Martha Whatley

Martha Whatley hails from Salisbury, and is a music journalist and writer. She will turn 30 this summer and is currently working on a novel along with a collection of essays. Her twenties have been mostly transatlantic and she spent a number of years living in Boston, Massachusetts. She has studied at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and at the University of Kent.
Contact: mwhat001 [at] gold [dot] ac.uk

How to Induce an Epiphany

 

One.

My bones never felt like mine. It’s as if I have borrowed a skeleton and am trying to flesh it out – to animate it – but my blood and muscles and cells and tissue pulse and ring with such a deep sense of unease that I am rendered immobile. 

I pull at my skin the way people pull at their clothes. It doesn’t fit well. It doesn’t sit right. It’s tight and restrictive, but it’s the only thing holding me together because underneath I have completely fallen apart. 

When the Darkness really takes hold of me, my heart beats so hard against my motionless frame it’s as if it’s trying to escape the body and ribs that cage it. Its rhythm becomes more irregular and unsteady under the reign of chronic insomnia and stabilizing chemicals, but still it thuds and pounds against my insides – desperate to separate itself from the Me that has all but given up. 

I fluctuate between limitless mental activity and complete nothingness when the Dark sets in, but my stay on the latter side is usually much longer. Emotional middle ground has been demoted to mere wasteland and my heart, the only part of me with any fire left, knows it’s time to get out. 

The only hope I have left thuds frantically in my chest with the defiance of someone who has decided to cut their losses and run. But the door I need to run through isn’t open to me, yet.

I hadn’t got up in three days. The last time I showered was sometime before the weekend – before I got back – and today’s Thursday. I’ve been existing in this suspended half-life where time doesn’t run in straight lines and my eyes get so heavy that I worry closing them will cause them to sink back into my skull. 

It’s not that I wasn’t tired; I was exhausted, but rest just couldn’t find me. The relief of sleep often won’t grace a troubled mind. There’s no quiet, no end – too much mental resistance.

The blanket on top of me felt as heavy as a car and I was trapped beneath its weight. I can’t get up. This is what happens when the Darkness creeps in. The won’ts quietly mutate into can’ts. 

Won’t implies there’s a choice. A won’t would be nice. 

Rose-hued light was starting to sneak in through the gap in the curtains, casting the kind of glow that only comes from a biting autumn sunset onto my sheets. I craned my neck to look outside and the sky was pink. It was the kind of sky people would stop what they were doing to admire. Only I looked at it for a different reason. I was chasing reassurance; to know that the world was still out there whirring away beyond the confines of these four walls, to know I still had some kind of grasp on reality and could rely on those instincts you develop as a kid. You know, the ones that allow you to interpret the language of the universe around you – to tell the time based on the kind of light you have, or predict the weather from the way the air smells.

I needed to make sure I hadn’t lost these instincts because I’d become so detached lately that I was struggling to recognize myself. 

“You smell like the cold,” my mother would tell me as she opened the door to let me in after school. 

This comment always marked the start of my favorite time of year. Every day starting October first I’d rush home and ring the doorbell at 4pm, wondering if that would be the day I’d finally smell like the cold. That day usually came around mid-month and I’d wait all year for it. The cold smell returned and then the best holidays followed: Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas and New Year. 

These holidays aren’t the same anymore. They lost their shine a long time ago. So did a lot of other things. 

I’ve started to smell the cold again. For years I’d buried this sense – the nostalgia choked me – but it’s slowly creeping back in and the distance has relieved some of the pressure. It’s one of those things I notice on people I’ve never met before when they sit down next to me on public transport or walk past me as they enter buildings, and I feel an instant affinity with them. My past collides with my present and for a few moments the irreconcilable gap between them closes. 

Instead of working on what troubled me, I had wasted years just layering tape over the cracks in the form of well-timed distractions to convince myself I was better. When the tape began to peel, I was left with hundreds of fractures that had me on the verge of caving in and eventually, I broke.

