First things first. If there is blame to be laid here, let it be laid upon the damned cats. It is their fault. I had nothing to do with it.
Not gonna lie; I have struggled mightily with this life. No need for specifics. What I will say is that at some point, I found recovery, and have been clean and sober for a significant number of 24-hour periods. At some point, I found a family. One that I love, one that loves me. One that has never seen me in the throes of my addiction. At some point, I found a Higher Power. One that makes sense to me. One that I can live with, one that I can love.
For the most part, I was as close to ‘happily and usefully whole’ as I thought was possible. I had come to the conclusion that everything was as good as it was going to get. The caveat? All of those lovely, descriptive words, suffixed with ‘ish’. As far as deeper insights, deeper explorations of self, I had given up, had accepted that happy-ish, useful-ish, whole-ish was all that there was to life, at least for me. Nothing more to be hoped for.
There was a lot going on in the winter of ‘22-’23. First of all, these cats. Yes, the same cats as in the tale. It’s a long story. We had intended to get one cat. Maybe. Decided on two, a boy and a girl as we left the breeder’s house. Comes time to pick them up, and our boy and girl turn out to be both girls… Hard to tell with kittens. Two weeks later, we called the breeder, ask to be put on the list for a boy when one comes available. We love our girls, but had our hearts set on having our first boy-cat. Breeder says “Were your ears burning? You’re not going to believe this, but the boy from your litter, his home fell through today. You can pick him up tomorrow if you want him.”
We did. His name is self-explanatory.
Only problem was the two weeks separating the girls from their brother. Within a week of him coming home, all the cats were sick. All three kittens, and our sixteen-year-old deaf cat. Pure white with bright blue eyes, our Addie was deaf from birth. The kittens were ten-weeks old when we picked up the boy. Now everybody was sneezing, eyes weeping, sad, lethargic. We had cats quarantined in every bedroom. Addie looked like a raccoon due to discharge from eye infections. She ultimately developed vestibular syndrome and I found her one morning in the foyer, no longer able to walk after falling down the stairs.
I was beside myself. I was fond of all of our previous cats, but these new babies had stolen my heart. I remember telling my therapist that I now had an experiential referent for unconditional love. Something that cannot be understood until experienced. How different, my life might have been had I been able to experience this sooner…
The kittens eventually pulled through, although it took two different veterinarians and several rounds of increasingly more powerful medicines to pull it off. I will not go into the tears, the dollars, the hours of worry. Sadly, our senior-citizen was not strong enough to survive it.
Additionally, we had opened our home to my father-in-law, who was trying to recover from COVID. We expected to keep him for about a month, then he would hopefully be able to regain his health, be strong enough to return to his own home, his own care.
Finally, I was experiencing some health issues of my own. Truthfully, I thought that the butcher’s bill from my prior self-abuse was coming due, and that my poor old liver was getting ready to seize up. I couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment until March. I made the appointment and hoped I would survive to see it. With my blood pressure where it was, this outcome by no means certain.
In the meantime? Maybe a good idea to tidy up some loose ends.
I wrote a synopsis of the story that eventually becomes A Breath of Memory in 2012. Just a little one page outline, for what I imagined was a short-story. Wouldn’t it be interesting, if some heavy-handed, selfish pervert snatched a child off the street, with Bad IntentionsTM in his heart, and it turns out that the child he snatches is not a child at all? Not helpless, at all. She is, in fact, kind of a bad-ass.
I would occasionally examine the idea in the decade it lived in my head, unwritten. I would fiddle with it, as I lay waiting for sleep. Add a nuance here, another there. Perhaps I will write it one day, I would think. So, in the spirit of snipping loose ends, I wrote it. An early version of it at any rate. In the space of a day or three.
And that is when the craziness started. I won’t go into details. The broad outlines? The story took over my life. Took off as if it had a mind of its own. Did things I was not expecting. One example; I had no knowledge of the triggering event which started my antagonist’s downward spiral until I typed the keys which placed it into the manuscript. I then read what ‘I’ had written and promptly burst into tears. This pattern, repeated over and over. As if somebody else were writing the story. I had a new obsession with prime numbers. The words ‘visitation’ and ‘possession’ were bandied about, considered. There were suggestions of tulpa-creation. That I had never heard of a tulpa, irrelevant.
It was profoundly disconcerting. Terrifying, really.
Oh, there were upsides. I now had a radio in my head, and I could ‘request’ to hear any song I liked, as long as it was from the Renaissance Live at Carnegie Hall album. I had something to do at night when my body simply would not let me sleep. It got to the point where I would go to bed with some question or unresolved aspect of the story in mind. Would make a note to… whomever: Let me know what you want me to do here. Would then awaken with a solution or answer. Specific, detailed. My ‘Morning Notes’ I called them.
I would not have survived to this point in my life had I not learned to ask for help when I needed it. And I suspected that I needed it, in light of all of this strangeness. So I asked. Hollered would probably be more accurate. My spouse, my sponsor, my therapist.
