I have been laid awake for what seems like hours between images flashing in my head of dreams last night, dilemmas and challenges of this dimension, processing my life, as it were, turning over in my mind, what story is true, is my life really a failure, imagining in what ways it can not be true at this moment in time, And, thinking of what might be great first lines of my next book. This ends when I stare at my turtle painting which has proven to be some sort of totem and diviner of how much i need a supernatural analyst to tell me who i am and decipher my hand- how it is i paint, seemingly childish imagery and yet, over time, the most crowded, bizarre and evident melange of persons and spirits emerge. Out of this revelry, the last sentence that makes me write is this: "I seem to live in a place until I have spent and exhaust all of its relationships and then move on to the next place or vista; just this time seems there is no more places for me to go to, the last having been so small and insular it has not given forum or berth to new shoots or flourishings. so it would seem, i am stuck, were it not for facebook.
In a few days I will be forced to live with someone I would never have landed myself with; a clear proof of my total impotence to direct control or protect my life. I place that period and realize perhaps it is the universe setting me up for some good omen, an unexpected surprise just by that unsavory unfolding. So i take pause for what I dont know, and try to be graceful
It is clear I am in a season of life, ancestors, history, universe breaking me open, a dismantling of all my old rules and preferences by my inability to adhere to them. I always prized living alone and solitary in my spaces the way i wanted them to be. But in the midst of where I am, i am saved, covered from being on the streets homeless but cant help but think, cant shake the evidence that i am surrounded by people who think nothing of me, nothing of my capabilities, potentials, who have no vision, are full of envy, jealousy and small minded pettiness. It stifles my breath, my energy, my wings. Somehow.
But I also take full personal responsibility. I wonder where it is, what it is in my life that I made a wrong decision, called a wrong choice, refused the wrong spirit, spurned the wrong lover that has caused me this ongoing tragedy of suppressed energy, and suffocated ambition, a barren uterus, despite its pregnancies and apparent clockwork machinery of fertility, I have not been able to birth anything of my hand, heart, head or mind...not business, not entrepreneurship.
And my social life is nonexistent. Just me myself and I. I wake up this morning wanting more than anything someone to commune with, a woman who has traveled, lived, dusted, been broken and yet rose back up like a phoenix, one wise by storms yet still full of grace and loveliness. There is none like that around me. The people that exists, are all family and relatives. All who find glee in listening to your sorrows and hearing stories that regale their empty cycles of time, but none who can really feed or help you. I decided I would not spend my time with people like that any longer. Nourishing their haterade for you, as it were, in some kind of way.
I have not been good to people it would seem. I do know I learned early not to trust people. I think perhaps. sadly, i just know to use them. But somehow i write that for the possibility of its truth and my blind side but it does not ring true. I am not that. I think that has been an unintended effect and outcome. But not the intention. What I have done i think is move through life as if only I existed and mattered. I lived life and made choices as if nothing else was of consequence' as if there was no consequence ever. I propelled by my abilities and survival skills for America from one place to another. And academics proved to be the easy highway to ride that rig until it crashed. At the terminal degree, in a field that was insular, perhaps, international economic development, that worked primarily, strongly on personal relationships.friendships, network and contacts. And I eschewed all and sundry on that account all through life. The folks I was most and continually connected to could do nothing for me. The folks who could are the ones I dismissed. I am writing coarsely and broadly, just trying to get it out, trying to get at truth, but i am not sure. It is just that life is no longer working , it stopped a long time ago., and I am just here wondering how and why and what happened.
But in the midst of that, wondering how I might make something out of the disaster. How I might continue. Writing is the thing I do and have done throughout my solitary confinement of life and its disappointments. So how to keep writing now, given my age and maturity and what I think i understand. I just think of a book a memoir of some kind. So I was pondering the first line.
