I fall back and wake and wake again and am clean and clean with relief and the booming voices recede and the smell of arguing is faint. The bright green and subdued brown of the date palms seem closer in the budding sun. I roll ever so much but I am captive to my body and my body is captive to time and to rescue and my eyes become heavy once again, and then I wish myself up and away and I travel to the ocean, blue, green becoming black not peaceful but free and clean and powerful and open. I ride fish, rolling and shaking my head and lips over to one side. Then I return and become wet again, enjoying the warmth then fearing the cold and the waste and the new constriction.
Then the smell of milk, ash and early light encircles me and I reach out with all my senses, open and full. Smell is brown and bitter, sharp and clear then receding to blue, calm and open. Open, strange and unlikely. But wherever I roll there it comes in waves of brown, blue fire ash and yes, milk, reassuring smells that enter my body, hover and then travel to all extremities. Again open, lighter, it encircles to depart.
I hear laughter and arguing, tempers and fire crackle waiting, suspended, no hands. Finally a breath I don’t recognize, a smell unwrapping me, exposed and dirty fingers poke me and I hurt and cry and am muzzled. So I fly again and leave my prison, altitude over the desert and higher and it is black and still and then over cities that become light and mine. Over mountains and over more desert. I’m cold and overwhelmed, but free; free to be and free safe and alone. Always alone.
I re-experience my birth, the milk, tears, blood, shit, sweat and spittle. Even the cum of my father who made me. All coalesce around me, liquids intermingling with liquids. Some with greater density stand apart in the concoction of life and living; other liquids merging and forming new shapes and colors, new effusions of memory and presence. This is repulsive to those who witness my event. Like great natural phenomenon, the blood cascades and spreads over me like a huge dominating waterfall, descending, pounding, splattering and careening. Elegance merges with the repulsive. I appear with the ambiguous genitalia of boy and girl. From the slime of raw skin a penis, green and spotted emerges from a slimy vagina, blue, twisted and distended. The midwife acts swiftly and decides my sex, not leaving to chance or life itself my identity. This embarrassing slab of flesh, this painful, flawed corporeality of humanity and existence is not a departure or an excuse or even a cheat on beauty but welcomed life in its essence. I am alive.
The fact I am raped and killed at twelve by my father should be the overwhelming incident in my life. But this is not the case. What matters most are the twelve years of ecstasy and abundance that carry me beyond the limits of my own perception of this world.
In the beginning I am ruled by these very limits and I fear to move beyond nature. Why do we take this world, nature itself at face value? I see and feel larger configurations, force-fields of energy and compositions of color and light that rarely reflect this everyday world. It is always this way: my senses operate not metaphorically, but metaphysically and always with dimensionality. These other, fuller worlds are real and palpable, not fantasies and I journey back and forth with considerable speed and delight. So what is real is never the question. What is asked is how I adjust and live in each sphere.
It began at birth or soon after. I am visited by a dark forbidding figure, cocooned in sheets of dark layers, standing near my bed. I scream and try to rouse my brother. No one hears what is all too real. The figure comes closer and I feel the scent of other worlds, of landscapes foreign to my senses, a preponderance of blacks, browns, and ochres here and there violated by light and by red and by yellow. I am taken up and out and forward and leave what is familiar to travel to those other places. The lights of my village seem far away; it is cold and dense and then farther away and away. I see what will in time be common opportunity for connection and resolution. I move forward and backward and sideways, testing my own strength and determination and then resolved in a kind of peace, where I am my own engine of movement, maker of color and opportunity and possibility. Nowhere is this more apparent than where I build on who I am becoming where I am and I lose my guide and rest on my own engines. But before this departure, I see so clearly on the many layers of darkness surrounding this face. Only what I can recognize as the lived experiences of many lives, repeated and continued, open and closed, fragmented and whole. They are mine, who I had been, who I am now and will be. The vision is so swift but so indelible that I take with me all that I can reconstruct.
Later, it is insects and fish that guide me to these new places; the color of their bodies, the textures of their flesh captivate my curiosity and as soon as I can reach, I reach for them as guides. I must tell you where they take me because what I experience frightens me and makes me initially not want to leave our practical world despite its daily pain, suffering and dislocation. But I long for connection.
