Find Machi , We've Got to Visit Ori in Prison
Find Machi, We've Got to Go Visit Ori in Prison
Week 145 b
My heart starts to sink when I think of what I have not accomplished as a writer. And now I am almost 60 and it feels like my life is gone. Although maybe 60 is the new young. I know a yogini and a politico who are having themselves big 60th parties. One is having sacred moments and the other is giving herself a fundraiser for multiple causes which turns out to be a must go to for people (others approaching or just past 60) women I know from other walks of my life.
My 60th comes at the end of the year and I won’t worry about how to celebrate it. I don’t have the fortitude for big parties, figuring them out, hosting them, worrying about the cleanliness of my house. I haven’t had parties since Ori and I left the Party. Probably the biggest party ever was for Machi’s baptism. Machi who paid our rent the month he was born. Ori and I were living clandestine in a project apartment that paid 35 a month back then. Every month I showed up at the cashier’s window with my little cardboard sleeve holding 35 folded dollars, impersonating a comrade, Carmela, who’d gone back to the island. Machi’s money birth gifts covered November.
Just now a piercing longing to go back in time and have my baby in my arms against my chest heart to heart. Why didn’t I know those were the best moments of my life? Why didn’t I pay attention? To be that close, that necessary. The other two emerging crones are also mothers, maybe one of them is already a grandmother. They are entering cronehood full blown, embracing it. I am doing so vaguely, as unawarely as I entered motherhood. Still a wageslave and with no prospects of escaping. A wageslave who remembers the field slaves but is a house slave, surrounded by house slaves, some who imagine they are the master.
How did my life turn out this way?
The reader would want to know it’s a sunny spring day and my lilac is blooming for the first time, prematurely, it’s still March. TR is dead. He was six years older than I and took me looking for O the first time O left me. Nobody would tell us where O was so TR instructed me to lie down on the floor of the car. He believed what O had done, to leave me without a word, just a note on the kitchen table on Thanksgiving Day so I would always remember, was wrong. I wasn’t sure. I never am. What is that vagueness? Why can’t I be vivid and clear like the two other crones?
When I write I can’t decide between the fiction and the truth. I spin my own mind and confuse my own self. Today I’m feeling that Sunday sadness already. This is my day but I am recovering from the sold days and have very little mind left, or intention. What was it I wanted to have done? That sinking feeling in the heart, longings, loneliness and the worry about tomorrow, about Monday. Not wanting to have to go back to that boring, oppressive place.
Sensory, iconic forms of memory
I googled TR and he’s dead. I’ve got to call up that first O of long ago and find out if he’s dead. I’ve got to form the intention to go visit O in prison. I’ve got to find Machi and tell him he and I are going to go see his father.
These moments I remember, or think I remember, what are they?
I am in the sun in a diaper or just panties. I see bright sun on rough concrete. I am with my cousin and maybe he is making bows and arrows. Maybe he touches me. Maybe he sticks a finger inside me.
Long before that, I am in my crib. There is a man beside me. He pushes aside my diaper and pierces my center with a finger.
A deep, harsh, sharp kinesthetic memory of being pierced.
As a toddler and later a little girl I touch myself. I can’t bear the touch of my labia against my clitoris so I adjust my panties. I have seen that men can so I assume that so can I. My Mother corrects me. She tells me that little girls don’t touch themselves in public. I teach myself to stop but even now, this moment, as I sit here writing, I am bothered by the sensation of my labia always caressing. It makes me want to scream.
Then the dreams: I must lick my mother’s huge vagina. I am in bed with a dead man whose penis is huge.
These are the mysteries that will never unfold. Are these memories? Did I make up these thoughts?
What does anything mean?
Post traumatic play
A lifetime of loving daddy men
Talking to C was scary. This old and still loving daddy men?
Not approaching cronehood with grace.
Reenacting the childhood rape.
The part of me that needs to tell the story of its pain and the part of me needing to be reminded that life is good, are at war; but what I used to say to Machi the year his life fell apart and he sobbed about the missing cat, the missing Dad, and he punched through walls in school, maybe is also true for me: my goody and my baddy are buddies.