Khala Brannigan
Ahead of her performance in this weekend’s State of Play festival, Dance Stories is excited to share an exclusive excerpt of her upcoming memoir.
It must be an ominous warning to come across a dead hummingbird on the side of the highway. In some cultures, seeing a dead hummingbird means a new chapter is beginning; perhaps it was my time to begin again.
I was in the Angeles National Forest when I spotted it on the side of the road. The fog that day was so thick, I could only see a few feet in front of me. I had a hunch that there was a spirit that would follow me until I made it to the top of Josephine Peak, where I would bury my restless yearnings and feel the crows wings almost touch my skin. I’ve been to a lot of mountains, but these were particularly haunting. And on that particular day, the spirit that had followed me for my entire life was speaking to me loudly: the winged shadow. I had begun a new chapter. I had just moved to Los Angeles from New York City five months prior — for the sake of listening to my gut and nothing else, and I was forced to face the things I had been running from my whole life, but more specifically, the past five years. I was determined to bury myself in the New York City hustle to escape the lingering thoughts and memories I couldn’t sit still with, but I was about to snap in half.
The lonely subway rides crawling over the Williamsburg Bridge in the dead of winter, waiting for spring while I wiped down restaurant tables and forced smiles onto my face. Countless auditions that led nowhere but rejection, while I tried to hide panic attacks inside crowds big enough to swallow me whole. Sleepless nights, unavailable lovers disappearing as quickly as they arrived, everyone around me treating relationships like another turn on a sadistic hamster wheel. I fell in love with New York City the way I fall in love with every beautiful poison: intoxicating at first touch, catastrophic by the end.
I still wondered what the hell called me to Los Angeles, and it didn’t take me long to discover that there was a different form of time and space in the City of Angels, where I had to sit still and face the fiery dragons within me. I didn’t come to this city to be someone, I came to listen closely to the whispers of death and rebirth that hung high in the air.
Just a few months prior in late summer, I visited my father’s grave at the Black Mesa Golf Course in Northern New Mexico. August was monsoon season, and with stretches of land for miles, you could hear, see, and smell a rainstorm coming. I could see the fierce clouds in the distance as I parked my car at the entrance gate. It was a Monday, so the golf course was closed. Something told me that I had to kneel before his grave and ask for his guidance. He had been cremated, but his coworkers wanted to create a place for his name to dwell. I will never forget the day they staked that cross into the earth, a fire heart at its center inscribed with his name: Don.
I knew I was walking in the right direction but felt a lingering sense of fear as I staggered down the winding dirt road, seeing rattlesnake holes everywhere I turned. To my left, there were deep, grey clouds and the sounds of thunder — to my right, there was blazing sun and not a soul in sight. I was absolutely alone. I remembered my father’s coworker warning me about the rattlesnakes four years prior. I had driven up to the Black Mesa Golf Course just a few days after my father passed in May 2020, looking for answers to questions I didn’t know I had. I was stunned by the landscape of the mesas, and instead of inquiring with the staff for details about the day my father passed, I set off on foot, walking briskly. I’m sure my father’s coworker was
curious as to why someone like me was wandering around a golf course, with no interest in playing golf.
He pulled up on his golf cart with a huff. “What are you doing out here?” he said with a stern, fatherly tone that immediately made me choke back my tears. I knew I would never hear that tone from my father again. And I would never see him sip Bacardi and Coca-Cola in front of the television, hunched over with his elbows on his thighs with a cool-guy posture on his favorite tattered couch again. I would never hear his sputtering smoker’s cough again; the one that made me think his next breath in would definitely be his last. I would never see him sip coffee in the early morning and fill out crossword puzzles again.
“My dad just died here a few days ago, so I just wanted to come be up here for some reason, I don’t know why,” I said.
He immediately softened his stiff neck, and, looking down with tenderness, took a heavy sigh.
“I’m so sorry, Don was such a good man. We didn’t know what happened, but it’s a big loss,” he said.
There was an awkward pause that I didn’t have the strength to fill. I was usually pretty good at masking my pain, knowing what to say with impeccable timing so that I didn’t have to exist inside the invisible space, a space I would come to know intimately yet never wanted to know.
Being on the land where my father loved to be, in his happy place, left me with few words, though I knew words weren’t the same as the feeling or experience they referred to. Everything is just a concept until it becomes real and tangible. And maybe because I still couldn’t believe that my father was gone forever — that I would never see him again or hear his smoker’s cough over the phone as he tried to tell me wise words that I didn’t want to hear — is why I wandered through the mesas that day. I needed confirmation that he was gone, because I could feel him everywhere.
