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cambridge, fall, new term. 

i have been here before.

i love fall. i crave leaves, not their color, but the acrid scent of their death, their promise that life, full will come again.  that things end but they come again. that sins are forgiven, and guilt finds peace.

some people come to Cambridge, to study; i to give birth. remember why you’re here.  she won’t let me forget.  it’s not me, she taunts.  you are too weak for memories.

i am half-baked, incomplete. i expelled her. and she was beautiful. what is beauty without soul?  her spirit stuck in my canal refusing to be evicted.  the afterbirth is rotting, parasitic organisms feed of the blood of her soul.  and the stench rises, coming from within. 

semi-suicidal.  don’t worry i’ll tell them in a disclaimer.  i am too afraid to harm my body. besides, even if i wasn’t, she would remain.  i’d prefer her scalp, a non-hygienic lobodomy; what i don’t get, the infection will.  perhaps her throat would do.  no words, no power, no me held hostage in her thought worlds.  she weaves an imaginary so strong that i find reality only in retrospect, always too late

they didn’t tell me, they thought i couldn’t handle it, plunged back into the delirium, binding depression, viral, that whittles  away at the girl they’ve come to know.  they remember her.  they don’t want her back; they fear her.  i’m afraid to tell them, she never left.  they didn’t tell me; i love them. 

they’ll be worried.  it’s better that they worry now than cry at the funeral.  i’m trying to spare them grief. 

i have been here before, teetering between sanity and crazed. let yourself go, she whispers, you made it out last time; you can do it again.  she doesn’t offer that she’s stronger or that she’s been watching from behind the wall, studying strategically.  last time, she thinks, was a mistake, i underestimated her power.  this time i know what’s she’s capable of.  i will not lose. 

i can feel the divide deepening; the rift becoming chasm.  i’m tired.  i thought i wouldn’t have to do this again.  i thought i was done.

no one to wipe my brow, to chant if you hold on, it will end.  i promise. i promise, i...

no midwives hover close now, to catch her body should we survive. i sit alone, fluid gushing. alone, opened wide i will myself to deliver her again. 

to save her? to birth her? explain yourself, stop speaking in those mixed metaphors.  stop trying to be a substance and shirking your duty as woman, person, human. you are more than thoughts, you live in both body and mind.

silence the voices, choke the thoughts, stop the speech.

i’m giving birth to her to deliver me.

~2004-2006