Dear Mom

Before and After Dad died;

I walked through the world weary from torn sentiments and my bleeding heart and I thought of you

A thousand aches and all of my best memories bled from my skin a whole decade away from a life of relative security

*the security being relative

I walked through bleary half lit days of homelessness, I walked until my feet became the blister

I found myself in mens beds who didn’t want me*just to sleep through the night a facade and placation

*or shall I say not to keep me

I found that the kindness of a stranger became me, made my life’s continuity a part of me

I found that dirt and filth and drugs could not spoil nor deter me nor the love that comes for me for it wouldn’t stop

I found that life was better playing the unkempt whore than being who I was.

My shine still broke through midnights and days brighter than my own soul shine in the glam of a culture that survived a darkness incomprehensible

I broke chains and slept in fences, the nights were cold in the city that slept beside the Mississippi and I found warmth and shelter in the scoop of a bulldozer, as I hadn’t the courage or energy to break into the warmth the cab

I shaved my head and called it love, a validation, a statement a token of respect for my dead father and a symbol of alliance with a new world without him.

I tore my clothes into fashions that fit my curves and lived with my hair dulled from street dirt, after it grew back. I tried all the short fashions I'd always admired and could never pull off.I lived out of bounds and unkempt and still pulled up at the bank

And was treated as the unquestionable majesty that I walked with.

I have suffered for hours unimaginable and walked though hell undeserved and I found myself still void of the taint of bitter and yet even so I could not find a reason not to love

I have been beaten, robbed, raped, and mobbed…I have been mugged, protested and spat on yet I haven’t even a sliver of the dime that dealing with this new and inordinate fame has cost.

I have turned crowds, gotten lost in their anonymity, been a crest in the waves that rode with. I have walked alone and when my cues have gone ignored I have told the world of and off.

Yet I have never or rarely found reason to feel perturbed or unsettled enough to feel the harm or necessity of violence .

I have lived childless and alone, I have slept in beds, on the sidewalks, and in posh hotels yet I have always made it through the nights unperturbed and I have always remained alone.

I have fought the demons of addiction and the phycological dependency to dysfunctional that goes with it successfully for 71/2 years yet I still I lie here in my bed haunted and alone.

I have walked through zones of red and lived through areas of discordance that dazzled my vision in apparitions like shattered glass.I have lay on the pavement, in the grass, and driven a stick shift car, and well. I have lived through circumstances that would send a pack of ravenous wolves cowering into their dens with courage and I can sing beautifully enough to make a grown man weep.

I have walked on top of the world and lived through its bottoms. I have demanded acquiescence from kings and wealth from paupers. I have learned to love myself and to accept who I am as what it is.

I have travelled as diplomat and queen, I have learned of beauty, truth, and the true price of freedom.

I have found kindness and empathy in the stangest of places as a matter of fact I have lived a life so hard that no matter how well I look or how high I become not an envy alive should and does not turn from hostility to me. I have a strength that men envy and women want.

Yet I find that this fragility haunts me, in all that I do.

Since he died, and in the years before it seems as if I am to blame. But I'm not. The stages of grief are a hard thing for all involved. Even so. I have had to pull a strength up within me, year after year to continue on. To face a world that doesn't understand me, alone.

I'm tired of being alone, when I know familiars in this world.

Did you know that I hate sleeping alone? I abhor it, I always have. Yet I have reached a state in my existence where it is becoming a little more comfortable to me. I have learned not to lament it, anyway.

I have always been alone. I have always felt alone even in crowds. I am intermittently comfortable with this and torn apart at the seams by it.It is my life, however, and I live it as I always have.

Sometimes peoples opinion of me still gets under my skin, however. I find that sometimes when people call me a freak...well lately it makes me cry. Isn't that strange? Me? Once again caring what people think?

I just wanted to d

r

o

p

a few lines and let you know, where I am and where I have been in the last decade since he died.

Brief Addendum: My father developed cancer at 21. I was a 7 years old. A thirteen pound tumour was removed from his chest and the doctors gave him a prognosis of two weeks to live. They had never seen anything like it. He lived another thirty four years but had complications in the last decade of his life due to heart problems that were inflicted by the tumour. He received life saving surgeries once by replacing the veins of his heart with ones from his legs but eventually succumbed to heart failure.