HISTORY
9.27.20
Tia
That single word reminding me this Mythos I inhabit has the right idea. Our affirming craving is right to pity the Midwesterner who measures their success on thrifty discounts. We, on the other hand, know forward is defined exclusively by how round the world is. That quiet, knowing wisdom dying to scream “Lover! Keep counting your straight-and-narrow steps in bargains, you’ll end up right where you began.”
That’s to say– strays know there are no inherit bridges. Bridges are built by those who wonder. Nobody’s coming to save you. No one’s going to break you out, or cut the thorns from your feeling-brambles. No one’s going to storm the castle walls, kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, white steed away your unaccounted-for accountabilities. No one will feed that malnourished yearning.
Face it.
You will have to do,
do it yourself.
We know this– us immigrants, I mean. In a culture where everything is foreign we learn the dialect of body. A new mother tongue. Our hands learning to say Hello in the language of empathy and white flags, all while America preaches the body an ignorant animal. But who can blame them… Intelligence dwells exclusively in the head, right?
If your heart shudders “no”, you’re at least partly bilingual.
The body is smart. It doesn’t discern between external stimuli and subconscious invitations. It reacts equally and viscerally to the tactile and the imaginary.
So here’s the question; How the fuck do you explain this to the American “objective.” The sad upper Western who made ‘objects’ of things and people by distancing itself from them. An act of deliberate desperation so anguished in its need to individualize, it succeeded to make a home bricked by inhumanity, roofed in pride, windowed by disparity, and cemented in otherness.
We scare you. You build borders around our melanin. Those borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A dividing line or narrow strip along a steep, steep edge (what’s down there?) A borderland vague and undetermined created by the emotional residue of unnatural boundaries, yes, si, your boundaries. A constant state of transition. Inhabited by what you perceive perverse, grotesque, foreign, prohibited and forbidden.
Now, here I am. Alien in your land of Milk and Honey. Defining myself as an act of kneading, of uniting and joining. A creature not only of darkness and light, but a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark. Here to give meaning to the in between. Does this make me mad? Sure, but I choose this madness above your sanity. May my words be the splinter on your smooth palm, the eye to the needle of your thread. May I always pick the sour cherry from the bowl and glorify it naturally perfect. May my feelings be vast, my thoughts humble, my words precise, my tongue wild for wild tongues can’t be tamed, only cut out.
THIS is why I write. Because the world I create in writing compensates for what this world lacks. Because life does not appease my appetites, my loves, my grievances, my anger… I write to become intimate with myself, and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad woman or a suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say isn’t disposable… Finally, I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more terrified of not writing.