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14 de Junio 2009
i told you before
about love and the million tiny risks, like papercuts on the sides of fingers.
so can I tell you now about the waking dreams I've been having?
I dreamed a tree fell down and there was a nest with eggs that needed saving.
I dreamed you wrote me a letter and your girlfriend signed it.
I dreamed I had a nightmare I couldn't remember because I was always in it, right now.
I dreamed I wrote a letter to punish some women who have recently hurt me.
~
I have been treated badly because of the race question my whole life. and so if you want to imagine the color of my skin, imagine instead that I am more like a burn victim. The blisters and bubbling flesh breaking and bleeding. Imagine that I have no fingerprints by which you could identify my limp body, imagine the hairs on my arms are coarse and my lips are swollen, without the lovely lines of a pucker.
Imagine that I have begun recently to warn others not to touch me unless they can do so gently, that I have spoken of my vulnerability with those I thought I could trust. And then imagine that in some cases, it was for naught.
I was angry, hurting so badly. I was weeping and crumpled and hoping those who had been so careless with me would hurt as much as I am.
So when I woke yesterday I composed the letter in my mind and wrote it out in my own blood. The problem was that I had to pick a scab to do so. If you know me well, you know that I am not a scab picker. I don't like to pick at chipped paint or scotch tape. I don't like to bite off hangnails or pull the strips of skin around my nail beds. I realized that this scab-picking simply was not me, not who I have ever been, not who I am, not who I want to be and probably not who I ever will be, if I can help it.
I lay in bed and heard one bird sing.
There was a small whistle and a sort of chipping away at the silence. The sound was high and sweet and I thought of stitches. I thought of new skin, quilted into place, like a patchwork quilt of my grandmother's aged and scarred and wrinkled whitish skin, my mother's cold and freckled skin, my father's acne and stubble, my grandfather's shiny and lined, calloused, and ashy skin, my sister's pale reddening cheeks, my beloved stepmother's crow's feet, my own skin, so different even from theirs, that smooths and dries out, and pales in the cold weather, then shines and darkens like stained oak in the summer.
I thought of a cousin's cafe con leche skin, another cousin's milky white arms holding her tiny white baby. I thought of my niece, the one we call Peach because she is just the right color, and the one we call Peanut because her lovely soft shell crushes easily and under it we find the salty roasted wisdom she holds close to her heart. I remembered the yellow skin on the one we call AH-gee, how we gave her to the light and it healed her, and the perfect curves of the skin that stretches not too tightly over their older sister Em's dexterous digits when she eats a whole peach without making any mess at all.
That little bird chirped away at the silence and her friends joined in because the sun was rising and warming their cedar tree. I thought of the way thread slips through the hole in the fabric, thought of a needle and string in the beak of a bird, like it belongs there. I thought of birds working, of their song tying my skin down over my bare soul and I knew that there was beauty enough to cover my exposed bones and heart.
I thought of birds building nests from pampas grass, from down and feathers, from dog fir and twigs and thought I might yet be healed, piece by piece, the way birds know best.
I thought of tree bark and surface tension, all the things that cover all the other things and began to be glad for all these thoughts and the skin over my pinkish lips that speak them, my pale neck skin stretched over the larynx that screams at the moon, my pink fingertips the color of raw-chicken meat that type them, my cheeks that redden when you read them. I was glad for myself. and for you. and I thought of all the pain I had wanted, only an hour before, to inflict on those who have hurt me so badly.
And I knew I didn't want them to hurt because of me.
Though I have heard it so many times I began to believe it for the first. Maybe it was because I was ready to hear it, or maybe because I was telling myself, or maybe because I just didn't need to bleed over this anymore and wanted to heal.
I knew they were hurting enough. There was no doubt in my mind that they would be lonely without me in their lives, at their dinner tables and I felt compassion growing in me.
I leaned into my husband lying next to me and felt the heavily furred skin on his hand, thought of the callous from his wedding ring, just above the life-line on his palm and how hard he works to be married to me, how proudly he wears the marks of our life together, then I thought of the skin on the backs of his hands, already turning brown and sweet like caramel in the first sunny days of Seattle summer, turning colors the way California foothills turn, the way skin turns colors, turns toward, turns.
Do they have skin like this? Do they know they do? Do they lean into the skin of loved ones, they have chosen not to think of mine, or to feel what it is like to wear it, but do they feel the skin of loved ones? Do they feel loved?
To be sure, I doubted and worried for them, for their beautiful faces and thought they must have wounds I will never know, never wear and skin that I may never touch, never wear, never appreciate.
Even now as I write, I am more and more willing to hope to cry for them. I feel my heart turning or softening, and as the wound closes I begin to think of opening it up again, all by myself so that I may stay in the pain, to be with them in theirs. I begin to wonder if the tears I cried for myself, the weeping into a friend's blood-red tee shirt, or wiped away with my own soft hands, will be replaced with tears for them. I wondered if what was initially a sadness for myself and my feelings about being rejected would turn into an even deeper sadness over the fact that we do not have each other in this moment. And I imagined, instead of their faces set against me, their smiles, or their tears falling down their faces.
Though I am so very afraid to move my body or my mouth in a way that will bring all this about, at least my heart will go there and that feels like a little healing and it will be enough for now.
help yourself | By crymytinyflood | 3:58 PM
