Hi Sweetie, I live as though I am partially blind. I see something, mask it with a justification and surge onward. I have spent 7 days in a dream of which I came out of only yesterday.
I was hit twice in the temple by a jealous drunk woman, offered a charge of crack and sex by a young beautiful black girl, got sick and broke out in crater sized pimples.
Since I faced myself in the late afternoon yesterday, the flu like symptoms have mysteriously disappeared. Could it be that my body is my best angel?
I am led to strange places by subconscious yet conscious Cubans who have a common river running in their desperate brains. “Can you help me”, they say again and again like a constant chant that fills my good senses with bad ideas.
I must have a need. I push all sorts of interesting but wasteful stuff at it and come away without having accomplished the very thing that I sought to accomplish and then I’m exposed to what I don’t want. Now buried, I can’t see it anymore. Write to me, I will explain what I mean or call.
For ever your friend, Karen
2
OK baby, Denial is holding on to what already has died but one won’t learn the lesson of it because feeling and thinking the same old shit is easier. Or, once again, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
Why are you hanging out in bars with shaky Latinos? You’re bobbin’ up-and-down with 3 fingers out of the water. The Cubans are only there to take the rings off your fingers before you go down for good.
You can’t possibly believe that you’re having fun. Where are your guts? Do something different. Don’t go dancing even if you really want to. Don’t rationalize your wants around your desperate needs. This time is not about you but about your family. There is enough there to fill your days and nights. Fuck the-guys-in-the-club thing for a big 8 weeks. I will meet the challenge with giving up or doing what you ask of me for 8 weeks.
I am worried about your recklessness. It is not 1970 when there were virtually no consequences to taking drugs or in a one night stand. I am worried you do not understand you can drop dead, you can get Aids, you can get herpes, you can nose dive and never get out of the spin. I don’t think you can see what your going out and coming back beat up must look like to your family.
Your recklessness in going out and looking for trouble is scaring the hell out of everyone who loves you. Don’t you care? Who is out there cheering you on? What are you thinking? You know what you are shootin’ for while you are in the clubs. Do you have the courage to say it? Is it worth it right now? What happens if your family says enough is enough?
I am ready to hear how mad you are that I would write this. I am ready to read where you see I am fuckin’ up. I am so ready.
I do love you. I check my email every day.
Love, MB
3
Sorry for jumping up-and-down on you in the last email I just don’t get the attraction to the same old scene that chews you up and spits you out again I don’t want to see you keep cripplin’ your relationship with your family because you want to be worshiped by anyone who is willing. You have so much wonderful experiences around you right now at this moment and the moment will not last long.
I check my email everyday. Feel free to write whatever, something like I have. I am not afraid to hear anything although, I might bark a little.
Still your friend? MB
4
Hi Sweetie, Will you please stop being afraid to speak your mind with me. Do you think that I don’t know what your reaction will be when I tell you the things that I do? I expect that someone who loves me as much as you do will tear me up when I fuck up. I give you, if I haven’t already, permission to nail me to the wall, beat me with a stick until I cry out for more love… but I know that I won’t quit going out dancing. I just want to get smarter, quicker. It only took me 7 days to open my eyes. Actually they were open all the time. I justify my blindness. I am gaining much needed experience and will hope to learn more each day. I will find out about myself. I will, I will, I will.
Mexico is the next stop, baby. I have to head home in order to arrive by the 28th. I will arrive late if I can come and see you again.
Gotta go. And by the way, nobody is influencing me. My friend is appalled at my attraction for the wild side. She prefers to die slowly, I, the quick and handy way.
“Get a black rooster”, he said. “Keep it 30 days, then after, bring it to me”, he said, his eyes squinted behind thick cigar smoke.
He is big and white with close cropped grey hair that stands on end in a military style crew cut. He has an imposing bearing and a deep voice. His glasses are modern and wire rimmed. His fingers gleam with rings with diamonds and other precious stones and his wrists with bracelets and an expensive watch. Around his neck are strings of beads in black and red and others in pure white. I couldn’t guess his age… maybe 40s or maybe 70s. He exudes a casual sexual energy, a pervading sensuality. He laughs often and with ease, but some how he is serious, serious as a heart attack. When he speaks, you are compelled to listen.
