A Room.  A Window.

Outside the window, an entire world that I have not moved through for so many years.  Some of the world comes to me, it is true, and I am not so reclusive that I do not let it in.  Marietta brought her newest baby just yesterday, and I held it as though I have held a baby every day of my life, in spite of the fact that I have not held a baby since that baby slipped away from me, into the arms of another woman I have never known the name of. That baby was ripped more violently from my arms than it had been pulled from my female regions hours before.  I was not given a choice.  No one knew.  The baby vanished and then I vanished, off to another country.  Off. . . .

A cough.  I spin around and look behind me.  It is a new intruder.  After so many years alone, two people entering my world.  Perhaps if I’d kept the door unlocked all these years, more people would have come other than the boy who brings my groceries and the other woman with the many layers of skirts who brings me new medicine when I have need of it.

I do not know this new person.  It is a young man who carries a machete in his hand.  He is very tall.  Very very tall for a Mexican, so perhaps he is a Bedouin or some other Arab from a tall tribe, plopped down in this country  in the way many of us have been positioned here by fate, by circumstance or by force.  His skin is that beautiful golden coffee color of someone naturally dark who has also been in the sun for long period of time or for a long lifetime.

“Disculpe, senora,” he says, as he moves into the room.  When I speak to him in English, he switches to English.  He has seen my tall palm with the fruit and the seeding husks hanging dangerously loose.  He can scale this tree and cut them for me.  It needs to be done, senora, and if I have no money to pay, he will do it for no more fee than my friendship.  And if I have no friendship to offer, then he will do it for the good grace it will bring him in the universe and perhaps an easier ingress into heaven.

It is an omen, I think, and I surprise myself when I give him permission to trim the tree.  He cannot know how much he looks like a young man in my past and he cannot know how uncharacteristic it is for me to allow anyone at all into my life, my room, my trust.  Now I have an obligation to this man I know nothing about.  He may be dangerous.  Certainly, he carries a weapon.  The branch of the pomegranate tree taps taps on my window, as though a strong breeze has come up in this still day.  It is the fingers of the afternoon reminding me.  Warning me.  But then I see that it is the movement of the young man as he brushes past the tree that has set it in motion.

A large turquoise dragonfly rests on the branch that has stopped moving and that now sits isolated.  Another dragonfly approaches it and seems to attach itself in an arch and they go flying away together in this impossible configuration—a broken circle.  How two creatures can move as one is not something I have ever learned, not since the one person who was a part of me for so many months was pulled from my arms still weak from childbirth.  If they’d waited, I would have been strong enough, I tell myself.  I have been telling myself for most of my life.
After they took from me what was mine, we took a drive to a large place with many chairs.  Many chairs and many people, then a corridor.

Then I was on an airline and in spite of my terror, I fell asleep. I was an eleven year old girl, accustomed to doing what I was told to do.  I woke up in America, where I was driven to the beautiful house of my aunt.  It was here I lived for ten more years.  Here that they expected to give me a new life to encourage me to forget my old life, but as I sit for all these years in my isolation, it is the old life that I remember and remember and remember.

For Thursday Inspiration #226: Whenever, Wherever

This is a 5 minute inspiration piece I wrote for a writing retreat a few years ago.  It was buried in my poetry file, for some reason, but I resurrected it as it seemed to fit the “Whenever, Wherever” prompt so well.  Like its subject, it has been tucked away for too long.