The Quiet of Chatter.

The wind tears through clothing, biting raw skin, a rash of goose bumps breaking out across layers of wool, ice picks pricking swollen cheeks, nostrils stuck shut with frozen snot.

Waiting for the reprieve of winter takes on a whole new meaning when you’re unable to breath, your lungs suddenly solid with the vapors of ice.

On the bus, everyone is a rendition of a wild animal bearing its winter coat: the mink on the left, dark and slick, black eyes peering from behind layers of Lycra fur made by the poor indigenous people of a country that’s never experienced weather quite like this; the bear, his beard thick with frost, his paws pulling a worn wooly toque over sad, experienced eyes, feet dressed in boots too big save the three pairs of socks; the bird, always at least one, too proud to hide its feathers but obviously shivering in its poor choice of stylish jacket and delicate shoes.

I, smudging fog from the frames of my glasses, unzip the first layers of down, loosen the wool around my neck, pull one then two pairs of mittens from warm and wet hands and settle into my seat for the long ride into dark morning.

The snowflakes fall fat, slow – almost apologetic in the way they drift softly in an attempt to excuse themselves from the shoulders of passers-by. Pardon me, oops, excuse me, they’d say in swirling whispers.

The winter dampens the noise of the city, cushions the chaos of rude traffic, softens the belch of industry, hushes businessmen yelling into cellphones. Slowly, the city is padded with the Styrofoam crunch of packed snow under tires, underfoot. With no rush to be anywhere in particular, traffic crawls, creeping down side streets, the rumble of engines lost to white noise.

With every sound suddenly so dampened, the world moving so slowly, I can finally hear my own thoughts.

Sometimes I get these words stuck in my head – just one at a time. I repeat them over and over and over again and again not because I want to but because my brain gets stuck like a sports car high centered in a plow bank of snow – a constant loop of letters spinning without gain or change, the same song stuck on repeat.

Calculated. I am calculated. I calculate moves carefully, chess board strategy – sequencing a chain of reactions. Calculated gets stuck up there, I can touch the letters – round and soft, interjected with sharp swords – swift and strategic in their placement. The word talks in my mind, tries on different voices, speaks different languages: prémédité; kalkuliert; calculado; gerekende. The voices, they’re hurried sometimes – in a rush to spit out letters too bitter to keep in. But sometimes, sometimes the voices are slow, carefully forming each letter, slurring them into one another. Caall-kul-ltd.

The squirrel gets on board on Jasper and 116, its cheeks full of saved food, its coat shivering with the chill of winter wind, eyes glassy, nervous, darting back and forth from door to window to the bear’s face, who’s drowsy with hunger.

Loss. This word is hissed sometimes up there – serpent and slithering, a flicking tongue, four letters, a gentle start to a slick, slow end. Loss – a forgiveness of something once held dear, letting go, a loose kite string floating higher and higher, or a treasure sunk deep in high water, filtering below the surface lower and lower until nothingness – black, murky, the treasure of memory. Perte; verlust; perda; het verlies: lllossss…

This word, it sleeps in the corner of my mind, wound tight around other thoughts, slipping between full sentences, interrupting logic, a low, slinking ssss, a muted soundtrack of letters in my mind.

The chatter on the bus competes with the chatter in my mind, each loud, persistent, vying for attention via auditory hallucination. The bird, chirping: calculated dress is a consequence of the interactive genetic algorithm; design is of the origination of the Latin ‘designare,’ you know? It means to symbolize some plan, a calculated placement of feathers, the bird coos, puffing feathers, ruffling wings.

The bear wipes his mouth with a dark paw, growling under his breath: failure, destruction, privation, defect, misfortune, risk, not gaining, not winning. Bearing a loss.

The chatter is loud today.

Jasper and 124. End of the line: tightened scarf, zippered jacket, mittens pulled on.

Soft steps off the bus, plowing through quieted streets, the chatter – it stops.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Instant. Gratification.

Our culture of instant gratification…

 

“…offers something strangely compelling about the long tease.”

 

“…[is] killing a couple’s capacity to stay together for the long haul.”

