free to see equality

recently, my favorite candidate for the u.s. presidency announced his support for gay marriage.  for more on gary johnson's recent announcement, click here.

you know, i've tried to reason with myself about gary johnson and accept the fact that he's not likely to get too far in this election.  i know the far right is not likely to be swayed by a gay marriage supporting, marijuana legalizing, right to choose respecting libertarian.

but then, he makes a move like this, and i just can't stop myself from loving this guy!  i'll accept being naive and unrealistic to cheer for someone who can stand up on risky political issues.

so, inspired by his stand on what i find to be a crucially important liberty issue, i decided to revise something i wrote a couple years ago about my own belief that right to choose a marriage partner should be a protected right.


the right to marry a partner of our own choosing is an essential freedom.  over 40 years ago, the u.s. supreme court protected this right in loving v. virginia by declaring laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional.

the court stated:
“Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival ... Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

inherent in this case and its placement in history, i find another story about cultural progress.  when government dictates that "we should do this" or "we shouldn't do that," we have less opportunity to fully see what those choices are all about.  conversely, when these restrictions are lifted, as they were by the supreme court in loving v. virginia, individuals are given the opportunity to live the lives they choose, and their free choices are beneficial for us all.  they are the laboratory in which we can see for ourselves what is really true.

at present, there is strong agreement on principles of gender and racial equality, and this is in no small part a result of what we've all witnessed by virtue of the equal opportunities and rights under law.  we've all had the opportunity to experience the truth of equality.

the declaration of independence states, “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” when this document was written, the word “Men” only truly stood for white males, since members of other races and women were not granted the same rights.

over the many years since then, “Men” in that same document is widely recognized to mean human.  this shift of the meaning in this word written hundreds of years ago is an example of cultural evolution, an evolution that naturally happens, given time and the truth of equality.  and it's what this document means today, with our evolved understanding of who it covers, that foretells where this same-sex marriage debate is headed.

given the inevitable movement of cultural evolution, the question is when, not if, the law on same-sex marriage will change.  the term marriage has already evolved in common usage to include any two adults that decide to join their lives publicly and privately, and really, we're just waiting to see how long it takes for the law to catch up.

the 100%

this interesting article, "we are the 100% . . .,"  hits on a feeling that i've been having as i watch the "occupy" movement sweep the world. 

as much as i feel a sense of truth in the feelings of protesters world-wide recognizing that something is terribly off about how our societies run, i don't resonate with the message of 99% and 1%.  i feel inspired by the united voices about the need for change, but i feel apprehensive about where all this is headed.

as i look back at other times of protest, the goals and solutions seem more tangible; the problems seem more clear.  civil disobedience took the form of resisting specific unjust laws, or at least, the desire of the protesters was clear enough that with time and attention, the demands could be met, the protests could end, and a state of harmony could be achieved.

but, the problems and the potential solutions here are anything but clear.  there are definitely issues with the movement of money and its influence of politics, but how do we address them?  what will be the cost of taking one path over another?  is the solution more government regulation of big business and higher taxes?  or is the solution smaller government, so there is less government power to be co-opted? 

i don't know the answers to these questions, and as i play with them in my mind, i just see over and over how these questions lead to bigger and more difficult questions - complicated questions about what we value, about the right balance between liberty and justice, the balance of individual freedom and community.  with such difficult questions at stake, and such a variety of solutions posed by the different individuals gathering all over the country and the world, i'm having a hard time picturing how this movement could peacefully come to an end.

my bigger concern though, is that there seems to be so much distorted information flying around that i worry about the blameful fingers pointed at the 1%.  i worry that this is just the kind-of divisive rhetoric that preceded some of the ugliest revolutions of human history.

no matter where the line is drawn, people divided are people divided.  no matter how justifiable the frustration or how small the percentage antagonized, turning against a part of ourselves doesn't seem to me the way to create lasting solutions.  i do recognize that there is another side of peace.  there is a great need to face up to our conflicts for the growth of society, but i'm feeling there is more focus on our divisions than need be.

