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Is this half an origin story? The way shame called
“eminent domain!” and built its freeway through my youth? When I was 21 I was a fool and a mother and grieved;
People were already dead, including the baby’s father. Motherhood was magic and it was arsenic; I swallowed
the seeds inside the fruit, plowed the field gone fallow: whoops, that was my id surrounded by daddy stand-ins and shaman wannabes.
Love wasn’t a given so much as a white elephant, gifted then yanked back. I probably got drunk about it. Careened into
the median of it. Then I was 31, a fool and a mother, and often still I would run from the caring voices that never
held back the vast in-betweenness that merry-go-rounds all love. I tried on the skull of a dragon. I tried
on the wig of a judge. The baby had grown tween-like, balancing grief and dreams like edits of his own
choose-your-own-adventure tale. The end. The end. Just kidding. In separate corners of the apartment, we outgrew the need to bury our
treasure before it was dead. Then I was 41, a fool and a mother? Indeed. The baby was practically a grown man in the world surrounded
by daddy stand-ins and shaman wannabes. I love the archetype of the Fool. I love the Fool, in theory. In theory. To love the world you must
love yourself, and I wanted to, for him, and I did, and I do. Meanwhile, the underworld circles, membranous, pressing on even the necks
of our most dear. I could never burn it down without burning down everything. That’s what I learned, those decades and these
decades beyond. This is the document of my efforts, which have kindled an eternal flame of awkward glory
for a small family to warm itself near. |
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