Anything Goes : "Desert Is a Quiet But Friendly Stranger" // some chapters // true story, true crime by Velvet Elle

16.

Let’s talk about something I actually like

I have been addressing multiple things and themes and issues and actions I don’t approve or even hate them

Who fancies a round of movie trivia? And I am not talking about Frozen or whatever’s in Vogue right now, those academically acclaimed productions that leave head spinning but heart cold

One of my favorite, actually could be number one on my list, is ”Closer” from 2004 with Julia Roberts and her peers

It is shocking, the artistry in that is remarkable

I cannot point out just one favorite quote, or scene, that’s why it’s so special, each one is close to perfection and it grows on you until becomes something you travel with

When Daniel breaks up with Alice, she says ”You had a choice” and cries

It is heartbreaking

Makes me think that majority of things done are - choices

In my case, several choices by others that have been not only criminal actions, but also pure evilness and hatred have resulted who, or what I am now

It is frightening, somehow

To know we really do come in all shapes and sizes also referring to the emotional and ethical footprint we leave behind each day

We’ve all heard the classic ”customer service for dummies” clause that if a customer receives excellent service, she tells about it to three of her friends

Yippee!

But if not, she spreads the word

Up to ten people will most definitely hear about it

And that’s one way to approach this matter philosophically

The actions, choices, horrible awful mindfuck stuff people do to each others will leave scars, marks, to many other people than the target on the go

And it runs deep, the pain

Like kindness and being just, fair, exercising grace would be the optimal target value or in fact, the norm

When someone is even moderately okay and not like a horrible abusive prick that rapes children or does things in similar categories, we are like not paying any attention

It gives the idea that the disgusting lot would be something ”exceptional” in the sense of the word, that they are not a rule, they are an exception

When in fact to me, I think, it is the other way round and in fact the very core bone of humanity, which is of course a bit heartbreaking, isn’t it?

To think that we are not born with certain definite action-leading abilities, we either choose to use them or not, like moral

To say ”some people are animals” is not a correct way to refer to dicks, because I actually think most animals are more human than the people I know

As I still hope, wish from the bottom of my heart there’d still be something left to die for

Having a moral, and acting against it is the ugliest

It does not hurt or cause pain to be an idiot if one’s kind - tries to understand what it feels like to be someone else, has the sense of empathy and doesn’t act against righteous beliefs

The worse, much worse are somewhat smart, intellect people, who have read about something and form a theory upon it such as ”feminists are dangerous because” or ”all minorities don’t deserve equal rights because” and spread it like covid-19 travels mouth-to-mouth among the unvaccinated making everything ten times worse for everybody

These days, it is pretty easy to do damage online

So I discourage myself to using it

I don’t have Facebook or do they call it now ”Meta” and every time I open Instagram I see how lonely, sad and needy we are as individuals that form our specie

It’s universal somehow wanting to bond, create strings to this world even if it’s by someone else digging your selfie because let’s face it, only gravity and tiny feet keep us here, have you ever thought about it? Above you, there’s eternity or forever, that keeps expanding and as it is, already has the qualities to drive you nuts without needing to expand WHOOPS now it’s bigger again WHOOPS here we go

Do I grow smaller or am I stable size, it’s just the time-space ratio that’s not comprehendible and I am something static in the constant energy that can never actually vanish, it only transforms and travels here as socks that go missing from the washing machine, meaning without any seemingly valid reason apart from it cannot do or be anything else and always finds its way forward?

And underneath your feet, which tend to be adult size something between 20 to 40 cm roughly, the ground that has traveled here from space and provides us everything we have here, in one form or another

Carries you

Think about it

My other favorite film is Notting Hill

Yes, I have seen the Tarkovskys, Kubricks, Bergmans and Kurosawas

Don’t get me wrong

I used to practically live in a movie theatre after I died, I watched three shows in a row each day, they were classic pieces or otherwise important and this went on for months

I couldn’t stay inside the apartment where it happened

So at noon I went to the first show and left around 6 or 7 PM

Sometimes I fell asleep, often I didn’t

All in all

It was very educational even to my - may I say - rather academic knowledge on the art of moving image from quite early age as I began really freaking about films in early teens, before that had just watched four or five each week that came from telly

But you know, truly formed a connection to the art form from around 14 years old, when I started visiting classic shows once a week

The first I saw there was ”Being John Malkovich” and I was hooked

Seriously, totally, utterly to the very first and last cell in my body, addicted

So when Anna says to ”gentleman in the pink shirt” that she’ll stay ”indefinitely” and the flashes start exploding around them, my God it is beautiful

Encouraging

Lets me have a sense of good things inside me

That I have this ability, capability, to feel and possess these feelings and emotions

Life as a movie is full of obstacles the leading character doesn’t know it is not necessary to overcome in order to be happy

17.

