August, ending.

Maybe August is the time for endings. Some of the worst things in my life have happened in August. No, that’s untrue- they just feel like they happened in August.  Endings tend to have a similar quality:  a slowness that’s not the same as a bleak, cold, February. Then your blood seems like it will never be warm again, sluggish through your veins, now, it just feels like it’s gone underground. It’s not the lethargy of a hot, humid, summer, with the sun merciless on your face, turning your skin from brown to burnt, when you can’t make the effort to even reach out to that cool glass of lemonade that your Mom has placed on your table. No, this is the hushed, sticky quality of the air before the rain suddenly falls in a sheet, and you’re drenched head to toe; your umbrella dripping uselessly onto your shoes, as the “road” underneath turns to a muddy river in two minutes flat. What just happened, you ask, even as you sigh and think “August”.

Afterward, you try to pick it apart: loop the past on scratchy rewind, like those tapes you played over and over until they became skippy, static bursts between the snatches of familiar love song. Where is it, you think, that moment, the turning point when it all started coming undone. You’re looking for the sign, the dark cloud in the distance, the flash of lightning- but sometimes all you’re left with is the clear sky and the thickening air.

One morning I wake up to find a baby lizard has crawled into the folds of my fading blue bean bag plonked on the balcony. It had been unexpectedly cold the previous night and the little tyke had probably sought out the warmth of the faux blue leather. I flap my hands at the mottled dark green intruder: unsurprisingly, it moves not an inch. I’m giving you ten minutes while I brew the tea, I tell it solemnly: after that, you’re out.  When I step out again, my hands slowly warmed by my steaming mug of tea, it’s gone. I feel both smug and guilty; like I’ve won a battle and lost a more important war; like I’ve missed the forest for the trees, like I have once again, failed to read the signs.

How are you feeling, N asks me. “Okay”, I say - she accepts it for what it is: a barefaced lie. We are, neither of us, strangers to this; when all the stuff inside is so tangled that the only possible answer is- “Okay”. 

There’s a dissonance that leaves me tongue tied; the inexplicable chasm between what I know I should feel, and what I do feel; akin to letting yourself in with the key and finding yourself in a stranger’s house. This is familiar territory, I remind myself. You’ve been here before, you know how this goes. Endings are not an undiscovered land. And yet. I look up The 5 Steps again; try to see what I’ve missed. Everything, it looks like; no progression, no gradual climb down- I’m just here. But there must be, I think, increasingly desperate for something, anything that feels familiar.  But no, this is the funhouse mirror version of myself, everything in its place and just that bit distorted, rendered unrecognizable.

I imagine what a therapist would ask me: how are you sleeping, are you eating regularly, do you shower, do you make the bed, do you change your clothes, do you exercise? Answer: Well, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, but I never did, it’s not unusual.  I still hate work the usual amount, not more or less. You should date, D tells me, I’m not saying marriage, babe, just, dating. I tell her a long and involved story about how I have the cow next door to keep me company. This is not a euphemism: my neighbours keep a cow, a huge white-and-brown speckled beast. It moos at odd times and reminds me that life goes on; that August, in fact, can be great for some species: plentiful green grass, the air ripe with smells; pleasant, if slightly unpredictable weather, cool nights.

I lie in bed and listen to the night sounds- the creak of the fan, the occasional drunken song from two streets away, a faint honking from a truck, some kind of chirping insect. A moth wanders in, flirts with the dazzling white light and then wanders out. It’s not hard to fall asleep on these days, when my thoughts seem to have no particular direction. When I wake up, I don’t remember my dreams.

Fact: time moves forward.

Fact: August seems to last forever.

It’s sticky-cool, lumbering, everything muted, life travelling to you from a faraway planet, immediate but also a couple of million light years behind, already over before it even began.

How are you feeling, I used to ask, inside-inside; and now I ask myself- how are you feeling, inside-inside.

Like August, I answer, like an ending.   

Rare Entertainment

Image:  White Male Character One is learning to control his superpowers- the ability to turn everything around him into cinders in seconds-so, White Male Character Two has set up target practice. The targets are unclothed female bodied mannequins- big breasted, narrow waisted- with big X signs on their torsos. Barbies without the annoying hair. Or clothes. Boom, boom, boom. High fives all around. Congratulations, you’re officially a man. Er, mutant. But manly mutant.

Image: Jon Hamm playing a umpteenth variant of Don Draper, a role he’ll probably play over and over in the next few years- a White Male Character helping a (younger) White Male Character score. “See anything you like?” he asks over a Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Younger White Male Character directs his attention to a Very Lovely Brunette eliciting surprise from Jon Draper Hamm because clearly the Very Lovely White Blonde standing right there in her cleavage-showing dress is The Most Obvious Choice. Interesting, he murmurs, and then the next ten minutes are devoted to Young White Male attempting a seduction- while a half dozen men listen and watch via Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Did I mention Award Winning? We are also Award Winning. Unfortunately-ahem- for our voyeuristic leading men, the night ends badly- no sex, just murder.  And because we’re the Award Winning Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show, the woman turns out to be a mentally unhinged murderess.  I feel blessed. There’s still forty minutes before the episode ends. It can only get More Progressive. (It does: more dead women, one still a girl).

