where the classes were split up like Hogwarts houses. Imagine your best friend (and others you knew) from the last six years were sorted into Gryffindor, and you, sitting under the hat not even knowing you might need to mutter “not Slytherin, not Slytherin” under your breath… got plunked right into a house of strangers. Dazedly, without time or knowledge to process this thing, you walk to the other side of the great hall, an unfamiliar hand at your back to usher you on, your eyes searching backward over your shoulder.
Wondering: What happened? What critical detail had I missed?
Not to neglect the concept of faith in this next phase of my life, my parents, soon after, put me through “confirmation” classes at church. I did not, by this time, believe in any God; I had made up my mind on that. Though I had no issue poking through bibles and apocrypha for lore on angels–and demons, now; the fallen ones–as fictitious creatures of myth and the human psyche, those ecclesiastical classes covered nothing of such interest.
What was worse, the schedule of those classes had interfered with an attempt to reconnect with friends I had known and new peers I was curious about, and to engage with a more joyful special interest that hearkened back to brighter elementary school days: a musical; The Pirates of Penzance.
A literally-minded, rule-abiding autistic girl, I was under the impression that I should not even audition for a role in this play, because an out-of-town trip I was required to attend with that church class interfered with a performance date for the play (or vice versa). It was only later I was made aware that the director had collected two main casts to alternate between performances, so it probably would have worked out just fine, but without that knowledge prior to the auditions process, I had missed out altogether.
Infuriated by the unfairness of everything I felt I had no control over, I formally declared myself atheist. Religion was a distraction, a hurdle; ridiculous in the face of science and the blunt powers of observation. The cycle of life decreed dirt and maggots after death. Nothing was forever, not even friendship. Humoring the idea of God was tantamount to chewing rocks.
Who then–if not God nor angels, if not friends, nor parents, nor the family pet, nor even my own inconstant self–who did I have to turn to for comfort? Who or what was reliable now?
There was nowhere I could place my thoughts and feelings where I felt they’d be compassionately observed and gently held. I had no obvious guardians to turn to. Instead, it seemed that I was more of a guardian for others. I was the vessel, the one who would listen to their stories, their thoughts, their emotions, their ideas, their secrets. I was the one in the passenger seat when my parents vented their frustrations about work, each other, or my sibling (who only served to further divide their attention). I was the one on the sideline when friends argued or needed help and wanted someone to turn to for confession, mediation, advice, or distraction.
Despite the aloofness and dissociation I adopted to wade peaceably through middle school, I retained some ember of hope that there was something more. I’m stubborn; it is both a strength and a weakness. In this shadowy realm of hormones and teenagers, I staggered toward another possibility of internal comfort and reprieve: Romance.
Could a soul mate, I wondered, be the answer to religion and friendship, safety and joy?
Fiction, the remaining magic of our time, made it seem so possible.
The human mind is fascinating in its capacity for imagination. In the absence of belief, or faith, in abstractions, there remains creativity. And beyond that, creativity becomes, ultimately, an essential human need. Imagination is a survival mechanism. A coping strategy for the things we don’t understand and can’t control.
So I continued to imagine. I began to write my own fictions. To the extent that I was passing three-ring binders of printed manuscript to my friends during class time.
And with these fictions, I created a new guardian for myself. A particular character. A partner in romanticism. A soul mate. In… mundane terms, I had an imaginary vampire boyfriend. You can laugh; It’s okay. My gothic tendencies were somewhat subtle, but ultimately no secret.
This vampire, much like Strahd, who I mentioned vaguely in Episode 05, was very much a classical Dracula figure, despite the new popularity of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight. Tall and striking, with raven-black hair and that ever-tantalizing widow’s peak hairline. He had thin wry lips, the hands of a harpsichordist, and the kind of dark eyes that understood everything they beheld. He possessed the inordinate patience of ages, and the low voice of someone who believed in the beauty of starlight. I made him out to be about ten years older than me, in appearance. I maintain that he still would seem older than me if I’d invented him today, fifteen years later. It was a hopeful distinction; I wanted to be older. Fully formed. Stable. Wise.
Much like the early days of Anna Leah’s ghost, we would sit on the edge of my bed, the vampire and I, and talk softly to each other. I would ask him for advice, for reassurance. He took up the mantle of my inner voice–the one who was kind to me, who sought to encourage and protect me.
I posted something to Instagram a while ago. It said, “sometimes my mind whispers ‘I miss you’ but I don’t know who it’s talking to.”
–and I just thought of that post, because at some point that distinctive presence disappeared from the forefront of my consciousness. And I felt a pang of heartache, remembering that whisper…
I miss the part of me that trusted myself. That held myself up, despite anything. My confidence. Some might say their muse, or their genius. I called mine a guardian.
Guard me from fear of death, from fear of life:
from fear of society, and of the unknown.
Guard me from loneliness and misunderstanding.
Guard my unarmored hope,
the delicate threads of my being which long to believe in something.
To love and to be loved, unconditionally and forever.
I named him Illich.
Because I’m a sucker for etymology, and the history of sounds applied to things, I had to go back and look up the name Illich. I don’t think I’d ever researched it previously, because it wasn’t a name that I had been searching for so much as stumbled upon at the time. A flash, a trinket in the road, which spoke to me, so I carried it home.
