#3 BORN DURING AN ECLIPSE

*

Where are you?


I hate life. I hate you, you in the mirror, you too weak to stand and do what needs to be done. You're poisoned, they tell you, like it's a new thing, and call you in to purge you and know nothing so you stay back and drink milk and to hell. You can decide how miserably you want to die. I hate you, I hate you, all broken and gray, shattered into glass, scared to touch yourself, trembling, nothing to puke except vodka and aspirines and you didn't even die.
But who are you? I hate you. I was afraid. I tried. You liar, you cowardly liar. Just look at you staring at the door wondering if someone will come. You disgust me. I hate you. But I tried, I'm telling you. I did as you said, at last I did it... And you failed. And look at you now. Drinking milk, eating bread, growing obese. I am proud of you, little monster. I should have drowned you at birth.
Is that you, Mom? Mother?

SECRET MESSAGE

Mi manchi...

#2 PAINT IT BLACK

*

Who are you?


For an eternity, I hang in black completely naked. The is in my eyes and mouth. My hands are fallen leaves around the bathtub bar.
I can see you, little brother, through the mist, and I reach to protect you even now that I will die.

I wake up shivering and Dad is punching the bathroom door hard, I go out and fall in a maze of blankets and sheets and stuffed toys. He tries talking to me, but I can't talk back. I hear the voices laughing in dreams and we all play and dance in circles and go to sleep, until Dad shakes me and something is wronf because I fainted in the bathtub and I can never ever take another bath.
How to explain blackness?
There's an empty space movin between my bones. When it's in my head I can't talk because the empty space is in my mouth. It has eaten it up. And if I can't speak Dad will take me to see the doctor again. But I'm never sure who it is I have to see. The doctor or the dentist. What's wrong with me this time. If it's the dentist I brush my teeth. If it's the doctor I only comb my hair twice.
Even after my near-death experience, I sit at the table and for an hour and a half I study with the door open and no music so I can get the black jacket at the end of the year. Of course I get distracted easily by the dead people, but in the end they are nice, except at night, when they won't let me sleep and I have to bang my head against the wall to make them shut up. If that doesn't work I prepare myself cups of hot milk and camomile, five or six of each. If that doesn't work, I bang my head harder. If they're still awake, I cry and hope Dad wakes up and helps me... but he never does. I knock on the wall between our bedrooms, I knock harder, I cry louder, I open my door... but he never wakes up and he never comes and I always bang my head until I see the red eyes of the dog of the Baskervilles disappear from my window. Then I close my own eyes and everything goes black.

SI TIENES UN HONDO PENAR, PIENSA EN MÍ

Another week gone by. Still here, becoming an fashion icon on campus... for real. They love me. And I am getting used to the whole only-girls-nothing-to-do-nowhere-to-go business... I get desperate at times, hysteric. I scare myself and others. Stop in the middle of the road. The other day I helped someone who fainted... I got to use my First Aid knowledge at last. Later I was in shock for no reason. This week I've been giving classes, five classes, and I've done it well. My students like me. They say 'Hi' to me and smile. And I wonder how did I manage.
Yesterday I had to yell at a sales assistant, because he wouldn't understand that I really really wanted to return my cell phone. In the end I did it. I don't want a cell phone anymore. Nothing to do with cell phones in America. People here are sometimes obtuse. Many are so inefficient. I don't understand. It's so frustrating. There are so many people, qualified people out of work in the world, and here you find folks earning good money who don't know what's an adapter or a SIM card (woking at the electronics department).
Friday night and no plans except to lie in bed and forget till tomorrow about my assignments. One of them about the aesthetics of my memoir, another about Donne, another about 'The White Man in the American Imagination'... that one is going to be irritating.
Is it four weeks or three that I have been here? Three. It seems an eternity. A deep blue eternity.

#1 (LET YOUR SKIN BE MY HIDING PLACE)

*
Who are you?