my personal focus is on a unified people with various backgrounds, lifestyles, and beliefs, constantly evolving toward the vision of liberty and justice for all.  the biggest step that i think we could take towards solutions is in civilly fighting out the advantages and disadvantages to the possible directions we could take, working together - 99% and 1%, rich and poor, red and blue - to clear the smoke and mirrors that make us believe our interests are so mutually exclusive.

stealing from the article linked above: "We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience." - Martin Luther King, Jr.  at the present, i certainly don't see a society at peace with itself, and i don't feel convinced that, on the whole, this occupy movement is headed in that direction.  i'm intrigued and i see a lot of positive things stirred, but my greatest hope isn't with the 99%; my hope lies in our ability to start seeing and acting like 100%.

finding my way home

in the series of three posts that follow, i tell my story of finding a home.  when trying to write about this decade of my life, the story kept coming out differently as i considered it from a different perspective, so i ended up with one story through three lenses.

finding my way home: geography

have you ever set foot in a place for the first time, fully taken in the scene with all your senses, and known without a doubt that you're home?

i have.  several times, actually.  it's a sort-of serial homing issue for me.

growing up, i never strayed too far from the place where i was born. . . literally.  from my pre-school, my elementary school, my middle school, my high school, my college, and even my law school, i could easily drive to the hospital where i was born, within half an hour or so.

of course, there were things i loved about this place, but then, there were also those things i hated.  people i loved where all around, but then again, so were people that i didn't love so much.  it was this mix of good and bad that settled into a feeling of ordinary deadness.

by the time i started my own family, claustrophobia had come on full force, and it was only a few years into my daughter's life before i started feeling like this place i knew so well just wasn't the home i wanted.  so, with our families grabbing at our ankles, my husband, daughter and i managed to get free, and off we went to start a new life 3,000 miles away, in eugene, oregon.

the feeling of freedom after arriving in eugene was unparalleled.  finally, i could define myself without a peanut gallery of voices that really knew me better than i knew myself.  i could decide what to do with my work life, my daughter, or my day without a sea of opinions to sort through.  i could look to the future as a big and beautifully blank canvas, rather than a list of obligations and expectations that i needed to coordinate so that everyone would be satisfied.

at first, it was a total vacation from reality.  we hardly worked, and every weekend was yet another exploration of some fantastically beautiful place we'd never been before.  as we hit the eight month mark, the reality of needing to end the steady outflow from our bank account and increase the inflow with some steady jobs began sinking in.  with that dose of reality, our new home felt less homey, and within four months or so, we road tripped our way across four states and landed in our next home sweet home - santa fe, new mexico.

and sweet it was.  we were welcomed into our new abode by a glorious southwest sunset, and the house we'd arranged to rent just weeks before turned out to be absolutely breath taking.  within weeks of landing, we had our daughter in the loveliest little school, had met a slew of like-minded friends, and our newly planted life was already beginning to feel like it had some roots.

and on things went for a few months . . . until even with the jobs we'd found, the money really started to dwindle.  so much so that i had to swallow my pride, and swallow hard.  there seemed no choice but to ask those parents whose hearts i broke if just maybe they could help us stay afloat.  and they did, and we got serious about figuring out how to stabilize in our new and beautiful home.

fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, about a year into our stint in santa fe, a perfectly matched job opportunity for me arose in a nearby town.  fortunately because it was a job teaching law that i really wanted to do, and with summers off but pay that would still turn around our financial situation.  unfortunately because the nearby town actually wasn't that nearby.  albuquerque was over an hour away.

after trying to figure out a way to keep this great home and take the dream job, it seemed clear that wasn't going to work out so well.  the flow of life was pretty clear that it was time to go, yet again.  having become somewhat obedient to these waves of movement that rarely explained themselves, again, we moved. 

the job did provide the stability we needed - steady income, steady routine, steady residency in one town . . . well, not really one town.  we still managed to switch our zip code and town at a rate of about once a year, but all of our addresses clustered around the job which kept life steadier than it had been for a few years.

