Be Here Now

You can't beat a sucker punch...they always know just where to get you.  Enveloping your tissues, sinews, chamber doors.  Hold your breath, and let the hole that's formed implode, the bubbles rising from your eternal sore.  Each red, forming beast a child born, resting his head on your bosom, while you tell him a story.

The dark night in the garden.  The actual child- his father acting tough, his mother preoccupied- it happens.  The bright spot light releasing hard our wrinkling time-lapse faces, dumb with meat and drink, and complacency.  The good kind.  The good times, bred from the familiarity we take for granted.  It's the gift of the provincial -- a rare occurrence in these invisible days.  We've all been ushered, prodded and pushed into the idea of future world, and have all answered with a resounding "no".  Not no to the future, but to the anonymous, and its hand flailing into your sight, and your life. Belonging to something and someplace else, but never where you are, or where your hand can reach.  We have stood up (or sat back) and decided--- It is better to know every inch, every neuroses, every crook, curve, violence and hidden defect (and delight) of our home, and each other, of one place (inside out), than to blithely touch with the feeble pat of a compulsive, greedy hand, every thing you can.  To know the thousand things at face value loses its power and drains of its ultimate reality, when you know the ONE, as yourself.  It's the first great lesson in recognizing that these boundaries apart from you do not exist.  Still, this is our home and we have scented its perimeter with our dysfunctions, our sharp tongued bravado, our cowering regressions past and away from ourselves and towards each other.

Here, he was my son as well.  As was the daughter in her belly, as is the son I will serve one day.  Here, he grew tired and we played at our lost youth - outsiders ruling the roost.  He could not understand the losses we reared back to conquer and return from.  The journey of the tribe commencing and existing over wine, some dirty jokes and the satisfaction that They could not come inside.  We were selfish too.  For the one thing.  But, the touch of home made me quiver to know it, and myself even further.  So, after hours, the little prince's face grew tired, let down, finished with the stomping grounds of our super egos.  I found his eyes and said that I would read him a story from his book, while he waited to go with his friend to their neighbour's house.  To wait until his dad and mom were finished cavorting in the way that he recognized and mostly respected.

It was late.  He agreed silently and sat down next to me on the steps of the pagoda, built by the hands of the men who stood nearby.  They, and others filed all around, being familiar and drunken, loud, crass or just plain talkative as was typical in their usual worlds.  I read him story after story, always leaving the decision for another up to himself; gold like a lion, just before nap time.  By the middle of the second story, he had leaned onto me, resting his head diagonally at the top of my breast, relaxing into me as my corresponding arm rested on his shoulder, his upper arm or at his side.  Just barely.  His friend came by in the middle of it and kept bugging him about going back to "the pirate ship", but the ship was dark too and the waters closed.  After ignoring his friend's first two attempts, (to which he responded with silence and I countered by always asking him "Do you want to go play? Or would you rather me keep reading?") upon the third verbal inquiry, he finally put his hands over his ears and yelled a sort of whisper scream of frustration.  He said with conviction: "I want you to read".  His friend understood and vacated the scene.

I kept reading story after story, and began to offer more natural ease of vocal inflection and tone to my slowly increasing sense of the characters and themes of each.  One story was about a man who visited a town without names and he named everything-- so the people there could know where it was they lived, what they did, who they were...so by reading his created words, they could know themselves.  I was able to continue reading, while thinking to myself  'what point Is it in life when we decide what names are true for us and how will he ever un-teach himself all the given names which he had no hand in creating?  How will he know the thou of things'.  The world was drowning in It's, I thought, as he took my arm (which had gotten displaced from him when his friend had tried to rally him away to the abandoned pirate ship) and gently placed it back over his shoulder.  I let it fall onto his arm again and held him close, but softly.  It seems to be my favourite way.

As I read the last few stories in the book (which he had found here, in the very garden we ritualized upon), he would occasionally point to the corresponding pictures or ask me to indicate specific words as I read them, to figure out what word meant what.  I wanted to tell him that people, and home, did not need to be given a name.  I hoped at that exact moment that no one would ever come to this place, our epicenter of beautiful misfits, in our innocence, our depravity- our suicide note to the world as we had all once known it, I hoped that no one would ever find their way here, and declare our name.  Our unhallowed ground protected us, as we protected him.  As I finished the last story, he silently accepted the end of this tale, knowingly closed the book and held onto my hand as he got himself up.

The next thing I knew, his plans were intact, his friend back at his side, and his wait over.  I looked up, and was back in the fray.  Smoke and voices, posturing and personality.  Bonfire and talk.  Always talk.  I think we'll be trying to figure ourselves out until the end.  Before I re-engaged, I saw him on the other side of the vine covered fence, walking past to the next street.  His lithe silhouette screamed like a banshee: "Mimi!".  I yelled after him, and still held him close to me, giving him a tale to steal and make his own, and protected his mystery, the one not yet said.  I picked up my beer, took a gulp, and thought 'sucker punch...there it is'.  That kid made my ovaries hurt.

~ M. Lucia