.
"And in the end, we were all just humans... Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
help me uproot this sickness, mama. help me get it up and out. stick out your hand and i'll spit it out like a piece of stolen candy. i'll tip my head back, mama, and i'll open wide. you can reach in with both hands and a bar of soap and wash all the badness out. lean over me, hold me back by my hair and spill your prayers of healing all over my face, pour them down my throat, find any antiseptic at all that will bubble and burn and dissolve the horrible lesson, the horrible, horrible lesson that the love of another can save or fix a fucking thing.
it is no solid gold you taught your daughters and son to chase, mama. it is no bronze or unbreakable steel. the insidious craving you cultivated in your children eats us from the inside out.
the definition of love we were taught is absolutely fucked.
you first husband didn't even call his children when he learned of your death. didn't even send an email. and so that door will remain forever closed.
your second husband, not even three years later, is remarried (again) to his fourth wife and refuses to have anything to do with your children whom he helped raise for 15 years. the awful joke of the situation is that, if you weren't already dead, mama, this shit would kill you.
even the man you encouraged me to marry didn't go to your funeral. and when i came home, spirit ripped in half after seeing you whittled down to your skeleton by cancer, burned to dust and plugged in to a small silver heart on a chain and put in to my hand... i looked at the man who claimed to love me, who said i was the most beautiful girl in the world, mama, the man who said i was his perfect fit... i looked at him and i told him that i hurt so bad, felt like i was dying too. i tried to explain to him how it felt to see your own mother's dead body wheeled out of the house through the kitchen on a gurney and my grandfather, your daddy, shouting in your ear, "We love you Nisey! We love you Nisey!", a minister who believes the soul escapes the body and ascends to heaven the very second of death... i tried to explain what it felt like to watch this, a father shouting in to his own child's dead ear that he loves her, despite and against his own beliefs, in the horror-driven hope that she could hear him... that she was still in there somewhere. that you were still in there somewhere, mama. behind sunken eyes and a hollow face. the only word i could find that even came close to describing how i felt was Homeless... i felt robbed and thrown aside and refused. my only real home, my other body, the womb in which i grew, the soft pink which gave me warmth and root was gone... and in that moment of total devastation and confused horror, all i wanted was to be fucked. i wanted to be fucked as hard as possible. i needed to feel something other than this immense horror, this total spiritual murder. i wanted to be thrown down and made aware of my body, to be rooted in Life, to feel the opposite of death; your death, mama, that was crawling all over me...
and he sat there and he listened to me say these things and with sad, down cast eyes, he nodded his head... and i sat on the living-room floor in front of him and i waited. i wanted so badly to feel the squeeze of his hand on my knee. i wanted so badly for him to slide his hand across my cheek, fingers reaching into the nest of curls above my neck, pulled close and kissed hard; responded to and dealt with and loved. i wanted so badly to be loved, in that moment more than any other moment of my life, i wanted to be loved and, in that moment, in my deep horror, love could have been anything that would have given me a reprieve, no matter how fleeting or inconsistent, from the atrocity i'd just witnessed. the minutes passed. and days. and weeks. and months. and he never did reach out to me, not even as another human being. he never touched me. he left me alone in that horror, mama. he left me sitting on the living-room floor, staring in horror, alone.
sometimes an offense against one's own humanity is so great that love simply dries up. i don't love these men at all and i don't miss them. not even when times are hard. not even when i need help.
my disappointment soars, mama. i really hope you wouldn't make
excuses for this shit. i really hope you wouldn't but i think you might.
i think you might.
i'm not mad. a bit disgusted at times but not mad. and mostly, i'm disgusted with myself; the fact that i still crave another human being the way i do. when the night turns cold and my bed feels so big after walking passed all these christmas lights through wet, empty streets, mama. you planted an evil seed and you made sure to water it well. the roots of this nauseating weakness run deep. in fact, these traumas have perhaps exacerbated the issue. i look at my face in the bathroom mirror and i look at the shape of my lips and eyes and i wonder, "when's someone gonna love me?" because i know enough to know that what i've been shown thus far has not been love. i go to bed with thoughts of hands in my hair and beautiful word whispered in my ear and a strong hand sliding across my cheek, fingers reaching in to the nest of curls above my neck, pulling me forward for a hard, hungry kiss, so hard and so longed for it brings tears to my eyes.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment