wish-list 2014

Ok, I'm taking a moment, a brief one, to do what I had promised not to do, which was revert to a self-indulgent pseudo-public diary. Why? you might ask... well... just because. You know. Chomsky.

Or something like that.

There is little wisdom to be sprinkled about these days. Not a little, as in, I have a few tidbits, rather, a dearth. There is not a lot sparkly going on right now in Ilana-world. Ah yes, deep into the self-indulgence we gooooooooooo.

Here's the deal. I had high hopes for 2013. Sure, I did some fun stuff. Mostly involving travel, bringing artists to Phoenix, meeting new friends, getting involved in some serious activism in the great state of Arizona, which is where, incidentally, I have been residing since late summer 2012, but since I skipped this indulgence last year... well, only the real world and some Facebookers knew about it. Anyway, despite making several wonderful new, sustaining friends, I've also made and subsequently lost a few (for reasons that will not be discussed in this forum) that have left a deep, wounded, blood-drenched hole in my heart... and I'm still wobbling, so... rather than a recap, or a list of resolutions, I'm going to put a personal wish-list out into the universe for the coming year.

In the coming year

1) I want to be able to speak with honesty (when it is important), and not fear the repercussions.

2) I want to don sparkles on a more regular basis. Especially glitter make-up.

3) I want to write something creative (and not self-indulgent) on the daily.

4) I want to keep my heart open, despite my overwhelming instinct to slam those doors shut.

5) I want to move to a part of the city that is more in line with who I am.

6) I want to let myself get angry and really feel it.

7) I want to set boundaries and defend them. For real.

8) I want to make music with others.

9) I want to be less of a perfectionist and send my work out, out, out...

10) I want to effect real political and social change in my community.

11) I want to help my aching child find herself, separate from me, become a happy quasi-adult.

12) I want to tear it up on the dance floor wearing the many new (gasp!) jeans that I just purchased on this last day of the year.

And with that consumer-drenched fantasy, I leave y'all.

2013, it's been real.  2014, let's hope you come through.

Día 9

Así nomás, pasas de ser un ser anhelado a un ser de la nada, anonadado. No nadas. No te gustan las aguas turbias y profundas. Te asustan por peligrosas y desconocidas. ¿Y yo? soy hecha de agua, hecha de agua que se extiende a las profundidades más vertiginosas. Echa el agua.

Poco importa.

Hay accidentes. Hay hallazgos.  Hay hallazgos que parecen accidentes, y accidentes que parecen hallazgos. Hay abandonos. Hay destellos de luz que se reflejan por sobre las aguas, que las hacen parecer llanas, llamas. Hay fugacidades que duran mil años luz.

Y vuelvo a mi cueva subterránea, cojeando y herida, del accidente, del hallazgo. No hay quién me calme el dolor, ni quién me traiga alimentos mientras se me sane. Yo he aprendido a cuidarme sola. Es lo único, tal vez, servible que he aprendido en este largo camino hacia la muerte.

Poco importa.

Hay puertas que se abren, compuertas hacia lo más recóndito. Vos las encontraste de par en par. Husmeaste. Decidiste que lo que había allí no valía la pena. Measte en una esquina, cual perro, marcando tu territorio y te fuiste sin más.

Y yo, pequeña y mojada, temblando de susto, de rabia, de impotencia, cerré esas puertas que por casualidad no había cerrado con candado. Y dolorosamente, todavía cojeando, retirándome a los aposentos de mi soledad acuosa, apagué la luz, bajé la cortina, cerré con llave y me envolví en mis propios tejidos, los que hice hace años, esperando al Odiseo que nunca llegó.

Day 8

And just like that, it is gone, vanished, burned up and released into the air like ash.

I'm left standing in the kitchen. There are broken plates shattered around me. Glass crunching under my bare feet. There must be blood, I think, but I don't examine too closely and I certainly feel no pain. Not in my bloodied feet, not in the skin pierced by shattered jagged edges shards of our former life, the possibility of a life, shattered.

You're a Phoenix, I tell my invisible self in the mirror that I hate. You will rise up from these ashes.

And I do, and I will, over and over, and over and over. But each time, there is something lost. And maybe something gained? How to know?

Day 7

And sometimes, there are just no more words.

The pain is so deep and so unutterable that it spills out over the edge. She says I don't listen, can't listen. She is often right. There is a limit and beyond that limit we just break.

She sits and bangs her feet against the door frame. She shrieks at me that she hates me.  Then her little girl eyes look up tearily and she asks if I love her. Why do I love her? What is the purpose? And it takes every. single. last. ounce. of. strength. to not simply dissipate. Melt into non-matter. Disappear.  And I hear myself saying, out loud, what feels to be true to me, right now, but is not comforting in any way. "We are all always alone. Always. We ARE ALONE. We are born alone and we die alone. NObody has any purpose."

