I was surrounded by people who loved me, I realized. The day before, I had a twisted dream. Not in a malicious sense, but the fact that dreams before birthdays where supposed to be immersed in loveliness, and sleepiness, and easiness. Yet I had dreamt about children ochre skin and fleshy lips and eyes drenched in anguish, with raving fires and arid deserts before the trails of their thin, calloused feet. I embraced them, just like I would to my five year old sister, but I didn't feel the flesh, the flesh of love, the flesh of wooden floors and cement houses, asados for dinners and kisses for goodbyes. I felt the grieving of their slender bones against my chest, their meager starving for comfort, their humble strengths from their decaying bodies trying to relieve from me some kind of healing, and the gentle thuds, like raindrops, very subtle in their wake, barely there but reminding you that they were still beating, that very slow thud of their tiny little hearts, little organs that would stop before their time, that would be buried before they learned to write, to read, to live. Little organs, poor little organs, poor little hearts. I felt them closer to my humanity than my own flesh and blood. And we were crying, all crying, our salty, feeble tears mixing among the aridity of the earth of which Yemala had long ago forgotten. And I woke up, with my stomach churning, with my eyes a little reddened, very confused, with this thirst inside of my chest amplified all over my mind like an infection.
I looked around me, the stars where giggling over my hair and my lover was to my right, my grandfather to my left, my aunts and parents across of me and my grandmother further away. My grandmother, Abubu, with her wrinkled hands and her azure eyes, who still lived with ardour. My lover and his coffee skin and his starless hair, as I always like to call it. I could read the words on my cards. I had a little sister who's little organ beats like summer drums. I had friends with strong bodies and even stronger minds and hearts.
I am so lucky.
Now I have to make someone else as lucky as me.Labels: writing
POSTED BY little girl blue ON Friday, September 30, 2011 @ 5:51 PM