 

“…take[s] away from the art form of a music album.”

 

“…gives a whole new meaning to the expression collective memory.”

 

“…focuses the effects of the sexual pleasure drive on a person’s emerging personality.”

 

“…questions legitimacy.”

 

“…is very important.”

 

 

« …questions the point of planning, anticipating, and developing long-term goals.”

 

“…leads us to overindulge in activities with immediate rewards and delayed costs.”

Clocked.

“A broken clock is even right twice in one day.”

It’s 3:32 in the morning and I’m lying in bed staring at the glaring red L.E.D. lights, willing them to hypnotize me into sleep.

I’m having those dreams again, the ones that rip me from reality and force me to run toward consciousness because I’m too afraid to see what comes next.

I try not to allow the dreamscapes to dance in front of my eyes as I call desperately for sleep – quiet, uninterrupted, dark and deep sleep.

I think of you when I try not to think of my dreams – your face is always cloudy; I can’t read your eyes and I don’t know what you’re thinking.

At 3:37 in the morning you begin to fade completely – I can’t remember the shape of your jaw or the line of your neck; your shoulders blur and your hands lose their strong shape; you disappear so quickly you’re soon a barely discernible specter – a mirage of colors and geometric shapes: blocks and circles and triangles and rectangles piled up, up, up on one another until you’re no longer blood and skin and bones but wood and plastic and a combination of color applied with the paint brush of my tired imagination.

I chase after you as you fall further away from the clock. As I run toward you, the ground starts to fall away, slowly at first – a pebble, then another – but soon becomes an avalanche, pieces of floor crumbling and racing off the cliff of semi-consciousness.

You wave to me, seemingly unfazed, and stand floating above the rushing rocks, your hands rectangles flashing in Technicolor light, waving hello or goodbye, I can’t tell.

I scramble toward you until both you and the ground are gone and I am standing alone in the dark, big red numbers flashing 3:40, flashing “sleep,” flashing “hello,” flashing “goodbye,” flashing “don’t go, please don’t go.”

Beside me appears a table, a pen, one piece of paper, a chair for me to sit. I draw you the way I remember you: blocks and circles, a triangle and rectangles piled up, up, up.

I draw humility and compassion, a smile and shyness, gentle apathy and fingernails, intelligence, hair, eyes, humor – melancholy first, then sanguine, then bile – just the way I remember you until the lines connect to become a continuous circuit of experiences and awkward moments, bruises and laughter.

Furiously, I sketch until the page is filled and I am sure I have captured all of you, appealing imperfection, stubborn love and passionate opinion. Picking up the paper, I examine my work of art, studying the shape of you.

The clock, red, infringing, dominant and forceful says “remember.”

xoxo

M.L. H’art

For no real Reason.

Staring into the gaping mouth of sunrise on a brand new day, she wonders if maybe, just maybe, today will be it; that today will bring the change.

She pulls on clean panties, then her tired ripped jeans and combs her hair without looking in the mirror. She counts the bills left in her wallet from the night before and, slipping her bra up over raw, sore nipples, smoothes a shirt over her shoulders, chest, tummy. She sneaks out the motel door before the lump tangled in the bleached stiff sheets stirs to stop her.

Outside in the fresh daylight, she stretches lanky arms above her head and starts whistling, for no real reason, that same tune her momma and her momma’s momma always whistled, for no real reason.

Bowing her head at the cleaning lady pushing a cart of stark towels and bottles of unlabeled disinfectant, she climbs into his truck and fires the engine.

Feeling the rumble of release as the engine catches, she presses her forehead to the wheel, lets her hands fall over it, caressing the curves just as he’d done to her night before, only with less hunger, less pressure, but just as much need.

Tossing her hair back, she kicks the truck into reverse and steals out of that same spot he parks the damned rust-bucket truck every time.

Turning toward the lonely highway, she points the nose of the truck straight at the wide open mouth of the horizon and, without checking for traffic, guns the tired engine, spitting gravel up with the back tires.

Rolling down the window, she sparks a smoke, checking the rear view mirror for him chasing her out of the parking lot, his fists and his belly shaking in the cool morning light.

