Page 63 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

LORA MATZ

Love’s Awakening

To this day, I can feel the unconditional, pure form of embodied love Dale gave me when

I was eight. This unconditional Love is a mysterious field of Presence that I’ve come to

recognize in many faces but first felt in her arms. The Presence of Love that moved

through Dale called my soul home to itself. It motivated me to find a way through my

ongoing unspeakable situation. This love transfusion changed not only my nature, but

my way of relating to and seeing the world. I suddenly belonged in life. When Dale

wrapped her arms around my small trembling, sobbing eight-year-old body, she opened

in me lines of kinship that I suddenly felt EVERYWHERE: earth and stars, human and

animal.

I longed for death. It fascinated me. I was eight years old, and Saturday after Saturday, I

snuck into local churches to sit in the back of funeral services. My obsession grew, and

after a week of spying into the windows of a local funeral home, I snuck inside, hoping to

see a dead body. My risk was rewarded. A large room was filled with flowers and a

casket with a body. Alone, I slowly crept up to the casket. Looking down in awe at the

woman in the coffin, I gently touched her arm and then her face. In a flash I knew that

nothing was there except this empty shell the woman had once lived in. It reminded me

of the loud cicadas that had been everywhere the summer before. Walking down the

street had been frightening because you never knew if you were stepping on an empty

shell or one that would startle you by taking flight. I felt like I’d seen what I was looking

for. Weeks later, I took two bottle of aspirin and lay down to die.

I lived to return to my bleak existence, deprived of love and protection from a mother

who didn’t want me, and who made me available to her drunken johns. From the time I

was three, she had blamed me for my uncle’s suicide. She and I were both present when