Rebuilding is exhausting. You try and get back to the familiar, but the reconstruction is always a little off – a little different. You take shortcuts to make up for lost time and when you finally get to where you thought you needed to be, you still don’t recognise anything. The familiar departs and the feeling of home is replaced with a growing, disjointed sense of not belonging. There is often collapse because these new foundations aren’t strong enough to hold you. Quick fixes never last and you have to make this mistake a few times before the lesson really hits, but collapse can be good. It forces you to stand still among the rubble and confront the mess you’ve been running from, one brick at a time. 

Maybe this is why I’ve moved around a lot. 

Towns.

Cities.

Counties.

Countries.

Continents. 

When I’m not moving – when there’s no transience in my life – I fall prey to atrophy. This is where I’m at now. I’ve been back in this country for 4 months. The settling in period has passed and normality is trying to resume but I can’t acclimatize. 

I don’t know where I belong anymore. My definition of home has faded and every time I return to a place I once lived, I can’t figure out how to fit back into my old life there so I stay a while – just long enough to feel the unsettling drag of discontentment – then pack up and leave again. Hopelessly transatlantic.

Different versions of myself stay behind as I move on - I shed the layers I no longer need as I travel – but when I return, these ghosts are patiently waiting to be reunited with me.  

They reattach themselves to me at the heels and I can’t kick them loose. Every different incarnation of myself fuses together - a warped collective consciousness taking on a singular form - until the translucency lessens and a black outline appears. They inhabit my shadow and it haunts me at night, lurching and trailing two paces behind me, reminding me of what I can’t let go of. 

The pink light was still flooding in through the curtains and it illuminated a triangle of fabric on my blanket. The pattern on it started to form shapes the longer I stared. The shapes became pictures and the pictures shifted into focus, revealing themselves to me in the design’s negative space. I saw faces. Every time I blinked I’d see something different; always faces, but the expressions changed from fright to suspicion to laughter to fear to pride. I was being taunted by all the emotions I couldn’t show.

I propped myself up onto my elbows, the most energy I’d exerted in days, and pressed the palms of my hands hard into my eye sockets until colors began to swirl in my head. I stayed like this for a while and the dull pain throbbed and distracted me from thinking about how sometimes I see things when I’m like this: so strung out from extreme sleep deprivation that I struggle to differentiate between my waking life, dreams, and daylight hallucinations. They all bleed into one. 

A thud snapped me out of it and I rolled over, dragging myself to the edge of the bed to see what it was. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was laying face up on the hardwood floor. 

There are always books in my bed; it’s my other library. The space usually reserved for another person has been given to words written by strangers that I relate to more than people I’ve dated for months and friends I’ve known for years. 

I remember when I first read this novel and how comforted by his words I was. He wrote about being unable to connect, about loneliness, about being tired. An all-consuming fatigue. I knew of this particular strain of tiredness and thought it was mine only; a distinct shade of exhaustion that can only ever be found in the fight against letting it all in. With every breath I took in while reading it, I inhaled the words from the pages and they travelled down through my body, intact and upright, wedging themselves tightly into the spaces inside of me that hurt.

Two.

My eyes opened seconds before an ear-splitting electronic frequency pierced through the silence as if I knew to expect it.

It’s strange how we do that – how we get a sense something’s going to happen moments before it does. Gut feelings can go a long way in helping us to navigate the human condition and if you get really good at developing them, you can learn to read a situation like stage directions: a form of static time-travel accessible only by the most intuitive.  

It was dark. How long had I been lying there? 

I must have fallen asleep. 

This happens a lot when I’m in the middle of a period of extreme sleeplessness; I completely skip over the falling part. The realms of consciousness shift so fluidly around me that I often can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep, and swing wildly between staying up from 3 to 4 days at any one time to sleeping in excess of 16 hours straight. 

When things seem like they’re starting to return to normal and I do manage to shut down, it’s brief and interrupted – not enough sleep to fully function, but just enough to get by. 

I’m always barely hanging on – my hold isn’t strong enough and I’m slipping. 

The sound screeched and crackled like a dial-up modem trying to make a connection, and I could feel his energy buzzing in the room. It was the Illuminator. 

