Farewell on Charlotte Street

Today I realized that it's the first time in my entire life that no can tell me to "have a good summer." There's nothing to come back to, only things to step forward into. The long haul of formalized education via bureaucratic institution, whether or public or private has finally come to a close. Most people, I suppose, will not be surprised as I say this. Nevertheless, I surprise myself: I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm feeling at a loss.

Nine months ago, I was ready to leave, pack up and go and never look back. I decided to stay. Ride it out. Be brave. I can take it. Of course I can. I, of anyone, can take anything. But I made a promise to myself: if I stay, I make a genuine effort to pull myself up from the ground; I enjoy life; I make it worth it, I make it count, and I build friendships. I take chances.

I did all of these things.

People told me at the outset, way back four years ago, that this was the beginning of the rest of my life. It was a new chapter. I'd come out with the best friends I'll ever have. I'd keep them forever. They were wrong.

College, for me at least, was not another chapter, but merely a subsection. The path I am about to dig up a mountain, is. It will be long and hard and strenuous and I know there will rain. It will cause the inevitable mudslide and I'll slide down. But it will be worth it like the time I really dug a trail up a mountain and slid down in the rain. I'm not remembered for that trail, but the trail exists. I made my mark.

The past four years have been, if not the most wonderful, the most important. I have learned what it is to grow up. I have learned to stand on my own and I have learned to accept and be content, even happy sometimes, that people come and go and that the ones you love and trust the most are the ones who are the most spiteful and the ones who kill you from the inside out. I have learned how to forgive. I learned that forgetting is not part of that equation. Forgetting is not productive because the reason those people have the ability to destroy us, is because we let them. I have learned that to love something more anything else, it is inevitable that you hate it, too, because that love shows you truths about yourself you never wanted to know. Scorn makes you look yourself in the face and hate it, accept it, move on, love it all over again. "To be born again...first you have to die" (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses).

I have died. I have been resurrected. I have learned not to wait, because Godot isn't coming. But I have to be surprised when I am on someone's list of priorities. I have learned quite recently that people tell the truth when you want them to tell a lie because it makes you feel good and they tell the lie when you want the truth. I have learned to my own inadequacy in the face of other people and I have decided, officially, concretely, that if people view me as insufficient, it's their problem. I do not change. I will not change. Not for anyone. Not if it compromises who I am in any essential way. I would rather be alone and real than false and deluded. It is a fair price. I am willing to pay it.

But I have dedicated four years of my life to this place. I love it to death. I can't wait to leave but it's killing me to see it go. Thus is life. I am my own best friend. No one gets that title anymore. The moment it's given, is the moment they abandon me and I'm tired of starting over like that. But make room for chances and I make room for love. Reciprocate and I open up the world to you.

I spent the day walking out in a chilly May rain. God knows why it's chilly. It's New England. I'm going back South where, if the climate is right for once, the air will be so thick with water I'll hardly be able to breathe. The storms will run like clockwork and I'll go hiking in the dark at the edge of a waterfall. What the hell, right? I'm already at the edge of the world. The air will be thick and hot, stifling, my limbs immovable like in the Egyptian's plague of darkness with all the light to goad me as to what I cannot reach. The world moves more slowly there. Another surprise: I miss it.

But it won't be long until I'm gone again and left to my own devices. Love is woven over distance if it's strong and I don't trust in anything unless it's strong. Time flows by and then it's gone. We all owe death a life. Let's make the most of it.

I suppose in the end, everyone's a hypocrite, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. The point is, I do care. The point is, I pick up on my own hypocrisy and hate myself for it. I recede.

Today, I spoke to the Gypsy. The one who went over the hills and stood by the River Clady and won the heart of a lady. The Whistlin' Gypsy. The one that jumped out of my childhood dreams and wove me around indelibly into post-adolescent schemes and left me hanging by a thread in the tapestry. He makes the world explode with angels in his wake. They appear on rooftops and trees and walk beside me. Life is a ride on air and after all this wasted time, I find there's still nothing to confide but the same old story. The difference: no one who will be my confidente. The Gypsy Rover is gone.

"You know nothing is impossible, Little Girl," the angel says.
"Most things are not. If we're talking about Time, though, we both know I can survive Eternity."
(I'm not like Quentin Compson.)
The angel bows its head.
But surviving Eternity is nothing much when it is impossible to survive myself. I don't believe a thing about people except their hostility, their apathy, their compassionless being, their utter lack of consideration for other people.

I discard them. I become what I abhor. But I am aware. I am a corrosive substance. I eat myself from within. The fact that I am unloveable kills me. The fact that I am a hypocrite kills me even more. I live in spite of these things. And yes, the information collects.