I wonder, sometimes, why I can't stop those words and that pain from spilling out. I try to contain it, I try to believe some other world is possible. One in which we don't greedily stomp on the next guy. One in which we are able to listen to our children, without interrupting or getting angry.

Day 6

"He loves you more than he loves me," her pink lips turn into a feigned pout.
"Oh, this puppy, he's such a puppy, he's such a siwwy wittoo puppiter..." is the indirect reply, from her mother whose hands are flopping the soft brown ears of this anxious, adoring, one-eyed beast that she never expected to love.
"Mama... you're so... silly."
"Who me?" she turns again to the puppy whose black and white border-collie face cocks slightly to the left, his one good eye tracking his new mother with a somewhat unholy devotion, "Am I the silliest of sillies? What do you think mr. puppish? Are you embarrassed by me? No? See? No silliness happening here!"
The beautiful, lithe, adolescent cinnamon girl-child whose dark, wide eyes are artfully laden with thick black mascara and eye-liner, whose glossy chestnut hair is curled, in envious emulation of her mother's golden ringlets, stops pouting for a moment and laughs as her heavy-footed mama dances in clunky circles around the living room, stopping to roll her hips, and hold the dog's front paws while they take three salsa steps. "Mama..."
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"I love you too, bear bear... come here."
And for a glorious moment, they just dance around the room, those three, that little unconventional family in the middle of an open-concept living space, forgetting about everything, the work, the dishes, the hurt feelings, the psychic exhaustion, the strange quasi-sisterhood. They dance, and hold each other in love.

Day 5

"This is all fiction, you realize.  It is just fantasy, all of it," I say, trying to calm him down. His nostrils flare with anger and his eyes, dark and storming, glare with intensity. His hate is almost palpable.
"I don't believe anything you say. You whore. You libertine," he flicks epithets my way, some that sting, some that deflect. "Stop smiling, bitch."
The semi-smile, the one I wrap myself in when everything is too painful to actually look at head on, disappears. The unrelenting words that pummel my soul like fists only manage to provoke a deep nausea and a solitary tear of anger and defiance that wells over the edge of my trembling eyelids. He lunges forward, casting his shadow before him, imposing with a towering man-body that dwarfs my own.  I am meant to be afraid, but I am not. I don't care.
"Hit me, motherfucker," I taunt. I don't care, I don't want to care, I believe for a minute, hold my breath, wait. He backs away, violently wrenching himself and turning his back on me. He spins around again, this time pointing, jabbing his finger at me, connecting with the soft flesh just beneath my collar bone. I wince in pain, don't move back.
"You are disgusting," he spits at me, "fat, ugly, disgusting. No one would want you anyway."
"You're right," I whisper. "There isn't anyone, there never was, there never will be." I want to wrap myself up in layers of blankets, of skin, of silence. I just want him to go away. Stay away. He reaches for my hair, grabs it with his strong fingers and pulls. My chin juts up at a strange angle and he throws me down on the bed. My hands fly up to his hair, burrow in, wrap and tear with force. His knee presses down on my abdomen and I yank harder.
"Let go of me, whore," he growls through clenched teeth.
"Not until you let go of me," I respond, digging from deep inside of myself.
I wake up twisted in my sheets, there is nothing but the darkened room that used to be ours. I look around, disoriented. There is an alarm clock sounding, it is 4 am. I cast my eyes around, trying to parse the sound. My head feels foggy, stuffed with cotton. My mouth is dry and the whoosh of the furnace fills the silent air. I shiver. There is a small child-body curled around me, it burrows in for warmth.  The air smells of Eucalyptus and tar, sea salt and putrefaction. I disentangle myself, find the phone, turn it off, and I weep.

Day 4

It starts in darkness.  I want to steal a few more minutes from the day. Replay all the beautiful things that are mine, ours, yours. I can’t.  The parts of you that belong to me and not anyone else. Or the parts of me that belong to you. It is the same. There is not much, and it doesn’t matter anyway because there is a dog whining, pawing at my bedside, his fluffy ears pricked in anticipation. There is a large pile of laundry, some of it clean, some of it dirty, all too exhausting to address, but placed in front of the other more unpleasant tasks that lie ahead.  I don’t do any of them. I am entranced by the music. My accumulated history. I walk through the house, picking up stray pieces of paper, organizing piles of books, rearranging my overflowing spice racks. I want to tell you my entire life story, as if there were meaning in the words, as if in the telling there would be some release, some peace, some… something other than this devouring loneliness that splashes back up against the malecón of my outer limits, crashing around me and seeping in. When you invited me in to your universe, you apologized. You seemed to intuit that your love would tumble all my walls and crack my foundations. I’m floating in suspense, waiting to know if there is any way to rebuild myself stone by stone, filling in the gaps with freshly mixed cement, gentle words, ineffable emotions transmitted through touches, kisses, eyes that look up and search for me, and blink in recognition. I lay in bed, in darkness, trying hard to hold fast to those beautiful things, because the fear chases me, nips at my ankles, arms, breasts, with canine teeth and razor-sharp ferocity. She is pretty, I think. Tall, and blonde and thin and stylish and put together. She is sweet. Everything that I am not, that I could never be. And I accept her bony, beautiful handshake and I tell her my name, and she tells me hers, though I already know it. And she blinks like a doe in headlights, but does not know anything about anything about anything. Why? How? And I continue talking, burrowing in farther to the conversation with your friend, whose stories I know, but who knows nothing of me. He reaches out and touches my arm. I hold on to that lifeline, hold on for dear life. Let him wrap me up in his warmth, his extra clothing. In his approximation of you, to you. A safe simulacrum. A shield. I can’t look at her or talk to her, I can’t like her, I can’t know her, and so, I pretend that there is no one else but the two of us, and he plays along. Willing? Knowing? My guess is as good as yours. The danger passes, and she moves on, uninterested and unperturbed. And I know now that I am lost at sea, with no moorings, and the day flows by, and I am still in darkness, in bed, fighting the list of tasks that grows and grows.

