Little Monique

Continents colliding, spilling blood.

I did not have to see the violence of colonization to know it’s true.

They talk about hope. Finding yourself in the journey.

But they know where their blood lines fall.

I have nothing but my skin to take back.

I come from heat and death.

Not recognizable anymore.

I hear the birds singing until the last drop of light juice squeezes out of the perfect sky. Thirty-four years ago, I am running back to my house. Running down empty neighborhood streets with the sun slowly setting like a Willa Cather novel. There was not a care in the world and I, who worried about everything, felt peace. I run to get on my bike and chase a rainbow down to the ends. I thought riding all the way to the end of the neighborhood would surely bring me closer but it was still the same distance. How forewarning. I stop and turn around riding with the wind in my hair until dusk. I sleep soundly in my rural town. Just the crickets and the moon shining in my window on our one-acre patch of land overlooking the prairies. These were some of my best memories. Be grateful, my father said.

The writing is on her arm.

It was running down like water. Dreams too vivid to be real. Speaking vulnerabilities meant only for one existence. I told you not to fall. in. love. Gushing water. She was feeling too much. Such a cliche. Water flows through tight spaces meant to keep us stagnant. It was hard enough to leave the prairies.
I come and stand here to say I am not sorry. The water is low and soon it will all be empty. We will have lived for decades. We will look back and the milkweeds will still be there by the pine trees in the back of the prairies. She will only remember how it all felt in color.
Burnt sienna glazes trying to make it better. Threads meant to be pulled. Gold halos in the water meant to be picked up. Not drowning, but wading, waiting. Waiting to be put back on.
The art is inside. Ready to be pulled back out. Telling truths. When you tell someone you are fine, you better be. There is no more time. There is no more time to be waiting to be your authentic self.

All that time we were spinning on the icy bridge and into the white van head-on, my seatbelt was stuck. The more I pulled the more I wondered if it was better to hang on to it or drop to the bottom. The spinning around and around was the dark calm before the impending crash, on ice, on a bridge, on top of the Mississippi River. When we didn’t crash, by a hair, my almost death was not my only problem in life. It was the failed friendships and duties and loyalties lying in a sea of quicksand, sinking with no return. It was me trying to pull the seatbelt out to save my one last friendship. That was a death that I in my twenties accepted because I thought I was not understood and had a terrible sadness. The thing is… it’s true when they say the rope burns at both ends, it entropies and cannot be repaired. It’s true when I tell my son to be grateful for the good people in his life because they only come once. Selfish wants and impulsive desires that see no one but you. It was I, that was the asshole time and time again. I take this accountability with nothing to show for it. Empty hands left with the hidden guilt when the past should have been the past. How I wish someone would have told me my wants were not better than my integrity, but I wouldn’t have listened anyway.

The day I stopped working… buried by moving layers. My work was self-reflective. It drained me in a good way, but then six years working with people who needed my help took over my emotional supply. It wasn’t about me anymore. This ultimately is a good thing that I cherish to this day. But at the time I told myself, a “real artist” would not have gotten so immersed in the lives of others. Life should only be about getting ahead.

Later I meet my husband, a love that smothered the sad longing in all my best works. It now feels like I am making new ideas from the dead skin of others. A process that is a thick dry rope and hopeless to climb.