On the face of the deep

How the Devils get in

I want to tell you how it feels.
I want to tell you how it climbs my skin like ivy.
I want you to feel the emptiness like I did—
a moist heat you can swim through,
a home too quiet for sounds of life.
I want you to know how the TV glowed
washing everything in white,
making everything night,
even when sun crept in through the windows.

---

“You’re on something. I know. You got that walleyed look.”

I heard my mother say this many times. When my sister would nod off into her food, into the couch cushions, into thin air. Her head lolling back and forth like a buoy in the water.

For years, I didn’t know what ‘walleyed’ truly meant. It became synonymous with an unfocused, vacant look—a certain drifting of the eyeballs that told me my sister was not home, was not present with us, was not even, in my child mind, my sister anymore.

At 18 years my senior, my sister was a second mother and a sibling all rolled into one. In the oldest house I remember, the one that casts a long, dense shadow over the face of my childhood, her room stood at the end of the hallway. It always felt darker to me somehow. Not because the blinds were always drawn tight and the room cluttered with clothes and things and the air heavy with the must of synthetically slowed breathing. It felt mysteriously quiet when she was home and mysteriously loud when she was not. It felt like it was underwater somehow. Muffled. Darkness like a substance. There were days when I sat outside it, listening for something, afraid to go inside but drawn to its eerie gravity.

When I think of my sister, I hear my mother’s words in my head. “Walleyed.” I remember the times, years later, when I stayed with her in Dallas. Miles away from home and estranged from the careful routine my mother kept for me, I would watch her head loll back and forth while the TV droned on. I would feel myself caught in a tide of endless TV movies, carrying me out to a place where time no longer existed—where there was no structure to corral it. No bedtimes or mealtimes, no errands to run or appointments to make. Just the slow, strange passing of sunlight through tightly drawn blinds. Just varying shades of daytime and nighttime burning through ivory.

A pit grew in my stomach as I sat captive on those couches or beds in one small apartment with one lone adult—both there and not-there, real and not-real. I couldn’t escape this dull blade of wrongness scraping across my intestines.

I wanted to wake her up, but I was afraid of what might wake with her. So I sat and stared into the TV like a crystal ball—looking for answers, comfort, something of substance.

Whatever had swallowed my sister soon came for my mom. Where once there had been some semblance of life—which I identified mainly through routine—now there was a similar emptiness. My mother made remote not by drugs but something else. I watched her take on her own sort of ‘walleyed’ look—staring into the TV, scrying for answers, comfort, something of substance.

At least in that big, two-story farmhouse I could withdraw, too. I could place distance between me and TV-lit lagoons of decay.

I could lock myself in my room on the second floor, switching on my own TV like a floodlight; beating back the dark, illuminating something that might counter the sights and sounds that echoed of parental neglect.

All these years later, as I cleanse myself of television sets and phone screens and all the many things that hollow people out, steal their lifeforce, that word loops through my head in a ticker tape stream.

Walleyed. Walleyed. Walleyed. Walleyed.

In the space between their vision and its invisible object—the ciliary muscle softening, flattening their gaze, their eyes sightless and all-seeing—something grew. I could feel what slept in that middle distance, could almost see it. A wild animal. A thing in a cave that you shouldn’t shout into. I felt the shouts hardening inside me, which I identified as a leaden quality that solidifies the aqueous fascial webs into limestone.

In the orbit of the beast, I felt paralyzed, petrified, cautiously stone-still.

You don’t look a wild animal in the eye.

This must be one of the fabled monsters of my ancestors that steal souls. This must be one of the demons that priests in my lineage must have exorcised. If there is a God, there is a Devil, and he’s staring out through the hollow space where my mother’s anima used to be.

He is more dangerous curled up and abed even than when I see him come to life in her open palm. I am more aware of him now than when hard objects sail through the air to land on my soft skin. I feel him hanging languorously above me more in this moment than when I am crouched behind the recliner, begging his host to drop her weapon. Pleading. Trembling. Praying. Shrouding myself in shame until I am worthy of protection again.

One day, after years of worsening chronic pain and a debilitating inner vortex of desolation that devoured every sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch that might confirm my own existence, the Devil swallowed me up, too. I came to know a new kind of neglect—medical neglect—as doctors refused to diagnose and treat my supposedly rare disorder (which I had handily diagnosed for them in advance) and opted instead to feed me the same pain meds that laid waste to my sister. I felt my sight soften into butter, my eyes spread, and I knew that I now had it, too. The walleyed look. I had thought that a diagnosis could save me—that an answer begets a solution—but I now know that’s not always the case. Modern medicine can’t save the most broken of our number, we the damned. Only God can fight the Devil.

I can’t say whether it was divine intervention, the resolution of my chronic pain. There’s not much I can say with certainty anymore. But I know that my soul got stuck somewhere—sometime before the pain started—and Divinity of one kind or another got it unstuck like a God-shaped crowbar.

Over 3 years clean from opioids and I still feel it set in sometimes: the walleyed look.

I feel it after too many days on my phone. Too many days of TV, YouTube, podcasts. Too many days of Noise.

In the crackling of all that static, I can hear the Devils waking up. I can feel them eclipsing my vision like giant hands replacing my pupils, growing out from the crevices of my brain where thought used to be like a zombie fungus.

So I commit myself to the brand new hammock on my porch and let my thoughts expand until there is no room for Devils. I let them take on mass until they’re no longer thoughts at all, until they become vast arenas of consciousness, lagoons of a darker but much less malevolent emptiness—one that doesn’t eat the things I love but feeds them, multiplies them.

I wonder if from the outside I look walleyed. Was walleyed a look? Or was it an energy? An entity? A virus? A possession?

Whatever possesses me now, it’s peaceful, dreamlike, teeming with life. It’s an emptiness that rubs together in great, invisible, mitotic blobs until that friction becomes matter.

It propagates visions and sensations.

It whispers things about the future and about an unknown past.

I am possessed of the radiant darkness of the limitless light. Finally, a God I can worship.

---

Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333

---

Rituals and practices to help you embody the Godself in one PDF.