The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Nineteen. {fiction}
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Right before dawn, Amy rolled herself off the side of the bed and into the wheelchair that sat beneath the window.
She ripped a blank page from the journal that rested on the bedside table, and placed it with a pen on her lap.
Then she wheeled herself into the living room where Leanne slept by the fire. And she continued to sit there by the fireplace, with her legs out straight like a plaster doll’s, until the sun rose light pink into the room and Leanne woke up.
“Holy shit,” Leanne said, peering at Amy from within her cocoon of cashmere blankets.
Then she started to laugh. “Oh, you are a pathetic little thing,” she told Amy. She said it sweetly though, as if to say the previous night had been forgotten.
Amy smiled weakly, but she was still thinking about what Leanne had said; she’d spent a sleepless night in the dark with those words, looking at the emptiness, taking responsibility for it. And thinking about changing, about how badly she wanted to.
She was still feeling bruised when she raised her head and looked straight at her, but she had resigned herself to Leanne’s teachings like a thirsty woman at a well.
“How do I grow up?” Amy asked. She raised the pen over the paper.
“Well, hot damn,” Leanne said, “that’s a good question.”
“Let me get some tea, wake the brain up.”
Then Leanne stood up and as her long white hair fell to her hips, her long white gown fell to the floor in one big rustle. She wedged her feet into her sheepskin slippers, and shuffled into the kitchen and switched on the kettle.
“You want some?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” Amy said, the fire crackled next to her and she closed her eyes for a minute. She focused in on the sound of the hot wood cracking and the sizzle of the flames. She was beginning to practice that meditation in bed, to just find one sound and stay with it, like the breeze, or the fire. Any sound but her thoughts. Mostly she just mediated on her breath.
She just stayed with the sound of her breathing, and sometimes she pictured the ocean, rising and falling with her breath. And she found that she couldn’t listen to both her thoughts and her breath at the same time, and that was the point.
Practicing meditation was becoming her way to stay sane and calm, to not react, to not drown in fear, to let the small stuff simmer away and what was important to rise to the surface. She found that from that quiet space between her thoughts, a new self was beginning to emerge. One she actually recognized and trusted, like a long-lost friend.
Leanne brought her tea in a light blue pottery mug.
She sat back down on the couch and pulled a grey blanket like a shawl over her shoulders.
“Good question,” Leanne muttered again to herself. “Okay, here’s what I, personally, think makes an adult.”
She crossed her legs and stared in the fire. She took a moment, letting the thoughts bake in her mind’s oven.
“Well,” she started, “an adult doesn’t just think about herself, she thinks about others. But she doesn’t care about others think of her. She’s not really worried about what others think, she knows she’s the one who needs to approve of her own life. She’s escaped the cage of herself and is focused on the world.
She knows how to care for herself, and that only from that place can she care for others. She knows what her body needs, how to listen to it. She’s got boundaries, borders you need her trust to cross. She protects the sacred within. She knows what she needs to be safe and happy… Oh, and her happiness, it’s not reliant on other people.
It’s not subject to external whims; she’s at peace with herself so she can be at peace with others.
She knows how to make decisions in her life. She follows through with what she’s promised herself and others. Oh… she’s on time. She meets you when and where she said she would. You know, she shows up.
And… when she fucks up, she owns it and apologizes. And she doesn’t blame other people for her problems. At the same time, she’s unapologetic. She tells the truth. She’s kind but clear. She isn’t sniveling around looking for approval or permission. Or forgiveness for being different or living her own life. She knows this ain’t no dress rehearsal.
She doesn’t sit around begging you to tell her who she is or what she needs. She cleans up after herself, literally and figuratively. She gives without agenda, she’s of service to others and the world.
She has a calm confidence about herself. She believes in herself and in her dreams. She’s got her own back and she’s comfortable in her own skin.
When shit gets hard, she doesn’t run. She deals. She can commit.
She knows she can handle whatever comes. You know, she faces things, faces what she fears. Oh, and she can’t be abandoned. Because she stands on her own two feet. You know, she’s got herself. She can lose someone or something without losing herself. She can depend on her and you can depend on her.
She’s compassionate. She has a big strong, soft heart. She’ll take breathtaking, heartbreaking tangible reality over imaginary untouchable fantasy any day.
She doesn’t just dream, she does. She likes who she is in the lonely moments walking through her house, when no one else can see her. She likes her own company.”
Leanne brought her mug to her lips and slurped.
“That’s all I can think of for now,” she said.
“Thank you,” nodded Amy, still scribbling.
