Writing on the wall: Three - Swamp Song.

Tool have provided the soundtrack for this ordeal of betrayal.

Maynard's lyrics have been a golden thread to follow through the labyrinth, in particular other work by Maynard (Puscifer 'The Undertaker', A Perfect circle 'Gravity', 'counting Bodies to the Beat' and 'The Package'.)

Yesterday's track Intolerance and today's 'Swamp Song' both come from Undertow (Tool album). I bought it ages ago but I didn't really listen. I was too lost trying to 'spiral out' as I sang Latralus to head off panic attacks.

Swamp song says it all. 

Because where I've been is so sad, so raw, agony. 

It is time to throw it back.

Time to be angry.

Because

I wasn't the one attacking, or criticizing, I was a punch bag for his inarticulate rage, impotance and despair, he was unable to be open and vulnerable. He was unable to deal with his inner voice of criticism, making me carry that too. Perhaps if I hadn't spent three years in increasing fear and anxiety about Josh's mental health, and then six months of fearing for my life, I may have been able to 'do my job' of letting him name things through me..

But after what I'd been through, I was in no fit state.

Maynard describes my husband's narcisistic process perfectly.

My error was to 'pick it up'.

I remember actually believing that when he asked me if I was OK he wanted to know! Instead of seeing that 'are you ok' was an invitation to a game of 'If It Wasn't For You'.

Well, Swamp Song is the sound of me throwing it all back.

For a while there was an alternative. 

To have 'gone back to sleep' .

To discount my self, continue to blame myself, to have kept on trying..

To deny what my body told me, that the corpse I slept with each night was no longer my husband...

But I don't look upon that time with any sense of sorrow that I failed. Instead I remember the miasma of lying, of how I forced myself into hope, into staying positive, and the effort of drowning out the sound of warning alarms in my head, and the stench of decay...

Overall, fighting to remain upright (do not fall asleep!) and remaining as positive as possible, constantly naming things, not going to sleep means I will be OK. The real damage is found in those layers of the soul where blissful amnesia granted a painless blue-black, Rohypnol-like slide into Hell.

Swamp Song levels of rage is appropriate.