Charles owns Botanica Manuel. In the front window of the storefront, in a seedy part of town, he stocks herbs and incense, oils, statuary of the orishas, and malas of many colors. A life size statue of a black Latino peasant, stands with its feet among paraphernalia. This is Manuel, beside him is a statue of Manuel’s wife. This is Charles’ “dog”, his personal spirit guide, guardian and servant. But in the back, behind a curtain is a different scene, a different world. His shop is small and crowded, though from what I gathered, is not the source of his relative wealth.
Charles is a Santero, a priest in Santeria and a practitioner and priest of Palo. He is not to be messed with. It’s something you just know, you can feel it. There is danger lurking and yet a profound love.
I know as I follow my mentor, Don Cosentino, through a black curtain into a tiny room, that I need to keep my mouth shut. There are chairs in a circle. The space is dark. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust in the darkness. There are others sitting closely together. There’s an air of anticipation.
Today, as I write this post, my memory fails to recall everything in this room. It is cramped with many accoutrement but there is a vision that no amount of time can erase. Next to me appears to be a fire pit. There are railroad spikes, dirt, ashes, bones, a nganga filled with sticks and other things I can’t make out. There’s a chicken’s head that from the bloody neck, appears to have been freshly killed, and a goat’s skull. I see ornately beaded walking sticks and against another wall, drums bedecked with bells and woven shoulder straps.
A nganga is an iron receptacle or a cauldron used for ritual and is used as a source of power. It can contain many things such as sticks, feathers, railroad spikes, graveyard dirt, ashes of humans and animals and animal skulls and they have been known to contain even a more power source, a human skull. It is within this cauldron that the spirit of the dead resides, or as it is known as, the dog. This spirit does the bidding of its owner and assists in divination according to the pact made between them. Manuel is Charles’ “dog” to do his bidding.
About the time it started to feel very close, Charles walks in. He is dressed all in white. He appears to have a crippled foot on which he can barely put any weight. He wears a pained expression. Charles is now inhabited by Manuel, a former slave in his life on earth, who was injured in work and by abuse. He sits and greets us with familiarity and affection but with a certain authority. He is handed a cigar at least 8″ long and 2″ in diameter. An assistant offers a light. He pulls on it until smoke billows into the air, hindering our sight. He appears blind and yet seems to see every detail of each person in the room. We are in the presence of the living dead.
Manuel, once he is settled, begins to call out each person in the room. He tells them about their lives, he chastises them for their faults, he encourages them to do better, at some, he shows disdain and anger. I become worried as he hasn’t called me out yet. He has not made eye contact with me. Perhaps, he has nothing to say to me… but then he turns to me, without any type of expression on his face, and I know he’s looking at me, though his eyes seem blind.
I don’t remember what he said. I didn’t… couldn’t record him. I was paralyzed. I heard the words but couldn’t “hear” them. Even now, when I let myself go, I can remember the gentleness in which my heart was revealed. It was no use to try to obscure secrets buried just under the surface. He called them out… one by one. I remember the rumble, the powerful sounds coming from his throat, his mouth, that caused me to tremble and the tears that came unbidden. Then, his voice became clear like an instructors, “get a black rooster and after 30 days, bring it to me.”
What happened after that, I don’t know, but all I could think was, “where do I get a black rooster”. I knew without a doubt that I was going to do what he asked. I stepped out of the back room behind the curtain, into the sunlit shop. It felt like I had left one world and entered another. I felt slightly disoriented. Charles came behind and others in the shop gathered around him. He was not limping. Amidst the chatter, I made my way to the counter and asked the man standing there where I could find a live black rooster, as if I was asking a clerk at the drug store where to find the dandruff shampoo. Without hesitation, like he got this question all the time, he wrote down an address. I took it.
The bright LA sun was still shining. “I might as well go pick up this chicken while I’m out here”, I thought. Like that wasn’t weird enough, I did it. I found the address in a part of LA I’d never been before. There were blocks of warehouses and delivery trucks. I pulled over in front of a building and parked. Like I knew what I was doing, I entered a large dim and dust filled warehouse. There were cages of poultry of every kind. A man approached me and asked in Spanish, ¿”que quiere”? Luckily, I speak Spanish. Timidly, I asked for a black rooster.