“It’s a waning moon, by the way. A ‘let go’ phase. A perfect time to practice letting go of all that small childish stuff. You want a spell?” she asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when we do ritual, we signify to our unconscious that we are ready to mark a change, or an important passage in our lives.”
“Okay,” Amy said.
“Write down the small parts that you are ready to release.
“The parts that complain, that are too passive. The tiny ‘shrinking in fear’ parts. The messy, lazy parts. The gluttony. The scarcity, the lack, the mother wound, the destructive patterns in relationships. Get specific, what keeps happening. What’s the story, the story you need to burn. What needs to die so you can live.
So that there’s no more story around your heart and therefore anything, I mean like your dreams, can happen. Write down all the small scared parts, the parts that refuse to let you bloom. ‘Cuz you were meant to bloom, we all were. Just like everything in nature.
Okay, Burn that. Burn that one. Offer it up. Release it.
Then, on a second piece of paper, write down who you’re ready to become and speak it in the present tense. Whatever you want to be and do…” Leanne waved her hand in the air, like she was beckoning the words to come to her.
They came and landed on her tongue. “Speak present tense. I am powerful. Calm. Successful, what you deem success to be. Loving, Loved. Kind. Of service. Write those down and keep them somewhere where you look at them everyday. And then, don’t just dream it, align your actions with her. Align yourself with the higher dream in thought and word and deed.
Self-actualize. Remember, do the thing you must do. If you can, you must.”
Amy nodded.
“Alright now,” said Leanne. “Wheel on back to that room. An adult commits, remember? She chooses her life and stays with it.
I’ll bring you breakfast. Whatever you do, don’t stop writing. Just keep going ’til you can’t no more. I’m telling you, that book’s your ticket to walking with confidence.”
“I’d take just walking for now,” Amy said.
“Remember you’re on bed rest for a reason. The answers don’t always come when we demand them. But if we relax, they do eventually come. The more we can accept what is happening right now, the less crazy with resistance we tend to go.”
Amy complied. She picked up the journal again, and plunged back in. She wrote for half an hour, until she hit her pill addiction. The moment she got her first Xanax prescription had been the downfall of…everything. Now Amy was blocked. Where she was once swimming along, she had now slammed into a brick wall.
She took a deep breath. The pen scribbled slowly in an ink whirlpool in one place.
Fuck it, she thought, be fearless.
She tried again.
It started innocently, she wrote. And she wrote. About how the pills made her relationship with James and life itself go fuzzy, how as she lost herself, she helplessly witnessed herself losing him, and the terror of that, of not knowing how to stop it. How to stop the loss.
The quicksand of her life that followed: the blacking out, the getting fired, the lying, the fights, the depression.
She stopped again; she didn’t know if she had the heart to do this, to write it all out. She could barely take a breath, like her throat closed off and all the air felt caught in her chest. How brave one had to be to write about the darkest saddest parts of her life, the ones she had tried to forget, especially the ones she herself had been responsible for.
She hadn’t just hurt herself, she had hurt others. And how shameful and terrifying it felt to momentarily face it again. How much courage and compassion it took to face the face of one’s heart. But somehow relieving, too, to pull it out of herself and place it onto paper. The pen somehow acted as a surgeon’s scalpel, touching each wound.
And she wrote and healed like this, for days.
There were times she felt as if she was sitting before a dark cave she was too scared to enter. But she couldn’t turn back now, she didn’t want to give up. There was nothing else to do but write this book, so she wrote through it. She kept finding, too, all that was in that cave, waiting to be faced, was herself.
She walked her pen across the paper like a sword with which she slayed her dragons.
When she carried on, despite the pain, she felt like a knight to the grail.
More days passed. Leanne had ordered her a little laptop with Amy’s credit card. The small, slick silver machine came, light and thin as a coaster. She typed out her diary pages and kept going.
A few weeks later, the first snow fell.
Amy was writing thirty pages a week, and spending the other time reading, talking with Leanne and napping. She even took Leanne’s advice and started making a vision board. Leanne had been kind enough to bring home old magazines from her volunteer shift at the library.
Amy sliced the pictures and words that called to her with scissors, and glue-sticked them onto a large piece of cardboard, which she kept by her bed. Slowly a vision truly did begin to appear. She would add words and pictures to it day by day, and tell Leanne about it.
“Saying it aloud makes it real,” Leanne had said. “Looking at your dream every day reprograms the Universe. It begins to roll out a yellow brick road for you to follow toward your visions. When you can see your dream, step by step, the path emerges. Take one step, and another one appears. So you know, keep seeing it.
Hold the vision, trust the process.”
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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