In a year from now, none of this will matter, no? All right, I've made my decision. Again. And of course, the best course of action is the one that is Right and the one that creates of me a masochist. But no matter. It is the most considerate of other people. Either way, I lose. So I will disappear because this is what is best. I will be there only when people want me to be there and that is only when I am needed for use. Fine. For what else was I created other than advantage? I understand. I am forgettable, except as a resource.

No matter. I will hope that people get well. I will neglect my own well-being. Nothing can hurt me now anyway because two-and-a-half years ago, I said "Yes" when someone asked me if I was all right with having my heart shredded. I said "yes" because "no" would have been selfish and she was happy. I said "yes" because it was the right thing to do.

But now I wonder what is right and what is wrong and where I fall on the spectrum. Sometimes you have to be selfish just to keep surviving. I don't survive. I exist. There's a difference.

Just don't remind me of my inadequacy; I am already quite aware. Don't remind me of my ugliness; I'm aware of that, too. Just don't pretend that these things aren't so. Please, don't pretend because that only gives me false hope and when it vanishes, I lose yet another crucial piece of myself and although that doesn't matter in the long run, it matters to me because I am all I have.

Perhaps I am just unlucky. No doubt, I am a fool. But like the Tin Soldier said, "Time goes by." That, it does. But I want to cherish every moment before I die and I would rather die after having lived and not merely having existed. But that isn't my call. Some things are left to the Fates. Some things are left to God.

I have surrendered.

I don't have it in me to be a writer like that:

splurging raw truth out on the page, gritted through my teeth, down to the wire, and then the airwaves. I just don't work like that.

I work the truth, but not the conversion of truth in thought into the Symbolic truth conveyed by words. Our communication system just isn't adequate. But what's the answer to this problem?

Music.

Yes. "I've Seen All Good People: Your Move"

I let myself sink into that and turn inside out.

I've never really seen myself as a musician. The cliche is spit out everywhere: Music is the universal language. So is math. They are the same, just viewed through different lenses. But the more I think about it, the more I know that music really is my forte. It's the only place I completely get lost and release myself from the weight of human triviality. No thought involved. No initiation. Just instantaneous holiday.

Give me some soma, Aldous. Headphones and a recording. Check, check. Just for the heck of it, a notebook and a pen. A blank screen and a keyboard. Check, check, check. I'm set.

Maybe I'm disheartened with the human race. Yes, the human race. All of us clumped together. We are all guilty of the situation we find ourselves in today, where there is discrimination based on the vain differences of the color of skin, an irrational fear of alterity, and the instinctual and immediate assumption of a monstrous "other" the moment we are confronted with even the most miniscule of differences.

Sure, we "dance around" the subject of race. We still can't even concretely define it. It exists, certainly, but as something negative, something in opposition: we are always not-someone else; we never really are anything, because we fail to pinpoint what those differences really are and what it is that distinguishes one group from another. So, of course, we dance around the subject of race. What else can we do with a bottomless pit of an idea like that but fall down it?

The irony here is that we have already fallen down that abyss of an idea; the problem lies in the fact that we fail to realize it or understand what that "falling" means. We have no solid ground to compare it to because the culture we have been born into never taught us what it is we're supposed to be so afraid of, or so celebratory of.

I suppose I'm frustrated. The last class was very good, from my perspective. We asked a lot of very good questions concerning "race," ended up discussing personal experiences and ideas instead and still, people call this a "dance." What else can we do with such an ambiguous notion other than discuss our own experiences and bat around our questions? In order to concretize race into something definitive that we each can understand, we have to talk about our personal experiences with what we think it is, about our qualms with it, about our fears and about our frustrations, perplexities, and agreements.

I have the sneaky suspicion that we will never know what "race" really is, because I suspect that it is whatever we want it to be, or believe it to be in any given moment. We pass those abstract ideas on and the cycle continues. Perhaps race really is merely an illusion, but an illusion believed in so zealously by all of us that it has grown a personality and substance that has chained all of us. Maybe instead of griping over dancing around the subject of race, we should ask ourselves why we dance and whether that dance is really around the subject. Maybe it is subject, because, like race itself, the dance is just an illusory construct and all of us are prisoners in our own delusion.

There's nothing like sunset from the air. I saw it two weeks ago and have been dreaming of it ever since. Now, I'm looking at it from the ground. Just as miraculous. Just as worth it to be alive, for those five minutes in the day when the sky turns golden and pink and purple. Here, I've spent the day failing to dance with my feet, but it felt good anyway. My reward? I get to dance with my eyes. Never turn a good sunset (or sunrise, for that matter) down.