Day 3

“Lucifer son of the morning, I'm going to chase you out of earth,” a clear voice pierces through the accumulations of sound, beats, thuds, crashes, bass strums. She is beautiful, with dreads down her back and  striking eyes. “I’m gonna put on the iron shirt…” I feel the words bubble up from some subterranean, pre-historic memory chest, and Max Romeo is scratchy, scratch scratching away on the beach in Paraíso. He had black curls and dark eyes and a dancer’s body, that gyrated in the hot night. He was never mine. There were hammocks and salty skin, and fish hungrily torn from the bone. Hunger like that only comes when you are young, or infatuated. Before you see the cracks. But tonight the music, oh. I can feel the rhythms seeping into my soul, rending each tight-gripped finger away from my heart one by one, so that it can be. Just be inside of myself and outside.  There is a freedom in such suspension, freedom and fear, and my hips are locked in unsuspecting perpetual motion, keenly tuned to just one thing: his hands moving, striking the skin of the drumhead, call and response. In that trance, the words fade out, her beautiful, sharp-edged song, the room full of people that I have never met, will never meet disappear, it is only the pulsing vibrations that anchor me, vibrations coming out of my mouth, out of every pore, they flow, like blood, like light. They wash over in waves, tantric, mystic, as if we were on the cusp of discovering some uncharted continent.  Then it is late. We walk in the cold under a clear desert sky, stars pulsing their own light-rhythms, centuries old, uninterested in our mortal plight. We belong to one another in deeper ways than we can admit. Impossible ways. The distant beats thump gently across the darkness.  “We can’t,” you say, as your lips contradict you once, twice, three times.

Day 2

She slips out of the room almost unnoticed.  There are voices tinkling with laughter, glasses of champagne clinking in the background. The world is a soft focus of lights, strung merrily around the room for the holidays.  It is too much. The light is overwhelming. No one notices the tight lipped smile as she refills glasses, gives hugs to the guests as they arrive. It really shouldn’t be this hard, she had thought, earlier, but then her mind was upstairs with the sullen woman-child that refused to come down the stairs.  No amount of calling, coaxing, coaching, goading. No amount of sweet implorations. It was useless.  She casts another look around the room before making her exit, sees that she is superfluous to the superficial interactions.  She glides down the long hallway, darkened to discourage explorations. The carpet bends and springs with her step. She draws herself into the darkened bathroom, does not turn on any light. She sits with her skirt hiked up around her hips and pees, and listens to her own breathing as it contrasts with the droplets of fluid she expels from her body. She bends forward, suddenly nauseous, and holds her head in her hands. It would be so much easier to just stay here, ensconced in darkness, she thinks. And two tears, uninvited, slip out, one sprung from each tear duct, rolling fat and hot down her cheeks.

Day 1

We pick our way over the rubble. Delicately, one foot gingerly placed before the next. Everything is the same dusty brown, if you don’t know how to look at it. But with each carefully crafted footfall, wending our way along the skirt of the mountain, we begin to notice the hundreds of shades, rocks crumbling red, bits of golden-silver mica reflecting back up at the sun, shale, side-ways, jutting out, revealing its undulating gray waves of sedimentary wisdom.  The saguaros dapple a landscape that on the contrary to being barren, seems to be ripe with little signs of life. Hidden life. Secret life. I hold my breath and then laugh in surprise as a quail, with its oddly shaped headdress darts alongside, back and forth, in the dry riverbed to our left.  You stop with a crunch and take my hand in yours. We are still. The sun is bright but the air is cool, not the unrelenting sauna of summer. I close my eyes and the warmth prickles my eyelids. Your lips gently rest on each lid, one at a time, and invite me to look back up into your face, your dark eyes and hair mixing with mine, melting together, cutting back swaths of time, as if we were suddenly children, not vaguely middle-aged parents.

“I’ve forgotten,” I say. Tears of some undefined emotion well up and catch me off guard.

“We all forget, sometimes,” you reply, and we continue walking, in silence.