My mind’s in a spiral, a dog chasing it’s own tail. At 12 am, when the lights switch off and the velvet of the blanket cloaks me, makes me yet another shape in the dark and then throughout till 3 am, when I’m ready to hold the barrel to my forehead, a soothing cold, a promise of rest.
The electric blue of the heater’s panel interrupts the dark, displays signs, to the lost? No, just signs that it is alive and that it works. That’s what’s important. Time scored in two phases: does it work? or does it not work? If then structures made for such potentialities. The world has all the answers to the questions that aren’t hard.
I think of rebuttals, of injustices done to and forborne by me, of decisions I didn’t take sooner. I think of women hammered down to believe relationships are formed by losing bones, especially the spine. I think of women whittled down to believe they must have an opinion on everything, no pass to say, ‘I don’t know’, and learn and come back to it. Ignorance is a privilege afforded to no one, not even men, but especially not women.
But we are ignorant, about so many things; of how the next month or week will shape up, whether an earthquake or a virus will shut the shop down, make it impossible to hug or touch or sit in a restaurant and drink a hot chocolate. Yet, we pretend we know. We plan like immortal beings, trading the most precious present for mirages, trembling, shivering promises of the horizon.
What of the women, the mothers, and the women without children made mothers of their mothers and siblings? All of them bearing the pain of doing too much only to be requited with a spiked arrow in their hearts. “I have done so much for you and this is what you give me.” I was one of them, the childless mother, giving away more than I could afford to and wailing at the world when it refused to acknowledge it. Now I teach myself to give what feels all right to give for free, nothing more. But I see them around still, mouths open, heart on their palms begging someone, anyone to take it from them. I can’t. You shouldn’t be giving your heart away, you need it.
Perhaps I shouldn’t allow anger to charge out from the stables, a wild horse, frothing at the sight of anyone trying to temper it. I just want a breath, the vines have held me so tight for so long, the dirt pressed so tight against my eyes and ears and chest that I’ve forgotten what air tastes like. Sweet, rushing air.
When I wake up, my eyes are tired as though the struggle to sleep and then pretend to sleep was physically taxing for them. My mind is setting cement, hard and heavy and slow. There was fog when I woke up but the sun broke through. Up on the terrace, I stole moments to watch the plants and the obscene gloriousness of flowers. Tarts, I call them with love, reclaiming the word as is my gender’s right. My mother pouts and complains at the ones who refuse to show up.
“Why aren’t they blooming?”
It’s not her fault, it’s the fault of our species, narcissists all of us. Flowers don’t bloom for us, our care isn’t their concern. They come, open up, twirl into being on their own time, never early, or late, but on time for each one that appears. They arrive for the propagation of their house, their badge, their insignia. Same with children.
I wonder at a lot of things today, how I am reduced to a trembling heart. Water, unable to hold its shape. I long to flow to the ocean but they’ve made all these dams, and so I’m damned to stay stagnant, licking the shores for a scrap of light, forming currents underneath that will take whatever they find in their grasp, because they won’t let me flow. I won’t let me flow.
Did you know it’s possible to be so cursed that even ghosts refuse to haunt you? Mine left a while ago, some times they’ll come visit, perhaps out of pity. After all we were together all the time back in the day when things weren’t the way they are now. Distance from an event grows exponentially with each passing second until it feels like another lifetime, light-years away.
insearchofthebeautiful 