But he’s not, and she knows he won’t, wonders how long it’ll take them to find his body.

Blowing blue-grey smoke out the window, staring into the warm wet of morning, she knows today’s the day that will bring the change.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The art of Quitting.

I’ve been smoking too much. My chest hurts when I breath. A sharp pain splitting the length of my chest bone each time I inhale.

I know I should quit – I give myself the same pep talk each night before bed: Respect your body as it gives you every new day! Eat well! Drink less! Quit smoking! Cut back! Sleep more!

But every night ends with me sucking back one more vice, an effort to quiet the nonsense rattling around my brain, I guess.

Sure I’ve tried to quit; cleaned out my house, changed my habits, made new friends. But there’s comfort in the routine of addictions. You always know what comes next. Drink, smoke. Dinner, smoke. Drink, joint, smoke. In the morning its the same, the only difference is you replace “drink” with “coffee.”

Tomorrow will be different, I always tell myself, but I’m reminded of some bullshit philosophy paper I once read arguing that tomorrow doesn’t actually ever exist as we are perpetually in the present. Tomorrow is a figment of routine – another one of those comforts.

In remembering that article I’m able to justify another day of self inflicted abuse.

Hoorah.

I think I’ll have to see a doctor about the pain – it’s not natural, the pain, so I should do something before I become the next heavily government funded anti-fun poster child rallying against smoking and alcoholism and drug abuse because the elusive “they” agreed to pay the heart transplant hospital fees.

I hope it doesn’t involve surgery. I only had surgery once when I was five and in first grade. I had my tonsils out. It was fun, despite the pain of having a necessary part of your sinus network ripped out, because I did nothing but watch Wizard of Oz and eat orange popsicles while I healed. But every last fucking kid in my class sent a hand made construction paper and glue “Get Well” mess to me. My teacher delivered them all in a big brown paper envelope with my name printed neatly in equidistant first grade teacher’s perfect block lettering. While the gesture seems kind, the weight of these cards meant I might not make it. Get well is a euphemism for “thanks for not dying.”

So surgery is definitely out of the question.

Perhaps, instead of surgery or a visit to the doctor, I’ll just go to bed. I can think about this again tomorrow.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Working Girl.

Daydreaming, she misses the point of the conversation entirely. “Hmm..?” she half asks, half sings. “Were you talking to me?”

“The economic outcome of the fiscal year is dependent on the turnaround success of fundraising efforts and should be quantifiably measured and cross referenced to years past so we have a comprehensive understanding of our financial situation…” his voice fades as she thinks about books, piles of them, each aching to be cracked, tired spines releasing the tension of too many years sitting unappreciated on lonely shelves, an erotic snap of the pages as each whispers a story so unique, so beautiful, written entirely for her eyes at that very moment…

“Don’t you agree?” he asks, shaking his head fervently, as if only to convince himself.

“Why yes, of course. We agree.” A chorus of businessmen cheer in response, all looking to one another for confirmation. She too nods to his tempo, watching the flap of aging skin under his chin wag in agreeance, up and down, up and down. None of them, she’s sure, has flipped through the pages of a book not devoted to swashbuckling business in years. She can see the one track of their minds and starts to get dizzy from all the laps.

“Right then, moving on. It’s in our best interest to move forward on the Zareski account by militantly invoicing him. That money won’t collect itself, you know,” he chuckles to himself. She imagines he sits in his office chuckling at his own brilliance often, fingers interlocked behind his head, feet up on his desk, the stench of unwashed socks permeating the room, the broken air conditioning vent sputtering warm air, making the frail strands of thinning hair dance about his head.

He’s looking directly at her.

“Yes, yes. I’ll get right on that,” she pretends to write important notes into her stenographer’s pad using shorthand, but a shorthand only she can understand. What he doesn’t know is that she’s making her grocery list for the week. Zi, mt really means zucchini, meat not Zareski and militant.

“You’re a real asset to the team you know, you’re going places,” he says to her. “I can just tell.” He spans his arms across the length of the luncheon table in showy bravado: “Director of Global Communications.” She hears “Glorified Secretary.”

