Mapping Life through Repression

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Spring rolled around and it occurred to me that I hadn't been home in two years. Two years in a self-focused, spinning swirl, some might call it a feel-sorry for myself depression, but there’d really been no conscious choice in the sing-song way, a broken clown, sticky, music-box sound, of what had been shoved down by a fourth grade girl came creeping up behind her.

Two years ago, was a year in which her life filled itself simultaneously with good and bad, the one she loved had flown away, dandelion seed, back to Detroit, her ears rotting, leaking and aching again just as they had when she was a child, and her first full-time, school gig since forking over thousands for a degree. Finally, she didn’t qualify for food stamps!

She’d been left teaching school in the town her gay-hairdresser-friend, David, called Warren-tucky, the values there, even though only eight miles across the Young’s Bay bridge being of the blue collared, uneducated, cabin-dwelling natives who’d been the last in the state to remove their Indian regalia, rename their sports team, forced by some government hand-of-white-God-gone-devil sitting with gallant mallet across a span of slue. They interpreted this forced renaming as a cowboy/Indian war between family values, white pride, a way of living out basic duck-dynasty-dreams in the hinterlands of America (it wasn’t their fault the Indians were drunks)! The end came through a shrinking of the world, everyone in everyone else’s business, jet flights they’d never taken either, though there wasn’t a one who didn’t have a large smart phone protruding from tight, bedazzled-butt-jeans, or peaking from ever-tough, camo and Gunderson chest-pocket’s.

I tried to reason with them. "If I get into bed with you guys, I lose my clients." Clients not as people outside of me, but in a sense yes, a smearing as in dreams where there is more than one meaning, each image having multiple connotations and I’d learned it cheapened the second image when one truth was vehemently lassoed.

She had to think about the young, sixth grade minds, most she knew weren’t going to retain any of what she said, but she owed it to the client inside of her own head, the part of her who had suffered all of these years under the tyranny of the establishment and the teacher who held her in for recess the same way in which she today saw this new, necklace-wearing man from Colorado across the playground, just beyond the three trailer’s (modular), used as classrooms, allowing the same, long-legged, pony-tailed, brunette power of his class.

She, responsible every day, for holding open the door for her classmates. She undoubtedly being told she was beyond her years, meant to be in charge, to be his special helper, in passing out papers, in burying scenes, in kissing mushy and coffee smelling lips when the rest were dumbly kicking red, rubber balls along the wet asphalt. Reasonably, she may be watching too, her classmates, from a window, while others are obliviously screaming under the clouds?

So, yes, she did try to reason with the administrators who believed all should come from a twenty-year-old textbook, that children weren’t meant to be heard, but all of their voices screamed through her head, the effect of which, swirled into a sticky storm to lift the decaying lid from a box of shaded visions she couldn’t decipher from dark dreams or votes of saving-grace reason that instruct children it’s better to own blame than risk the slaps of pointing out the emperor has no clothes.

First, it was her memory that went. She read all before the lesson about the fertile crescent or how cells divide and then again see the young teacher coming in from recess, patting the girl, putting his arm around her, blowing his whistle loudly at the other children and then letting her triumphantly hold that heavy, iron door and all would be out of her mind.

And, there’d be this feeling of lice on her scalp, a jittery, sick feeling in her chest as if she’d not slept in days and had swallowed a pot full of black coffee. From someplace, far back in the tunnel, there was a ghost, a shade that wasn’t quite making itself known. A sensation similar to when you smell something that reminds you of something distinct from your childhood, but you don’t know what it is, honey or tar? As if a prior-to-memory part of you recalls in its DNA a time prior to this body, a word that conjures memories that are like the strings of dreams we can’t quite tug into the morning light, just a day left, with a haunting and ambiguous feeling, “Wisteria, wisteria, wisteria….” that was one such phrase for her.

She left the building every day, scarcely throwing books, papers and heavy teachers’ bag into the passenger seat when the tears would start, like rivers of lifetimes spilling out some unknown poisons. By the time Happy Holiday’s was strung across Main Street in tinseled depression, she made up her mind she’d have to resign; this place was not safe even if it meant walking away from the Master’s degree.

Photograph: Young's Bay Bridge

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You always blow my mind! I can see the place, the people, the ignorance, the trauma if being stuck in a place that does not fit.

It is always such a pleasure to ready your freewrites!!

Thank you so much for reading and commenting and for the prompt's, @mariannewest!


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It seems to me that this woman is still merging with the children, to whom she seems to attest a rather miserable life. Isn't this compassionate suffering rather an illusion?

The indulgence in the past smells, the passage through doors, the wandering around like an escape from oneself?

It is said of depressives that they suffer until they have acknowledged their way, until they surrender to what they - created by themselves, by whom else? - seems to be preordained? Some see spirits, they have providences, they really get very very sick and only when they give up, when they have reached the bottom, they can ascend again and lead a really challenging existence. In the service of others. Depression is a strong force. People do get it wrong to want to get rid of it instead of looking into it with another eye. The real one.

What they seem to loathe, what they mostly have difficult memories of, is that which could make them strong. She who says "no" to the strongest in herself says "yes" to the weakest at the same time.

She can perish from it or use it for herself and others. Not many people follow such a call, in most cases it's also a simple imagination and a fantasy, which is played out in films and dramas and to which one clings identity addicted.

But some times, who knows, there seem to be such calls in real. Maybe she is one of them.

Giving herself to the world is not losing herself.

But for this, the right time has to come. She cannot have duties of close ones, as she chooses to be on guard all the time. Probably the hardest and the best way in a sense.

And, the darkest of films, negatives shown through with projector light, become beautiful art.
Thank you for viewing~

thank you for inspiring:)

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