The Return Novella
The "HER-STORY" of this Return continued...
A sequel unfolding such a return journey, exploring these questions felt like a story that I needed to write.
I have tried to be faithful to the mythological style and form I created in “Letters to a Missing Woman” as the chosen expression of its autoethnographic work. The imagery and metaphors within the story were born out of my experience as a woman, and an artist, on a journey of a painful regrowth and the surrender of my old ideals of belonging and homecoming. I hope that the issues raised in this story will be spacious and universal enough to find resonance with diverse women and men, as a guide offering some companionable self-understanding, just as it was with “Letters to a Missing Woman.”
Before a returning begins there is a turning point – events and moments that tilt, that unsettle, and that wake up the once sleepy and tranquil soul, evoking the impetus for the last act to commence. The arrival of a new character begins this account with upheaval. A girl, she insisted on being included. She had been lurking in the shadows of “Letters to a Missing Woman” as a thought or the awareness of an untold story. In this new work I felt an insistence, one that writers of fiction will understand, that this character wanted her presence known. I did not like her much when she first turned up on the page to turn tranquillity into trauma. When I tried to write her out, I could not write anymore. It was only as I included her that the writing began to flow again. So she was determined to stay.
This imp holds a good part of the storyline. Eventually the girl will reveal who she really is. Returning becomes a journey of paths converging and diverging, of roles being reversed, and the hidden inside world being turned outward as a gift. I learned to love the presence of this unexpected girl in the story and am grateful that she was determined enough to arrest my attention and remain a central character.
A missing relationship to be recovered is at the heart of this return story. There is always another layer of one’s history to comprehend. “Letters to a Missing Woman” begins with the derelict house and a community of “women who half lived and died and dwelt in diaphanous shadow, who lived in houses but had forgotten their way home.” What becomes clear about the derelict house as “Letters to a Missing Woman” unfolds is that it represents an imprisonment or an attachment to life-inhibiting and destructive patterns that have been learned within an unhealthy environment. This environment or culture is full of “voices and loyalties...the sickness or addiction to the well-earned and worn, self-imposed misery of shadow dwelling.” In this soul-sapping environment, where wings are torn and tattered, members of the household or community cannot learn that they are lovely and loved as a sacred person. The imprisoning attachment or loyalty to this kind of derelict house is a cruel formation that shapes or deforms the view of self, relationship to others, to life and love. It is a powerful narrative that becomes embedded, scoring grooves in the psyche or soul in which the lie of worthlessness runs in repeating cycles.
The herstory of how this derelict environment evolved and why the women lived in shadow with such forgetfulness is not divulged in “Letters to a Missing Woman.” In "The Return of the Girl Behind the Door" the Woman With Renewed Wings is initially reluctant to face and explore herstory. A denial of our herstory or history, especially the painful kind, does not seem to serve us well psychologically or spiritually, and I would gently argue, communally. I say ‘gently’ because to return or reconnect with one’s community (original/family or of one’s choosing – communities of faith, career/workplace or membership) where one was profoundly wounded (trauma) or shamed, is a momentous and courageous act. While one can heal personally, how does the opportunity come about for a community to be healed, especially when trauma, shame and silence play suppressive roles and many people continue to suffer if the narrative is not in some way challenged by a regenerative other?
History may be denied or buried yet it is still very much alive; it has a story to tell and a voice to be heard. Denied herstory, shaped by trauma and shame in the form of an unwanted silent girl the Woman with Renewed Wings would rather have forgotten, arrives at the crucial and unavoidable juncture to initiate a return that the woman would rather not make. The Girl Behind the Door’s roaming and waiting is over. She is the guide to what else is to be rediscovered in the unconscious realms personally and communally. Herstory and the present, once sundered because of shame, are about to be tethered together to create a healthier bond in the hope that it will heal, not only the two main characters but also their kin and kith.
In this new quest, the Returning Woman is challenged to open herself up to another odyssey beyond her control. The difficult question that she will grapple with throughout her Returning experience is to ask what gift or remedy she returns with that has gone missing and is forgotten by her people. As we travel with her and the Girl Behind the Door, I hope, dear reader, that you and I will discover that we are a community of questers bound for home, bearing the gifts of Return.
