Saturn Return: Say Goodbye To Your Old Life
You don’t tell for years then when you start telling you can’t stop the words take wing, like mad confessional grackles. you tell your boyfriend first and he holds your hair while you sob. You tell your mother next but she says she doesn’t know what she did to deserve a kid like you so you roar away in your red Sunfire radio blaring righteous tunes shocked and betrayed. you tell your girlfriends one after the other and none of them knows what to say. who has heard of people doing such despicable things to children? there is no internet yet. so you tell your last friend Diane who says, I’m so sorry, finally, and makes you dinner. on Fridays you watch cop shows together and munch M & Ms. July mornings you walk to work through ceaseless traffic, horns assault your ears, escape the steaming concrete into Queen’s Park, you need earth, maple leaves, you feel skinless and flayed. you hide in your air-conditioned office all day the cubby hole with no windows jammed with machines, computer beep, blinking fax machine, ancient photocopier spitting out pages of its own volition. is it ever quiet? a single desk lamp burning hot light onto the newspaper article you read six times, the words blurring paragraphs jumping like those Mexican jumping beans you got as a kid. PTSD? you cannot understand anything anymore do words still have meaning when a man rams grownup penis into child vagina? when no one stops when you scream? NO! you are not sure if anything else will ever be relevant again, you are drowning in the past which refuses to be forgotten, fighting off ghost hands, memory a quicksand, rattling the door of the locked shed. LET. ME. OUT! you cry at the drop of a hat now at everything, you misplace your keys and become hysterical with grief in the car wash, you never sleep, every day you watch CNN for hours on end hopping channels looking for clues. the Berlin Wall comes down and then you do too. you crack in the bath, crawl onto the black and white Hamilton tile, the whine of rush hour traffic sending you over the edge, praying to Tara the Mother of all Buddhas HELP! Save me from the noise inside my head. next day stepfather shows up with a poster of Green Tara, just cleaning out closets, synchronicity? gasp! hope glimmers, prayers do get answered, you are living in a liminal world where time dissolves yesterday bleeds into today stains tomorrow your hours a slow burn in your New York style walk-up with the fireplace that doesn’t work, beach umbrella in the kitchen, a knife on the bedside table just in case. you quit your job tell your mother to fuck-off disconnect your phone. so much for telling. truth. it’s Saturn Return. your old life crashes and burns. you will cry every day for six years. Write. Pray. Until. Free.