static_abyss (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
static_abyss) wrote2024-07-31 12:31 am
static_abyss) wrote2024-07-31 12:31 am
LJ Idol Week 4: The Calmest of Rivers Hide the Deadliest of Currents
I used to wonder who I'd be if I had a different mother, if like the Mixteco river, I too would know how to wash away the debris that inevitably finds its way into the waters of my life. I wonder if I'd survive like that river has survived the most egregious of human behavior.
Who would I be if I'd had the support those waters have, if the people in my life sat at my riverbank and closed their eyes as they listened to the sounds of my soul. I wonder what it would be like to be essential, to be touched so carefully, to have others swim in my waters until we were one, connected by that unexplainable sense of belonging that flows from river to human and human to river. That feeling that tells us we belong.
We are home.
I have walked the path to the river hundreds of times now. I have listened to the sounds of the night, to the way that Mother Nature murmurs to her children. I know what my ancestors heard as they got ready for bed, how the stars shone above them as the wind whispered bedtime stories. I am never afraid there. I do not fear the sounds of the cerros.
I know the secrets that hide in the vegetation, the danger that comes from the coyotes' howls at night. I know we must sleep above the ground with a fire burning to keep the wild animals at bay. I know intimately the feel of cold scales against the back of my leg, the power of a wild hog's horns, and the sting of a scorpion's tail.
I do not fear what comes from those cerros. How could I? I am a guest among that land and in the home of those animals.
I am the stranger.
I am the real danger.
Before I was born, the animals and plants lived there, thrived, existed, flourished. Why would I fear what the land gives me? I am not scared of the fruit that kills if eaten. I do not fear the rashes on my skin when I come across a plant my skin no longer remembers. I know my place in the world among the towering cacti.
I can sense my ancestors in every step I take, in the silence that's never really the absence of noise. It's much more than emptiness. It's the sound of animals and people, of the river and the insects. It's fallen fruit, and my grandmother's tears as she buried her father and his mother tongue.
You could blindfold me, and I'd find my way around that pueblo, in those cerros and among the fruits of my family's labor. I will always know who I am there.
But don't ask me who I'd be if my mother had loved me differently because I do not think I could answer.
I do not recognize the child that lives within me. All my life I thought she was the problem. I thought her tears and her anger were unjustified. I see her smile in pictures and cannot recognize her. She repulses me. The happiness in her face, the grin in those pictures she took with her friends.
She was never happy, you know. She pretended. She was good at acting, at taking all the things she felt and pushing them as far back into her body as she could. If you asked her how she was, she could spin you a story so good you would never know it wasn't real. She'd smile and touch your hand, and you would swear you saw the entirety of the Mixteco in her soul.
She was good at lying. I can see it in her eyes, in the way she stands next to her family. She looks so happy, I want to reach into those pictures and shake her until she snaps out of it. I cannot understand how she does not know, how she does not feel the weight of her entire family's trauma. How does it not drown her? How is she able to hold that smile?
I think she must be like the Mixteco during the dry season, when its waters are so still I can imagine floating across the top, carried by the warm wind and the sounds of the cerros. She's those beautiful, shining rocks at the bottom of the river, the buzzing of those unpolluted waters, and the fish that come and go on their way to the Poblano river.
She's dazzling.
She's perfect.
She's a liar.
She lives in the photographs my mother keeps in her cardboard-covered albums, and I wonder how no one else can see it. Why am I the only one who recoils from that dishonest smile? Why does her false innocence nauseate me?Is it because I know who she becomes? Is it because my mother looks at her preserved in those photographs and touches her so reverently, as though she is touching something beautiful. Dazzling. Perfect.
Why doesn't my mother know? How could she forget?
After all, it was underneath the still waters of the Mixteco that her father drowned.
Who would I be if I'd had the support those waters have, if the people in my life sat at my riverbank and closed their eyes as they listened to the sounds of my soul. I wonder what it would be like to be essential, to be touched so carefully, to have others swim in my waters until we were one, connected by that unexplainable sense of belonging that flows from river to human and human to river. That feeling that tells us we belong.
We are home.
I have walked the path to the river hundreds of times now. I have listened to the sounds of the night, to the way that Mother Nature murmurs to her children. I know what my ancestors heard as they got ready for bed, how the stars shone above them as the wind whispered bedtime stories. I am never afraid there. I do not fear the sounds of the cerros.
I know the secrets that hide in the vegetation, the danger that comes from the coyotes' howls at night. I know we must sleep above the ground with a fire burning to keep the wild animals at bay. I know intimately the feel of cold scales against the back of my leg, the power of a wild hog's horns, and the sting of a scorpion's tail.
I do not fear what comes from those cerros. How could I? I am a guest among that land and in the home of those animals.
I am the stranger.
I am the real danger.
Before I was born, the animals and plants lived there, thrived, existed, flourished. Why would I fear what the land gives me? I am not scared of the fruit that kills if eaten. I do not fear the rashes on my skin when I come across a plant my skin no longer remembers. I know my place in the world among the towering cacti.
I can sense my ancestors in every step I take, in the silence that's never really the absence of noise. It's much more than emptiness. It's the sound of animals and people, of the river and the insects. It's fallen fruit, and my grandmother's tears as she buried her father and his mother tongue.
You could blindfold me, and I'd find my way around that pueblo, in those cerros and among the fruits of my family's labor. I will always know who I am there.
But don't ask me who I'd be if my mother had loved me differently because I do not think I could answer.
I do not recognize the child that lives within me. All my life I thought she was the problem. I thought her tears and her anger were unjustified. I see her smile in pictures and cannot recognize her. She repulses me. The happiness in her face, the grin in those pictures she took with her friends.
She was never happy, you know. She pretended. She was good at acting, at taking all the things she felt and pushing them as far back into her body as she could. If you asked her how she was, she could spin you a story so good you would never know it wasn't real. She'd smile and touch your hand, and you would swear you saw the entirety of the Mixteco in her soul.
She was good at lying. I can see it in her eyes, in the way she stands next to her family. She looks so happy, I want to reach into those pictures and shake her until she snaps out of it. I cannot understand how she does not know, how she does not feel the weight of her entire family's trauma. How does it not drown her? How is she able to hold that smile?
I think she must be like the Mixteco during the dry season, when its waters are so still I can imagine floating across the top, carried by the warm wind and the sounds of the cerros. She's those beautiful, shining rocks at the bottom of the river, the buzzing of those unpolluted waters, and the fish that come and go on their way to the Poblano river.
She's dazzling.
She's perfect.
She's a liar.
She lives in the photographs my mother keeps in her cardboard-covered albums, and I wonder how no one else can see it. Why am I the only one who recoils from that dishonest smile? Why does her false innocence nauseate me?Is it because I know who she becomes? Is it because my mother looks at her preserved in those photographs and touches her so reverently, as though she is touching something beautiful. Dazzling. Perfect.
Why doesn't my mother know? How could she forget?
After all, it was underneath the still waters of the Mixteco that her father drowned.