How I became an Alchemist
I ‘woke up’ for the first time when I was 6. This is how it started: boy me had been sleeping serenely, I imagine. Little black limbs tangled. Ill fitting shorts and shirt clinging. Nestled in the Caribbean heat with my cheeks salty as I had been crying. I woke like a dawn, both slowly and suddenly. There was the picture of white Jesus in his halo praying. The sound of the bush birds signing in the bamboo. A cool Trinidad breeze softly rattling ten million leaves. And then with a start I popped upright. My tiny heart pounded. My little nostrils flared. I remembered: my first atrocity.
It all started as a fight with my older brother Junior Aly. Like many such fights of sibling rivalry the cause did not matter and still to this day is not remembered. Yet in the pathological mind of 6 year old me it made sense to win. Being the more scrawny of the two I lost. Batted away and pinned down like the big lazy grasshoppers I used to chase on my way to church. Being the prouder of the two I would not relent and took the conflict thermo-nuclear: I poisoned his fish.
Junior’s fish lived in an oil drum, cemented at the bottom, with the top 3rd removed — a Third World aquarium. The green murk bloomed with goldfish and baby coy and aggressive Japanese fighter fish. This was my target. I poured the entire bottle with the skull and crossbones label into it. That thick black liquid we knew simply as ‘disinfectant’. I’d watched it kill crapeau (toads) with just a few splashes. It worked so fast you could follow their last few hops and watch them go. So I knew as certain as Kobo (vultures) flocked in tall trees that every single fish was doomed.
My punishment was equally devastating (in my mind anyways). Miss Excelly, our wise grandma, knew precisely how to get me: I was now not allowed to go on the excursion to San Fernando that afternoon. The smell of the sea, the rolling topaz water, the palpable excitement of the trip, none of this would be mine. So cruel! I wailed. I begged. Gushed up rivers of remorse to no avail. At last I passed out exhausted and forgot that fish, excursions or brothers ever existed.
Until then when I woke up suddenly and remembered everything. Dashing headlong into the street I saw that the big mini vans we called ‘Maxi Taxis’ were being loaded for the trip. I ran, arms swinging, for what seemed like days. When I went back to Trini in 2011 it turned out to be not that far at all but my legs were shorter back then. I arrived at the junction only to see the Maxi Taxi turning the far corner, leaving me stewing in diesel and disappointment.
Then I did what most people would consider a second act of madness: I ran after the mini van.
What child would do this? Heart thudding with stubbornness I ran and ran and when I could no longer run I walked and when I had passed the streets I knew I kept walking and when there were no houses I kept walking and sang to myself surrounded by the teeming jungle. Never turning back even when the sun began to fall and the veil of the horizon grew darker. Finally, the deep of the evening descending, I found myself at the edge of existence. A southern Trinidad night is pitch black but never silent. It is filled with the million voices of insects, frogs, snakes, grasshoppers, night birds hunting — a great seething chorus of the unseen. This terrifying choir finally, along with my weariness, sapped the fight right out of me. Little me wept.
I had come to the border of reality. A void as vast as space. Big enough to contain all the terrors and potential of life itself. This was the first time I remember being conscious that I existed as a separate thing from the world. And that this existence was very small in a Universe that was very big. It is the origin story of my inner life: my second birth. And it began with a mean spirited, selfish act of mass murder.
I didn’t know this then but I would frequently return to this borderland in my head: this place of terror and clarity. In time I began to see it as the place where my true self lives. It is a well from which I frequently draw and drink the wisdom of what I am. The greatest lesson: that our awfulness can often bring out our best. It amazes me that I have journeyed over continents and decades and can look back and still find myself rooted in that moment and its alchemy; its power to transform.
So I blamed the whole thing on rastas. When a random car picked me up and took me to the police station I claimed I was kidnapped by Rastas who had then dropped me on the side of the road. Of course no one believed me but it was worth a try. Apologies to my Rastafarian brothers and sisters for the slander (Jah Bless!). Yet perhaps until the moment I die the power of facing the void will be a constant guide: my black star shining.
This sweet alchemy is, in fact, the only thing I can offer you
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