The Dead Don't Need You To Keep Dying With Them
Chapter 4: The Little Wood House Inside My Mind
Hello.
I’ve been dragging a corpse around The Little Wood House Inside My Mind for about a month now. Well. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the whole story:
Chapter 1: The Little Wood House Inside My Mind
Chapter 2: There A Corpse In The Wood House Inside My Mind
Chapter 3: Crying Without Tears
Let’s call this Chapter 4… See, I didn’t really plan to bring you in here, at least not fully, not like this in the heart of my imagination. But now that I am…Now that I’m standing here, fucking naked on the internet (again), and you’re here. What else am I supposed to do?
That’s what it is.
Sigh.
I’ve been dragging the corpse here and there, making her soup, spending time with her, being present, feeling her. I covered her with gifts and care. I even built her a room, with a special rocking chair on wheels so I could roll her through the house and out into the garden easily.
A whole month of this parade and well, still no movement. No sound, nothing, and that’s never happened before. I’ve been doing this kind of imaginative exploration since I was two years old, and I’ve never been confronted with a corpse like this.
I’ve seen corpses before.
But there was always some kind of movement, a flicker of life (even if that sounds strange, but you know what I mean). The only thing that was there was the act of caretaking. The illusion of being useful. The ache of staying attached to what’s already gone.
I walked her through silence, through rot, through flood and rage, and when I finally stopped for a second, I heard something in my heart.
"What does it feel like to carry what will never return?
She’s not speaking, not moving, not coming back.
Your job is not to nurse her anymore.
Maybe your work is to accept she’s not coming with you."
That’s when I learned:
Presence is not resurrection.
It doesn’t bring back what’s gone.
I started to think about her funeral. If you know me, you know I’m in love with ceremony and ritual. I need everything to mean something, that’s my job as a poet. So even while I was still taking care of her, I was already imagining how I would end it all.
Maybe I’d bring her back to the cold ocean where she died, near the snowy beach of The Laboratory No.9. (another imaginary place I created in 2021, where I used to bring people to teach shadow work). I pictured both of us on a small wooden boat, filled with flowers, drifting under the moonlight. I’d let her drown slowly. She would obviously say thank you. Right? Something magical would happen, and I’d cry, not out of pain, but out of deep appreciation. Right?
Something like that?
The only thing I did know was that I needed it to be poetry, as it should be. Right?
Right?
…Right.
Yesterday, I was about to go to sleep, and… when I’m tired, that’s when all the unfelt feelings flood my space. I’m used to it. When I feel it coming, I just sit down and appreciate the beauty of the walls of the Little Wood House Inside My Mind crashing, bursting, exploding.
The rain started to fall, carrying ocean debris and fish swirling everywhere.
I stayed and watched in silence.
~See, when there are feelings inside my chest, I don’t hear my thoughts anymore. I don’t hear the critic, or the hate, or everything that used to tear me down. There’s feeling. There’s water. There’s rain. There’s storm. But there’s no label. It’s just energy, images, creatures and stories, existing in my body.
So, there were no walls left.
I was sitting in the middle of my once-again wrecked home. I found four sticks and tied a thin blanket on top of them to create a small shelter. I started a fire and I saw the corpse drifting away in the water, getting stuck on a broken plank at the edge of the house. Still no life. Just a pile of bones with no soul.
I left her there.
Staring at her.
And I started to feel what I can only call indifference. The water began to rise. It soon drowned the fire. The water grew and grew until it submerged everything. I was back in the middle of the cold ocean. I could see the light of The Laboratory No.9 in the distance, glowing faintly on the snow-covered beach. There was no moon, no stars, only darkness.
The waves were hostile. Intense. I could barely catch my breath.
So I let myself drown.
It’s okay.
It’s not the first time.
Nor the second.
My body began to drown. I could feel all the energy taking control of me, and I just surrendered. Then, I saw a circle of light at the bottom of the ocean. It grew and grew the closer I got. I didn’t rush the process, I simply followed the gravity and observed.
At the center of the light was the corpse, lying on her back like she was part of the ocean floor. There was nothing but her. I fell onto her, as if I were about to take her place, and I heard:
“All your life, you’ve interpreted emptiness as something being wrong.
Is this silence, right now, asking something from you?
Or is it telling you you’re free?”
Real imagination isn’t precious.
It let curiosity detach your heart from the first thing
to make space for the next.
The corpse was the part of me that went too deep into self-exploration, alone. Burnout. She kept diving into the void, always looking for something to fix, trying to earn wholeness without any help.
She was the checkpoint between obsession and creation. She taught me about depth, about danger, and about the limits of doing everything alone. And her final lesson was this: You can go all the way down… and still miss yourself.
For all those years, I confused self-love with endurance. But sometimes, the most loving and nurturing thing you can do is feel the end, walk away and open your eyes towards what’s next.
I came back to The Little Wood House Inside My Mind, and it was all back up again. Like nothing had ever happened.
Just before I stepped inside, I saw the old man who had been restoring the corpse’s diving suit. He packed up his lunchbox, put his old wooden pipe between his lips, and said something (not in English, not in French) but I still understood… he was done with the restoration.
He built a small wooden closet just outside the house, with a window so we could see the suit hanging, complete, shiny, in bright green and white.
On a metal plate at the bottom of the window, it reads:
Something is always waiting behind the third silence.
Maybe I’ll never know what it means.
Sometimes healing looks like forgetting it ever broke.
I left the mystery there, and walked in without asking for more. I sat on the couch. The house was in perfect shape, it smelled amazing, and I was alone appreciating the silence until…
To be continued.
V.
Want to visit your own imagination and create freely inside your mind?
Book a Storm Seat session with me, a Parts Work experience where we meet the creatures living inside you. We’ll explore your depths together and meet the part of you that’s been waiting to be heard.