Apartment 9A

My mother, Lois Runanin

Last night in the thickest part of my sleep I dreamt I was about to receive an important message.  Others were with me as I sat forward, straining to hear, lucid and aware that this was the response I sought.  The woman delivering the message whispered, “9A.”  Everyone around me mobilized to act on this, but I sank in disappointment.  I held up my right index finger to stop everyone and said, “I know what this is.”  9A was my mother’s apartment, the place I left.  9A is the Sad House. 

There is a terrible grief in the inquiry when I find... exactly what I expected to find.  Apartment 9A is the target I can’t miss.  No matter where I launch myself from, a force more personal than gravity grabs me and drags me back “home.”  I could no more avoid it than I could jump off a cliff and land on the moon. I woke up feeling leaden and let down, and even tried to forget the dream, not bothering to record it.  But it stayed with me.  It was an important message. 

This morning I wondered, what if this is not what I think it is?  Maybe I’m not being asked, again, to sift through the ashes of my childhood looking for meaning.  Maybe everyone else in my dream knew something I did not, and I’m being drawn to this place repeatedly because it is a portal, a gate.  My conscious mind thinks it knows exactly what 9A is, and so it masquerades as unimportant, surrounded by a deadly lack of curiosity, imprisoned in futility and defeat.  All roads lead there, eventually, and then give up.

Like the people around me in the dream, I got excited and went to work.  I wondered who my mother would have been if her grandfather had not molested her, if her mother hadn’t been insane, if her father hadn’t been the kind of man who sent all five of his children out to choose the willow switch he would beat them with, if her first love had not had his head blown off in World War II.  I looked at a picture of her and saw a familiar angry disgust.  Where did she land when she fell off a cliff?  I suspect it was a place remarkably like Apartment 9A. 

In the tarot, the number nine is associated with the ninth sphere on the Tree of Life, yesod, the unconscious.  The letter A stems from the Hebrew letter aleph, considered to be a maternal letter in the Western mystery tradition, that which breathes primal air into life.  It is also the letter assigned to the Fool, stepping out from the moon with nothing but instinct and the need to move, as yet unhindered by cherished laws of gravity.

We get hurt, and our bruises solidify into belief, coding into deep parts of ourselves the expectation that we can only create what we know.  Generation after generation only proves to itself what it already believes, and aliveness is forced to go dark, the purview of lunatics and fools who dream themselves awake.  

From Tarot of the Spirit

I felt 9A move through my system like a homeopathic remedy, a small dose of the sad poison that can numb me to love and to joy.  Rather than the water I swim in, it became a wisp of something held separate, an apart-ment, and my immune system held it until the fever passed and it remembered where it belonged.  I felt the Fool’s lack of definition fall through what had seemed like inevitably solid ground and found myself somewhere I hadn’t expected to be, at peace. 

It’s so easy to forget that this is how it can be.      

With love,

Mia