Did you know the violence doesn’t end on the act of doing that?

Well it doesn’t

It actually only begins

After that the victim gets hallucinations of her worth and value as a being, as a human and as an entity, it twists everything into morbid proportions and in the long run, changes the living, not life itself as it’s stable and not comprehendible state of having consciousness and vitals

The living, let’s say me

Lacks things and has oddities in behavior such as well, auditory hallucinations or terror of losing it in public

There are so many times I have been stuck in the traffic riding a tram or bus, not moving an inch, and during the waiting period that feels like a small eternity or the half of it, lived in the horror of snapping, going mad, that I cannot even count them all

In the fantasies I scream to a racist redneck next to me he’s a monster and advice the driver to honk repeatedly or else I will steal all the printed timetables on the vehicle and make hats out of them

Or just yell

A nice, good, long yell

AAAAAAAAAAAARGHHH

Wow that was refreshing

Man I feel like a different person now

Should do that more often I think

It’s half past eleven at night and I keep on poisoning myself with the extremely strong coffee, I am getting fond of the effect as now I cannot really smell anything, it’s fascinating, it somehow messes with my sensing abilities, that’s how strong it is

We were at the side-effects of abuse

Well, you’re clutching one right now

Hearing voices is much less than you think, and more than you could possibly imagine unless you are involved in the phenomena empirically

I just couldn’t explain them out, even if I tried but can guide you through the small fragment of what I know

First of all, one in 25 people hears voices others don’t

They’re fucking real to them, though not for anyone else

It makes 4 individuals in 100 so 4% of population

If you are a newbie, has just started hearing them, I am more than happy to assist you to navigate in there, and in the world designed for the average perceiver

4 cases in 100 make us a minority group of 312 million people

That’s not a small figure, when you think about it though the experience can be so totally, fucking isolating that some, like me, choose to die or try as no other can really experience the same world anymore

The mutual language can start having these holes in it, gaps, things that are impossible to relate to, or have empathy towards to so withdrawing from communication slowly, bit by bit, to utter and utmost solitude, is tempting

It can be

Because I can still almost remember the world where I was the master, I was the one who felt things without extrasensory hallucinations that interact with my thoughts, I remember the silence when it was real silence, not a sound, of any kind to detect

It was what I knew then

And how dramatically it changed me in the long run

Hearing voices can also be something, a gift that a person is born with

So there’s just no other world, where to have lived in before, and it can come as a surprise that majority, a big majority doesn’t actually have that

Voices are strange, some can be encouraging

Some can be truly, literally evil and awful towards the one who hears them

So rather than seeing us as scary or unnatural, unhealthy we deserve a little respect of going through successfully, what we are sort of doomed to having to go through

We don’t really need to top that with a stigma to carry

Trust me on this

Scientifically it has been proved over and over again that we really sense the voices as sound

And approximately half of us who have noisy and talkative friends others cannot hear don’t need any kind of help or medical assistance to cope with them

Psychosis and psychosis-related illnesses such as schizophrenia or psychotic mania / depression can come with the baggage in the form of voices, but it’s not a proof someone is in psychosis or psychotic just because

People can have unconventional answers to what the voices are

Some know as a certainty that it’s the sound of alien talk or let’s say, a chip CIA has installed on them while sleeping

Medically speaking, it’s not the symptom itself or phenomena, based upon on the diagnosis for example are made with, or medication in the very best case scenario

Some no need no medication at all, some do, so fuck you who think it’s anyone else’s business

In the ideal world doctors wouldn’t prescribe pills to make us more normal but to ease the pain that goes or comes with them

There’s a difference

18.

The plot thickens

I am wearing wool socks

Outside my head not many things are going on in this shelter

Been walking without any kind of socks or underwear, as left in a hurry delivered to the doorstep in a police car, and surprisingly I feel much fuzzier and warmer, cosy even

I mean, as cosy as one can get under these circumstances

Actually, when I think about this, being here is a hoot

No, not really

But where else would I go, be?

