First Escape:
“Lucien Roccomatio opened his eyes, as if for the first time, and knew one thing — he needed to go to the toilet.
This was his first "waking" moment that he can recall. He was alone, and this was no different to normal. He knew this room. It was soft and bright and empty.
…
Lucien couldn’t talk yet, and screaming had never worked in the past.
He needed to act. And so, at, maybe 18 months, Lucien climbed out from under the covers, scaled the bars of his cot, and wobbled toward the bathroom — haphazard, heroic. Lucien felt achieved and empowered, having this capacity to address a need — at least in progress.
As he rounded the corner into the bathroom, he recalls she’d noticed and came to coddle him in a way that felt comforting to him, though at this point he did not possess the capacity to understand why, nor the dominion of any language to ask why there was an uneasiness to that moment. She moved around him like she was smoothing out the static in the air — her voice a warm rhythm of coos and sudden peaks. Something in her touch said I was hers… She was tender, yes. ‘She is teaching me how to be. How to hold still. How to smile when I’m dry and fed and praised… This must be love,’ Lucien reasoned. ‘This must be her kind of love.’”
This was my first ‘waking’ moment — or at least, the first my body remembers, later given words.
That’s the seed of it: my first remembered act of agency — leaving the place I was meant to stay, arriving where I wanted to be — immediately taken from me in the guise of caring tenderness. The start of a fucking awful pattern I can only see clearly now, thirty-something years later, as I welcome my shadow into the light. Having serious, honest chats with myself about the ways I’ve let love and ownership and agency blur — and how I’m done letting that pass unchallenged. How I have truly given away everything so that it cannot be taken away from me — even if that means creating suffering for me - especially when... Because, if I give you everything, surely you will return love to me?
Here’s the truth: my mother, though I believe she thought she did, did not show me love. What she gave me was a performance — a commodity. And I thank the gods she’s gone now, because it means I don’t have to keep pretending otherwise.
As I continue to descend, I am beginning to realise the importance of mapping and tracing the things that trigger me in today’s life. With this tracing, I am able to begin to look where it sits in my body, and I try and cast my mind’s memory back to a time that I can recall that same sensation. I then summon the senses — what can I smell, what can I feel, what can I hear — in the today body, the present, but also throwing a part of me back in the memory of my body and my senses - sending Lucien to investigate and come back with treasures lost long ago.
Each week, I map these early recollections against the body I inhabit now. I trace sensations back to their first shadows. I send Lucien into the memory and he brings back what was lost.
If you enter, you’ll find:
– Original fragments from a memoir-in-descent before it is launched to the world
– Prompts to unmask your own shadows
– Erotic, mythic, and sacred truths from the edge of survival
– Audio recordings in my own voice, so you can feel the words as they were born
The descent is not safe. But it is necessary.
- Lucien