In the silence of consciousness I asked myself:
why did I reject my life? And I answer
Die Erde überwältigt mich:
the earth defeats me.
I have tried to be accurate in this description
in case someone else should follow me. I can verify
that when the sun sets in winter it is
incomparably beautiful and the memory of it
lasts a long time. I think this means
there was no night.
The night was in my head.
Louise Glück | from “Landscape”
looking beyond the horizon
where I dreamt
downtown middle america
grandpa’s house – now abandoned
I want to lay to rest what I saw and felt when I went home almost a month ago. A home that was a desperate sanctuary during those teenage years of economic struggle, maternal abandonment, and good old fashioned repressions of thought, body, and spirit. I feel compelled to honor those sharp memories of family, community, and those intimate transgressions between loyalty and independence.
I’m old enough to know better that I should not force this process of internalization. I desperately want to name these experiences and own them.
The endless landscape connected by bridges and resistance shaped my core sense of self, an embodied joy in knowing conscious disobedience yields revolutionary results. I may have adorned myself with fancy theory and identities that I have fought to name in my own words but the class I was born into, that binding agent of perspective, is unescapable.
For now, I distilled these details:
- my grandpa did buy a car with only silver dollars (two cars in fact!)
- my value was defined by others who did not exist (husband and child)
- survival is predicated on silent obedience of unquestioned rules
- broken sidewalks paved a geography of constrained despair
- if you look up and out, the clouds will guide you
- I’ve always been this way
- the consequences of choice matter and language continues to fail me