After a quick search now, Illich seems to be a Russian patronymic, meaning “son of Ilya”. And it’s probably pronounced more like “Ilyich” than the kind of Germanic “Illich” slant I assumed. But, well… that’s okay. That’s language for you.
So… Russia is complicated. Let’s just get that disclaimer out there now. But, one of my favorite regions of mythological story is in Russian legends and wider Slavic folklore. Ilya is a recognizable name from some of those tales. From the UK, we know the Arthurian legends; the knights of the round table. The French have their just and daring Musketeers. And, in a similar vein, Russia has the bogatyrs, who go out and quest and defend the realm and other knightly things of that nature. Ilya Muromets is one of those bogatyrs.
Ilya’s story begins that he, from a young age, was disabled. He was bedridden, unable to walk–until the age of 33, at which point a beggar-who’s-actually-a-sorcerer type of figure enters his his home and asks for water. I’m going to point you to Myths and Legends episode #43: “The Wasteland” so you can listen to more of that story and Ilya’s journeys. But the short of his origin is that Ilya ends up not only cured of his inability to walk, but is also granted superhuman strength. You can see why he might have wanted to go questing after that encounter. Get out there and seize the day, so to speak.
So, my middle-school contrived vampire boyfriend is ultimately, deep down, named after a shining knight of Russian legend who got a second chance at life. In his thirties.
And, this is especially interesting: According to a Wikipedia article, Ilya Muromets is also the only bogatyr to have been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Coincidence? Delightful.
During the time that I was relying on this image of Illich, as I mentioned, I was having a lot of issue with being forced to go into church. But I remember sitting through the programs, and just focusing on some of the sensory aspects, rather than the actual content. Churches are built to be… gripping, to capture the mind and the imagination, even the simpler ones. It’s a kind of theater which human beings are very drawn to. Just like anything else designed with intention and devotion, their interior is supposed to make you feel something.
So I would look at the stained glass, and that one red candle, always burning, and the wood of the pews, the buttons on the old cushions. I would listen to the notes of the piano while they echoed through the peaked ceiling. I would tune out the words, and hear the pattern, the rhythm of voices instead. And I would feel Illich there with me. His presence kept me grounded when I was overwhelmed or irritated.
I have some amount of synesthesia, I think, between sight and touch–which is probably a lot of why I have the kind of motor skills that I do… If I can see something, or even just visualize it in my mind, I can feel it, too. So I would imagine something simple, like the structure of finger bones interlaced with my own, or the way the side of my jaw tingles when someone leans in over my shoulder. I didn’t have to experience the real thing for my nerves to assume what it felt like.
Even so, the sensation was more of a murmur than a song.
And, as I said… puberty is a powerful force of confusion and distraction. Largely unguided, experimental nonsense, flying across a movie screen so rapid-fire as to resemble seizures. Even as the tumult of those currents swept Illich away from me, I still clung to the idea of romance to stay afloat.
My first flesh-and-blood boyfriend was gay. I was his first and only girlfriend. Honestly, though, we might have had more in common as people than did my next boyfriend and I, so… I remained utterly confounded by fate and circumstance.
By age sixteen, I thought I had found someone who could have really been a soul mate. I’d forgotten Illich. But here was someone else who felt… strangely familiar. The dark hair, the knowing eyes, a wry smile. Someone who was both irreverent and affectionate. Someone who seemed… much more real to me than a lot of people I’d met.
But I was so utterly and completely afraid of rejection and disappointment by then that I could neither bear to definitively let go of the previous relationship I’d managed to hook my talons into, nor risk the possibility of failure with this new important person. I did not want to be alone. So I remained in a halfway place, taking crumbs of company where I could get them, oscillating between physiological and psychological desires and fears, a variety of perceived social expectations and exceptions, conflicting dreams and utter exhaustion.
Who I was–what I was–amid all this chaos of time and sensation and sentience…
I could not have fathomed anymore.
To further complicate matters, I had gotten into LARP.
LARP, if you haven’t heard of it by now, is an acronym for Live-Action Role Play. The kind of thing where people gather at a location with costumes and props, and interact with each other in real space, in real time, under the guises of fictional characters.
The chronology of all this has been attempting to slither out of my grasp as I write. It leaves a physical pain in my skull, trying to roll open the map of it, stretch it taut, and make it legible.
So this is where I leave things for you this time. An early intuition, a gut belief in something imagined, becoming progressively unhinged and tangled with reality in a rapidly-changing nervous system flung into new environments like a battery of winds. An unreliable compass, and wet ink on old vellum, amid an ocean of saltwater.
To be continued…
Thank you for listening to Spectral. Come back in two weeks for a surreal exploration of fantasy, reality, and contorted muses trapped inside a matryoshka doll of kintsugi-pieced eggshells.
In the meantime, I recommend Myths and Legends episode #43 titled “The Wasteland”, and (for more childhood intrigue) the 1998 YA novel “Don’t Look in the Mirror” by Larry Weinberg.
Music for this episode is Solar Flight‘s single “What does Love mean?” available in full on Spotify.
I’ll be back.
Much love,
Mariah Lamour
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