seizures

I've gone to bali or thailand with a friend who ends up going off, and I'm on my own in a strange place, which is scary at first-- then I start paying attention to the place-- there's water everywhere, running even under the street, and beaches in the not too far distance-- there are manholes in the cobbled street you can climb through into the ocean-- I lean down over one and watch the creatures swimming, bright corals on the ocean floor, large manatee bodies passing by-- when they see me, they surface to investigate and snuffle affectionately like big dogs at my face, and I laugh out loud.

then I wander across the street and into a house and ask the woman who lives there if there's any chance I can pay her to crash on her floor-- she says, no problem, and gets me situated in a kind of hallway alcove where the floor is soft as a featherbed-- I'm worried about being in the way, but she reassures and welcomes me, and everything is beautiful and simple and clean and bright. I lie down, so tired, and slip into semiconsciousness, and her housemates or friends arrive-- I can hear them and am paying somewhat attention, though I'm far away-- and then one of them, a woman, comes and lays her hands gently on my back, and there is an intense warmth and a surge of sadness, and I shudder and sob-- she says to the others, she's carrying a lot of pain, and then she keeps laying her hands differently on me and releasing that heat and stretches of sadness, releasing it out of me.

later I get up and want nothing so much as to be enveloped in water, and I ask if I might to plunge in somwhere-- even one of those sewers right outside-- and they give me kind of odd looks, and I realize how bad and self-hating it sounds-- but I was only thinking of the manatees and the corals.

we go on a kind of slow roller coaster-- the whole places is very buddhist, with everyday holy men and monks all around-- and while on it, I have another episode of losing consciousness, and then there are shudders that verge on seizures-- I keep holding back and rousing myself out of it-- and the same woman asks me if I've ever considered just going through it, just giving myself over to those seizures to see where they take me-- and it's an interesting idea, but I'm unable to do it-- she seems to be suggesting the episodes are not so much an illness but instead some kind of mystical birthright I've got to fully embrace. I hadn't even really been aware I had them in me.