Moonlighting as girl-child
what I've been reading/post solstice musings
hello from a cafe in chester, vermont, where anya has taken me for a brief field trip between making lunch and dinner at the field center. hello, too, from the end of a love affair, from on my knees on my bedroom floor with florida water on the solstice. from new sheets with no period stains, from the four books in my bag. hello from my smallest self, from my teenage self, from my heart after a brief visit with riley & james this week. we’re all here.
the longest day of the year was beautiful and I cried the whole time. I got a kick start the evening before and didn’t stop when I woke up or while zoe and I had breakfast. I cried while I cleaned my bedroom floors and while I packed my bags and when i got into my car to drive up to the field center. I took the back roads and wept until the moment I parked my car.
i’m grieving and I’ve been grieving my whole life but somehow more so the past few months. people, relationships, things, versions of this life, and also some intangible materials and emotions and responses I can’t name but I sense have gone on without me or run out, finished. and in their place, I am left with more of myself.
my child self: anxious, constantly weeping, wanting to act out, wanting to be responded to, feeling safer when I tend to her, feeling more excited to be vulnerable, feeling embarrassed.
my teenage self: raging and capable. wants eyes on her. is unimpressed with being misunderstood. asking for (demanding) more compassion, more love, more acknowledgment that she is, in fact, a person and not a vessel for others to project onto or store their reserves in.
and twenty-six-year-old me: putting massive question marks over whole parts of my being and personality that i feel deeply confused by. constantly reconstituting, having strange emotional and mental growing pains all over.
i am with myself. it is exhausting!
literature helps. i finally got my hands on Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker and the first section of the collection is called Murmurs. it’s forty-something pages, a few lines on each page with an abundance of negative space. at times it’s hard to place the speaker’s voice or rather their body and their surroundings until it’s not, then it is again. the piece moves with a slow cloudy urgency and i’ve gone back to these lines over and over again:
Moonlighting as girl-child russet fleshed/pink feathered first born, uplifted every claim assured — Gift given: three scarlet ibises hatched from the Sun. ... I've been given to mourning my gifts, faithfully aiding in deceptions of self, seeding forgery a ritual of fictitious charm thrown against me, stuck to the nape of the neck, barely visible, little lime green ticks. I've been praying on never-born idols, confusing the dream witht he face, the dace with the specter bulging open, a formless psyche, queued— There is no formal, no one familar body. ... All this singing set above me commands nothing. Like the good stone I wait and count the footsteps appraoching over the hillside I've hidden many men from sight, many deep holes shaped as people whenever they turn their back on me. No clue for a traitor. No symbol but your own to die on.
*
last night i laid in bed finishing Fransisco by Alison Mills Newman. before i could get myself to sleep i got stuck on this paragraph, from part three of the book, which is titled Images, Instead of Real Things, Made by the Money Mirage. the narrator (who is nameless), escapes into the bathroom in an attempt to end a conversation with a self-hating black male friend — she is replaying the way her friend has said “black women are strong” — as if it is a question with an obvious answer.
Black Women Are Strong?
i sat on the toilet in the bathroom— i've sat many a place with fransisco, or by myself or just sittin talkin to chris, or havin good time passin time like watchin a kid, or feelin me wantin a kid inside of me, now in this time of supreme unpracticality. life is blunt. and so is success. failure goes round and round forevea if you don't watch out. i shall rest. i shall rest from black people. i shall snooze. i shall breathe and not see the sight of white people. i shall fly. i shall fly into the pastel colored smudged on my fingertips from paintin too many dreams on canvas, but i shall hang them up so that they may be real. people dance, forget the decay of limpin love, only rememberin that we are human and conjurin up the will to be strong, to be good. children shall come of their own accord. lovas will leave each otha to love foreva, and if i am patient i will learn to wait and know when to fight.
i love so much about these passages — especially that they found me when i needed them. the whole of Murmurs, this passage in Fransisco, and most of the rest of the novel feel like dedications to the pursuit of life and living despite and against ____. at my own pace and rules with my own desires. they’re stubborn, clear, direct, and hopeful. ten toes down.
i’m sitting with these words as i shuffle through the rest of my cooking gig this weekend and as i look forward to being back home with my things and in the swing of my other job and my other work and my other selves.
i shall rest. all this singing set above me commands nothing. conjurin up the will to be strong, to be good. no symbol but your own to die on. i will learn to wait and know when to fight.