He looks so proud of himself. “Hey, what do you think about that?” he asks as he jabs at her ribs with the tip of his pen.

She flinches and practices her plastic smile. “That would be nice, very nice.”

She turns to her notepad and starts drawing circles and lines, a map of her boredom, while he blabbers about the evolution of the next campaign, a campaign for the real working man, he says as he wipes spittle from the corner of his mouth, white and dry, stuck in the crevices of his wrinkles.

“That should about wrap up our meeting don’t you think gentlemen?” she asks, hopeful to escape before the back slapping show of machismo and ego-stroking begins.

“Yar har,” they guffaw in unison, like the gabble of geese all calling in response, but for no real reason other than to outdo one another.

“Why yes, my dear. The rest’s all business talk if you know what I mean,” he leans toward her and winks as if she doesn’t already know how, once she’s left the room, they’ll talk about the size of the waitress’ tits, her ass in the fitted black dress pants she chose to wear today, how they banged their wives while watching the game last night.

“Right then. I’ll see you back at the office.” She packs up her files and daydreams, neatly stacks them under her arm and heads for the door.

He grabs her shoulder and says: “Great work, doll. You’re doing a great job.” She can smell the rye and gingers he had for lunch, a hint of the steak he devoured.

“Thank you, sir,” she chokes. She can feel his eyes on her ass as she walks away from the table. She is more angered than degraded.

A pedestal, Steinem said, is as much a prison as any other confined space. She tells herself this over and over as she walks away, fighting the urge to place her hands over her bottom in sheer embarrassment of the fact they are not gifted with a vagina and some sensitivity.

She is the trophy office chick, the eye candy, the boss’ meow, the reason why men talk too much when they are around her, spilling secrets she has no use for, other than to entertain them later into giving more money to the foundation when, suddenly, she speaks intelligently of their manly business strategies, muscular mergers, ooh, handsome acquisitions.

This show, she tells herself, is exactly what bull shit smells like.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Conversations with Dad.

She’s wearing a black tunic dress, two sizes too small. Underneath, her tights pinch her sides, squishy cellulite encased in lycra. Ripped at the toe, her pinky sticks out of her nylons, faded pink polish chipping at the edges.

This piggy had none.

“Can I take your order.” A demand, not a question.

“I was thinking we’ll just play in the food, thanks,” he says, chuckling to himself as he waves at the buffet.

“I don’t really want to see that,” she scowls as she walks away, stale acrid coffee slipping from the edge of the pot she’s holding at her thigh.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I left your mother at home with a murderer?” he laughs, the edges of his eyes turning up until I can’t see his pupils. He looks over my shoulder at the door as if expecting someone he knows to walk in.

“Uh, no Dad. I think you forgot to tell me that story,” I say as an old man carrying a seat cushion walks past us, his hair pushed up into a stiff cowlick crowning his forehead. He turns once, twice, three times like a dog circling a comfortable place to sleep and finally takes a seat at a table facing the window. He removes the paper from under his arm, unfolds it, folds it back up again, passes a hand over his forehead up into his hair.

“She’s so naive sometimes, you know?” he asks.

“Can’t say that’s a side of her I know well, Dad.” The honest truth.

“Well, she is. At least she was.”

“What happened?”

“Well here we were living in Red Deer when I used to party with the Vags – you know who they are? – this old disbanded hard-ass biker gang who used to run through the west. I used to party with Donny, uh Donny Ronaldo – he was this rough old bastard who was always up for a party. Anyway, he called one night when I was on the road and your mother answered the phone. Told her he wanted to meet up at the Park. I called when I hit Calgary, and she told me to hurry home – we were meeting Donny. So I packed it in, and fudged the logbook to make it look like I’d hit enough hours and headed home. When I parked the truck, she was already at the Park into her third jug and you know who she was with? Donny and Crazy Stan. We got our buzz on, had a few beers, closed the place down and suddenly it’s the end of the night and your mother’s inviting them back to the house!” he slaps the table and throws his head back laughing at a punch line I haven’t heard yet.