but even with all this growing stability, albuquerque wasn't the home that we chose with wide eyed excitement.  albuquerque was actually the town we drove through with our noses turned up when we first blew into new mexico. 

i had learned to admire how beautiful the sandias were all lit up at sunset, and i'd found my favorite restaurants and bookstores.  my mental roadmap of albuquerque was set, and it gave me that nice feeling of comfort in always knowing where i was and how to get where i wanted to go.  maybe, through the back door, we did in fact stumble upon a new home.

after being faced with the statistic that our ten year old had lived in ten houses in her short little life, my husband and i did have to admit, we were so sick of moving.  the renting game which was so freeing, uncommitted, and wonderful (especially during the housing market crash), had become a frustrating lot of ups and downs.  maybe it was time to settle down, and maybe home didn't need to give us that warm and fuzzy feeling of the towns we hand picked.  maybe home was actually closer than we thought.

to be continued. . .

finding my way home: marriage

one of the ways that my husband and i knew we were right for each other was because we both had this itch for something more.  we could talk for hours about our fantasies: living in hawaii, buying a beautiful plot of land, growing our own food, building our own house. . . the dream went on and on and on.

and both of us loved it.  we loved the dreaming, and we loved that we could so harmoniously paint this beautiful picture of exactly what we wanted, together.  there were no fights about whether or not to include this or that.  just blissful agreement.

but unfortunately this state of bliss didn't last long.  in our first years of marriage there was a time when our prospects didn't look so good.  newly wed and newly strapped with a baby, we fell into the pictures of what a family looked like from all around us.  he started a business, i got a good stable job, we put the kid in daycare, we bought a house, and we waited for that sense of the great american dream to settle in.

but, it didn't.

instead, it all felt terribly wrong.  he became increasingly frustrated with how long it took for a new business to actually start making some money.  i hated my good job, yet felt chained to it and had no interest in any other possibilities.  and our daughter, let's just say daycare wasn't at all where she wanted to be. 

everyone else had made it look so easy.  no one else seemed to be jumping out of their skin.  but, as much as we used all those appearances to persuade ourselves that life was really grand and wonderful, we just couldn't be convinced.

and so, something of a mid-life crises showed up there at the end of our twenties.  well, more likely it was me that had the crisis and some spilled on to him, but either way, there is no denying crisis was in the house.

during that period of time, i questioned everything.  i questioned whether i loved him, whether i wanted to be married, whether i'd just rather be with someone else.  i questioned motherhood, whether i even had it in me to be a good mother, whether it might be easier to be a mother only part-time.  i opened that dark closet of skeletons.  i'll just be straight; i jumped in the damn closet.

and luckily, before i made a choice that wouldn't be so easy to turn back from, i slowed down.  in the pause, all those dreams that my husband and i had hatched, way back when our relationship was new and our love was the most real thing in the world, those dreams started tapping me on the shoulder.  at first in whispers, and then, as i got further and further away from the pull of the closet, the whispers got louder, until it was absolutely undeniable.  the time to go for it was now.

fortunately, he too was hearing the call, and so we dusted our bruised and battered relationship off, got our gorgeous little daughter packed up, and hit the road, full of hope that in a new place we could make those dreams happen.

and things did truly shift.  it was one of the greatest blessings of my life to restart life in new places, again and again, with my little family of three.  as we moved from house to house, and town to town together, we got to know each other in ways that i don't think many people ever get to know others.  in each new place, we always had our best friends, and those best friends were us, by necessity but i like to think also by choice.  as our time together as a little unit flourished, our appreciation of that time together became the nucleus around which everything else gravitated.

and those beautiful dreams and fantasies that started us out were memorialized in each home by a collection of collages that encapsulated the spirit of what we most wanted.  even our daughter was in on it all - the family farm dream.  even though our lives looked nothing like the dream, we each had the dream painted on the inside.  it was a sort-of secret club we had going, a secret dream that kept us moving.

