When I Start to Write I Disappear

Week 50a
When I start to write I disappear. I don’t exist. On the psychological plane this is that moment when at the age of 6 I joined my mother in our small kitchen in the married student dormitory of the seminary, to show her my drawing, the best I’d ever done I thought. I had at last figured out how to make a real looking nose. She turned toward me and away from where she stood at the sink and waved her hand in disgust. I covered the woman’s face in the drawing, her mouth, where a cigarette dangled, and said to my mother, “Y ahora?" She still didn’t want to look. I disappeared first when my enthusiasm was crushed by her revulsion, and a second time when I was willing to destroy the essential cigarette in the picture to get approval, disappeared a third time when my self annihilation still didn’t stop my annihilation by my mother’s rejection.
But is that the only plane of my disappearance when I write? Isn’t it that having traveled away from myself so many times I have forgotten how to return? Having gone so many times into the foreign land of my wage slavery, I have lost contact completely with my bedrock.
Having been an exile for so long there is no longer any island or origin. And that island of origin was a colonia mediatizada, already more than half disappeared.
And so, it follows that the state of disappearance is my homeland, is what I have to explore and bear witness to.
What does it feel like? Terror trembling up my esophagus, loneliness, despair, desperation. Wanting too much of something. No longer remembering what that something is. My parents both began to die when they retired, or the dying that had been held at bay by their complete submission to the retrace of their lives, bloomed. No matter what they got up early in the morning, piled into their car after chugging café con leche, drove to their jobs of different ranks in the same building. He was an ejecutivo she was a secretaria ejecutiva. They were both wageslaves. They ground their bodies away and when they finally retired and moved to Florida they were already far along in their approach to death. He kept on evangelizing (lecturing?); She sank into a terminal disappointment. She’d waited all her life for the time to come when they retired and he came home. But he never did. She literally disappeared from diabetes. Her fatness vanished. She was a viejecita. She got a scary facelift that made her look like she’d had the fright of her life and had too wide open eyes, espanta. I imagine her walking by herself to the liquor store at the Walgreen’s. The little airplane sized vodka bottles I’d find larded in her drawers became full size gin and vodka bottles in the fridge.
They traveled away from their selves so many times they had no self to come back to. Or that was their self.
Just like this terror is mine.
Lucha just walked in and asked me why I look so sad. I thought that I was smiling, giving her my biggest smile. I’m sad because I know more about your life than you do. I wish Solly hadn’t told me Xiomara wants to fire Lucha, is laying the paper trail.
Just then wanting to respond to Lucha’s question last night’s dream floated into my mind. I was with Ori I don’t know where we were and he was joking, making me laugh. I could hear his high pitched explosive laugh. It was one of those dreams that seem to be reality, so real I thought that I might touch him, so real I could smell his coffee ground skin.
But Lucha was already in her space, picking up the telephone, making her first thing call to Jody’s counselor.
So I don’t tell her about my Ori dream. Just for a moment I was ready to tell her the Ori dream, to mention Ori, to say his name aloud. Because maybe then I would be less disappeared. But I don’t. I never have told Lucha about Ori. Even to Solly who once met him, I don’t speak of Ori. Maybe that’s why Machi ran away, because I disappear my life and he needed to not be disappeared, to disappear from me before he ended up disappearing from himself