Dear Diary, I must confess.

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

I have a confession to make. It has been hard to read and write much of anything lately. I skim both headlines and posts, chapters and poems. I am scared, absolutely terrified in a way I have not been since I was a child, staring, watching vigilant. And all of that has been stirred while I am now a 54-year-old woman, responsible.

And I could name all that it is, for what I am responsible, but the list would never end. The important, the urgent, relevant, mundane, physical, emotional, spiritual, global, local conversations uttered and practiced in my mind in silence, in my own life out loud, the lives of those I love, the direction of our humanity, the collapse of manifest destiny and everything ever caught up in the swallowing of continents for insatiable consumption, the deeply nihilistic need to devour ourselves whole, the expectation that destroying the world will give us a chance to start over like in building a house of cards or hitting reset.

The only way out is through, everyone will tell you that. That’s the message. We cannot get through this if we skirt the fringes of our truths. But that is not what we do. Believe me, I know. Because when we have gone just so far and cannot turn back, cannot recover the time we have already spent, we begin that acid-burn painful churn in the gut of reconciling the fact that we’ve built it all off center, and decide to push on anyway; we already know we are doomed. And to save face, we put our heads down, becoming more and more frustrated, angrier at ourselves and everyone around. Start lashing out violently in all directions so that the truth doesn’t touch us.

When I would write in my diary, I started with “Dear Diary,” but wasn’t really sure to whom I was writing. Was it God or myself or some other god or goddess to whom I’d also leave flowers and candies and gifts, offerings, at the base of a tree, somehow remembering from a past life that Mother Nature needs honoring and reverence. That she responds. I’d write, “Dear Diary,” and try to make sense of the empty hollow, the vibration of outer space where they say there is no sound, with pleading promises that I’d be better if it could be better. I would write, “Dear Diary” and believed that the strength of my hope and my prayers would be revealed by whether or not there was relief.

I know helplessness and it is always cushioned with silence, deliberate avoidance, and a refusal to acknowledge that someone must step in and do something. There wasn’t a lesson on earth my mother felt like teaching. Not one. I watched her, wanted to know what it was to be a girl child in a world that did not value girl children who were not white and privileged, wealthy or pretty or sexy or something and the something was elusive, a glamour thrown over the eyes and hearts of everyone with whom they came into contact. I wanted to know how the world would see me and then for her to tell me that I was beautiful anyway. That my brown skin, rounded behind, wide-tooth grin, and crackle of a voice would mean I was a challenge, a dare, an assault, and affront to the beauty standard but that I should come in swinging because I was worthy still.

I wanted her to hold me by the shoulders, look me in the eyes, nose to nose and give me some tools to face the world’s view of black girls, brown-skinned black women, smart as fuck, funky, organized, and magical women. Teach me how to hold a shield if not a sword, give me some sense that I had a fighting chance to be worthy in the world.

I wanted her to stand in front of me when there was rage around us, whether from my father’s haunting ghosts, our little white town masquerading as “welcoming to everyone,” or society at large. I wanted her to stand up for me, go marching right into that school, knock hard on the neighbor’s door, the one whose boy called me nigger on the bus. I wanted her to speak up at the school board and tell those mothers and motherfuckers that they sure as shit needed to stop denigrating her child, her children, leaving shit on the driveway.

I wanted everyone to stop telling me that living in the corner house in a white neighborhood was progress and gave me a key to wear around my neck and let myself in. Because I knew even then that we were lying to ourselves and letting them lie on us because we were so readily forgiving. But my backside was still sore.

And when he came home from work he might be happy about something but he also might be mad and the sounds of children playing and laughing when one is mad is enough to put them over the edge, even in the house on the corner lot, and warnings to ‘be quiet’ even said sternly, when you are releasing from your childhood day are hard to heed, so despite knowing what is likely coming, you can’t stop. I wanted her to say stop.

A belt whip to your legs for laughing, for being too loud, for taking up space, for not remembering your place. He remembered his place and had no one to offer him guidance for his rapid rise. For forgetting there is no space held for little brown girls in the world, and we all know it, everyone in our family, all of us, but we can’t say that out loud even though the only way out is through. Hurt and pain causes atrophy in the muscles, even in our hearts and blood flow feels like a shock to the system.

She chose not to make contact. But she did come to town last week to see some Broadway shows with her boyfriend. I went to meet them, to spend a little time before my girl got home from school, to show that I would come the extra mile. You only get one mother when everyone notices you might be taking care of yourself.

Dear Diary, as I return to my body, I bear witness for myself. The pain blockers have worn off after this surgery and I feel where all the bones were broken, where the muscles tore, and where there was meant to be connection, there were frayed or deformed edges. I am mending them. Some people say that those of us who were not seen or heard, loved or filled, have a bottomless hole at our core that echoes the anguished cries of the world like a canyon. The world needs healers.”

