Last gasps of light

Summer heat bleached out

Prudence of autumn

Sobering

 Grief is a memory of love

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8H1Wvg4uVsh7byG26

 Grief is a memory of love

 The most important, frightening feeling was her inability to place specific memories of recent events on that time period canvas they belong to.

The constant bobbing on the fraying ends of waves, washed out in the ambient humidity and bleached form, were sending garbled  messages in her brain. The meaning or the memory of it was there but could not be retrieved and recomposed as a whole yin and yang concept. It was as if the saltwater in that vast southern ocean was but one tear, at the same time holding an entire sea, but crying it out, could not build the sea whole again.   

It was as if the washing of the pain was a most finite  act, erasing even the memory of it.

That feeling softened and covered the emotional meaning of said encounters into a tattered, graying blanket. It felt like a match spent. 

A sulphureous last spark of light, giving up the intention of illumination of time. It signaled the beginning of fall, like the sense of a permanent change, of summer ending for good, of the sweet tiredness of a life lived and done.

Her preoccupation was to no longer to employ a variety of mnemonic devices that knit escaping bits of informations to a certain taxonomy, but rather a dispassionate observance of that exact inability. What is a memory if it is not attached to a meaning ? And  letting go of that discipline, the vigilance and worry, the setting up arsenal to fight the worst possible outcome, was a fresh new territory that rearranged her judgment apparatus in two simple buckets: here and gone, in the moment and eternal, sentient and soulless absence, doing and being in time.

It was freeing and fearsome at once. The Ying and Yang of a conscious mind.

Like facing the Scylla and Charybdis passage, the prospect of her brain’s obliteration, the horrifying loss of existence as she knew was both pity and relief. It meant that  while tinkering with the scales of values,  could also mean an end of the working order of things, being unable of having to know and appraise them was a means to an end indeed.

Her usual Christianized value abandoning judgement while offering unmerited kindness was the surest  homing instinct of connection , a system that  surely had  started to malfunction: aspiring to be a Scheherazade of racial and class imposture herself, was no longer a feasible, sensible plan. That could only work if her cognitive abilities  would be maintained  and now, with that fading , it would reveal to others the empty shell she was becoming. Worse of, maybe she was an impostor all along.

What to do? How to swim against the current? How to scale a peak?  Can one  fly without wings? If only wishing it hard enough could accomplish relief  and presumed  safety.

The gift was of a kind she has never dreamed of or even thought of being worthy of: a buffet of imposed upon social interactions, all in a glass fishbowl of living, bilateral, mutual voyerism, for the entirety of two weeks.

 A smorgasbord of routines so unlike the girdled, thin flatness of routines back home, all unfolding onstage of a majestic theater of nature and man-made luxury, that when one ended the other overlapped  and so on and so on.

 Τhose routines were as much as guards of the norms, as the safe shell- escaping  a cruel, hostile, foreign for ever world. The ones at home, proffering comfort and contempt as an inherited not chosen or cultivated talent, were less sinister in her estimation now: safe sheep, penned in, the wolves at bay and only the occasional bleating betraying the ennui and pathos. Rendered harmless almost, by repetition, of a near lifetime sentence.. repetition as the sheep-guard dog of disarray.

These new routines were not only uncomfortable, boringly inane but also decisively testing the balance of hierarchy holding all this weird social experiment together.

This experiment was a gift: not since thrusted into the life of a college campus living, at a  naive age of eighteen, without familiarity of the ropes of social acrobatics, such inadequacy was felt to the core: a survival by any means available was the script handed down.

Back to 58 years ago, the stoning incident:

Και αυτή η πριγκίπισσα που τ α ξέρει όλα μου την δίνει τόσο στα νεύρα γιατί είναι τέτοια υποκρίτρια - οπίσθια γλύφει της βασίλισσας περισσότερο από όλος και ποιος θα υπό χρέωσει  τον άλλο με μεγαλύτερα αγκάθια και προσβολές που παρουσιάζοντας πως  είναι εξυπνάδες 