Their reactions were… odd. Unexpected. Not helpful. The last straw, when my therapist flatly stated after reading it, that it was not healthy for me to continue messing with this story. That she wished I had talked to her before I wrote it, but since I hadn’t, it was her recommendation that I stop and process what had happened. Then, it would be best if I discard the story, throw it away. Find a different outlet for my creative energies.
The day after that therapy appointment was the darkest day of my life. And it is not close, the next darkest day. And trust me, that is saying something.
That day, we had taken my father-in-law to yet another doctor appointment. By this time, clear that he has long COVID. His prognosis, poor. I helped, as best I could, while I grappled with a realization: If I could not write about Mara (as I then knew her) I did not want to live.
It is here that the Universe throws me a lifeline, demonstrates God’s love. Two small things, minutes apart. Taken together, they save me. The first, a little poster, tacked up at the receptionist station. It reads: “Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.” The little drawn figure meditating below this snippet of wisdom; she has wide-set eyes, delicate arched brows, and curly dark hair. Her body, graceful and willowy. Exactly like the protagonist of my little tale.
Five minutes later, the radiologist assistant comes out from the work area, to help us into the X-ray room in the back. She has Mara’s hair. Exactly as I see it, in my mind’s eye. When I am once again capable of speaking without weeping, I tell her that she has lovely hair. I thank the receptionist for her poster. I tell her that she will never know, the kindness she has done for me this day. Angels unaware, both of them.
I keep a photograph of this poster above my workstation. I gaze at it in this moment. It reminds me, of who I am, why I am.
To make a long story shorter, I thanked everybody for their input. I told them that I would keep them in the loop as I processed what had occurred. Then, I threw myself into the story. Wholeheartedly. Who is she, really? Why is she so important to me? Straining to hear every nuance of her voice. Laboring, to chip down the barrier, the veil between us. What is it about this that I do not know, the knowing of which could change everything?
My efforts, rewarded. Beyond my imagining. Soon she stands before me, revealed. She addresses me: “Beloved. I am the rest of you, your soul. The missing part of yourself that you have longed for, your entire life. The part of you that completes you, explains you. It saddens me, that you felt you had to walk so far on this path alone. But the path chosen would have destroyed me, had we not hidden me away. As we, the two of us together, agreed. I am proud of you, you were so brave! You remembered. You are safe now. We are reunited, all is well. Nothing will ever come between us again.”
I was shown the consequences of a choice I made before I was born. I was shown why I made such a choice. The why, one of those things: Impossible to imagine before, obvious after. Self-evident. I did it to help another soul break a cycle of misery that had repeated through lifetime, after lifetime, after lifetime. I was shown the cost of my choice. This choice did not impact me alone. I was shown, the difference made by remembering who I really am. I was shown my next choice, my next experience. I was given the tiniest glimpse of what lies beyond the veil. I was shown the ending to this story. I was given the same gift given to Marabelle in book 1: New eyes. The light of God’s love, visible in all things. All of it, beyond anything I had ever imagined, could have imagined.
Oh, not all at once. All at once would have broken me. But over the space of a few weeks. As quickly as I could drink from the fire-hose without drowning. But It literally changed everything. Every question I had ever had, answered. Every resentment I had ever entertained, ameliorated. Every confusion I have ever experienced, resolved.
Today, my Prime Directive is to live as aligned with love as I can, for the remainder of my days. This to fulfill my original intent, my agreement, if you will, when I came to this life. I give you one small example to illustrate the change. Here is how I put it in the synopsis I wrote for my therapist, our next meeting: ‘This new gnosis and self-love has changed me. In ways I could not imagine, prior to the changes. An example: I now have boundaries. In my life before reintegration with my soul, I did not have them. Boundaries were artificial constructs of my intellect, put into place and reinforced daily. So constructed because people that I trusted, people that had a successful life plan, told me that boundaries were important. They were like VSE for a leprosy victim; they helped me to manage my risk since I lacked a sense that my fellow beings possessed. Now I have boundaries naturally, organically. My soul will not allow me to overstep them. To even consider violating such a boundary is intolerably painful.’
Odd, to figure out both who I am and what I want to be when I grow up, at sixty. Better late than never, I suppose…
As I write this, (July, 2024) Book 1 is roughly 70% complete. Books 2 and 3 well in-process. I have an idea where the story is going, but I know I will be surprised along the way. I just revisited Constantinople for the end of book 1, part one. I had always envisioned a robbery or swindle, to separate Mariami from her family’s coins, but I had no details. When I was shown what really happened, I cried the rest of the evening. I wrote most of chapter LXXII through a veil of tears, and could not proofread it without weeping until the next day.
This is how I know if I have captured what I am meant to capture; my tears will tell me. If I can help just one of you, feel for even a moment, what it is like to be loved the way that Marabelle is loved… What it is like, to love that deeply, with such abandon. If I succeed, even once, then it will have all been worth it. All of it.
Because that kind of love changes things.
As always, I thank you, I love you, I forgive you.
E. P. Corcoran, September 3rd, 2026