All day long I've been munching on this giddy feeling, making bubbles behind my eyes and between my teeth, because I knew tonight it would start. A memoir.
While I scratch my first words, I look in the bathtub. It fills up with blue water, real blue, although the bathtub is white and I didn't put anything in the water to make it blue. Just my foot. A flower of a foot. Very well-behaved and heroic, lady-like despite its size. Always dreaming about becoming a prima ballerina, but there you have it now, just a foot in a bathtub, always mistreated and forgotten when sloppy caresses are given away. I am not very much of a feet lover.
I dive in the bathtub. It's so low I feel I'm being buried underwater. No-one must know I took a bath. The water is no longer blue. Now it's gray and pink, and I have never seen a water that changes its mind so quickly and without chemical help.
As I go down I search for words amongst the colours. Words that I have lost or that have run away from me. Someone is behind the curtain and I hold my breath, letting one of the missing words escape again.
I open my eyes as I stick my head out. The water is yellow and green now. My body is red. Behind the curtain still lurks the invader. Is it the same person? Is it just one? The one who has been there for hours sharpening her nails, waiting for me. When she began I was still young. The colours are melting back into blue. Blue... blue... blue... with a few strands of black.

LYRICS

Jen is bringing the drugs.
She wants to get real fucked up.
She used to laugh and smile,
But the years of denial.
Have taken their toll on her dial.
But, me, I do as I please.
I caught you and set you free.
Cause I have been left alone by the people I've known.
And I don't know when they're coming home.
And Jen don't wanna be seen,
But I saw her in a swank magazine.
She had an airbrushed face,
But the lines of distaste were crossed without crossing of legs.
And I don't wanna be found.
So when you get home, I'm skipping town.
I'm leaving to go someplace
where nobody will have any clue where I am.
And Jen is bringing the drugs.
She's gonna get me fucked up.
Cause love is an inkless pen.
It's a tavern, it's sin.
It's a horrible way to begin
(Margot & The Nuclear)

EN OCASIONES VEO MUERTOS (O GORRIONES)

Exercise in automatic writing for my Creative Memoir class about an episode in life that happened many years ago... nine years. I wrote what I felt then, not what I feel now.


You're lost little girl. Because she is gone and you are stuck in a strange country where you are not allowed to show your true face lest they get too scared, lest you get too scared yourself. You're lost little girl. You are not even allowed to mourn properly. She went away two days ago, maybe three, no-one really knows how or why, and you are stuck here and they made you go to class and you had no black clothes to wear, only a gray and orange sporstsuit. Painfully orange. You're lost little girl. You can't tell anyone she's gone. They could distrust you. They could ask questions and you don't have any answers. No one has given you answers. No one has given you anything except for empty words and pained looks, as if they knew anything about her, or about you for that matter. You're lost little girl. The children are playing. They look at you out of the corner of their eyes. Maybe they already think that you're not the happiest girl that they have ever met, as they have been telling you for years, and you always laughing inside. Maybe one morning of painfully orange isolation is enough to break up all the masks, to darken all the smiles.
It's the first of October and your birthday will come soon. The weather is fine. Even the trees look beautiful despite the attempts of your class mates to murder them with volley balls and footballs. One of your friends finally approaches you and catches an unguarded tear in your left eye. "Is something wrong?" "Oh, well, my dog just died." He believes you. You keep that lie for months. You are good at lying. You are not good at living your own life though. It feels like an old movie that someone had been watching over and over again, damaged with the use. You're lost little girl.

THIS WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME (I'M STUCK WITH THIS FEELING)

At last I have the courage, the inner strength, and enough whatever-ism to write here. I know I promised virtually everyone to tell all about my surrealist misfortunes in the first days... But I really just want to forget all about it. Like the hurricane Ernesto getting me in Philadelphia and being responsible for the cancellation of zillions of flights (of which no one informed us), like all the luggage with all the medicines lost, like no adapters for the laptop and the rest of the electronic devices in the whole county, like no Internet, like no cellphones, like no possibilities to contact home, like a room that looked as the ones from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"...


Then all the academic mix-ups, the mass-shopping trips in WalMarts which is the embodiment of the Evil Empire, going to bed at 9pm, waking up at 5am, meetings and meetings where they only confuse you more and more, lots of first years screaming about the Backstreet Boys and Avril Lavigne, $300 spent in postcards and others decorations for your rooms trying to make it cheerful, but now it looks kinda psycho.


And all the stupid parties. Only girls of course, cos this is an only girl college, so the parties are strange... and the rugby team is really scary. The lesbian population is around 70% Some of them really agressive. Last year some of the TAs had real problems. Great, with my record of obsessive psycos...