“Oh yeah, Dad. That sounds like her for sure.”

“I know, right? So, Donny and I are both kicking her under the table – anyone named Crazy Stan is no one you want to invite back to your place and I know for a fact the boys are hauling a trailer load full of souvenirs I can guarantee aren’t small stuffed mountie dolls or tiny bottles of maple syrup, right? But she doesn’t get it and soon we’re all piling into the Stan’s lift heading back to the house. By this time, I’m flying, right? And I have to be on the road first thing in the mornin’. We drink all night and eventually we all pass out and I’m out of the house by six AM, only the boys are still there ‘cept ol’ Stan’s slept in the truck ’cause he didn’t want his souvenirs to go missing!”

He’s laughing as the waitress comes around to fill our coffee mugs. “All good here.” She says.

“Ha, yeah, for sure darling.” Dad’s still laughing.

“So I’m on the road – this is before the days of cell phones – so I don’t talk to your mother until later that night and fuck do I get an ear full. Here she is making breakfast for the boys – pancakes, eggs, bacon, coffee, right? And Crazy Stan starts telling her how he used to stay in Guelph. And oh, I can just see it, she perks up and says ‘oh really?! I grew up in Kitchener!” right? and fuck I can just imagine, so of course your Mother asks Stany what he was doing in Guelph when he pipes up and says ‘two years less a deuce for manslaughter.’”

I choke on my coffee. I can imagine my mother – prim, proper, incapable of swearing without giggling, comprehending the fact she is feeding a murderer breakfast.

“Fuck, Dad. That must’ve been some phone call she gave you.”

“Oh yeah, it was an earful and I just laughed, right? What was I supposed to do? I tried to warn her!”

I laugh and make a mental note to ask her about Crazy Stan the next time I talk to her.

We hit the buffet, armed with chipped plates and stained cutlery and load our plates with creamed corn and indistinguishable shredded meat, a soup that’s so thick we can’t see what’s in it.

“So George been to see your Mother yet?” he asks as he shovels salad into his mouth, kidney beans in soupy dressing slopping down the front of his grey United Trucking t-shirt.

“Not that I know. I think she’d tell me. He planning on making a visit?”

“Oh he always jokes, you know, thinks it’d be hilarious if he just showed up on the doorstep one day. He never called her Katherine, hey? Always Kathi with an ‘i’. She used to go by Kathi when she was in the radio business till she figured it wasn’t lending her any favors – wasn’t professional enough to help her get ahead in the business world, right? But George just has never called her anything else. Kathi. I’d ever tell you about the cat in the wall?”

He’s told me this story before, but it gets better every time so I nod my head back and forth, a mouth full of mystery meat sneaking out the side of my lips. “Nah Dad,” I gargle. “You’ve never told me about the cat in wall.”

“So we all moved into this house in Toronto – this place must’ve been 75 years old when we moved in. The place was a fucking zoo. There were five of us living there, and at one time we had a cat, a dog, a gerbil, fish and a fucking lizard, right? A zoo. We lived next door to this old Spanish couple an’ I was the only one working morning’s at the time so I was out of the house by eight o’clock – no one else had to work till at least nine thirty but usually not till one or something – they all worked at Thrifty’s at the time selling jeans. So I’d get up early to move furniture with Mike and in the winter the snow’d be so deep I’d have to get up early to shovel the drive we shared with this old Spanish couple. But every time I’d get up early, the walk’d already be shoveled. And there the old man would be, holding the shovel and I’d feel like dirt ’cause here I am young and capable and he’s already shoveled the walk, right? But he’d pat me on the back and tell me ‘I shovel walk, I have nothing to do. You young, you work!’ and I’d thank him again and tell him –again! – that if he was ever disturbed by our loud music just to let me know ’cause I’d never want to disrupt the neighborhood, right? And he’d just laugh and tell me not to worry – he liked it when we played our music ’cause that meant his son wouldn’t play his! Anyway, so we’re living in this house and Deb – one of the girls living there at the time – comes home one afternoon to find George staring at the wall next to fireplace. And she can hear this meowing, right? And so she asks George “Where’s the cat, man?” And George, high as a fucking kite, points to the wall and says ‘I think it’s the wall.’ Deb starts freaking out and is all like what do you mean it’s in the fucking wall George? and he just starts to laugh and points at the wall again and says ‘it’s in the fucking wall!’ So I get home and now Deb and George are both staring at the wall and this cat’s just going ape trying to get out and so I grab a hammer and put a hole in the wall and sure enough, there’s the fucking cat – in the wall!”