Without hesitation, and within a couple of minutes, the man handed me a cardboard box with a young black rooster in it. I paid a small price and took the box out to my car and set it in my back seat like I did this everyday.
At the time, I was a graduate student at UCLA in the fields of folklore and mythology and my focus was Cuban spirituality. I would be writing about my experiences for my thesis. But this was not my 1st rodeo. I had lived with a Santero. I won’t go into my life with him now since I have written about it in other blog posts but suffice it to say, this was not new to me. Animal sacrifice was a natural part of this religion and I knew what I was in for. I knew the destiny of this black rooster.
I was living in Santa Monica, just blocks from the ocean, in a small garage conversion. I took the box out of my back seat and took it in to my small apartment setting the box down in my kitchen. The rooster was quiet and calm. It didn’t make a sound and it didn’t make a sound for the entire month that it lived in my kitchen. Perhaps, he knew his destiny, as well. Perhaps, he felt honored to be a part of this sacrifice.
Over the next 30 or so days, I fed the rooster and I talked to him and cared for him in every way. I was growing attached and began to feel bad for how his life would end. He would look up at me out of the bottom of the box with one eye and his head cocked as if to say, “don’t worry. I know what’s going on”.
After 30 days, I once again put the box with the black rooster in the back seat of my car and headed for Charlie’s botanica.
I don’t know if Charlie had written down on a calendar or in his ritual book that in 30 days I would be coming back but he didn’t seem at all surprised when I walked in the door. Maybe this was a regular occurrence and he knew exactly what was coming in the door. One of the people behind the counter took my box from me and headed through the curtain to the back room. The rooster remained silent.
Just as before, people had gathered in the botanica and had slowly drifted into the back room to sit in a circle to wait for Charlie to arrive as Manuel. Just as before, Charlie arrived. He addressed each and everyone in the circle, just as before. I grew impatient. I looked around for the box but didn’t see it.
Finally, in what seemed like hours, Manuel departed and Charlie sat there in front of us. Slowly, much slower than what I wanted, everyone moved in to the botanica to chat, perhaps to buy things that Charlie had suggested for ritual. Charlie motioned for me to stay seated and he left to say goodbye to the others.
A short middle aged man came to me and motioned for me to follow him through some curtains into a larger room behind the room where we gathered. I don’t remember a lot about this room except that it was more brightly lit and had the air of a kitchen with a sink with running water and tiled floors and I don’t remember what else because, of course, I was getting nervous. I felt cold. I felt a chill run down my spine as I stood there.Where was my rooster?
Charlie came in but didn’t look at me. He was prepared and he was going to do what he was prepared to do. This is what I remember… that I stripped to my underwear. Charlie approached me holding a large knife and my black rooster by its feet. My rooster didn’t make a peep. It hung there as though dead but its eyes were darting about. I was getting colder and began to shake.
Charlie held the rooster by its feet while he rubbed the live rooster all over my body from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. He was speaking but I didn’t understand what he said. He wasn’t speaking in English nor was he speaking in Spanish. When he was done with me, swiftly, with one slash, Charlie cut off the rooster’s head. The rooster bled into a cauldron where its head had landed, still with no objection.
It was clean and swift. The other man said that I could put my clothes back on and Charlie walked out of the room after he placed the rooster back in my box in a bag. I had previously received instruction that after the ritual I would take the rooster’s body to a graveyard and leave it there. I had looked up the address I was given and was prepared to leave the sacrifice among the dead.
After this, I didn’t see Charlie again until my next visit to the botanica. I had heard from other Santeros that after these kind of rituals there is a kind of exhaustion that takes place and I suppose that Charlie had gone to rest.
I guess there’s a certain kind of familiarity among law enforcement and cemetery personnel, because it was explained to me that finding dead roosters or other kinds of accoutrement in graveyards was not so strangely rare. But I was warned to be discreet. There were certain graveyards that were more tolerant.
I arrived at the graveyard sitting on a hill. It was late afternoon and the sun was bright but low in the sky. I walked among the gravestones and thought about what I had just experienced. I wanted this time to be personal and to be meaningful. As I mentioned before, I had experienced many things living among the Cubans but this was the first time I had been the center of this ritual.
