Blog 24-Machi's Home and I Can Sleep

from marble notebook
It was almost dawn. Another all nighter waiting for Machi. From where I hunched over my notebook I looked up and saw the sky over the beach growing pink. At what strange angle did this Island lie on earth that from this very spot if I looked to the right in the morning I saw the sunrise and to the left at dusk, the sunset? I saw Machi. I sat up. He was with Robles who had his head still wrapped in a bandage made from a bandanna. It felt like weeks since the Guardia beat him. I saw my son approaching our shelter from the Base side of the beach. Where had they been last night? There had been no streaming video. Was he drunk? Just as abruptly as he'd left Machi came back, glanced at me, said nothing, and crawled into our shelter, on top of his sleeping bag. Robles lay down beside him. They seemed to be instantly asleep. I didn't want to know whether or not he was drunk.
I made myself lie down in my corner of our lean-to, close enough to Machi and Robles that I could feel the rise and fall of their breath. Now that my son was home my mind at last slowed down and let me sink into deep sleep. But my sleep was short lived. I woke up in a state of stampeding panic. I knew what Patria's son Tomas meant when he had told his mother he could hear his chromosomes screaming. All of my dead were screaming in my cells, all the way back to the Tainos hanging from the trees, the mothers bending down to the river to drown their children...all the way forward to Taina in an underwater world...I felt one with Tomas, not alone with the terror for once and this allowed me to get up, head into the fear. I grabbed my notebook and took myself back to my writing dune by the beach.
The choice between writing down what I wanted to notice or what I wanted not to forget seemed clear now. If I wanted to examine my life for any buried successes that had escaped my notice, if I had decided not to believe the feelings of failure and regret, then maybe not forgetting would provide more evidence. I could see no success in my current vida a la intemperie. I thought of Patria. She would contradict me here. We were here saving each other, hasta que Karaya sea libre. That gave me some relief. But to be in the present put me in a state of nearly unendurable, screeching chromosome terror, over losing Machi again, over not finding Machi, over nothing being right before it was my time to be among the screeching dead, present only in the chromosomes of my son. If Machi disappeared again I would be done, go mad. I had a fleeting thought that if I did go mad, lose my mind and not find it, I would be free of my terrors at last. I had an instant of relief and then I realized, madness would not free me from pain. The idea of pain without my mind to guide me out of it was yet more frightening than going toward my mind.
So not forgetting won out. I decided to write down as much as I could of my first conversation with Patria, my joyous discovery of a new ally and friend. I decided to try, even though after spending hours with vivid Patria and looking at accomplished Adela online, I felt erased by my terror and my deficits, shattered, coreless, small, absent, blurry, barely quickened enough as a being to formulate words.