“I hate the ask the obvious here Dad, but how’d the cat get in the wall?”

“That’s just it! I don’t know, right? George still hasn’t told any of us to this day – he swears the cat was in the wall when he got home. But the thing is, George didn’t work, right? He was selling drugs to the better half of Ontario, so he never left the house. Deb’s still convinced he somehow managed to get the cat in the wall, but man – I just don’t know!”

She sidles over to the table, the lycra between her legs squeaking. She piles our plates one on top of the other, takes our napkins and empty sugar packs and throws them into a pile. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she asks if we’ll have anything else.

“Nah, I think we’re all done here,” Dad says as he reaches for his wallet. “How much for the mess?”

“Seventeen dollars,” she says, drawing out tee-een into two words.

“Right, thanks.” Dad says, laying a bill on the table as he pushes away from the table. He pauses for a second, takes a deep breath as he hoists himself up from his chair. It looks like more effort than it ought.

“Thanks for dinner, Dad. It was great to see you.”

He grabs me by the scruff of the neck like he’s always done since I was a child and rubs his rough hands into the small of my neck, where my spine meets my skull.

“Yup, no worries,” he coughs, 30 years of smokers phlegm caught in his throat. “Next week?” he asks. “I’ll tell you what happened to the gerbil then.”

I laugh, looking down at my shoes, “sure Dad, I’d like to hear about the gerbil.”

I grab at my smokes from the bottom of my purse and hand one over to him.

“Ah, that’s my girl,” he says, reaching for my neck again. “I forgot mine in the truck.”

“No worries, Dad.”

We walk out of the diner and into the cold and light our smokes as we walk back to his truck in silence. When we get there, he pulls me into his chest with his big bear arm and hugs my face to his dirty shirt. He kisses me on the head and says “well” as he turns and climbs up into his truck.

“Bye Dad,” I say as I turn to catch the bus.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Thief.

I’m a criminal, a thief of sorts. I’m not your commonplace thief. I will steal from you, right in front of your face. You will watch me steal from you, but you won’t even realize what I’m doing.

We’ll be friends, lovers even, and you will trust me more than you will trust most anyone else. Regardless, I will steal from you. Clean you out, leave you with nothing. And you will not think to blame me, because you love me.

You’re wondering why I don’t feel guilt when I tell you this. Don’t be fooled, I’m guilty, can feel it, and it aches in me, but it won’t stop me.

I’ll weep for you and apologize to my maker for allowing myself to take from you, unlawfully. Tomorrow I will think of you as I spread marmalade on my toast, wait for the coffee to brew. I will think of you all day – small flashbacks quick with the emblems of our relationship – an inside joke, that painting we bought on vacation, the smell of pavement before rain. The memory of you and therefore the memory of what I will do to you, will stay with me weaving in and out of my life, forever, even though once you realize what I’ve done you will never forgive me.

I’d apologize but there’s a chance you won’t speak to me, you know, once all is said and done. So don’t expect me to get down on my knees and puff out my chest, batting eyelashes and gargling through a smile: please, won’t you forgive me?

Because I know you won’t, and that’s okay.

Don’t shed a tear now, it’s not such a bad thing. I’ll steal from you something you didn’t realize you ever had but it will be something you won’t ever be able to replace.

Figured it out yet? No, of course not. Look at you, patting your pockets checking for wallet, car keys, phone, emergency condom, pocket knife; the contents of you. Yup, you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: all there. If asked, you could show proof of you – open your wallet or manipulate your knife.

Yes, I am laughing at you. Preoccupied pretentious bastard. I can buy my own condoms, carry my own credit card tucked into the sleeve of my own wallet. I don’t want the contents of your pockets. I would have taken them already if I did.