I left the rooster next to a gravestone that was the oldest that I could find. I thanked him for what he had sacrificed for me. I walked slowly back to my car enjoying the sunshine and the heat. My body still felt cold. I drove through LA towards the beach and my home away from home.
Though I remember a great deal about this, still much of it is from my memory. Since I didn’t write down the details after they happened, all I have is my memory.
Though this story may seem strange and gruesome to you, my readers, to me these are, yes strange and extraordinary but they make up the person that I am today and I am grateful for that.
I realize that this story of mine leaves a lot that is not explained, But there’s more writing to be done and there are previous blog posts that go into some detail about living with a Santero and among the many Cubans that I met in the late 1990s.
This post is not intended to be instructional or specifically educational but it is true. Truer than true.
A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous… as this story proves out.
I don’t know where to begin because I don’t think that I’ve told you enough about my past with Santeria, Palo and Vodou, but this memory came to mind this afternoon and I wanted to write it down. Perhaps, I’ll even publish it without giving you the proper context. To help a little you could go into some of my blog posts that are tagged with Santeria, Palo and Ramiro and the like… yet it might not help at all. But let’s get right into it, anyway.
Without going into any great detail, suffice it to say that I had been living with a Santero (a practitioner/priest of Santeria. My break with him was tragic. After being with him for several years, to better understand him and the culture of Cuba and its people, I studied Cuban spirituality and simultaneously, Haitian spirituality which, of course, both derive from African roots.
In my studies, I came across primary resources written by priests. Primary resources, of course, are documentation that record first hand experiences. These books or pamphlets or diaries recorded the rituals of their religion. I had watched many rituals performed in the years spent with the Cubans. I always felt though that I was standing at the door with the door just barely cracked open and me, I was peeking inside of a room not truly being able to enter, to participate or to even understand what I was seeing.
This new found knowledge, accompanied by my first hand experiences with Santeros and practitioners of Palo and Vodou, proved to be dangerous weapons in my hands.
After my break with Ramiro, I was left with many accoutrements, but this is another story. My heart had been broken and I had seen too many things. I wanted to relieve my broken heartedness and I also wanted to affect others with what I knew. I didn’t really want to hurt anyone, that was not my intention. But these two things alone are a dangerous combination. I wasn’t looking for revenge but this is how it was perceived.
Pepe was a friend of Ramiro’s and appeared on the scene to “soothe my pain”. I didn’t want a boyfriend, I wanted Ramiro back but I wasn’t getting him back, so Pepe became a friend. But this was not how Pepe saw it.
Pepe would not go away. He tattooed my name on his arm. He led his friends to believe we were lovers. That, we never were. My mistake was to allow him to continue to be my friend even when I realized that he was unreasonable.
My reasoning was that Pepe was nice enough. Pepe cared for me. He was willing to tolerate that I was still in love with Ramiro and that I didn’t love him. In a selfish way, Pepe was my connection to the Cuban community and vicariously to Ramiro. In some odd way this helped to ease the pain, to have somebody familiar around.
This is how the problem started and I am the only one to blame. Pepe was insistent and I suppose you could say that I allowed it, I left the door open, I was too tolerant. But as he became demanding, I became frustrated at first and then afraid. I didn’t believe he would hurt me but he had become frustrated, too. There was an element of him being out of control. Here again, I won’t go into unnecessary detail about his fits of frustration. He was refusing to just be my friend. Though I would lose my connection to him, to the Cubans and to Ramiro, it was time for him to go.
I wanted him to know that I was serious. I wanted him to know that I could make him go away. I knew in no uncertain terms that it had to be final and permanent. I thought that my most powerful ability was to use his own beliefs against him.
I knew too much and yet I knew too little. I never should have done this but I did. This wasn’t the first time, nor was it the last that I used what I had learned, that I used ways that I had no business using.
Whether you believe this or not is neither here nor there to me. I don’t care. But this is what witnesses have reported. These are the consequences of my actions. I followed the directions to the letter. There are times that I regret what I did, but they had the results I was looking for. I never heard from Pepe again.
