My hands are tied behind my back. Yes, as a child growing up my hands were tied. I sat in my room and stared at the walls and yes, they stared back. I drew their faces screaming at me. Self-loathe self hatred self desctruction in plain vision. As a child, my mother's hands were suffocating, intoxicating. I was imprisoned by self hating thoughts from my mother. She showed me to never trust in another, because it was all a lie, she said. Debes ser desconfianda. You should be untrusting of people. Don't even trust your own. And so my sisters and I grew up bathing in her insults, her oppression, self hating blood. A stain so deep in runs through generations.
I sat in the old folk's home today next to my grandmother's wheelchair where she was laying down, sedated and dreaming of difficult things. I was surrounded by 4 generations of family, all blood related dealing with the same issues all pasted down from my grandmother. My father's real mother. This cranky, grouchy , mean-spirited, rude woman who is my grandmother. Her epilepsy has been acting out recently, her medication isn't helping. She lays in the wheelchair with her feet up surrounded by stuffed animals like a child, a lepard print blanket. Her face twisted with unsettling dreams as eleven of us whispered Happy Birthday, Mama Fina into her ear.
And I watch her face, and so I watch her sleep and I look at the pictures on her wall. The pictures of her family she gathered together in her 82 years on Earth. I didn't even know this woman. And I was the only grandchild missing from the pictures on her wall. I think about who she was before she became a mother, before she became a married woman, and when she was my age. Was she always the rude and mean-spirited grandmother that I knew? Could she have been someone different?
I wonder what she dreamt.
Guerrilla Libre and the Universe
