Some Life Beyond Wage Slavery?

Some Life Beyond Wage Slavery
Week 98
I’m at my desk at work staring at the photographs I wiped clean of mold after I found them in the basement last night. Ori, and Machi, and Mirta the yellow lab, on the stoop, in the mottled shade of the gingko tree. I couldn’t tell we were happy at the time. I didn’t know those were the best moments of my life. I can barely look at these photographs. El mundo se gasto desde entonces. I’m living in the same house but no Ori, he’s in prison…I have to write it down and maybe I will believe it, put i t in the center of my mind. He’ll never come home again. Short of a revolution, he’ll never come home again. And now Machi. I somehow ruined things with my son. I somehow chased him away. I’ve done everything wrong. That leaf dappled sunny summer afternoo n is gone. If it weren’t for the photograph I wouldn’t know the moment ever happened.
I suck the tears back into my eyes in the way I know promises a migraine later in the day. I close my eyes away from the view of the mirror building across the way. What are we, who are we? These beings warehoused hour after hour sitting at desks?
But I haven’t succeeded. I find myself sobbing.
Then god knows why I remember sitting on a sunny leaf shade dappled step in somebody else’s patio as a girl of five, before we first came to the City, in the older, better days. I’m chewing on a chunk of sugar cane, a 3 inch length of cane bamboo segment, quartered lengthwise. Some adult I can’t remember has just warned me never to swallow the fibers, the bagaso, because they’ll make a world in my belly, and I have already swallowed some so I am sitting there, chewing the fibers, sucking the cane juice, and imagining the little people and little houses and schools and churches and rivers, forming in my belly. I don’t understa nd who wouldn’t want this little world, why doesn’t everybody swallow the bagaso.
All these years have I lived in a bagaso world of unhappiness. I look at Machi’s face in the photograph. Ori must have just made a joke, and Machi’s head is tossed back, la ughing. When he laughed it shuddered through his entire body. When he was younger even than this photograph, he would throw his entire body on the floor to laugh. Why didn’t I know that I was happy then? Why didn’t I pay attention?
Where has my life gone then, sitting at desks, staring out windows, pondering my inner bagaso world?
Where did the street in the photo go? Now it is populated by neighbors who call the cops on Machi and his friends, who no longer say hello. I avoid walking up the street. I approach my house from the avenue up above, so that I can walk down a short stretch of my street with only the side of a big Avenue store, a dentist’s stoop, and two houses whose residents I seldom run into, before I reach my own bagaso home.
What would I have to do to know the happiness in this moment? Do I have to remind myself of my future: that there are only moments between now and dying, that my life seguira gastandose, infirmity, old age, decrepitude, incontinence, senility await me. By contrast t o that this moment of stabbing longing for my husband and my son, is a happy moment, those are merely this moment’s shadow dapples. I still have my health and most of my mind.
But can there be something more, some deeper thinking, something whole emanating out of my belly, some bigger gear of the mind, the soul even, some deeper knowing than this foul contract on my desk I haven’t yet reviewed?
Some life beyond wage slavery.
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