but then, a great job for me slowed us down.  financial security caused us to stop the moving, and for the first time since our crisis, we remained in one place for five years.  there were times that i seriously felt a little like a drug addict tied down to a bed without getting a fix.  the moving, seeking, dreaming, reaching had become an almost addictive impulse for us, and when life stopped we weren't quite sure what to do.

the stress of an intense job started bringing in my control issues full force, the ones that had haunted our marriage from the beginning.  the lack of distraction from constantly moving backdrops brought in my husband's depression, in all the ways that had made me so confused about whether he was the guy for me back before we started moving.

we needed to get moving on these dreams asap, or everything was going to start falling apart.  we revised the collages and rooted the dreams in the current biome where we lived. and we started looking for property, opening up to see how it could all unfold moving from right where we were.

we went out with realtors in a few different places, nearby and some far, but after each day out, we'd come back scratching our heads.  we knew that where we looked wasn't it, but there was absolutely no indication at all whatsoever about what was it.

after getting slapped in the face a few times, i just felt ready to surrender.  that surrender brought me to some of the greatest contentment that i think i ever experienced to that point.  life just seemed perfect as it was.  i felt ready to pack up the collages and put away the dreams.  i was madly in love with my family, content with my job, and really comfortable with my surroundings.  i was already living a dream.

until, i found out that my husband wasn't living in the dream with me.  since i spared the details of my own little crisis, suffice to say that the end of our seeking was that stationary sort-of environment that brought on my husband's questioning crisis.  he started to feel restless, and in that restlessness, he started to feel confused about what it was that really held us all together.  he jumped into his own closet of skeletons, and to me, it was quite an abrupt awakening.

so, after all i'd put him through in those early years of our marriage, i had the patience and understanding to wade through the muck with him for a bit.  it hurt to realize that maybe the dream that i was living in wasn't the same as what he wanted, to realize that maybe he didn't feel the way i did about our lives. 

and that summer, our marriage died.  it was one of the most painful experiences of my life to feel so content and at peace in my family, and then to realize that my husband was in such a different place.  deceived, betrayed, unappreciated. . . the depth of difficult feelings is hard for me to express.  my memories of that summer are a blur of tears, aloneness, and surrender.

in the surrender, there was no more hiding from all the problems in our relationship.  so many of the patterns came to a head, and we honestly started to consider that maybe we just couldn't be happy together, not without some big fantasy driving us one way or another. 

at times, i thought two strikes was going to be it for us.

but, as it turned out, after this winter of our relationship, there was a spring.  when asking all the most difficult questions, we ended up in the realization that we wanted to be together, and we wanted this more than either one of us wanted to be right.  we truly wanted to be good to each other.

this moved into a rebirth of our relationship, a chance to reevaluate and restart.  the trauma of the summer had taken us deep into all our discontentments, and with all we had seen, there was a surprising turn that came into our sense of the future.

to be continued. . .

finding my way home: motherhood

when my daughter was born, some portal opened inside me.  as i held this perfect and beautiful little woman-to-be, i felt such a deep commitment to her.  during those first moments holding her in my arms, it was like i made a little pact.

i silently promised to do my best, my very best to teach her what this woman thing was all about.  i wanted her to have the benefit of all those lessons i had learned, i wanted her life to be easier, her confusion to be smaller, her happiness to be bigger.  i wanted her to have a guide.

when she was still in my belly, i could feel her femininity blossoming.  although i kept it a secret, i knew she was a girl; i knew it all along.  images of a woman dancing kept gliding through my mind, and even more, i felt this aura of soft womanly light surrounding me.  maybe all pregnant woman get that little glow, but i definitely felt that mine had a pink tinge to it.

when she was still an infant, i found a blank journal that said "i hope you dance" on the front.  i bought the journal, and since that time, every six months to a year i pull out the journal and write a little passage to my woman in the making.  my plan is to save the journal and give it to her during her own time of transition.

the reason all this guidance probably means so much to me is because of how messily i slopped my way from little girl to adolescent.  it wasn't that my mother and the other women around weren't there for me, but just that they didn't have a clue how to lead a young girl through the dense jungle of puberty.  none of them had a leader, none of them had fared much better on their own treks; how were they to know what i needed?