In macro, it would appear as though from my art, paintings and photography- with writings, poetry, essays, this blog and my facebook pages, my cooking my interest in women and health that I crate Content.. What to do with it and how to have it make me a living and how to get it to resurrect my spirit and character is my current preponderance.While at the same time to learn the lessons of the season, To be content of where i stand and am; as uncomfortable and untenable as I find and construct it, this is what I did create, how and why possible, I am totally flummoxed, but to accept be graceful, accepting and gentle with it, comes to me/
It is indeed a deep mystery. all the pieces. this woman with a phd unemployed and unemployable? overqualified for the earth she stands on, totally alienated from all who knows her, she being seemingly of a content, character, mind and sensibility of outer planets and ancient creatures. Struggling to a climate in this stratosphere. One that is killing her slowly as it preserves her for that eventuality. That is what it feels like/ that is how i would describe the whole of it --as much as i can. This Sunday May 27, 2012
And so many have such ill and mixed feelings for me toward me that i find it a bafflement. My highschool boyfriend who i spoke to a few months ago, attempted to ream me out, he clearly has been holding much on his chest since the `1980s when we got together and were in high school. He told me he felt as though I thought he was not good enough for me./ I have to tell you that it was true. My father felt it. I felt it when I left to go to college, for I cringed when we tried to visit each other and I could not stand him to touch me. I have looked over my life and wondered how it is I have always chosen the wrong men. Men who did not love me, did not like me, wanted nothing of me, but what it was, the time, the interlude, men who tried to break me and bring me down. And I dont have the ugly stories most women have with men, so can you imagine? From Gerardo Myrie who was just a pothead football player who did not graduate and refused to take me to my prom. To Andre Moxie in college who tried to tell me I had a belly when mine was fat, who never claimed me as his girlfriend though we were together for over two years who could not provide a word of salve when my brother died. I write this stuff and I think what complete braindead and soulless people i have always encountered who were my friends until some excruciating experience show them to be the spirits they really were. To Mark Edwards III, the Philadelphia mayor's assistant who i had a brief affair with and got pregnant and he indicated the baby was not his. To my next and last boyfriend, Lazarre Potier, a Haitian development economist like myself whom i met as we embarked towards Africa for the first time. We met and it was sparks flying passion and el caribe dancing...I loved him. But when we got over there he cheated on me with a 'colored' (light and bright), and I got pregnant and he did not want . And I having the resolve never to bring a child its father did not want and not having the strength as I have now or the core content character and capacity as I do today, feared for what kind of mother, parent, protection and love i could provide that child --- not having the family and functional unit I was born to with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, I aborted. Deep pains. I can only look back and see what utter curs and cads these devils roaming were. And yet i have made peace with it, with them, talking, relating, recapturing moments with them through time, but it is not without knowing they were not good for me Meant nothing good toward me. but that has been my life and choices. The more I write the more i see a theme. Always seeking succour and salve among those and in places that will kill me. I am writing here and my mind hearkens back to Ant BItes. I am writing still Ant Bites, a book i attempted at fiction but was just my experiences as a returning national to Trinidad. to a place i loved and had so many stories and myths about its history, my identity and patrimony, only for it to really be a place that was killing me slowly, stealthily by insect poisoning undetected by its medical professionals.. Hence the title Ant Bites. The smallest most inconsequential thing can kill you
9:00am CBS Sunday Morning Starts.
In a few days I will be forced to live with someone I would never have landed myself with; a clear proof of my total impotence to direct control or protect my life. I place that period and realize perhaps it is the universe setting me up for some good omen, an unexpected surprise just by that unsavory unfolding. So i take pause for what I dont know, and try to be graceful
It is clear I am in a season of life, ancestors, history, universe breaking me open, a dismantling of all my old rules and preferences by my inability to adhere to them. I always prized living alone and solitary in my spaces the way i wanted them to be. But in the midst of where I am, i am saved, covered from being on the streets homeless but cant help but think, cant shake the evidence that i am surrounded by people who think nothing of me, nothing of my capabilities, potentials, who have no vision, are full of envy, jealousy and small minded pettiness. It stifles my breath, my energy, my wings. Somehow.
But I also take full personal responsibility. I wonder where it is, what it is in my life that I made a wrong decision, called a wrong choice, refused the wrong spirit, spurned the wrong lover that has caused me this ongoing tragedy of suppressed energy, and suffocated ambition, a barren uterus, despite its pregnancies and apparent clockwork machinery of fertility, I have not been able to birth anything of my hand, heart, head or mind...not business, not entrepreneurship.
And my social life is nonexistent. Just me myself and I. I wake up this morning wanting more than anything someone to commune with, a woman who has traveled, lived, dusted, been broken and yet rose back up like a phoenix, one wise by storms yet still full of grace and loveliness. There is none like that around me. The people that exists, are all family and relatives. All who find glee in listening to your sorrows and hearing stories that regale their empty cycles of time, but none who can really feed or help you. I decided I would not spend my time with people like that any longer. Nourishing their haterade for you, as it were, in some kind of way.