“Let me take you to where he died,” said his coworker. “Hole # 7.”
I climbed into the tiny golf cart, suddenly feeling like a child again. I swallowed hard as we drove through the dirt roads on a spring day with the desert sun blazing, my hands clenched together on my lap, my knuckles about to burst.
“I was worried those rattlesnakes were gonna getcha,” he said, trying to fill up the invisible space. “Plenty of people try to run around on foot around here but they don’t realize how many rattlesnakes we got.”
There were things that terrified me — having someone look me in the eye and really see me; someone really seeing me and deciding to reject that and leave; the mysterious underbelly of the ocean and how quickly I could drown; rollercoaster rides with squeaky, sketchy sounds that promised the wheels would fly off the rails at any time; loving someone deeply and fully because it was completely out of my control if they were here to stay, or here to pass; and of course, the inevitable phone call stating I would never see someone I loved alive in the flesh ever again, the permanence of death sinking into my bones. Rattlesnakes still weren’t amongst the things that terrified me.
I made a sweet, rigid smile to let this man think I was just an ordinary young woman with ordinary abilities, with ordinary fears. I had become a master at concealing the hidden, secret world that dwelled inside of me. Most humans only want to believe something is real if it is tangible, and can be gripped with both hands. No one could see into my inner world, and I liked to keep it that way.
“Here we are,” he said.
My father’s coworker brought the golf cart to a stop. We were perched on top of a hill overlooking Española, a place I constantly tried to forget about while caught in the rat race of my big city lifestyle. I never wanted to remember where I came from, but it followed me everywhere I went. The town’s shadows had sculpted that inner world that I spent so much of my life running away from and concealing.
I stood on the sandstone foothills of the Santa Clara Pueblo, watching the scattered clouds against the bright blue sky. The green grass looked vivd, full, and plush next to the big patches of dirt on the mesas. There was a stillness surrounding me. This is where my father took his last breath, I thought. I took in a deep breath, feeling pangs of guilt that I was alive and he wasn’t;
that my lungs could breathe in the high desert air and he would never get to do that again; that the millions of others dying from the Covid-19 virus didn’t have the chance to hold their loved ones hands in hospital lit rooms; that I was somehow still standing not fearful of dying while others fought to clutch onto their lives, just so I could hug my father one more time and say, I love you.
Standing on that hilltop overlooking the mesas with a piercing blue sky behind them, I was almost positive I would hear the answers as to how and why my father suddenly died the morning of May 9th, 2020.
“He was just as he usually was, laughing and joking with everyone before he set out to hole #7,” he murmured. “We found him cold to the touch an hour later, right here.” I looked down to the path of grass that looked worn and flat, wondering if that’s where my father had laid, where he took his last breath. My eyes traveled up to scan the horizon, and I thought the whole thing was eerie. But it also seemed to be exactly right — precisely the way my father wanted to leave the earth. He didn’t want anyone changing his diapers in a hospital room with visitors coming in and out, causing a ruckus over just how and when we would pull the plug. He always said he wanted to go quick like a lighting bolt, without a drawn out process. Of course he would die suddenly and alone while looking at this majestic view that felt like you were inside a living, breathing painting. After all, this was his happy place. I didn’t hear the answers as to how and why my father died the way he did. On that particular day, and still to this one, I have never received them. But even if I did get written documents with clarifying language allowing me to speak common sense to myself and others, I knew words weren’t exactly an expression of the real truth anyway.
___
The desert landscape
Trying to know love
Ghosts in the bedroom
Screaming into a towel
Sitting in a corner
Fresh cut grass
And a four leaf clover
Crying for the pain
That was not my own
___
It can be enough
To sit with the sun
Dreams of imprints
Settling onto bare skin
My hands shaking, remembering Where we’ve been
Where we are going
Flowing like a faucet
That will never run clear
I drench myself in time
Guided by blood and innocence Abandon
Give it away
To time and space
___
The sidewalk is a different color My mind moves
Like a thousand shutters
Night walkers that stray
Someday this mind will know But by the time that day comes It will all be over
___
Khala Brannigan is a Los Angeles–based choreographer, filmmaker, yoga instructor, and somatic trauma practitioner. She has created more than 15 original dance-based works for the stage, film, and multimedia productions, and her practice centers embodiment, emotional resilience, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The Winged Shadow was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.