but i suppose after spending years of my adult life unraveling yucky patterns and processing poor choices from my own unguided youth, i just couldn't bear the thought that my own little girl would have it just the same.  sure, she'd make mistakes.  sure, life would be hard sometimes.  but wasn't there something i could do to make it easier?

and, that was the question that filled my early years of motherhood.  that was the question that overwhelmed me with shame when i saw the ugly patterns of wanting validation from men surface when she was just a baby.  that was the question that told me i needed to figure out two things for myself: how to be the mother i really wanted to be, and even more, how to be the woman i really wanted to be.

i tried to find all that within myself in the community where i grew up, but it was just too easy to fall back into unconscious patterns, to act out what i had seen elsewhere, to act either from resistance or attraction to what was happening around me.  i just couldn't chart a new course being surrounded by the things that had built my old course.

and this deep feeling that i needed to do it differently was a large part of the fuel behind the desire to move cross country.

i hit a major turning point in eugene, oregon.  two special kindergarten teachers at the eugene waldorf school, ms. bonnie and ms. lourdes, were some of the first guides to me in how to parent from a different place.  i remember sitting at the kid-sized table in their lovely classroom crying because i didn't know how to console my daughter during violent spells of crying in her sleep.  i was overwhelmed with guilt that it was all my fault.

that guilt had strong roots in the fact that having her in daycare was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.  i only dropped her off there once, and i stood by the door listening to her cry for a good twenty minutes before i could leave.  then, i only was at work for an hour or so before i just had to take a sick day, run back to the daycare, and take her home. 

from then on, my husband and i made do with an 'i never take her to daycare' arrangement, and then, my husband and i stopped by a bookstore one afternoon, and the cashier recognized us.  she told us how she used to work at that daycare, and that she quit because of how her supervisors would never let her pick up our daughter.  her co-workers told her that my daughter needed to cry it out, and even after hours and hours of non-stop crying, they wouldn't let her go and give some love to our little baby girl.

ouch.

so, getting back to that little kindergarten table in eugene, oregon, you can now hopefully see why i thought maybe these night terror crying spells that we couldn't wake her up from somehow had to do with our awful parenting choices.  and as i went through all this with these kindergarten teachers, i felt no judgment coming from them.  they clearly hadn't made the same choices for their own children and were not advocates of such choices, but they just held this loving space of compassion for both me and for my daughter. 

their whole way of being was this immense lesson to me.  they didn't try to solve and conquer; they just listened and offered their loving insights with an open hand. . .and within a couple weeks the crying spells were gone for good. 

from there, mentors in my new journey of both motherhood and womanhood came from everywhere.  all sorts of women seemed to model little tidbits of the path i was seeking, and before long i didn't even need the mentors.  a process began to unfold inside me, a process of intuiting my way into the mother i most truly wanted to be.  and i've got to say, it has been amazing path - one that could fill many more pages on its own.

but, all this leads into the present, and how that time of transition for my daughter is finally coming to pass.  after getting a permission slip from her school last spring asking if she could attend the girls only video presentation at school, i was cued that the time to get serious about this transition stuff had come.

i jumped on amazon and started ordering books: first, some of my judy blume favorites for her, and then, some books to help me get a sense of how i could possibly guide her through this stuff.  one book in particular grabbed me: becoming peers by deanna l'am.

i happily floated through the pages after it arrived, absorbing the ideas and formulating my own, until i got to her discussion of the "coming of age year."  in this chapter, the author talks about identifying a year for your girl to work with different women in her life.  she suggests gathering a group of women that love your transitioning girl, and asking them each to choose a task or project to do with your daughter during that year, creating a sort-of net of wisdom to hold her as she moves through the confusion and questions of puberty.

i loved the idea . . . but felt this pit in my stomach as i saw how logistically impossible it would be.  i lived so far from my friends, from my own mother, from my relatives.  there was no one in my current town that really felt close enough for me to ask them to mentor my daughter's coming of age year.