Still don’t know what I want?

No, I will not tell you. If you are too blind to see what it is I’m going to take from you, then you don’t deserve to know.

That’s the rule. Now that we have that clear, let’s move on.

The reason I am going to steal from you is not because you are a bad person. In fact, I think you’re rather upstanding, but truth is you’ve missed out on a very important life lesson and it’s my duty to ensure you don’t carry on as an untaught student. It’s likely you would eventually stumble upon this lesson yourself someday years from now when I’m forgotten, but it wouldn’t be as meaningful.

Once I steal from you it will be your turn to steal from someone else – that is, if you ever figure out what it is that you should take. I’m giving you the experience with which you can change someone permanently.

You think you can’t possibly steal from someone, I know, but you will. Your moral fiber’s not as strong as you would like to think.

Still guessing?

Yesterday I drove past a fallow field of choking wheat grass, and in the middle of the field I saw a young woman in a simple sundress so thin the wind carried it higher up her thigh the faster the wind blew. The wheat grass flailed around her naked ankles and in her hand she held a string which in turn desperately held onto a balloon tossing against the sky. She stood for so long staring at the balloon I almost got out of the car to ask if she was okay. As soon as I reached for the door handle, she lowered her head, her hair a mask around her face, and suddenly let go. The balloon flopped higher and higher, tossing over itself again and again until it was gone, not even a dot on the horizon. The girl walked back to the road, disappeared into her car and drove until she wasn’t even a dot on the horizon either.

What I steal from you will feel like what that girl feels about her balloon: you will feel a pang of regret but will forget quickly to continue on counting the contents of your life, the things you think matter. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

xoxo
M.L. H’art

Writer’s Block.

This girl’s a dying breed.

Slow and sure, she listens. Voices, words in her head, tumbling, realized, transcribed on a page to break her fall.

She gets lost in the sound.

The scrape of pen to paper: auditory hallucinations of schizophrenic scratches. Interjecting thoughts, radio waves filling the room. Invisibly audible, loud and persistent – a distraction.

Distortion of auditory memory, selective hearing. Spontaneous tickling of temporal overload, hiccup in the hippocampus. Remember, remember, remember.

But I can’t remember, she says.

Accept the noise, negotiate the feedback.

Pathologised social context. A minor…be flat. Perspective at variance with patience. Patients.

Undigested emotional just desserts. Deserved.

She shakes her head.

No.

Equilibrium. Accommodation. Empowerment. Stabilization. Be…normal.

Concentration deficit. Distraction through dissociative efficacy. These voices, loose words like mental cannons, serve a purpose.

I, I, I…she stutters.

I remember…

Gunfire, pen on fire, moving fast, bulleting across lean lines, missed crosses and dots, the work grammatically unfinished save the speed of her sudden memory.

…what it was I wanted to write.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Dear Alice.

Dear Alice;

I can’t help but believe my attempt to write to you is trite – a thank you letter lost in a sea of a thousand others, connecting us unknowingly through your creative non-fiction.

You’ve told my story and now I’m unsure I need to. How many rape victim stories can the book store shelf hold? How many survivors will read them all, each a part of a seemingly disconnected series, the book covers a different color, the fonts un-matching, the photographs on the back each of a different girl, all telling the same story?

When will my story and your story and her story become redundant – the repetitive pleas of a hurt unchecked, unhealed, an open wound leaking the puss of a neglected hate?

I feel like by telling you, you are me, and my story is there – inside your words, a little out of order perhaps, but no less important.

I wrote about it once, read it aloud in my creative non-fiction class of twelve other awkward students, each uneasy in the discomfort of being stuck between teenagedom and adulthood, not awkward because the walk between the bus stop and the front door of the house after dark brought on frantic imagined delusions of attack in the street gutters, the type of delusion which forces a girl to plot her escape even though there’s no threat to run from.