Whenever I hear it, he appears. He arrives in fragments: thousands of metallic shards that sweep in under doors or through cracks in windows. They repel each other so violently they create a whirlwind, fuelled by the Darkness. It swarms and surges, and its center becomes so hot with friction that eventually this vicious gunmetal mass turns to liquid. The second it reaches melting point, it stops moving. It’s like watching something on 16x the speed then hitting pause the as soon as the picture begins to make sense. It becomes jagged and still, suspended in exaggerated human form like a child’s drawing of an adult, and the sound turns to static. The it becomes a him. 

I never see him make his entrance, but as soon as this immobilising sound rings out I know he’s there – just out of my immediate line of vision, materialising mostly in corners. 

He was standing by the door. I turned my head slowly, trying not to look directly at him in the same way we’re taught not to stare straight into the sun. 

His outline was already visible as the blue light from the full moon crept in, replacing the sun that had warmed the room earlier. It caught the angles and sharp lines of his figure as he flickered and glitched – the way a computer screen with a loose wire or a television that hadn’t been properly tuned might.

“They want us to sleep,” he told me, his voice dense with reverb and decay.

I didn’t know who he meant by they – my therapist? My family? The friends I’ve avoided seeing for what felt like months now because I’m so messed up I don’t know how to be around them – or anyone, really – when I’m like this? 

That’s the curse of the Darkness, when you've been fighting it for so long you get really good at hiding it when you need to. You always find a way to remove yourself from your own life, but with enough distance to pass your absence off as a clash of schedules, a series of unfortunate events, or something beyond your control. I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it, you say. Or I’m so busy; I keep missing your calls. Only you never even tried to make it and you weren’t too busy to take a call. You went home, crawled into bed with your clothes on and turned out the lights. You apologize and reschedule whatever it was you skipped out on just far enough ahead in the future for it to either be forgotten or for another excuse to seem plausible. The master manipulator. 

You can't always tell if someone's struggling and usually, if they are, they’re working overtime to keep it from you.

“They want us to sleep,” he repeated slowly, shifting and contorting until his head hung so low it looked like his neck was broken. “But you know better.”

This is how it goes. Sometimes it takes him hours to form words, the syllables drag out with a slow violence that sound like knives scraping metal and I lie there, paralysed, forced to listen. 

“You’ve come this far.”

I closed my eyes and tried to convince myself he wasn’t really there, that this was some kind of sleep-deprived delusion. Hell, if you tell yourself something regularly enough, eventually you might start to believe it. You’ll believe anything if it holds you up when you’re struggling to stand, and my knees had been getting weaker by the day. 

Only I’d started to see him outside of my dreams lately. 

He appeared in alleyways, watching me from dirt clouds kicked up from dustcarts that settle almost as quickly as they billow up, moving with an unnerving fluidity from street to city block to district. He stalked me at work, interfering with the studio’s soundboard and radiating electromagnetic energy that appeared on the screen in the form of visual soundwaves and messed with my recordings. 

The only thing that never changed was the sound that followed him. It affected me like nothing else; it shattered the inside of my head and slowed my pace until I was dragging my feet under its influence. I saw him on the street - on good days – I heard him, but no one else seemed to notice. I opened my eyes. He was still there.

My pulse thumped against my temples and he fed off my fear, the tension in my body powering the clang of garbled metal that rang out around us.

“Get up,” he jeered. “Hey. Get up, Jude. Hey, Jude.”

I brought my hands up over my ears, trying to block him out.  

My radio lit up and it lurched between static white noise and judders of undeterminable audio until it settled on a familiar melody. 

Paul McCartney’s voice struggled against the poor tuning, singing, ‘Hey Jude, don’t let me down’, but every time the line finished it would skip back to the beginning of that third verse and he’d sing it again. With every repetition, it got slower and slower until the vocals mutated into a sinister drone and shifted across the room to where the Illuminator stood.  

Stop. I don’t want to hear that. The more I resisted the louder and more disorienting he grew. His words became distorted as he ingested the lyrics, like the words were made of tar and he couldn’t choke them down, regurgitating them first in reverse. Once he got them into order, he said them back to me over and over with increasing speed and pitch until his voice pierced the inside of my head and stung the backs of my eyes. 

No. Stop it. Stop. STOP. I howled into my pillow, a guttural, primal reaction, but the fabric muted me. I grabbed at my hair and pulled so hard it felt like I was trying to rip myself in half, like it would release this feeling that was swelling inside of me. Get out. Go. Stop. Stop it. STOP. I’M SO TIRED. I’M SO FUCKING TIRED. 

