Marasovica 29

The thought was disturbing to her.  The thought was extremely disturbing to her.  The thought - it repeatedly disturbed her.

Our lives were bullshit.  There was no other way to get around this very plain fact.  We existed back there, in the so-called land of freedom, of opportunity, of any dream you wanted to dream up.  But that's just the problem with the American Dream - it is for the patterns and happy trails in your head, not for the life you think you lead there, in so-called Americana, land of the free.  You're only free when you're dead, and you there, living in the land of the dead.  

It is as if every anger that plagued at me, every rage and reason that smacked me all about town, if you can call it town, is gone away.  It does not exist in me here.  Because *I* exist here.  Without my defenses up, without my fists curled into angry baby dragons...coiling and strategizing and shaking its fist at the world.  

The world, it goes by here.  There is a vista both in front of me, my past behind me, and all about my mind.  There is the homemade wine I consume, sometimes with water and sometimes not, which exists in me in the very same way, the meat made in the town of my father's birth.  The family talking loudly, smoking outside, there the sea and the ferries, the beer I had on the promenade, my hands caressing the walls of Rome.  I can never leave this place because it has been inside me all of my life.  Now, it is free and does not claw at me as it does in your land of the living, so-called.  All of these things are there, present in that very moment - as the moment I am living in right now.  

Ami the big black poodle barks - the Bura wind is coming in for the night, into my quiet apartment rooms, with the bathroom in which I remember sitting on the toilet at 6 years old and someone opened the door, because I did not lock it.  I am here now.  The woman raised somewhere else, but existing here all the while.

I have tasted the tip of it on my tongue and it glides down my throat - glistening all spit filled, salt water kissing, roman relic on my heels --- this is water, indeed.  And I'm soaking at its shores, far away from the idealistic and self deluded bullshit of the workaday American dream.

Time does not exist here.  Everything will work out.  Every moment is a golden one, indeed.  Henry was right.  This is my Paris, the Roman ruins collapsing my neuroses and telling me to be still.  He would never ever have dreamed of suicide if he had been alive and present in the waters of this city.  Every place we are, every one we can be, is golden and renewed, sprouting up and in all directions, and nobody has to get hurt.    A house with all its right parts, and a family with all its right members.  Each love in its own right place.  That's the lesson.  The wind comes by and will paint me up a sunrise for tomorrow, advancing from all the shores.

M. Lucia