What Happened In The Smoke

I sained my daughter’s room a few nights ago, smoke curling from bundles of rosemary in such a furious, unusual way. It filled the house, traveling up into webbed corners and tucking below window frames. The smell made me choke, made my head pound, but she was adamant. The walls of her room needed to unbuckle, she wanted the roof peeled back so whatever had become trapped could evaporate.

I opened every window for the cold, rainy Oregon air. Let it run through our rooms like fingers working their way through knots. Up into the loft, out one window, and looping back through the other in a way that made me think of The Wild Hunt. Along the long hallway, crooning around tables, couches, and dishes waiting for the dishwasher to be emptied, tendrils of smoke touching everything. I swung the backdoor open and closed, a rhythmic fan coaxing out the old. Still, whatever had been lingering dug in its heels and clotted, soured. Howled. I couldn’t shake it out of me.

Around midnight, I got out of bed, walked out into the wet, spongey yard, tipped my head over, and let the rain wash through my hair. I curled over like a crone returning to her fetal shape. I shivered while Nature herself rinsed trapped smoke from my feral curls, my joints, my arced spine. Bare feet sank into soft mud, the sound of an oceanic sky lilting siren-like over, around, under, through. Straightening again in the backyard, I began to suspect that I, like the night creatures around me, gave off a faint glow, a phosphorescence akin to deep sea creatures. I was out in the yard, but I was somewhere else, too.

I have been remembering the first time I understood what I’d been doing my entire life - traveling through soul journeys, marking the ground of my inner territory. It wasn’t that I stumbled into the practice or picked it up somewhere. I think I’d just … always done it. The first faint memory I have of a dream that overlapped with a body experience happened when I was 2 or 3. Later, when we’d moved to a small town by the Mississippi, I’d walk invisible labyrinths in a field behind our house, weaving portals with my breath and my feet. I’d lay in the tall grass and travel far far within, changing shapes as I went. But it was that first apocalyptic year of my divorce that maybe thinned me out so rapidly, so thoroughly, that I finally understood that I was doing something.

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A weekend night alone in my house. Kids sleeping across town in rooms that I would never see. My dog curled on the rug of my bedroom. Candles lit and flickering everywhere. A random playlist turned up as loud as I could let it without waking the neighbors. My worn yoga mat unrolled gently on the white concrete floor. My body a river of grief, of loss, of liberation, of hunger, of yearning, of sharp aliveness.

And then a song I had never heard before breaking through the walls of my mind, dissolving my carefully constructed battlelines. A phrase that flooded time and folded me into another weekend night years and years before. The night I’d tried to die. And this time I was there with me, cradling limp limbs, burning loneliness, and a numb heart to my chest. It wasn’t god placing a hand over my head, another on my belly like I had once thought it had been. It was me. “Hold on,” I said it over and over again. “I still want you.”

An hour or so later I opened my eyes. I don’t know when I had curled onto my bed or when the last of the wax had swallowed the wicks. I was just … there. In the dark liminal, the song somehow caught on repeat. And I was different, less alone. I think I just climbed up to the pillows, cocooned below the blankets, and slept.

The next day, I drove to a brunch spot to meet a friend who wasn’t exactly a friend yet and wouldn’t be for years still. She had asked me to come, and I had agreed. We did this thing sometimes: random lunches or coffees. Like we were testing the waters of each other. And it was never a bad or wrong outcome - we would just… fall off again, I guess. But there we were sipping our drinks that morning, talking about the wobbly legs of divorce. She watched me with a largeness in her eyes, a feral ferocity that mirrored the strange wild I’d been compressing into concave graves all my life. Only… I had just woken something up. I could feel the wavering, translucent lines between parts of myself still. They shimmered like heat waves on the hood of my car. They burned with an intensity I’ve mostly associated with asphalt in the dead of August. I was less fractured, yet somehow far more cracked open. The both/and of it groaned giant-like while it leaned against my back.

For some reason, I told her about the night before. I don’t know why I did it, but I think I was still somewhat outside of time, and maybe a future version of me knew that this friend could hold it. The strangeness of it. The grief of it. The possibility of it. She did. In fact, she leaned forward just a bit and said, “You were always waiting for you. Not for a god. Not for a savior. You were waiting for you.”

We waved goodbye awkwardly in the parking lot, probably both knowing we’d keep watching from the bleachers of Instagram and maybe meet up again in a year or two. I turned the key in my jeep, and the radio hummed to life. “Hold on,” I caught my breath while he achingly sang, “I still want you.” That same song, the one I had never heard before the night before, caught in my hair like tenacious smoke. So I sent one text. Just one. I told

Mel Gentry Bosna

that it was playing again. A sign maybe. Or just a confirmation that she was right. I was the one I’d been waiting for.

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And then there I was the other night, soaked clean through in the backyard with the smell of fir and maple clinging to my wet hair. The smoke of whatever had been ruminating in my daughter’s room drowning, dripping, pooling in the grass. A thin t-shirt plastered to my body. My teeth chattered, but I stayed a while longer. I closed my eyes and thought again about the thing I was born to, the Seiðr no one had to teach me.