And there is food at all times, strange times... Like lunch at 11 or dinner at 5, but good food anyway. Lots of vegetarian food. Lovely. But apart from eating and doing whatever you have to do for class, not much to do here. The campus is magnificent. Lake and horses and grass and squirrels and pretty buildings... and that's it. We're stuck here. The village has one bookstore. One pub. Three cafeterias. A couple of stores. One cinema. One bridal shop. That's it. If you want to go anywhere else you have to go on the bus. Takes at least 30 minutes. We live in complete isolation from the real world. In our leafy tower, combing our hair, reading our manifestos, and longing for holidays.


In one word, and as The Beatles already said many years before, HELP ! Here are some ways to reach me, use one, two, three, all of them, but do use them...
Phone in my room: (001) 413 498 4062
Cell phone: (001) 264 591 1033
Mailing address: Olga Arnaiz , Mt. Holyoke College , 50 College St. , 1200 P.O. Box, Blanchard Campus Center, South Hadley, 01075 MA, USA
And if you want to come and visit you are more than welcome... my room is bigger than in Canada and England, and though it doesn't have great views, well, it has great decoration... and the dining hall is the best on campus.

PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND TIMES ARE STRANGE (LA MAR DE TRISTE)

Many days since last I wrote here. Tomorrow I fly... away away away. These last few days I have been meeting my friends often (although I have been sullen and silent), sleeping till 3 pm, watching... Today I fought with all my things and I almost gave up the whole trip just because I did not have the strenght to lift the chest where I thought was my coat (coat which I wanted to take to Boston with me, but which I do not have anymore... of course, Murphy's law).
In these last few days I have been reading too. A book about BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder, TLP in Spanish), that is, a book about myself. It is good to finally know what it is that ails you. Why you behave the way you do. I am not strange. I am crazy. I do not suffer from depression or anxiety or anorexia. I have BPD... and it includes those disorders and many more. It gives answers to so many things at last.
Then of course there's the dark side of the moon. They say that you can nver be cured of this disorder and that you have to take medication during your whole life. They say it is partly genetic, so not only it is possible that my mother had it, so chances are that my children will have it - for once, I was sure that I wanted a family of my own, I wanted a husband (with or without marriage) and I wanted children (not one, but many), I was not afraid of being like her, of being a bad mother... now it doesn't even depend on how I behave, it's in my blood. I am truly damaged.
I guess therapy has done something to me. At least now I find just one tiny bit easier to talk... and it has brought me understanding of this illness, of which I am grateful. And I do think that medication works. Of course I am better now that six months ago. But it's not good enough. It's not even good.

AFFITTASI SOLO AD ARTISTI E BASTA!

Il più bello dei mari
è quello che non navigammo.
Il più bello dei nostri figli
non è ancora cresciuto.
I più belli dei nostri giorni
non li abbiamo ancora vissuti.
E quello
che vorrei dirti di più bello
non te l'ho ancora detto.

(Nazim Hikmet)

XAU!

PORTERÒ CON ME

Porterò con me

Porterò con me l’imbarazzo del primo bacio
e i tuoi occhi nel lagole
tue smorfie piccanti
strofinandoci il nasola speranza spezzata
di toglierti le calzedi
vederti dormire coi pugni sulle guance
porterò con me
un maglione mai lavato,
le tue cadute nel buiola sconfitta,
l’ingenuità d’innamorarmi
la tua testa sulla spalla e i tuoi occhi bagnati
il profumo del legno e delle lenzuola
porterò con me
l’intimità delle nostre carezze e sorrisi puerili
la tua silenziosa sorpresa sotto l’ultima luna
il vento freddo pungente e l’abbraccio più caldo
e quel fare l’amore per fermare il tempo

(Ettore Giuradei)

LE BAISER DU TRATTOIR

Sei la mai schiavitù sei la mia libertà
sei la mia carne che brucia
come la nuda carne delle notti d'estate
sei la mia patria
tu, coi riflessi verdi dei tuoi occhi
tu, alta e vittoriosa
sei la mia nostalgia
di saperti inaccesibile
nel momento stesso
in cui ti afferro.

(Nazim Hikmet)