Revolution Not Optional

His arms wrapped around her neck. A tangled necklace. I still remember standing there. Helpless. The couch was facing the door. The whole house seemed tangled. Just like those arms around my mother’s neck. She looked straight into his eyes and she was reciting protective verses. Maybe she was reciting departure versus. Her soul was escaping her body through the tiny hole in her throat. It’s always in the eyes.

“Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up!” He screamed.

My heart beats still thinking about the day my brother almost murdered my mother.

In cold, drunken, tangled hands.

Hours later she claims that she felt protected. Safe and that I shouldn't have worried. Mothers will say anything to soothe their children.

I knew better. Don’t we always know better.

He left the house in array. Episodic anger isn’t cured with anger management therapy. It’s cured by God. That’s what my house reminded me of every day. And yet anger remained.

Being the youngest always felt heavy to me. The journal entries read sadness and yet no confusion. The martyrdom that we are taught to enact and in this way we become enablers. Enablers of mothers who carry on the tradition of patient women and “wise women” to daughters who do not know the perils of being a “patient woman” in a home that is broken like teeth and broken like bones and broken like distorted eyesight and migraines and mistakes and misspeaking and missteps and misgivings.

When all she wanted to do was be loved and there wasn’t ever enough love to go around. It always seemed less than necessary when she talked and her words seemed voluminous yet flighty.

Filled with analogies and beads of wisdom that I still carry around my neck.

We don’t own a tv. We kill the news in my house. The dead bodies have risen and the feathers are still lightweight. Too light to make an instance turn into a revolution. So for the time being we sit still and the flag wavers on. To be heard generationally and still silenced under all the love, unrequited.

After my brother’s seizure of entitlement, my mother is forced to clean up all the broken glass. I watch helplessly as I pack my bag. I have a meeting with the Dead Bodies before the news breaks loose.

The bus arrives on time, 3 minutes late.

“Smile” says the driver “you should smile more. It’s better for you”.

Internally screaming. A smile stretches across my face like a Manhattan mother with fresh botox.

“You’re right” I say with dead eyes and I walk away as his smile falls flat. As do other things.

I’m fucking tired of smiling at dumb motherfuckers. My mother taught me not to curse because it is unbecoming of a proper “girl”.

Well, fuck.

I touch the beads around my neck whenever I feel predated. Which means I’m usually touching my necklace with it’s heart-shaped locket hanging low reaching in between my breasts. I keep it hidden because I don’t need more attention than I already get.

So, there’s only a few men I’ve learned to trust. My mover and my broker.

***

On hot summer days, my mother’s hot flashes burn holes through the couch she sleeps on. She’s had insomnia for twenty years. Twenty years of inabilities. Twenty years of the torture that guards committed in prison to create disillusionment. She was poisoned by them and she’s had the same fever that won’t break. For twenty years.

On certain days every few weeks, she comes back to me, back to life and she tends toward laughter. Most days she’s on the run. Even though she’s in the same place. She prays a lot. Too much. She prays so much, you start to wonder if there is a god. Then you realize that if someone is praying this much, they must be compelled by a higher authority.