"Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve
to peer into my eyes
while I within deny their threats
and answer them with lies.
Mushlike memories perform
a ritual on my lips
I lie in stolid hopelessness
and they lay my soul in strips"
— Maya Angelou, Remembering
to peer into my eyes
while I within deny their threats
and answer them with lies.
Mushlike memories perform
a ritual on my lips
I lie in stolid hopelessness
and they lay my soul in strips"
— Maya Angelou, Remembering
III. A Confession
There was no earth as you know her. She was wild and rebellious, pure electricity. I remember each molten flare, each gaseous rain. The stinging and singing cries from the lime green-pink clouds. Teal streaks torn in patchwork strips across the navy sky, and oh…the taste in the air—suffocating, hollow. A sob without tears, raw in your throat and the pit of your gut. And always, always the inferno of red and purple flares whipping at your sides in choreographed capoeira. Scalding scolding for crimes known and unknown. She was passion, she was exhilaration, she was pain. The dizzying, proud pain of fresh wounds from a dangerous, barely-survived fall. We shared in it. You would not have recognized her. She was not the verdant nurturer, nor the wise silken cycle-spinner. She did not yet cradle the dirt and the sky. She had not learned to finger-crochet our souls endlessly, intertwining them together through time. That is when I arrived. My prison. My quilted tomb.
She cooled and formed, solidifying into steady purpose. Black electricity zigzagged scars across her thighs. The earth became a mother to the most tiny, unlikely creatures with Bodies and Hearts forging meaning from a meaningless existence. They wriggled, fought, loved. She settled into herself—a gardener of microscopic misfits. I emerged from the writhing smoke of burning gasoline, from the fumes of noxious ozone high, carrying a soul ignited by hatred. One just as churning and infernal as the molten magma core below. Tearing with my machete-eyes through the world, narrowed on a single, lavender light. My shackles. My calling. My eternal blight.
When you are alone, lost, missing for so long, you desperately claw with magnetic ghostly white-blue fire knuckles until you feel nothing at all. Numbness is at least a feeling. I was granted no respite. I was a wailing bassoon discarded in a catacomb. Treasured, now ancient. Buried. Unearthed. Unplayable. A dusty, brittle mockery of its former purpose. Dry roots searching but unable to grasp. Waves tearing at the shore, raking their claws down the land, no hope of reclaiming their former territory.
From my face (my face?), fiery red permafrost tears thundered down to the loamy soil. I had nothing. I had no one but the earth and her strange, inconsequential creatures. So I ripped out my soul. Young one, you must know how this feels. I cannot, in words, convey the feeling. Even if you’ve forgotten, willingly or otherwise, deep down, you remember. Of course you remember. It might be the only memory stamped into your heart with bubbling iron but you remember. I ripped out my soul ten times. Gnawing and gnashing, I carved a litter of will-o-wisps out of my chest and plopped their pulp onto the newly tender earth. And I loved them. Oh, they were so, so beautiful. Tender, sweet, iridescent light waves of pure condensed energy and twinkling radiant joy. They crawled and wiggled and danced. And I still love them, even now. Despite what you may have heard, I loved them. But she loved them unconditionally. They are mine, they are me, but they are more her. My love was warm but rough hands on their heads. Proud but expectant eyes looking into their naïve and curious hearts. My own confused being mirrored back to me in fractals of light and noise and deep, deep ultraviolet trauma. Cosmic-colored projections. They were going to save me. They were going to save us.
But she never expected anything of them. Then, no stranger to spontaneous life, the earth welcomed them into her embrace. Her hands were warm and soft. Her twinkling egret-eyes always looking over them, not into them. Her playful nature inviting, beckoning. Her sincere smile, born from a hard-won life of defiant coalescing. They were born to revolve, to orbit; but they lived to wander. They wandered into her arms.
You may have encountered them. Sprinting, slinking, shuffling around their territory. I beg of you, my young one, please do not repeat a breath of this to anyone. Especially not them. I am the first; their mother. You are their children. You are light of my light and yet, still more and more hers than I could ever be. I see her twinkle in your eyes.
She cooled and formed, solidifying into steady purpose. Black electricity zigzagged scars across her thighs. The earth became a mother to the most tiny, unlikely creatures with Bodies and Hearts forging meaning from a meaningless existence. They wriggled, fought, loved. She settled into herself—a gardener of microscopic misfits. I emerged from the writhing smoke of burning gasoline, from the fumes of noxious ozone high, carrying a soul ignited by hatred. One just as churning and infernal as the molten magma core below. Tearing with my machete-eyes through the world, narrowed on a single, lavender light. My shackles. My calling. My eternal blight.
When you are alone, lost, missing for so long, you desperately claw with magnetic ghostly white-blue fire knuckles until you feel nothing at all. Numbness is at least a feeling. I was granted no respite. I was a wailing bassoon discarded in a catacomb. Treasured, now ancient. Buried. Unearthed. Unplayable. A dusty, brittle mockery of its former purpose. Dry roots searching but unable to grasp. Waves tearing at the shore, raking their claws down the land, no hope of reclaiming their former territory.
From my face (my face?), fiery red permafrost tears thundered down to the loamy soil. I had nothing. I had no one but the earth and her strange, inconsequential creatures. So I ripped out my soul. Young one, you must know how this feels. I cannot, in words, convey the feeling. Even if you’ve forgotten, willingly or otherwise, deep down, you remember. Of course you remember. It might be the only memory stamped into your heart with bubbling iron but you remember. I ripped out my soul ten times. Gnawing and gnashing, I carved a litter of will-o-wisps out of my chest and plopped their pulp onto the newly tender earth. And I loved them. Oh, they were so, so beautiful. Tender, sweet, iridescent light waves of pure condensed energy and twinkling radiant joy. They crawled and wiggled and danced. And I still love them, even now. Despite what you may have heard, I loved them. But she loved them unconditionally. They are mine, they are me, but they are more her. My love was warm but rough hands on their heads. Proud but expectant eyes looking into their naïve and curious hearts. My own confused being mirrored back to me in fractals of light and noise and deep, deep ultraviolet trauma. Cosmic-colored projections. They were going to save me. They were going to save us.
But she never expected anything of them. Then, no stranger to spontaneous life, the earth welcomed them into her embrace. Her hands were warm and soft. Her twinkling egret-eyes always looking over them, not into them. Her playful nature inviting, beckoning. Her sincere smile, born from a hard-won life of defiant coalescing. They were born to revolve, to orbit; but they lived to wander. They wandered into her arms.
You may have encountered them. Sprinting, slinking, shuffling around their territory. I beg of you, my young one, please do not repeat a breath of this to anyone. Especially not them. I am the first; their mother. You are their children. You are light of my light and yet, still more and more hers than I could ever be. I see her twinkle in your eyes.