Heat rose to my face. I felt defeated. I started to cry. They came slowly at first, the tears. The emotions swirled bigger and faster and harder until I couldn’t contain the nervous energy I was harnessing inside of me any longer. 

That was the first time I had cried in sixteen years. I cried myself to sleep. 

Three.

I could never remember when the Illuminator first started to visit me, but I think I’ve finally pieced it together.  

When I was 13-years-old, I had the same dream every night for exactly six months. A recurring nightmare. I tried to stop it, I tried to keep myself awake, but nothing worked. The more desperate to redirect my subconscious I became, the more vivid the nightmare seemed to get. 

The nightmare always played out in the exact same way. It never deviated from the original plot and nothing changed. The street I grew up on acted as the setting - the sidewalks I had cried on, bled on, thrown up on, and been happy on were central to the action. The only character I saw was a faceless man. His anonymity wasn’t self-imposed. He didn’t wear a mask or go out of his way to protect his identity; he just existed without one. 

Every morning I’d wake up shaking from what I’d seen in my sleep and it would take me hours to feel calm. By the time I started to feel at ease again it was bedtime and this sickening sense of foreboding would sneak back up on me. 

I knew there was no way something that consuming would come to an end quietly. It felt bigger than me; there had to be a purpose to it and I was sure it had to go out with more of a bang than it arrived with. How it’d do that, I had no idea because it wrecked pretty much everything in its path from my schooling to my sanity. 

The dream stopped without warning in early February, but the relief I felt was horrendously short-lived.

Later that day, my father died.

It had been a pre-cognitive dream full of telling symbols and imagery. My father was dying – he had been for six months - but in an effort to protect me from facing their mortality, my parents tried to play it down. Their actions mostly said it’s not that serious. Looking back on it now, I get it. I was young. How do you explain that to a kid? My recurring nightmare began around the time of his diagnosis and lasted the course of his demise. 

I’d probably picked up on what was happening around me and this recurring nightmare was my psyche’s own way of preparing me for the inevitable end. The loss and fear and guilt I felt in the dream were setting me up to go through it in reality. It’s as if all the answers can be found in sleep, which is the one thing that constantly evades me. This way of thinking kick-started what has turned out to be a lifetime of screwed up nights. 

If anything changes with my sleep pattern now, I question it and try to figure out if I’ve missed anything in my waking life that’s presenting itself to me as a dream. I just can’t let this defining experience go and write everything off as just coincidence. I have a loyalty to the past that I just can’t shake; only my access has been revoked. I see it, but I’m kept away. It’s preserved behind the toughest glass and I’m banging, smashing my fists against it until my hands bruise and bleed and my body aches from throwing myself against it, but I’m not yet strong enough to break through. 

It was so obvious. Why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I realize he was dying and not just sick? I would have spent more time with him. I would have been nicer, more patient, more available, more anything.

I would have…

If only…

I wish I had…

Why couldn’t I…

I didn’t know… 

I really didn’t know is what I tell myself. But I did know and acknowledging that kills me.

Things I’ve blocked out are starting to reappear in my dreams. I have no control over them – they just show up and play out and I am forced to lie there and watch. I fight back. I retaliate. It’s not unusual for me to wake up with cuts, scratches, sheets twisted and wrapped around my throat, soaked-through pillows from where I’ve cried out all the tears I swallow down when I’m awake. Maybe I am ready to confront them now, after all this time, but it needs to be my choice. 

For sixteen years I thought the man in that dream was my father, but now I’m sure it was the Illuminator. 

I still see it – that recurring nightmare - it’s weird how something that wasn’t real has become one of my most powerful memories. 

Since then, my ability to recall dreams has always been significantly stronger than my capacity to remember things I’ve actually been through in real life. When people talk to me about my past it’s like they’re telling me stories from books; I sit there wide-eyed on the edge of my seat as if I’m hearing these tales for the first time – seeing nothing of myself in any of the narratives being relayed to me.

