I'm Finished!

Anyway, so That’s over. Again. Not sure what comes over me, but I can only explain it as a rush…..a whirling dervish skirt being blown up by an industrial strength hurricane past the levys, the floodgates, the moats and filters, past and into a place where the light is so, not bright, but comely, so in a way that any little shred of average or below, any noise that is anything less than the perfect breath to that light, disappoints, scatters the shining parts, ruins and disrespects it to the point where I cannot be around any of it. My insides turn into a horror show- cut up, bloody and pus stained limbs, organs oozing and life force still whirling into muddy corners and choking on its own backwash. There is no other way to describe it and I am thankful it comes now and again and goes. And there will come a time, when all doors will be open and the keys thrown into the rushing tide, locking out all the stopgaps and excuses, the dead pan overcast air stuck in the middle of my brain.

When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.

I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.

Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.

Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.

We need them more than they think.

(For DFW)
M. Lucia