Image: A half-naked woman being beaten bloody by a man straddling her. In the imaginatively named town of Vice, you can have every forbidden pleasure you choose to pay for- your partners? Synthetics or Not Real People. Coincidentally, these Not Real People are shaped like Extremely Hot Women programmed with Real Memories and capable of feeling Real Pain (we are never shown them feeling Real Pleasure: presumably the White Male Characters who seem to form the general clientele in this Pleasure Town are only interested in Real Pain). Anyways, this is almost two hours of an AI-becomes-sentient-and-is-hunted-down-but-survives story aka The Not Real But Real Woman is stalked, hunted, beaten up, violated and Emerges Triumphant….to be a sidekick to the Real Male Cop. Ah! The twist in the tale: our heroine turns out to be Not The Real Heroine much like she is not a Real Woman.

X Men: First Class grossed over USD $353 million worldwide when released in 2011, Black Mirror has been nominated or has won major awards every year since its first episode in 2011, and Vice- well, Vice had a limited theatre release in 2015, and then was released to DVD- and made around #1 million USD.

In the span of two weeks, I’ve managed a random sampling of available entertainment in terms of critically acclaimed and/or popular (or neither!) in a genre and am served up the same thing every time: images of women being brutalized emotionally and physically. Sometimes this brutality is An Important Plot Device- what would Our Leading Male Characters Do Without Motivation- but other times, it’s just there. The stuff you only notice subconsciously most of the time, the peripheral, the scene, part of the stuff that’s there because it helps you suspend your disbelief, because yes, a woman is being violated and you don’t have to pay attention to that if you don’t want to, so the story feels just like real life.

Image: In the thirty seconds it takes me to get a token for the subway ride, the young couple nearby move from a silent-tears-and-recrimination kind of fight to the hands-around-your-throat kind of fight; he has his hands around her throat, shoves her into the wall and walks away. She follows, still crying.

Image: Two young girls strung up on a tree in a UP village.

Image: A smiling, smartly dressed young woman stands next to a car at an automobile expo. You can’t sell the dream without the woman, can you?

Image: A news story about a woman who committed suicide after her rape was filmed and circulated on Whatsapp.

Image: Two people in a public argument on the road- you whore, I hear him say, see what I will do to you.

You see the problem I have: separating fact from fiction and wondering where the line exists.

Sometimes I think: this isn’t real, this is a stupid movie that you’ll turn off in a minute or forty, when you are really, really sick of it, and then you never have to think about it again.

But it is, and it is and it is and it feels like somebody should be sick to death of this story already, should say, this is overdone, let’s start anew, but no, it’s so foundational that even when we tell stories about the future- the marvelous, miraculous future with star ships and mutant genes and time travel and artificial intelligence- it’s the same as the stories of our past, the ones with dragons and historical accuracy- the same old story: the visceral hatred of women, invisible in its ubiquity.

And I think about it every day.

Fig Tree

And everything has a season,
they tell me,
and everything has its time
the leaves, and the fruit, and the flowers,
the soil, the sky, the wine.

And death has no dominion,
they tell me,
not on earth nor in heaven above:
I watch the year in its turning
the worm and the rose, in their place;
I see the fig tree, withered - still standing-
I see it renewed,in hope, in love.

The Jar

Note: For those unfamiliar with the Old Testament, this is a retelling- well, re-imagining-of the story of Elijah and the widow at Zarephath, as recounted here. 

Give me, he said, some bread, and then added

please.

This is the last thing, I said, that I have to give.

Give me, he repeats, and this time adds, the jar will never run out.

He presses his lips together then, something startled in his eyes, as though unused to opening his mouth to speak a blessing, and unsure of its consequence.

*

Perhaps that is why I decide to give him the last meal, that, and the bone deep weariness that is also anger that is also sorrow that is also the jar that never runs out. 

To have come this far, to have begged and stolen, and worked my knuckles raw, while they threw the acid of their piety on my body, another layer of scars, to have endured all this, and come at last, in the end, to die in a strange land.

Perhaps, I wish to believe, that the jar also contains one last act of kindness, or indifference masked as kindness, whatever it is, it is close enough to what he needs, which is bread. 

*

The jar doesn’t run out.

*

Sometimes, it seems, even blasphemy is a form of prayer- heard.

*

I have known what it is to be fugitive, and so I let him stay, though I think, what he runs from, is bigger than mortal queens and kingdoms, and stone walls and silence can only do so much.

*

My boy makes him smile, and one day, laugh, the sound loud, and hoarse. He stops abruptly, and leaves the child mid game to retreat into his room.

*

He stays there for two days.

*

I know who he is of course, though he gives me no name, and does not ask for mine.

*

The jar does not run out.

The ground cracks beneath the azure sky.

*

Thank you, he says one night, as we break bread under the stars.

For some reason, shame rises like bile in my throat, and it must show on my face- he looks surprised- thank you, he says, softer, Miriam.

It only makes me angrier.

*

I promised myself once that I would never again be beholden to anything above or beneath this earth.

I have not been able to keep that promise, and I know that everything has its price, especially promises.

*

I find out this price when my boy dies.

*

He twists my hand so hard, I’m forced to drop the knife.

Then he uses it to tear off a bit of his robe and bind my wrist.

Is this why you came, I whisper, because I cannot bear my voice.

Is this why you came, to make me pay for my sins? Because know this, if I had to do it all again, I would.

His eyes fill with tears.

*

He brings me back my son.

I look in his eyes, and see, for the first time, no fear.