I wrote Pepe a letter simply asking him to leave me alone. I sprinked into the envelope, powders and ashes of certain and specific animal bones, crushed plants, rocks and metals procribed in the books of priests. I carefully copied, by hand, certain ancient symbols drawn in the books. I sealed the envelope and drew certain other symbols that crossed over the seal, so that when opened, the symbols would be torn in two.
Pepe recieved the letter. According to witnesses, when he tore open the seal, a cloud of dust rose into the air covering his face and flew into his eyes. He was blinded momentarily and had trouble breathing. The dust caused sores on his face and neck that lasted for weeks.
Pepe was out of my life for good. I haven’t heard from him or about him for years. I hope he’s OK.
Has no one heard of soldiers stripping women of their clothes, raping them, cutting their unborn children from their wombs, excising their genitals, executing them, leaving them for dead, buried in unmarked graves?
It has happened and happens all over the world in authoritarian countries where men rule the world, own all the resources and mandate the military. Very Franco-esc.
She’s lucky she wasn’t grabbed, thrown in the back of an unmarked car and hauled off to jail and/or “disappeared” or simply raped and thrown back in the street.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of women clothed and unclothed die everyday while protesting, while the world watches.
History: read it. It happened in the past, it also happens now. News: read it.
Do you really think that soldiers are afraid of naked women? A womans body is not powerful. It’s vulnerable.
This reminds me a little tiny bit, but much less dramatic, of Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire in Saigon and the student who stood against a line of tanks in Tianamen Square… other than a big news flash and it being documented in history, what good did it do? What permanently changed in the world?
What permanent good has been done by the imprisonment, torture and death of millions of women and men protesting injustice when small groups of wealthy men own the world?
Am I saying give up? No. Adamantly no. Just acknowledge reality before you put your bravery on display.
The night when souls wander freely is fast approaching. The sky is clear and in this chill morning I can even read the constellations. Lights in sickly orange and violet shine eerily from rustling bushes and the withered, brittle leaves falling sound like footsteps following stealthily close behind. A black cat steals silently across my path, but I am not startled; I look behind to see if I am still alone in the black stillness. My gaze reaches out for the lone street light still beyond my rapid shuffle through the dark street. Was the crack in the wall always there or is it opening just for me. Finally. .. the bus. “Good morning, how are you?” “Great”, I say, as if nothing happened.
This post is in a short response to a Facebook post made by a friend. I won’t include it here but suffice it to say that it released a floodgate of words. This is relatively unedited, so you will read redundancy and ill-composed sentence structure, but I couldn’t care less.
Most of my readers enjoy reading about my misadventures and I am well aware that when I get serious, my “likes and comments” plummet. That’s O.K. I will continue to spout off when the mood strikes because I don’t want to stand silent when our voices are needed. And our voices need to be raised right now.
The post had to do with whether or not your opinion of people changes based on who they support politically. It suggests that it should not. This is my response to, first, the poster and then to a friend of the poster, who agrees with the premise of the post. The name has been changed to protect the innocent.
This is easier said than done, xxxx. The fact that a person would vote for someone who is a known racist, a misogynist, a liar, without empathy for the poor, who is homophobic, anti- immigration, anti-Muslim, etc., and continues to support such a person, says alot about that person who you consider to be a good person and worthy of your friendship. I have friends and family who support such people and I don’t believe I can still hold them in respect or in a close relationship. I choose not to associate with people who hate or support those who hate and are a danger to the health of this planet. I will take a stand against it and cannot look into the eyes of others who can tolerate for the briefest moment those who don’t stand against it be they acquaintances, long time friends, or family.
My comment was not meant as sarcasm. I cannot stand with others who vote for a government of hate, warmongering, whoremongering, scaremongering, and that is spending money, 25 billion dollars, on a wall, and increasing billions on the military, increasing coal mining, oil drilling, dismantling the EPA, using our SS monies to continue wars that serve no one but only to fill the pockets of the already rich, who lie about everything… the list goes on and on. For me to continue in a relationship with someone who supports “not my president” and his band of criminals would be like me saying, as Trump did about the white supremacists and neo- Nazis, that there are some fine people among them, that those who support them are fine people. That would be ludicrous and hypocritical. No. If one hates like he does and supports his policies and refuses to see what damage he is doing, I do not, cannot, see them as who I thought they were. I see them as what they are, in collusion with a would be dictator and so much worse.
