i wonder if people battle with themselves as much as i do. i go back and forth and around in circles so frequently that i exhaust myself and then require long periods of sleep or inactivity. or both. i justify excessive sleep by working 30 hours or so per week, but really by being away from home for 11 or so per day. that, i feel, by walking in chicago winter, is the real work i do. the rest is just preparing for and doing things that will hopefully lead me to other things–a constructive way to pass time, i guess, editing and correcting things put before me…. and though practical, it is unrewarding. paying bills on time can only be as satisfying as forgetting what it was like when you couldn’t. once you can for a while, it just is. things just fall in line and you glance furtively into old closets of art supplies, sometimes, with a glass of wine, sitting down right in the middle of the floor surrounded by the old charcoal gesture drawings, self-portraits in oil and graphite and watercolor… the many failures and few successes of art school; things you wrote and saw and thought… you walk around to the other side of your desk, the side where you plan to work but mostly pay bills. you sit in front of your three writing devices–an antique typewriter for show, a dysfunctional g4, and a heavily used macbook…also, at times, somehow, also just for show–and attempt to make yourself be real again. write something angry but true about your scorpio mother or horrid teenage years, or something sad and amplified about your dying father, something berserk about the conversations you have with your daughter’s deadbeat dad, or something fervent about a love you once had, something wistful about the trenches of love you find yourself in now, or maybe something about being black, and a woman, and educated-all at the same time, and when none of those things are good enough, take a stab at writing about being a mother perhaps…and black, and a daughter, and a sister to a prisoner. yes, tell a tale about the brother in jail who somehow wishes you cared enough to still tell stories about boyfriends, even though he threatened to kill the last. maybe you could write about the irony of growing up black in a white town, growing up black in a white america, or growing up black with white presidents. you could write about how things changed shortly after turning 30–a black president, the recession, your depression, graduation, alcoholism, unemployment and then, how you came to settle into this stifling little world of pragmatism. (sigh…)
again, i’ve lost myself in maybes…
but here i am, still. blogging. hoping. wishing on a star. fearful now that 40 will arrive as quickly as the daughter turned 10. how is it that her years fly by so visibly and mine do not? i feel like there’s a benjamin button somewhere between us even as i realize it must be because i am always on the inside looking out… i look at her and i see her future. i look at her and i see my past. people keep asking if we’re sisters and though i should take it as a compliment, i take it as a riddle of time all the while obsessively trying to remember all the things my mother told me and refused to, the things she gave me and forbade me, the words she screamed, the lies she told, the wisdom and cautionary tales and perverse accounts from her days in poverty and marriage. i keep trying to inform mine and protect her at the same time; curiously, she has taken a liking to my last beau. i find that endearing to death, even as i know, and even as i plot with him for all time, she is already exiting my nest. oh morosity! oh facts of ecclesiastes!
it’s time for more sleep. let’s see where toni’s florens and sir might take me tonight…
Nonfiction Woman 