Έτσι και γίνεται η διαλογή με την στρωματωση των επιφανειακών σχέσεων που ουσιαστικά δεν είναι τίποτε άλλο έκτος από μια  αέναη  προσπάθεια για επιβίωση που είναι και τόσο εξαντλητική όσο και άσκοπη. Αν ο καθένας ήταν πιο ήπιος και ευτυχής και χωρίς την επίδραση του αλκοόλ η και τα διαφορά παραισθησιογόνα η και όλα  μαζί, νομίζω θα είμασταν πιο αυθεντικοί στις προσπάθειες να « συνκοληθουμε» . αλλά όσο προσπαθώ να γεφυρώσω το αγεφύρωτο , που είμαστε από- τοσο διαφορετικές κουλτούρες και κόσμους τόσο πιο πολύ τα βάζω με τον εαυτό μου που ήμουν αφελής, ανυπεράσπιστη και αθώα και χωρίς ευφυο κεφάλαιο . Έτσι δεν το κερδίζουμε το παιγνίδι της αφομοίωσης και της προσάρτησης. Ούτε και την φιλία της Μαρίας η την ετερόκλητη ζήλεια της απέραντης αγάπης του μπαμπά της. Και ίσως αυτή η τυχαίο συναγωγή να μην ήταν τοσο τυχαία, ίσως να ήταν ένα άλλο ζεύγος που , περιμένοντας ότι εμείς θα είχαμε τραβήξει την συμμετοχή μας , το τυχερό λαχείο θα πήγαινε σ ο αυτούς , η και στην χειρότερη περίπτωση, ήταν όλο ένα πείραμα, να δείξει η βασίλισσα την υποταγή διαφόρων ιθαγενών

, και σκλάβων και ανεπιθύμητων για να αποδείξει και να ενισχύσει την επιρροή στο πλήθος της ιερέας ακολουθίας πως μπορούσε να είναι και τόσο μεγαλόψυχη και τόσο ευγενική στην ελεημοσύνη της. Η , ακόμη μια εκδοχή, η παρά κατάθεση για τον εραστή της , να σου κάνω μια ακόμη χάρη, να μην είναι η τράπουλα σου λειψή από ισοσταθμίση και να έχεις κι εσύ ένα κόκκαλο το ίδιο σαν εσένα να γλύφεις.

Και τώρα γίνομαι κακιά και μίζερη όπως με ξέρεις, ένα παράταιρο πλάσμα γεμάτο ανεπάρκεια και καχυποψία. Αλλά και το παραμύθι πρέπει να συνεχιστεί γιατί η γιαγιά πρέπει να το κλώσει σαρίν υφαντό, να το σκεπάσει με την πράσινη μάλλινη κουβέρτα πάνω σου όπως τα χρόνια τα παλιά, πάνω στο άσπρο σιδερένιο κρεβάτι , με τον Σταχτοπεπελο και τα τέτοια , τον Κοντορεβυθουλη, την βασίλισσα του χιονιού και την αλεπού με τα ξυπνά σταφύλια. 

Η γιαγιά που ποτέ δεν σε συμμάζεψε με τα σάπια τα λεμόνια, που δεν σε αγάπησε άγρια και καταπιεστικά, αλλά και που ήταν η παντοτινή σου κατα προς οιμασιν

 Coast

When I finally reached the shore

Broken mast and all

I could not count the sand

For surviving was renaming it all

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Marc Twain 

I DON’T BUY IT

 The oil at the surface

The merely adequate raft  I am sailing on

Through life’s monsoons

Is but a random cork and wick on a grave’s votive candle

Its feeble light keeping company to the departed 

Along with the survivors’ remembrance 

As simple a fate gifted me a gliding ease to endure

This journey

Me, the anointed one, spared from drowning in the waters beneath 

My oil rising to the top

 I Painted Myself Into A Corner

A chokehold is now the winnowing of escape routes

Anxiety is even running out of breath

No matching suggestions for relief offered 

To the inevitable fruitless of pursuit’s attainment

Old age is not for ninnies 

And dying is not painlessly obtained 

“Some day soon, you will meet me

As you arrive at this crossroads” she said with sorrowful resign

 Pandora’s box inheritance for future

A gift I did not expect, none other but

The effort and the desired end

A mere random match 

 Mon petit  bonheur 

Survive the grey

Force them flowering quince sticks to bloom

Light all the frankincense candles

The public house of worship is now

Your Ms Tittlemouse  abode cut-out

Winter’s reckoning is counting

Your days remaining, as much as the joy of rebirth

Bookmarking your emotions with all the stuffing of a life

Well lived