The shadow over my face is Death
And it burns like the Sun
I’m riding through the prairies of Texas. There’s a shadow across my face and it burns like the light of the sun if it could burn as white hot as oblivion itself. I’m scorched by the rays of what does not bleed but seeds everything. I’m cradled in the hand of Death themself, if they had a hand to extend. I’m curled up in the tentacles of Time itself, if it had a copse to commit me to.
Death has always followed me, hung over me like a wayward branch of the same tree that sprouted me.
Death is a member of my family, as much a part of me as the parents and sibling I’m estranged from.
Death made itself known to me early but I misunderstood them. I mistook their meaning. I misinterpreted their energy and I saw it all around me as a great plague, as a blight on my inner landscape.
Death is coming and I hope it’s not for someone I love, I hope it’s not for me.
I was born in the shadow of Death. I was born almost exactly a year after the death of my brother. My entire childhood, I heard tell of my better half. The half of me that could never be inferior because he died before anyone could find fault. My features are his. My facial expressions are his. My temper is his. My fierce protectiveness and defensiveness of the underdog is his. His Mars-ruled Sun lives on in my 12th House like a dark mark, like the legacy of what has been undone. Of what can never be complete because some flowers are not given time to bloom.
My 12th house Mars is like a slow knife, sharpened over decades I never lived to see. I feel that blade—even on both sides.
I am a Libra rising and I am ruled by Saturn via exaltation as much as I am ruled by Venus.
I know that Time is a weapon and it cuts both ways.
I cut both ways.
Even while everyone would like to wield me in their favor, Justice bows to no man and it bends to no whim. I am a well-kept knife, sharp to the lightness on one side and the darkness about the other.
I grew up in the shadow of Death. I felt their cool breath on the back of my neck when I was meant to be playing. When I was meant to be growing. When I was meant to be living.
In my nightmares, I saw the end. I saw the disasters that would come for the people I loved but I never imagined that I would be the one to kill them. I never foresaw that this sharpened blade would cleave my own family tree in two.
When I saw separation in dreams, I saw it as murder, kidnapping, earthly horrors beyond my control. I never dreamed that I would be the one to desert them. That some part of me would kidnap itself, stealing me away in the night when everyone else was sleeping.
I felt Death again when I met my husband. I had no framework to understand a world where I know peace—where all of my dreams come true.
I met my husband at 20 years old and at 22 years old, I thought I must be about to die.
I became possessed by it—the burning shadow on my cheek. I formulated my mysterious, lifelong but worsening chronic illness symptoms as some sort of rare cancer. “This must be the end,” I thought. “There’s no way I could exist on the other side of this.”
But I’ve done more than exist in these 8 years since.
At my core, I’m a survivalist, a minimalist. At only 16 years old and long before it came to be considered even slightly appealing, I became fascinated with vandwelling. I learned long ago what I needed to survive and now life seems determined to surpass that—to flood me with surplus.
I am tortured by riches, taunted by abundance. I am scorched by an alien Sun that rests in shadow, ever elusive. I am drowned in molten gold, my airways filled with the brightest bounty.
Death came to me when all seemed fruitless, hopeless, and yet curiously full of opportunity. In Death, I saw not just an end, but a new beginning. Thanks to an Astrology reading with none other than Nairy Fstukh of Soft Moon Rising, I finally begin to understand. My North Node in Scorpio finds itself in the first house (in Placidus, that is) and I crave a new beginning drenched in the blood of the old world. I like my juice with a little pulp. When I sip on the serum of the new, I want to taste the flesh of what came before.
Life, in its morbidly forward bent, has rendered me vampiric.
Death came to me in many faces, many names. They came to me in sleep, in wake, and finally, in the creek where I come to unwind, to relax. I heard a name: Azrael. I saw white, lacy tentacles shifting, changing, knotting and unknotting, winding through all of eternity.
“I am Completion, Convergence, Coherence,” they said.
“I’ve come to you because you seek to weave your loose ends towards an eventual endpoint.”
But I heard nothing. I felt only the bright burning of their presence. I felt myself eclipsed in white. I felt myself melted down, merged. I fell back upon the rocks and found myself inside them, fossilized.
I have come to know Death many ways, under many names.
When I see them, besides the white lacy tendrils, I see white robes that drive upward like a mountain. If I looked up, I doubt I would see a face. But I never look up. I always meet them at my own level—my eyes tethered to the horizon.
Death is all around me at all times.
Death is the theater of war, the annex all about me.
Death is my guide but they rarely speak, rarely offer direct guidance.
Rather, they are a background presence. Always arching over me like the strong arms of my father, like the warm heart of my mother, like the wildness of my sister, like the piercing cold of my brother.
Death came to me like a million hard rains to a giant boulder, chafing away each layer that was not mine. Wearing back the years time wore upon me until I was something new again.
Where Death is often represented with heaviness, darkness, I feel the most confronting levity. Death, Completion, however they may name themselves, they are the brightest patch of my life. They are that beautiful vista you reach through the most overgrown path. They are that moment where you rest in deep knowing, deep peace, that everything you have sought to create is done. They are that respite from the plans you make yourself, the ones that lack the foresight for comprehensiveness.
I love Death like I will never love anything that lives and breathes.
I love Death like a piece of me. The piece that can’t exist on this gnarled plane. This disastrous world I’ve wound up in.
I love Death and they love me. They tell me to still my beating heart, to temper the tremulousness in my fingers, to close my eyes and close my mind until I can finally see clearly again.
They love me in a way no human can love me, in a way that I am most desperate to be loved.
They love me until I am complete. And not a moment before.
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Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333
The ouroboros in this AAAGH SOOO GOOD. I’m chewing on it. Yummmyyyy.