Once the Romans believed that dawn was the ghost hour, where souls lost to dust and hubris rose to the sun’s salvation. Will I see her then? What decides an ending? Is it anything like this? Were we ever anything more than just double-helix strands passed down? Of mere cilia and sinew – I wish she hadn’t taught me that pain is a gift. I wish I hadn’t inherited her war. Am I the General now?
“Searching to belong is the final quest of war.
The final drum blow, that single remaining thought
as the arrow strikes.”
I've done my best to integrate. I've fit into cracks between walls and marriages, in the marrow of bone, and spit shared on lips, Echoing, and seeking recognition in the eyes of my beholders. Through a mirror, in a church, in the dark part of a stomach. Seeing, knowing, wanting, holding. Silently wishing to be known without an ultimatum. Gripping onto cutlery at the dinner table with white knuckles– steady, steady, steady, now. Because even if known in pieces — known bruised — felt as gracious as the caress of a mother’s hands.
“You accuse me of murder;
and yet you would,
with a satisfied conscience,
destroy your own creature.”
But I am that snag in the gilt thread weaved through the line of the family, suspired to be mended. I can fling out, spit in the altar cup, but there will always be the return. The reckoning, the revenge – perhaps even, the idea of reconciliation. We often don't realise where we belong until the path to it has been lost. The arc of things is always towards the end. All bows bend towards goodbye.
It’s within the seed taking its own, ships dissolving in the harbours pulse, bones from the pond, coins tarnished in a pocket, remote languages fading, grave treasure taken and displayed, the last draw of breath falling into place before a song concludes. It’s two thumbs dragging over two closed eyes, that awfully human head. I had a patience no one would believe, an aptitude for silence as the heart idled.
I was a lighthouse on the coastal skein of my M(other)land. How could I deny her what she’d hoped to suffer, seeing what it was her hand had done; letting go with one, holding with the other. Not a memory now, a ghost.
To the obscure mechanism of our heart we are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what gods and angels lie underneath the threshold of our perception. We do not live in reality, we live in our paradigms, our habituated graces, our illusions that we share through love what we call reality, but the true reality of our condition is forever invisible to us.
I thought I knew everything there was to know.
The intricate crinkles and coils of the heart were nothing more but ripples in a current that strode toward the hindrance of reason; once the heart lays stagnant, the rest of us grow around it like nature spreading over the fallen footstones of a crumbling ruin—
Primordial glory, suddenly derivable.
Truth reveals itself like a language without tongue. Those who spilled love as wine from a barrel in the chest are unhearing to its elusive consonants. To love is to bare yourself like a fish laying belly-up against the blade of a knife, thinking it will meet the sweet caress of a loving hand. Cue the spillage of the organs. Will I keep her, perhaps in a jar? Poured over ice, with formaldehyde? Or will I wrap her entrails in paper and dispose of them? Being by nature little more than winged insects and gatherers of decaying matter, the only thing that actually lies close to our heart is the desire to bring someone home that makes us forget about the fate we have signed.
Oh, how I was unknown to her. But how could I hope she’d find what she never looked for? She’d learned too late how it takes a dissection of the ribcage to view the heart and let it be known. She might never learn how it takes being known to be saved, until—
“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
We are unfathomably captured by the obsession to know and, in this doomed hang-fire of death we only love to get to know ourselves through the eye of another. The axiom; no heart understands it can be understood, and wraps itself in thorns until the hour of finality, forgetting what it needs in tenebrae.
All her mental glass. Her mind is mad. My mind is mad. Our minds are uterine. Iron is the rule. Steel begets steel. Cruelty begets cruelty. Madness begets madness. Clytemnestra and Elektra, bitter with the metallic rage of suppressed love.
I will keep bandaging my own scraped knees, as I’ve always done, as I always will.
But who will push me to the pavement now?
I beg you.
In my best behaviour, I am really just like you.
I beg you.
You scold me for being sentimental.
I beg you.
You tell me to clean my knees.
I beg you.
You refuse to meet my eye.
I beg you.
You refuse to hold me.
I beg you.
Why didn’t you ever hold me?
I beg you.
Why do you refuse to be my mother?
I beg you.
Omnia pro Matria.
Omnia pro Matria.
Omnia pro Matria.
I loved the ending, so powerful! I’ve been reading your stuff and now I feel like we have to be friends lol
beautiful