Starting Over With Dakota

“If you’re looking for something more real, you have to be destructive when necessary.”

I haven’t written since I’ve been back. I’ve been avoiding it all. I’m stunned by how incredibly different it feels, how different I feel, how there’s been no other trip I’ve taken that’s lent its purpose to me as obviously as this one…

I’ve been reading over some of my earlier entries. Even in these private moments of writing, there is so much restrain. Maybe that’s why I am so much more comfortable painting than writing, though I’ve never considered myself to be any good at it. But at least there, if no where else, I allow Aiyah to speak, to play, that is, until I arrive at a certain point of the painting and even there I pick up that old, terrible habit of making it all look perfect, neat, flattering.

What area of my life, if any, have I allowed myself true, untimed, raw freedom? None. But sometimes, I get these moments where my mind drifts beyond me the way it used to when I was a child in a place I shouldn’t have been, and I’m suddenly elsewhere, in a place that doesn’t make any sense at all, where love reigns freely, abundantly, where I am not a woman stuck in a room but one who’s loose, careless with no resemblance to her past, no memory of where she comes from, where she must stay. Even with the physical distance to spare me, I stay close to where I’ve come from, which is not much. I harbor the same poisonous belief as my father, that we are worth nothing, deserve nothing, can offer nothing and so, why try? For whom? For what? For the ears that are always gated in our direction? Or for the lover we will always feel unworthy of, the audience we fear may see past our delicate performances and fraud attempts at art?

I feel as if I am only touching the borders of what it is I mean to say. It’s a permanent frustration every child must feel deeply who has never been listened to, whose inconvenient desires have always been brushed said for the guardian’s convenient ones. We speak, and in speaking, realize how much of it is false, untrue. In speaking, we hear not our own voice but the polished, well-rehearsed voice of the child who has had to perform endlessly before a family that couldn’t tolerate truth, messiness, a wild, raging, passionate girl. The truth in me was tucked into an ill-fitting dress of the false one, and I’ve never tried to undo the clumsy buttons before. I only noticed recently how they’ve been pinching at the skin of my back, not that I would have been brave enough to attempt an undoing before. The realization has come with the courage, arriving at once, in sync, desperate.

Still, how do I go on writing when I can’t hear myself, while the truth in me has only been half undressed? My obsession with how I write has more to do with how I live, because the two are so closely linked and have always been since I was a child. I could survive for as long as I could write. I could be free in the different homes I passed through as long as I kept my mind guarded, separate and shared it only with paper when I was alone. But without anyone reigning over me anymore, I lost the fight. My thoughts became someone else’s, and that voice I used in front of my family became the voice I used with myself. I’ve turned against myself. The war I once waged against them has become a private, senseless war. At my worst, I direct this war against the ones I love. At my best, I direct it against myself.

I want to experiment with the days to come, the art I desperately want to make, the stream of conscious writing I want more more than anything to try, to experience. I want to murder the guard standing at the foot of my mind, tear down the checkpoints, the fence, the curled wire. I want to dust the abandoned thoughts, desires, go where I’m not supposed to, say what I shouldn’t, what was never allowed. I want to know what Aiyah wants to say, not the “writer,” not the one with title and pomp and a yearning to be seen, heard. No, the one that got held someplace back in the early miles of my life, who waits, patiently, who has stayed true, untouched, unfound. To hide one self is the key. To keep her for me, for poetry, for filmmaking. I don’t want to share her or speak of her to anyone else. She is the only source of life in me, the only thing worth guarding. For her, I’ve done the work, sorted desperately and longingly through a long and stinging past to find her, like a journey through the marshes where the foot sinks into thick mud with every step but there’s something worth the trouble at the far edge, waiting. A boat that’s washed up, a recovered item that was once thought to be lost forever to the sea…

All this time, I’ve divided my life into two categories, the 19 years before I met the love of my life, and the 5 years since then. The first part was productive, extremely lonely, near useless. The second part was destructive, desperate, a long, dangerous unraveling of everything that had not been allowed to be expressed before — the boiling rage, the hours crying, the heavy sadness that kept me held against the bed for days, the desire for revenge and the deep hurt that kept me constantly in pain and never far enough from the hospital. And in my rage, I gave myself to more hurt, more loss, because in my mind, I’d received a love I was unworthy of and the loss of it made all the sense. It lessened the burden of guilt, of having picked up something that was intended for someone else, someone calmer, more loving, easier. I entered a long, exhausting crusade with the certainty of a soldier who knows he has no chance. I was half terrified, half resigned. I wanted the end. I wanted to fight it too. And somewhere in the big mess I’ve made, I lost my thoughts, my voice, my vision. I was a soldier who came with purpose and accepted defeat, only to find the war at its end by the time our infantry had arrived. How then do you return to a life whose end was tirelessly fought against in the mind, then finally, finally accepted? How, when I’m unprepared to reenter what I believed I had no more of?