When we recognize that deep resonance, we have two choices. To want to stop the suffering for ourselves, or to stop the suffering of everyone in the world.

I know there are some things that are unspeakable. You cannot say that you do not belong to your family. You cannot say what it is that you know to be true out loud. You cannot ask anyone to help you if you cannot tell them the whole truth. You learn to suck on your tongue and force it to the back of your throat, feel the uvula gag you to silence. Your body begins to betray you, to work for your silence, convincing you that you are safer that way, that the belt is sure to come, that you are meant to occupy the least space possible, that you should be grateful that you are alive, that you were not born into lesser circumstances.

The witnesses will tell you either that they had no idea or that they knew but did not know what they should do, feared retribution, feared being associated with whatever it was that made you undesirable. They chose to exist just a fog cover above your anguish, to look with blurred vision, shining the flashlight from their phones in your direction, hoping that is light enough for you to believe you are not in the black hole.

The scar above my left eye looks like the deepest of my wrinkles. When I was younger it seemed like a badge of my resistance, my courage, my strength, but now just makes me look weary. All the creams and lotions could not stave off the inevitable horizontal lines dragged across my forehead, but I still slather it all on each night. I take my pills for perimenopause and collagen before bed, use thick lotion on my feet and hands and wear socks for as long as I can bear before the first of the hot flashes forces me to rip off all my clothes and then put them back on and then take them off again. I wake up early because I am afraid for the world, because I see the family calendar in my mind, every day and month crossing itself off before I get to the bottom of the list, because I remember that the favorite sweatshirt that still hangs in my daughter’s closet needs a zipper.

I remember that we need boosters, and someone needs new dance shoes and that I have a deadline for an art show. I am thrilled that I have found a way back to making art and to dance. Then I watch dances from even just four years ago and wonder if my body will allow the revisit. I wonder when there will not be enough energy to fight.

I have run headlong into the arms of the wrong men, kept friendships and relationships going that left me feeling unseen, I walk and talk with my father who passed nearly three years ago, chat occasionally with my mother when she answers. Wished my brother a happy birthday. No longer talk much with my sister. Somehow it is already midnight. Somehow it is already five am.

One of my besties stopped talking to me suddenly, to everyone really but I only know how it makes me feel, an old lover messages occasionally to tell me how beautiful I am, having no idea that I use filters, and that being told you are beautiful isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when you are 54 and want to rest. I’d settle for lovely. I want only to be seen for real, take it or leave it. I have lived 54 years trying to figure out if every comment is meant as an invitation to keep doing more of the same or change.

I have sick friends and my friends have sick friends and my kids want to fall in love and my friends have kids who have had break ups and heartache and my car needs to be serviced but I don’t want to sit too long in the Jiffy Lube knowing they just might convince me to do all kinds of things with my old car that I don’t need. Or certainly not right now.

It’s forty-five degrees right now but by this afternoon it will be a record-high of 80 and I don’t know how to dress or how to feel about the changes in the climate that big business and the multinational corporations that promised they’d make life easier and better for us, now deny. They are the cause. They tell us they are not. Then part of the world is underwater.

I want to love a country that I am afraid to drive across. The landscape, the maps all changing. I need more than a Green Book because even my friends tell me that their wonderful parents are voting against the interests of everyone they know but would still serve me at their dinner table. The LOVE me, they say. They think I’m funny. They think I am sassy. I am tired of coming up with ways to describe that one is not open-hearted or decent when they do not care if we live or die.

And you see, the world is completely on fire. Literally and figuratively on fire and we watch people die in front of our eyes because everything is recorded so we cannot say we don’t know or understand. We see families of people die on camera in front of us and check the movie times. I cannot imagine what to write because the weight and breadth of human suffering leaves me prostrate on the floor.

I woke up at 5 am which is early for me, after going to bed sometime in the haze between 11 pm and midnight. I woke up to go to the bathroom but thought immediately of Gaza. I haven’t wanted to say so, but it’s the truth. I think of the ways of the Western World, I think about the Roman Empire. I think about the fact that the opportunity for love might be behind me, that the girls’ father tells me how lonely he is and that I listen, that everything costs more than it should, that I can’t go back to sleep because I will enter that strange void of “second sleep” and be a zombie for the rest of the day, so I get up.

I get up and think of the countdown to the end, make coffee and mark off the last four days of our calendar which I’d not yet done because we were all together and it was so glorious that time stood still. There are huge bags under my eyes. I use the gua sha and then my eye masks to try to reduce the swelling. I’m trembling with fatigue and feel a pimple forming in one of the creased lines in my face. I need to find a tailor for the sweatshirt zipper. I need to stay open to love. I must allow that there have been worse times in history. I must confirm these appointments.

It is from this place, that I beg of you, offer you, thank you, the blinking cursor asking for words. And I have no idea where to begin.