I have not been good to people it would seem. I do know I learned early not to trust people. I think perhaps. sadly, i just know to use them. But somehow i write that for the possibility of its truth and my blind side but it does not ring true. I am not that. I think that has been an unintended effect and outcome. But not the intention. What I have done i think is move through life as if only I existed and mattered. I lived life and made choices as if nothing else was of consequence' as if there was no consequence ever. I propelled by my abilities and survival skills for America from one place to another. And academics proved to be the easy highway to ride that rig until it crashed. At the terminal degree, in a field that was insular, perhaps, international economic development, that worked primarily, strongly on personal relationships.friendships, network and contacts. And I eschewed all and sundry on that account all through life. The folks I was most and continually connected to could do nothing for me. The folks who could are the ones I dismissed. I am writing coarsely and broadly, just trying to get it out, trying to get at truth, but i am not sure. It is just that life is no longer working , it stopped a long time ago., and I am just here wondering how and why and what happened.
But in the midst of that, wondering how I might make something out of the disaster. How I might continue. Writing is the thing I do and have done throughout my solitary confinement of life and its disappointments. So how to keep writing now, given my age and maturity and what I think i understand. I just think of a book a memoir of some kind. So I was pondering the first line.
In macro, it would appear as though from my art, paintings and photography- with writings, poetry, essays, this blog and my facebook pages, my cooking my interest in women and health that I crate Content.. What to do with it and how to have it make me a living and how to get it to resurrect my spirit and character is my current preponderance.While at the same time to learn the lessons of the season, To be content of where i stand and am; as uncomfortable and untenable as I find and construct it, this is what I did create, how and why possible, I am totally flummoxed, but to accept be graceful, accepting and gentle with it, comes to me/
It is indeed a deep mystery. all the pieces. this woman with a phd unemployed and unemployable? overqualified for the earth she stands on, totally alienated from all who knows her, she being seemingly of a content, character, mind and sensibility of outer planets and ancient creatures. Struggling to a climate in this stratosphere. One that is killing her slowly as it preserves her for that eventuality. That is what it feels like/ that is how i would describe the whole of it --as much as i can. This Sunday May 27, 2012
And so many have such ill and mixed feelings for me toward me that i find it a bafflement. My highschool boyfriend who i spoke to a few months ago, attempted to ream me out, he clearly has been holding much on his chest since the `1980s when we got together and were in high school. He told me he felt as though I thought he was not good enough for me./ I have to tell you that it was true. My father felt it. I felt it when I left to go to college, for I cringed when we tried to visit each other and I could not stand him to touch me. I have looked over my life and wondered how it is I have always chosen the wrong men. Men who did not love me, did not like me, wanted nothing of me, but what it was, the time, the interlude, men who tried to break me and bring me down. And I dont have the ugly stories most women have with men, so can you imagine? From Gerardo Myrie who was just a pothead football player who did not graduate and refused to take me to my prom. To Andre Moxie in college who tried to tell me I had a belly when mine was fat, who never claimed me as his girlfriend though we were together for over two years who could not provide a word of salve when my brother died. I write this stuff and I think what complete braindead and soulless people i have always encountered who were my friends until some excruciating experience show them to be the spirits they really were. To Mark Edwards III, the Philadelphia mayor's assistant who i had a brief affair with and got pregnant and he indicated the baby was not his. To my next and last boyfriend, Lazarre Potier, a Haitian development economist like myself whom i met as we embarked towards Africa for the first time. We met and it was sparks flying passion and el caribe dancing...I loved him. But when we got over there he cheated on me with a 'colored' (light and bright), and I got pregnant and he did not want . And I having the resolve never to bring a child its father did not want and not having the strength as I have now or the core content character and capacity as I do today, feared for what kind of mother, parent, protection and love i could provide that child --- not having the family and functional unit I was born to with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, I aborted. Deep pains. I can only look back and see what utter curs and cads these devils roaming were. And yet i have made peace with it, with them, talking, relating, recapturing moments with them through time, but it is not without knowing they were not good for me Meant nothing good toward me. but that has been my life and choices. The more I write the more i see a theme. Always seeking succour and salve among those and in places that will kill me. I am writing here and my mind hearkens back to Ant BItes. I am writing still Ant Bites, a book i attempted at fiction but was just my experiences as a returning national to Trinidad. to a place i loved and had so many stories and myths about its history, my identity and patrimony, only for it to really be a place that was killing me slowly, stealthily by insect poisoning undetected by its medical professionals.. Hence the title Ant Bites. The smallest most inconsequential thing can kill you
9:00am CBS Sunday Morning Starts.
No comments:
Post a Comment