I’ve erased so much of my history from my mind that when it does resurface in any form, it feels brand new. The pain is still so overwhelming that I have completely disassociated myself with it. Sure, I feel twinges of sympathy, as you do for any protagonist in a story, and there’s sometimes fleeting familiarity, but the attachment just isn’t there. 

Revisiting my life is mostly this destabilizing experience tinged with jamais vu – things I know I should recognize as mine feel so distant that I can’t claw them back. As well as coming back to me in dreams, memories have been returning to me in the air without warning and I reach up and grab at them. In my desperation for reunion I snatch too violently and tear them into pieces, and some of them blow away, leaving me with partial or skewed versions of reality. Things are often out of order or missing, and the details I need for completion are nowhere to be found. 

This is the problem with defense mechanisms: they have a time limit. Blocking things out might seem like the easiest solution, but in the long run it’s just a destructive dance of avoidance. You can tell capacity has been reached when the issues you’ve been running from start to catch up with you. Information begins to leak out and it’s only a matter of time before the self-imposed restraints burst completely, flooding you with things you’ll drown in. 

I’d been feeling increasingly unstable, but was self-medicating and trying to keep myself where the light was.  It was cold, the air smelled of my childhood. I had been at the cinema alone in the middle of the city. It was late October and Halloween season was in full swing. My favorite theatre was showing double features of 80s horror and B movies downtown. I often go there by myself at night – they have movie marathons that run from 9pm until 7 in the morning and it’s a welcome distraction from the stillness of my apartment if I know I’m not going to be sleeping. After the showing, I walked among the crowd with my headphones over my ears enjoying the anonymity. Inside the subway station, as I moved further down the escalator, someone behind tapped me on the shoulder to ask for directions so I took off the headphones and that’s when I heard it. That song. 

The last time I heard that song was at my father’s funeral. I’ll Follow The Sun. It played while his friends carried the coffin containing his defeated body out of the church. I looked at the floor, not wanting to be there. I think I cried at the funeral, I must have done… I can’t remember, but I shut it all out as quickly as I could. 

If I’d just kept my headphones on I would have walked right past the busker and not noticed. Instead, I turned my head to face him and stared, the chords weighing me down. When I got to the bottom of the escalator, I hesitated, and the people behind me threw their hands up in disbelief that someone would disrupt the flow of human traffic. The tourist lingered behind me, probably thinking I was about to help him, but I walked right up to the busker. I watched his fingers give birth to the melody, which had marked the end of a life I couldn’t accept was over. He nodded, expecting me to drop some coins into his guitar case, but I just lost it. I yelled and shouted, and punched the shiny tiles until I gave myself a boxer’s fracture, blood from my knuckles smearing the wall. My pain echoed underground as the song spun around me; a symphony of repressed grief. A couple of guys tackled me to the ground and I was taken to the hospital, where I was assessed and held for three days. When I got home last week, I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened, but I couldn’t work, people kept asking about my busted hands, and I just needed some time out. When I got into bed on Monday night, I just didn’t get up again. 

After my father died, then came more deaths, more funerals, and more traumas, both self-inflicted and external. 

Is it me? Am I the cause? At the very least, I’m the link. 

You start recovering from one thing and another comes hurtling around the corner to knock you back down. 

I want out. I WANT OUT. I won’t go through this again, I can’t. I’m done. 

It has been a long time, but these forgotten parts of me are finally starting to come back. They return when the Darkness is at its strongest. 

Once the Darkness takes over and blacks everything out, this unwelcome reserve of energy kicks in. My main power source has been cut off, but the defense mechanisms spring into action – an internal battery back-up – and unblock themselves. They’re not strong enough to fully reboot me, but these little sparks of Self flicker in my mind in the hope that one might ignite something within me that won’t burn out. It’s like trying to light a match in the wind.

Hey, remember this? 

I’m tired.

I know, but look!

I just want to lie here, quietly.

It’s not like you’re going to get up, so I’ll show you whether you like it or not. 

Please, don’t. It hurts.

This is when the Illuminator appears. He exists in the nothingness – this other plane of reality we aren’t supposed to visit. It harbors the kind of darkness our eyes can never adjust to. He’s the caretaker of this domain and whenever I begin to enter it, he steps in. He can’t force me to leave; I have to make the choice to. His electricity is the trip switch.