So I just bite my tongue and accept the level of hoot around here

I am not really feeling any better, just wearing more make-up so people around me don’t look at me with such pity in their eyes today

I had flashbacks before falling asleep, not the worst kind, but again, about the time when I was unconscious and laid on the floor in my home, vomiting all over and feeling like it was the devil itself that raped me, leaving burn marks and bruises on my anorexic body

I would like to think, now I could come up with a pretty good fight, if it got down to it, but then I believe I had more than one guy involved in the drugging and raping so as sad as it sounds, the odds are I couldn’t resist them at all

Well, I know the consequences, don’t I

The very last memory I have before the date I was found (it was January 28th 2008) was New Years eve, I went clubbing alone and got home feeling totally free and happy, I didn’t even drink or smoke then, was pretty straight edge, only went dancing to let go from trapped energies jammed inside me from excessive working and printing photos in the darkroom and to consume few sodas

What is not known, describes the best as real true crime mystery

At some point during January, I don’t know who or when or where - I just know where I was found, at home - I had sent an email to mom that I was going to an exhibition opening and talked about knee high socks I was going to wear, which is pretty strange when you think about it, it was January after all - but then nothing

Mom had apparently tried contacting me for about a week, with no answer so she decided to call to the police

Which is something I am sometimes grateful for

She was instructed to call all hospitals first if an anorexic Jane Doe was there, but no

I was placed on the floor of my studio, paralyzed, with my phone next to me, that the police found later

And once she had rang the round, the cops started moving and mom knew I kept my spare keys in the corner pub resulting easier access to my studio

My sister’s fiancé tagged along with the cops per request and they first called my cell from the corridor, and it rang but no answer

They opened the door and I remember vividly how my brother-in-law later told me that one of the police had said ”There’s a corpse” meaning a little bump on the rug that was me

But my heart had kept on beating

No one knows how long I had been there

Maybe even all week since the last email

At some point I had managed to drink water so my blood sugar was the only test result that wasn’t almost zero

Apart from sky high CRP and fever

The doctors said to my mom on the phone, when I was taken in an ambulance to the nearest hospital’s emergency room that my heart shouldn’t have kept on beating anymore, that’s how badly things were

I cannot remember any of this

Nothing

Absolutely nothing

Blank

Black

My amnesia is 28 days, complete apart from few flashbacks where strange men are in my apartment who speak to me

The first thing I really remember was pain

Excruciating kind

My veins had all dried from the vomiting and as I was re-hydrated it hurt like hell

Though morphine was one of the liquids they injected into me

Drop by drop, the saline, antibiotics and morphine found their way through the tube into my system and the first night was so unbearably painful it’s a miracle I am not madder than this

I have blurry memories, not visual ones really apart from the saline drip and bags of liquid and people fussing around me, taking tests, talking

I could hear their voices, and understood mom was on the phone hearing the odds

Which were less than she would have liked to hear

If I pulled it through, I would very likely be a vegetable for the rest of my life and never walk again

This is true

On the 3rd day of laying in the torment my condition got worse

I floated outside my body and saw it from the distance trapped in the bed and wires and machines

In fact, that is pretty accurate as I wasn’t trapped, my body was

I could travel back and forth in time like a ghost moves in the attic

I wanted to die

I had refused to eat, the nurses tried feeding me but if I did take something in my mouth I didn’t swallow it

I just wanted to die

It hurt so bad

Not only my body, but being

It was this place with ten thousand spears, erect needles ready to pierce through me and my mind and they did

So what happened, was that as soon as I realized I can leave; I can travel in spaceless time and a place without other dimensions, I did

I saw this bright light, that tried to escape me but I reached it in the end, after chasing it around the unknown universes

And I saw entities there, they spoke to me

I cannot recall each word they said, but what was firm and undeniable I couldn’t change

It was not my time yet

So they didn’t let me in

Once I returned to my body my sister had brought me a card from my nephew, who was then few months old

She had drawn his tiny footprint on the blue cardboard and it said ”Get well soon, auntie”

I could read it and as soon as I recalled who he was, I remembered an oath I had made to him once he was still in my sister’s womb

I would not let my dad abuse him

I had spoken to him mentally when I saw the first ultrasound picture presenting him as a newcomer to this world

And I had sworn I would protect him at all cost

So it was highly inconvenient, if I died prematurely when he was just a baby

I started coming back from the shadows

I just exit the worlds without space or time and bodies and immortality and came back

It sounds a lot easier than it was

But I came back with a miracle

My legs started feeling things

And I could move them

I was no longer paralyzed from waist down

The nerve connections went on again

And the next day I was removed, set free from the monitors and drips, placed on a wheelchair and pushed to the back of an ambulance

It took me to mental hospital