as the weeks passed and a really difficult time arose in my own life, i felt more and more of that pain of not having a community of women around me.

part of why i'd left my hometown was to discover a different way of being a woman, and now, all these years later, the whole plan seemed to be turning back on itself.  now, i felt this great need for all those women that i left behind.  they weren't just like me, but now i could see how their different perspectives and even their different values were their wisdom.  those different ways were the great jewels they could not only offer me, but they were those things that i most wanted them to offer to my daughter.


and within some months, these feelings about geography, marriage, and motherhood all converged, and the answer to all the questions about "finding my way home" started coming clear. 

the path that we've been on is a circle.  little by little, the plans started to evolve, and it seems that in the spring, we'll be moving back to where we started: the eastcoast.  we'll have family and friends around, a house of our own, and a new adventure to watch unfold.

although it turns out that our search for a home out in the world was in vain, it's turned out to be quite a fortuitous wave of ignorance.  by blindly looking around every corner for this perfect home to appear, we started to break down and realize there never would be a place with all pluses and no minuses. 

finding a home for us was about releasing all the resistance to seeing the great blessings of what was right in front of us from the beginning.

american in 2012

all the people that i've talked to about the current state of our country seem to agree that we have a huge mess, but there seems to be much disagreement on where to point fingers of blame.  i think lots of smoke and mirrors and slanted media presentations have created pretty hefty divides on who or what is to blame, and i hope for 2012 to be a year of clearing things up. 

throughout my life, i've often thought of myself as a liberal.  i've tended towards democratic candidates more than republican.  i proudly voted for president obama in 2008, and i was inspired and deeply hopeful that he would lead us to unity and needed change. 

inspired by our new president and the big issue on the table, healthcare, i decided to really engage and try to understand, beyond red and blue.  but as i researched the different sides of the issue, i found that my political identity wasn't so easy to nail down.  i found that views i initially rejected were ones that deeply resonated, once i understood. 

i felt overwhelmed by the divisions in our country, and i felt disappointed in our leader that seemed to feed, instead of bridge, the divides.

so now, i feel somewhat disillusioned.  change didn't come as i had hoped in 2008, but i'm still thirsty for it.  i realize that i was fooling myself to believe that one person can deliver change, and since then i have come to believe that the real place to make change is in the process of engagement. 

i've decided to be more open to other points of view, and this openness has led me to register as a republican.  i want to participate in the primaries because the candidates in 2012 will have a lot to do with the political conversation that will come.  i want the opportunity to be a part of creating that conversation, and i hope for a candidate that contrasts president obama in useful ways to really highlight the choices that we must make about our country's direction.
 
the candidate that has my attention (although not so much media attention) is former new mexico governor, gary johnson.  he strikes me as bringing some interesting contrasts through his libertarian views.  what appeals to me is his feel of authenticity and his very consistent stance on small government - keep government out of both our wallets and our personal lives.  and a president that has climbed everest doesn't seem like a bad thing to me either.

one issue that has a lot of people saying that gary johnson can't get the nomination is his stance on the decriminalization of marijuana and on treating drug use as a health issue when there is no other crime (like driving under the influence, theft, etc.).  to me, his position makes sense not only fiscally, but also from a criminal justice perspective.  don't messes like this point to the need to shift our drug policy?

gary johnson is a name that seems suppressed by the liberal media, and i believe it points out how the information we get, whether from cnn or from fox, is laced with all sorts of agendas, opinions, and propaganda.  the media decides what to make us look at, and the media decides what to make us ignore.  but, my hope is that we take back our power and decide the things that matter most for ourselves.  all the ways we can exchange info on the internet connect us so much more than early americans, yet, the crucial and necessary element for a healthy democracy, civil discourse, seems alarmingly absent in modern america.  

so, here's my humble attempt to overpower what feels to me like an incomplete picture.  to me, that is the potential that this upcoming election has to offer - open political conversations about the direction that we truly want for our country.   no matter the outcome of the election, depending on how we engage in the process, i so truly believe we can come out of it a stronger and more unified nation.

