Insomnia

Insomnia

She wakes up scared. These are the thoughts she doesn't want. She'd rather be confused than see this clearly. Her eyes are blurry. She wants to make herself go back to sleep but she can't, seeing the little boy in her mind's eye, and the man. The little boy and the man she left. Seeing them both.
It wasn't worth it. She's sorry. She regrets that choice. When she was younger she liked to tell herself the choice had gotten her where she was and it had been the only path and it was good. But now she's older. She knows that there were other choices and she knows where the story turned out. She left them to be an artist but she is not an artist. She is a wage slave. She is a wage slave anyway and her son was hurt for nothing.Now she knows she didn't really leave them for that other man who was the accident that opened the birdcage. The other man was barely real, someone who stepped out of a bad dream of longing for Papi. She left them to go after her own life, her true life's work, to make art, to write. She left them and it was for nothing because she ended up back in the cage, the wage slave she would have been, that her class and her hurts condemned her to be. Born to be a lifer.
(She knows she's beating herself up but she deserves it. Life was kind enough to beat her up but she has to add to the beating. Maybe if she does this for awhile she'll end up someplace else. Someplace different. She can't imagine forgiving herself unless Machi's life turns out well. Unless he forgives her. And she can tell he hasn't forgiven her because of how he rages about Sammy.
What did he say on the phone? Sammy's pregnant. But there isn't going to be any family. Whenever I re hear those words they echo down through time to the little boy, waking up after I was gone, looking around at his smashed life, saying to himself, there isn't going to be any family. My friends tell me of the crista astronaut lady who dreamt of being an astronaut and blew to pieces, that it was good for her children to see her go for her dreams. But in my case it was the little boy who blew up. That is not good.

This wasn't what I wanted to write about but I can't remember what it was. Like the dreams about the perfect words that shattered when I woke. When I was on the subway this morning I had a writing thought and now it's gone.

I just remembered it...and then I lost it again...
It had to do with writing...What does it mean to write simply as an act of faith, like a spiritual practice almost, like a mantra meditation, likhit japa is when you write your mantra over and over...To write even when there is no clarity and purpose or plot or salary or intention or hope of publication...to write not even as a way to think...to write because I once upon a time decided to do this..not out of flights of inspiration or in an altered trance state like a drug high..to write from some basic faith that there is a mind there and that it is worth it to try to find that mind because it isn't only my mind somehow but our mind...that alone is useful work
Freire said every true word transforms the world and to write looking for one true word is reason enough to write
But did I ruin my son's life so I could write? The women say to me it was good for him to see you going after your dreams. But are they justifying the slaughter of their own children? Maybe in capitalism none of us can go after our own lives without trampling on other peoples'? It's not a full resource society. Somebody always has to get hurt. My father went after his evangelism for God and for his fulfillment and my mother was left and she was hurt, and her children were hurt. My mother went after her marriage and her mother and her brother were left behind, one in poverty the other in alcoholism. The ones left behind were hurt by those who got to leave. But would it have gone any differently if they had stayed?
Why does wage slavery mean that we are love poor? What happens to the love? Did I hurt my son because I left or because I was too distracted to love him at key moments when he needed my love? I needed my love for myself at key moments when he needed my love for him.
The deficit of love, those times when I wasn't loved in time, get to be paid up by others... (more on this...)

Love poor. Love binges. When Papi came home then there was love and light and joy in the house and energy and purpose and perspective. When we were alone with Mami we were her companions in grief, listening to her sad songs popurri. Or I was the target for her rage, the raging rants and the dug in nails and the beatings with the heel of her slipper. To escape her I'd roll under the bed. I have vivid memories of the undersides of my childhood beds, the meshes of springs holding up the thin cotton mattresses with yellow circles of pee stain. I loved those havens under the bed.