I won’t compromise. I didn’t say I voted for Hillary. I didn’t mention my vote. Our history is bloody and I’m not just talking about the U.S. Genocide, oppression, inequality, injustice, xenophobia, are what characterize the human race. Power corrupts and an oligarchy we are. The constitution was written for the benefit of the white landowner. America was built on the backs of slaves and indentured servants, on the backs of the poor and dispossessed.
From our first steps on this continent, from England, Spain, France, Portugal, we have been trailing blood from our hands and feet. We continued the bloody wars that were taking place in Europe, fought over land and resources and we have never stopped. If you want an eye opener, simply read the basic facts on Wikipedia on the US history of war. Peace, freedom? For who? At what cost? What a joke!
The American dream has never been and will never be. It is an illusion created while we were sleeping. Ask a native American, ask a Black man or woman, ask the working poor, ask the homeless, ask the deported, ask the refugee, ask someone in prison on charges of marijuana possession, ask the dispossessed who can no longer afford rent and even less, buy a house, a car or take a vacation. Ask a single mom who has to choose between paying rent or buying food, ask a promising student who can’t afford college… Ask, ask, ask some questions. Then ask whether 25 billion dollars should be spent on a wall when our roads, highways and byways and bridges are crumbling. Ask why we need billions more spent on the military? Could it be because we are hated around the world? Could it be because the government is afraid of civil war if they take our Social Security, our health care, our homes, our land. Have you read why there was a provision for a militia in the constitution? Read it and weep.
Trump isn’t and never was a politician and he’s ignorant and selfish and worse. He’s just the fruit of the horror that we as a country, a white nation, have sown. Take a good look while you still can. And weep. Weep because the human race, at its core, is homicidal. We have devised ways to finish off life on this planet. What an accomplishment. Way to go guys. Let’s see which homicidal leader will start the final war. Let’s see what unregulated chemical manufacturer will pollute the last of our drinkable water and fertile land, what under-regulated oil company will drill and frack away our oceans and lands, what plastics will clog everything including marine life and forest dwellers.
I could go on, but I won’t. Read it for yourself. I don’t need to school you. You’ve heard it all before but you refuse to open your eyes. There’s no way that the will of the people prevails. Never has, never will.
Rise up people and face the torture chamber, the lynching rope, the chopping block, imprisonment, the firing squad, the reservation, or banishment, if you’re lucky. Many already have.
Rise up if you dare. Fill mass graves. Fill the newscasts and newspaper headlines with your death. All this while the rich line their pockets. Do you think they care about you? Why would they, except as you serve them? You answer that question.
If I were to make god, he would be terrifying, his eyes would be red and glowing like embers.
If I were to make god, his hands would be claws, his hair would be flowing out behind him against a rabid wind, his feet would be cloven, his teeth would be sharp and pointed and he would go after evil and evil doers in every corner of the universe.
If I were to make god, he would not be tolerant, would not be full of love and compassion or be patient with evil. No, not for a moment.
If I were to make god, he would tear faces, arms and legs off, he would create havoc, he would scare even the most callous of men.
If I were to make god, and he was all seeing, all knowing, all present, all powerful, he would not allow for children to be pent up in closets, shaken, slapped, burned, nor dogs to be on chains, people to be starving, and our species to be so hateful.
If I were to make god, he would be too busy cleaning out the temples, the churches, the synagogues to have time to count every hair on every person’s head.
If I were to make god, he would to be too busy getting rid of the money changers, the whoremongers, the warmongers to see every bird that fell from the sky.
If I were to make god, then you would know what love is.
…where I toss and turn. But there are nights in this very bed where I fall into dreamless sleep or more possibly they are not nights without dreams; I just can’t listen to them, I cannot, or choose not to remember them. I mustn’t, they are too real; they are too painful. They speak too clearly and they hurt. When I wake, they are a new slap in the face, a new home run, a new right on the head.
I don’t want to wake up to the truth every morning. I don’t want to wake at 2:00AM and know, really know I am on a very scary planet; looking right out my window, I can look at another ball spinning in space somehow kept in its orbit; and there are so many others all in a semi-orderly fashion. If an earthquake hit, I would be shook out of my loft nest.