I guess I'm in a very good mood today. I've been thinking about miracles. The little ones and the big ones. I talked to the Tin Soldier yesterday. For the first time in months he was happy. I guess that's what happens when you let it all go for a dance in the rain. The good news is a possibility. Perhaps he won't be tin for much longer. But the past never leaves you. Hopefully, I'll be there soon, too. I can fill the tin with something other than emptiness like he filled me with disbelief and no way to left to doubt. It's hard to be a skeptic when miracles happen and people come back from the dead, right? This is one ghost I will not dance for. I'll dance with him. And even though I can't dance well, it'll feel just as satisfactory. That's always how it is when you're lead by someone who was born to be a dancer.

The sunset's over and life calls. At the moment, at least, I can say that there's always tomorrow.

Little Blue Hawk

When I was seventeen, I left the Rosebud Reservation of my birth and had nothing left to lose but my life. Like most Lakota in the twentieth century, I'd lost my father to shame and the drink that made him forget it. When I was you,g I often wondered if he was still alive. Now that I am wiser, I understand that he had been born robbed of life. But life will come again, beyond these imaginary gates. So says the Father. A'te he'ye lo.

If I had not been born an Indian, perhaps, I would know how to dream. Perhaps I would dream of owning the White Man's holy collection of refrigerators and barbed wire fences, and flushing toilets so that I would qualify to keep my children and so that the Great Father's Social Services do not deem me the dog they've made of me. But I would rather spit into the wind and give my shit to a hold in the earth, as it should be, than dream the White Man's dream. Ya'nipikta' e'ya u'-we lo. "You shall live," he says as he comes. Ya'nipikta. A'te-ye he'ye lo. The father says so.

When I took my first step onto the soil of the United States of America, in the state of South Dakota, I sought to save myself from the spiral of disgrace that the White Man's wheel had wrought upon us. I sought to shed my name in this White Man's world that had laid waste to the holy Badlands and Black Hills by covering them over with ribbons of cement, immigrants' toil, and Indian blood. So many trails of tears flow freely here, those trails have turned to rivers. I spoke the White Man's tongue and knew his god better than I knew my own. But like I cannot shed my red skin or my slanted eyes, I cannot remove the Indian from myself. To become the redemption for my own people, I set out upon the father's road, to learn the White Man so well that I should become him, in order to defeat him. Give me my arrows so that I may carve a grave out of my heart. Wanhi'nkpe mi'chuye.

I see a child walking towards me. It is my child. YOu will live, he says as he comes. E'ya ye'ye. Michi'nkshi mita'waye. Ya'nipi-kta e'ya u'-we lo.

In the plains country, where the buffalo roamed free so thick you couldn't see the ground for miles, I met my destiny. Sometimes, the father makes the wind blow in strange directions. I stood upon the White Man's highway, sticking out my thumb. Crazy for an Indian girl from Sioux country to trust in the good faith of the White Man of the United States. But not all preconceptions ring true across a population. Tell my grandfather that some White men have Indian souls and he would ring a string of turtles for protection around my neck to ward off evil spirits. I would set the turtles free. My heart was sent into the Badlands, running after my feet, and the Silvers stopped their bus for me and I denied them my voice for one whole moon before I finally gave it.

Since as long as I can remember, I've never been able to sleep at night. So I lay myself down when the sun comes up and sleep through most of the day. Phin says it's because I have a little bit of memory like he does. I say it's because I have a problem with nightmares and figuring things out for myself. The whole world's mostly asleep when the dark is out and that's the best time for me to sit and think through everything. I still don't understand why, when Phinnaeus goes, I stay. I've never been able to leave Early. She's too much a mystery and if I leave for even a moment, she'll reveal the answer, and I will have missed it. She was always something more than human for me and at the same time, something less.

I remember watching her once, when I was younger. She was standing in the middle of a rainstorm, thinking we were too young to remember.

"Stay her, boys," she said to us, leaving us behind in the Wheels, while she ran out into a summer downpour that ended up carrying half the state away. "If I don't come back, you won't remember anyway. But you just don't understand about water. It's the only way I can get to River." When we were little and too young to talk, she'd mention River every now and then. Now, she stops at rivers and stays silent, like Phin did after the ice-pick rod, for days. But rainstorms are different. She'll go out in them like it's the last thing she ever wanted to do in life.

Me and Phin watched her climb out of the car and run down the road and we climbed out of the back and stuck our faces to the window. When she came back, she was completely dry, as if not a drop of rain had touched her. This happened often. She'd run out into the rain, into storms that should've left her dead and drowned and she'd come back completely dry. Untouched.

"Damn it!" she always said when she got back in the car. "Damn it." Then, she'd remember we were there and look at us with a puzzled expression, as if we weren't supposed to be there, look ahead, stick the key in the ignition and start driving again without mentioning anything. So Phin and I grew up on the road with a mother called Early, who did everything she could to get soaked in a rainstorm but always came back out of it dry.

"I suppose, little brother, man," Phin said, "that she's just got herself followed around by a column of air. No rain for her, no sir. She's got a pocket waiting on her in the sky."