Sculpted driftwood clusters along an unswimmable beachfront at the tip of Puget Sound’s lip. Sun-bleached, brittle bodies, once proud trees, now crowd atop silica smithereens of shells shattered by tides and time. Former lifeforms all blasted apart and reconfigured into a new, albeit hostile, coherence that breeds life in its shelter.
They call this place Point No Point.
Nearly a decade ago, and about an hour away from this beach, I sat in a dark bar named Liberty reveling in the burning singe of rosemary in a cocktail called Point of No Return with a future broken promise, who held my shattered heart together just long enough to break it again later in the story.
We’d come to Liberty after imbibing drops of alchemical oil of gold and imagining the nanoparticles of aurum as an internal shower of spiritual rings binding us in some kind of cosmic marriage that held a middle finger up to the actual cathedral on whose steps we knowingly made these vows. We scribbled in the bar’s notebook, probably long tossed away by now, like two teenagers, marking our personal point of no return for an imaginary posterity, just before he flew home halfway across the world.
The shatter that preceded him persisted in his absence. The bond we shared with the obliterated, yet curiously bioavailable gold particles kept me from turning into driftwood.
I had become human kintsugi.
~
A few months after crossing the Point of No Return, I saw the name “Point No Point” on the map, and I had to go and see it for myself. It was the last day of the year. I found myself almost ready to laugh about it all, but the kind of laugh that still makes your lungs hurt, and the raw shape of your sadness creeps out of your pores even though you think yr good at hiding it. We never are.
~
I’ve spent a lot of energy in the last decade teaching the astrology behind the moments of losing an important two-decade relationship that left me in smithereens, just before this intense love story began. I had been so focused on the unimaginable pain of losing a connection that I never thought I would lose that I had totally overlooked the other way this astrology can play out: with marriage.
And there was a wedding!1
It wasn’t “legal” so it’s easy to forget it ever existed as such. No paper evidence equals no truth in our era of panoptic bureaucracy. But it was absolutely real. We had intentions, gold “rings,” church steps, and even vows, followed by years of high-intensity interaction, creation, making non-human children together, and in its own time, separation, custody negotiations, and proverbial divorce.
~
Two years ago, I began to experience a genuinely deep, restored, and ongoing peace with the person I thought I had lost forever, just before I got carried across the Point of No Return by a phantom spouse. And it’s now that phantom spouse who has left with nary a trace, including his role inside the larger arc of my life.
In this bound, we (re)visit wounds and the tiny balms that tried their best to heal them. We are all driftwood, sand, a finger in the lip, a singe of rosemary curling, shattered hearts mended with alchemical gold. We are all editing, forgetting, choosing not to remember, or blocking, avoiding, and omitting. In this witnessing, waiting, and wondering, another layer of healing shifts the scabs and scars around.
~
Sitting inside CAELi and reading more about the superior conjunction of Venus with the Sun, a new way of understanding those old moments of intensity came into my view. I had to laugh when I realized how my attention had been so focused on the pain that I forgot to acknowledge the pleasure, and how fruitful it was and honestly still is to this day.
How can we shift our angle and see what’s been hiding there all along, just outside the neatness of a tight story?
We cross points of no return, coming to the point that there is no point.2 Until there is again.
~
See you on June 14th at 6:49 am PDT, for the Sun’s last few days in Gemini.
~
Research Note:
Last year in the Leaps + Bounds group, this bound began a perilous spell that continued for around two weeks as the Sun moved from the Mars bound to Saturn’s bound in Gemini, and then to the bound of Mars in Cancer. Hopefully that was an anomaly related to last year’s deeper astrology. If not, we may have found a new quasi via combusta for bound lordship, to be determined with further research.
As always if yr enjoying the Bound Report, share it with your friends and foist it upon your frenemies, and tell them to:
Photo by Josiah Ferraro on Unsplash.
In editing this, I noticed that I didn’t write: “I got married” or even “we.” Tackling the self-edits can be really tough.
On how Point No Point got its name: “Several European explorers and fur traders passed the point in the 1700s and 1800s, but it was Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition who bestowed the curious name. From the water in May 1841, he noticed the quarter-mile-long point tended to appear and disappear from view, depending on his position. Point No Point seemed an appropriate name.” Supremely appropriate.
this was a beautiful read <3 thank you for sharing