I, Woman, Still Stand Among My Tribe

There I learned: from the edge of the rails, the ocean's roar, the slaps of cutting waves, she sailed across from Poland, a cold place, a hard place where she escaped from the camps. There her mother died, her sister and brothers, disappeared into the dark forests of blood, where bodies lay topside, no graves, no burial rites. I learned how to survive the generations of women, the insane, the insane asylum. How the hand of G-d and the belly of the Goddess births a people, a nation, and spreads them like salt across the world and gives them a life that is challenged by displacement, estrangement and isolation.

A death of a self that emerges from the ashes, of black hearts, dirty minds, and filthy souls that tear out hearts of families, children, mothers and fathers leaving the women empty in her womb, waiting for a seed to birth a new beginning. And then, after the tears, and grief, and swollen stomach of the dying young, after the stench of death and the screams from behind the jails, I see a tunnel of light. I see the entrance into an angelic realm. Gabriel blowing his horn, Miriam playing her tambourine. I am here to witness how life can distort us into suicidal thoughts, to hate ourselves. And then realize that it is the only life that we have and we have a choice. I am here to watch the thousands walk across the continents, at first one in spirit, then split apart like the atom and exploded into separate tribes, separate nations, separate countries. I am here to hear the call of the wild, the women waving from afar, waving to come home, come back.

My grandmother crossed the ocean in a pickle barrel. She left behind everything, every picture, fork, spoon, tear, touch and connection to her roots. My mother swam in her grief. The women of my family fought to stay alive, fought to find love, fought to forget that there was a past to their beginnings. But they couldn’t wipe it all out, couldn’t forget. They tried, with fancy cars, large diamonds plucked from the sky, gambling junkets and big brick houses with mezuzahs attached to the door, where they kissed G-d’s lips every time they entered the house.

This is their remembrance. The witness of a people who survived but didn’t know quite what it meant to be happy, or alive, or satisfied; an insatiable lust for life that never quite got quenched. I learned so much from these women, these people of the desert tribe, this world I live in because of their courage and valor. I witness being human, being afraid, being torn apart and sewn back together. I have no way of knowing anything except to see that I stand on the earth, sun shining, oaks swaying, moon behind the rim of the stars--and down below is me--watching, waiting, delivering the past from my womb to reinvent the secrets that are encoded in my cells.

One day you finally knew what you had to do and began

Inside the crevices, dug into the skin of my toes, my total being grasping for air. I strip myself of the perfect house, red, greens and blues, gold, dripping across the walls, pillows fluffed. Waiting for something to happen. Someone to show them how to fit into the material that lodges over the edges of the ends. I am lost. Who have I become?

I shut him out. Deleted him from my email and cell phone. I shut him out, his green, dreamy eyes and wide lips and sullen gaze. I cut him out, ripped him out of my subconscious, letting the soul blood fall across my face, tears of my yearning, my deeper self that holds all the paths, all the directions. We drive down the highway in his corvette, Stevie Wonder singing, for once in my life I have someone to love me, and we smiled thinking this true. But soon the car crashed, and the red paint peeled back and what was there was only rage and despair.

We held to the dream as long as we could, but we both became sick with paranoia, defended by abandonment and tortured by unrequited love. We tried to suck from the other, to fill the hole that danced together for so long. The emptiness so deep that only a sick stomach and anorexic heart was left behind to mourn and cry over. We drove down the highway, the ad signs, Marlboro cowboy, Mr. Clean his earring dangling, mops, spoons and dark roads to a nowhere diner, a cup of coffee waiting for me as I dream of the past, of what could have been, should have been.

But I sit in my neat little house with gorgeous blue cobalt walls, lonely, alone, without a destination. Deep down something calls to me, I think it is him, screaming out to me in the night to release his spirit. This makes no sense. I need to be free. But what is freedom? What is the bell that rings for me to turn and see what lies in the horizon without him?

But I am sick. I vomit from the grip I have on the past. I cannot let go. Find my own self in the reflection of the mirror. I can't see, I am blind. I am seeing only a ghost image, something my mother wanted me to be. A married woman. A woman clinging to her past, a woman scratching off the dust of the desert, afraid that the sand will bury me alive.

We drive the highway. I'm wearing a tight mini. Him a sweet white shirt and jeans. It was a perfect evening. Moon, stars, navy sky. The breeze swept us away. It seemed so real. So real. Then he left me. And I left myself, thinking he held the key to me. Where am I? Laying naked on the floor, battered and abused from the lack of self-love. I hate myself without him. Why can't I feel alive without him. This is wrong. Disgusting. I have to leave. I have to go. Shut him out. Turn off the light that holds his face in my hands. I have to leave. I have to...where will I go?

The road I once drove with him is no longer there. No longer smooth, sleek and seductive. It is gone. But deep down I hunger for the obscenity of that night. The way I melted into his eyes, the way he licked my cheeks, held my thigh. This touch that made me feel that I existed. That I was somebody. But I can't do that anymore. I can't think of him as my savior. My way of running away from myself. I hate myself when I am alone. Why? Because the self I thought would travel the world, eat sticky food in foreign places, write great manuscripts and kiss the ass of the David in Florence, the one who once thought the world was in the belly of my womb...really never existed.

I am just the little girl shaking in the back of a closet. Shaking and shivering, terrified that life will gobble me up and I will be left in ash, blown away by the wind from a hollow hole in the wall. I want to crawl into the hole, like a mouse, squeaking, small and insignificant...where am I? Who am I? How do I save myself from myself?

We drove down the highway all googly eyes, hot inside, wet between the legs. This was life. This is the way is supposed to feel, until the vagina dries up and skin scales, and the eyes wrinkle. We drive down the highway. I reach for the night and hold it in my palm. So much promise, so much wonderment, so mystery...

I felt very disturbed after last night. Something deep in me crawled out. Something hot and heavy. A yearning for that mystery. I want to slip away in it. This world is one dimensional. I want to get lost in my subconscious, individuation is the spiritual path. I am not sure what that means anymore.

There is no other. Just myself. Writing this to myself. Talking to myself. Who is that Self? Yet I yearn for another to hear this self that plays hide and seek.

I will make it...

What do I most need to know now about this situation?

I need to know that I am solid, that I am waiting, that I am balancing. I need to know that Ruby is integrating, coming into her body to receive her story. That I am waiting to come out as the writer to allow for the story to be revealed, to be received, to be allowed to exist. That I am ready to exist, be seen, be different among the same. That I am accepting myself, healing myself. That I am ready to go back into Ruby’s world and ground it to the earth. Whereas before it was in the ethers...she was still in the ethers with Marianne. That she and Marianne are ready to merge and come out from behind the veil of darkness and void and believe in their own story. That I can take the nitty gritty pieces that need to now come together. That I can give the time to complete and sew together the last threads. That I am ready to know that this is the story, this is the time. This is the place. That I wake up and write, what I can write, just like I did before. That I don’t have to rush, that I can give space and time and patience to this new level of completion. Patience, time and love. I can feel the fear in that. I don’t know why I fear it, I just do. Patience, time and love. That I have the time and That I will live to see this happen.

Death, illness and insanity...you’re going to make it...