I don’t care if I die; then why should these dreams, these sleepless nights, hurt? That is not my fear. In fact dying would be a release from the constant feelings… memories. Why shouldn’t they hurt? Aren’t I living simply a physical existence? Isn’t this a dream from which I will wake from one day?
Didn’t he and I know before we came here that this would happen? Didn’t we carefully plan this? Didn’t we know as he and I squeezed into this world and entered into these bodies that we had little control over growing old, that we would meet again? Didn’t he reassure me that though I was going first, he would soon follow and we would know and not forget that I had to have the pain of lost love to understand the mind of god? Didn’t he say that I would act in ways that were illogical; that I would sometimes be crazed and the outcome would be my own doing and that I would have to do what I must, to go where I would arrive, to learn what I need to know?
Why then, with this knowledge, does listening to the damn radio make a tear glisten in the bottom of my eye and then fill the socket until it falls out onto my face and enters my mouth through my open lips mouthing question after question? I taste the salt and the memories cause a flood to fall from my eyes. I am how much water? I am apparently all water. I am all ocean. I am drowning because I can’t hear him anymore.
Didn’t he say it would be like this? Didn’t I live forty-seven milliseconds before I met him. I count them, forty-seven flashes of light, forty-seven lifetimes I lived before we met here. Then it was only five years, five grains of sand, five winks of an eye, five less than that… but it was wise, static, and eternal and now that I have seen him in the flesh and I cannot talk to him, nothing else seems to matter anymore except what I think might be beyond here because I have forgotten.
Home, nothing. Outside, nothing. What I wear, what I eat… nothing. I slept a few hours last night and woke up old. I read an entire book and then I cried alligator tears. I created a pond, a swamp in my bed. I only know what I know, I have no experience beyond me. But I do know what I know. I do know what I feel. I live in “elected wretchedness”. I knew that I was coming here. I made it happen while all around me the doors opened to take me to this place and I stepped in on my own. Alone; I have to be alone. I have to feel like this. I have to hurt. I have to have this pain.
What is he doing today? He wakes with his baby on his chest, laughing… behold! He’s speaking Spanish! Little Spanish baby-talk. He will get up and make coffee and yell at his lover that it is ready and he has already released his love deep into her recesses. He has a car to buy, to fix, to wash, to sell. The phone is ringing and he has a dozen friends waiting outside, cracking open beers and drinking at this early hour. The sun is shining and he is up and out the door. I know this; this was once my life.
I think at times that he remembers me. I push myself at him through the air, through my thoughts, to remind him of what we knew before. I am sure he remembers but it is way back behind diapers, the sex, the dinners, friends, music, dance. I can’t let go of that. He is everywhere, in the radio, in the cat he left behind, in the love letters, the poems, the music and those things that I find to help me forget.
The bones never forget, nor the soul. I am sure that he is mine and I am his forever. Maybe I will kiss him again and we will make love again. I don’t know. But I do know that in this life I ran into someone I recognized from some other time, some other place… we knew we had come here together.
He was dark, I was light. I liked it that way. He was energy, I was repose. I liked it that way.
It’s OK, I tell myself. You’re confused, I say. You have always been confused, I say. You have never known where you belong. You have never recognized your own house; not even as a girl. You have never fit. Why do expect to now, I ask myself. Nothing has changed. You are meant to be alone, I tell myself. You are meant to walk alone. You are meant to push the safety net away and walk on the tight rope and skim along the cliff and regret every move, like it mattered. You are meant to be painfully aware that your existence is nothing in the big, vast sky of things. Who is here to help you? Who is here to answer your why questions? No one.
Don’t expect relief. Don’t be so foolish to think that there is a person on earth that will help you cease and desist. You have to keep walking alone, like always. Now go… walk alone. Don’t be afraid. It’s OK to be sad. This is not your world. But the world is a lovelier place seen through the prism of tears. Only a few have the privilege to know that and you are one of them. Be glad that the world doesn’t seem like a stable place, that each time you put your foot down the earth gives a little and threatens to suck you under. This is the reality. This is not your dream. This is how you will live. It’s OK. There is nothing to fear. Your choices will never seem right. You will never be complete or completely happy. It is not meant to be.
eyeamdust 