to be touched by them
My birds sleeps on the windowsill behind a curtain of green tulle. There’s a soft yellow light above me, and the most uncomfortable feeling turning in the confessional silence of this evening.
I could have screamed earlier, waiting in that shuttle, late to a dinner I didn’t want to go to. I could see all the faces before me, all the people I was going to encounter, people who brought with them those ugly years, who, just by looking at me a certain way, could drag me leg and arm 15 years back, and all I can do is return the forced smile greetingme.
But how.. to have so little control over the way people take me on this forced migration back to a land I left. How do I lose total control, how is the severance undone? how, if I’ve gone far, do they manage to reach me? To touch my skin from the distance I’d imagined was between us and make land of the sea I thought would forever divide us and keep us apart?
How inconstant life could be. One night you’re in the clouds, melting into the most tender moment, the most sensuous, your most desired wish, and the world is all yours. Then, what was yours, what was in your hands just 12 hours ago recedes again into what is not yours. Your hands, that held all it wanted, empty, desiring everything it just had. What was mine returns to me a stranger; I could reach out to his cheek, be tender, be her who left him earlier that day. Instead, I am stiff and undesirable and desiring and confused in the exhausting exchange of what’s mine and what’s god’s and what belongs to neither me nor god, the unpossessable that is every love I’ve passed through, everything I’ve ever wanted.
I am still at the mercy of the way I am looked at…still willing to live or die according the tone of a goodbye, a look that answers, or ignores the insistent question of worth. How could 20 years of me melt into the mess of an unspilled scream? How could this grown woman sit on the bus with a desire to die because of a brief encounter with someone she liked? an hour that sends her back upstairs to that haunting room on Iverson St where all there was between those walls was air that never moved and thrifted furniture, a young girl begging deliverance of another world from the books she grasped, her only proof of life.
What was life to her without the solid world of those papers? What is life to her now without the permanent promise of love from a lover?
What is worse than the sadness is the denial of it, the forced laughter that never fools anyone, the pleasant talk that slices through the skin, makes strangers of lovers, and liars of those who’ve never lied.
Today revealed to me the biggest lie, not that I haven’t gone far, because I have, but that there’s no place far enough that can’t be touched by the eye of someone who holds the past, the grip of someone who holds the future. I have no desire to lie. People take me places. Beautiful places, terrible places, to the pit of hell, to the highest heaven. I can swear on my freedom, promise to streer my own course, but there’s always the winds, and the rains, and gods that play with air and sea. The intention lives; I haven’t unburdened myself of a promise made. But around it lives the characters holding moments that do different things to the hours of my life. How, and is it possible, to guide one’s body against and around the dance of winds? How does one leave just enough space to be touched but not to be dragged?