As I read it aloud, I too turned red, my cheeks blushing, burning, taking emphasis from the words and instead placing it on my face. I was embarrassed, not for my story, my pain, my hesitation in sharing the hurt of a lost innocence, but because in telling each of those other awkward and uneasy students, I felt as though I expected something from them in return, forced them unwittingly into dealing with the ugly and unavoidable truth of a too often told tragedy.

When I finished, they stared at their desktops, hightops, tops of the heads of the students in front of them. All to save looking at me.

Their language came slowly at first – typical of the uncomfortable linguistic fumbling that comes when…you…just…don’t…know…what…to…say….

Brave. Important. Challenging.

With those words came the looks: the sadness, the sorry, the judgment, the change; change in the way I looked to them, at them; change in the way they dealt with me, talked to me; as if suddenly by saying aloud the words “I was raped” I became fragile, breakable – as though before those words came tumbling out my mouth like tangible markers of my person, I was invincible, indestructible, a typical but naïve twenty something with nothing to hold on to but a dream and some spare bus fare, certainly not the weak and tainted frame of a girl wrecked by the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suddenly wary of my condition, my classmates became careful of me as though an emotional breakdown due to the stress of sharing something so personal would bring forth a torrent of uncontrollable tears. Because really, who wants to deal with that?

My professor was careful in his criticism, suddenly softening his previously demanding editor voice for the simple reason, I’m sure, he suddenly became aware he was a man.

Before class, he discouraged me at first, saying I didn’t have to share if it was too difficult, that he would understand if I chose to workshop something more…digestible…a different piece, perhaps the one we didn’t get all the way through last class?

I laughed and declined gently, politely, and handed him my papers to photocopy for the class to read.

It was four years before I had the vocabulary to write about my rape. The first few attempts hit the page as muddled euphemisms, as if rape were a word not wanted to be read, a word impossible to write, its plosive posture making it stick out on a page like a gaudy neon sign, blinking like the xxx sign in the storefront of the peep house down the street. And like the peep house, the word is both revolting and curious – something someone rarely asks explanation of for fear of learning too much, for fear of being repulsed by the truth – the truth of the girl who sat next to you in second year.

So I didn’t write about it again. I helped others – the survivors, as someone once branded them – tell their story.

I never found comfort in the moniker “survivor” – it indicating there was a harrowing sequence of life threatening obstacles, disease, war, famine, drought, a long lasting struggle resulting in triumph, as though knocking on death’s door were a prerequisite to being raped.

I didn’t die that night. I didn’t let go. I hid in the back of my mind as he slammed my head into the hard tile of the bathroom floor, wedging my shoulders in the small space between the base of the toilet and the ceramic of the bathtub, my neck bent awkwardly at a funny angle, an angle odd enough I couldn’t see his face as he yanked my hair over my eyes and forced his fist into my mouth so no one at the party in the next room could hear if I chose to scream.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t whimper. I only fought back until his grasp started to hurt, until the back of my skull started to bleed. I looked into his eyes once, when he let go of my hair as he came. I have frozen that picture in my mind, could draw it for you if I had that kind of talent.

Years later I would take proverbial scissors and cut that image from the fabric of my memory and sew it stitch by stitch to the quilt of me, alongside other carefully measured squares of personal experience tailored from the cloth of understanding and strength and forgiveness.

I forgive him for his weakness, his unsettled soul, his inability to communicate in a touching, trusting, personable way. I forgive him for the hate seated heavy on his heart and I forgive him for the power of his anger.

I may seem pious and righteous, dealing out forgiveness for that which is out of my control (perhaps out of his control too), sitting upright in my throne waging pity on his head; or perhaps forgiveness is a sign of weakness for not seeking revenge – an eye for an eye so too preaches the story.

But the pain of hate carried in the front pocket of my worn second hand jeans for all those years was heavy, burdensome, tiring. Lugging that kind of weight around every day can wear a girl down, make her tired, stop her from walking too far from home.

In forgiving him, I emptied my pockets and handed my faceless assailant the weight of the responsibility of his action. Karmically, I’ve tossed the ball into his court, although he has no hope – there’s no defense for honest forgiveness.

I’ve given back all he’s ever given me, the only difference is I made it beautiful.

xoxo
M.L. H’art