the fountainhead and the vessel

the fountainhead
in the fountainhead by ayn rand, she posits that the treasured fountainhead of innovation is the ego.  she defines the self as the creative and individual drive, and an egotist as someone that follows their own path in the world, uniquely and fully expressing the truth of their own being.  through her main character, howard roark, i find that she masterfully illustrates the courage and creativity in the masculine principle.

rand targets altruism as being the sacrifice of the great fountainhead of individualism, and she goes as far to say that this sacrifice is the source of evil.  altruism is depicted as the squelching of what is unique, ingenious, and creative within.  she recognizes how much of our desire to be altruistic comes from wanting to be perceived as a humanitarian, and in this, there is a corruption of what is pure and true.

she also recognizes the danger of manipulation when people give up their individuality, their ability to think for themselves, their unique ways of expressing.  she sees that feelings of obligation, pity, or guilt can be the achilles heel that allows ruthless dictators to rule masses of people.

i see the commitment to self that rand illustrates through her hero as an allegiance to the authentic truth of one's own being, and a person with the courage to live by their own authentic truth is the absolute ideal of masculine energy. 

the masculine principle is not to be sought by only those inhabiting a male body; rather, this true expression is part of all of us.  to me, in the fountainhead ayn rand has created the ultimate symbol of awakened masculine energy. 


the vessel
to oppose all that rand symbolizes in roark, selfless people are a big theme in the story.  to rand, someone is selfless when they have no separate sense of self; they only act for the approval and attention of others.  their ideas, enjoyment, and motivation are derived from that which they picked up "second hand."

through her portrayal and commentary on the “second handers,” she seems to discredit all that is not animated by this masculine principle of creative genius.  in that, i believe she misses what is truly special within some of those "second-handers."

where masculinity is the fire and force of existence, i see femininity as the water and receptivity.  although i agree that the pull toward altruism can be the sign of manipulation or corruption, i also believe altruism can be authentic and good.  the feminine principle is the softness, the mothering, to desire to heal and serve, and actions coming from this aspect of being can be both selfless and true. 

although rand says, "all that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil," i've experienced dependence quite differently.  in motherhood, the dependence of my daughter has instigated such a pure desire to dedicate my action to the good of another.  with my students or with criminal defense clients, my motivation has so often come, not from any self-interest, but from the pure desire for the good of another being that is in some way dependent on me.

to degrade that which is dependent and motivated to serve is to miss the aspect of humanity that is equal and opposite to the fountainhead.  it is to miss the strength and integrity of the vessel - the ability to hold and contain what is being spouted by others.  these intuitive aspects of life have an important role of their own.


the balance
rand fully expresses the truth of the fountainhead.  in a complete, eloquent, and powerful fashion, she illustrates the need for the masculine in an awakened and alive way, and she alerts us to where we may reject or fear creative innovation.  she inspires us with the grandeur of what it might look like in its most ideal form.

but, a deep truth that i hold in equal esteem is the truth of the vessel.  the truth of intuition, of being led by something other than the intelligent mind, of holding space for another, of being in service to humanity just for the sake of service itself.

both the principles of the fountainhead and the vessel can be mimicked in unauthentic behavior, and both can be directed with evil intentions and used for harm rather than good.  to me, it isn't that one is good and one is bad.  rather, the greatest potential for humanity is the balance of both.

rand clearly sees the potential for a huge flat pool of water with the fountainhead stilled and drown out by a crushing force.  but, there is an opposite danger of the recklessly spouting geysers that have no vessel to hold all that springs forth.  a glorious fountain needs both: the fountainhead that provides a steady stream of inspiration, and the vessel that contains the spouting water and recycles it back through the fountain. 

to me, neither the fountainhead nor the vessel is superior; they are equal and opposite forces of creation.  the vision that i hold coming off this journey with the fountainhead is an image of a complete fountain, with both the fountainhead and the vessel, each full of integrity and in harmony with one another.  

short story collection

the trilogy of short stories that follows was written around 2005, right around the time when i moved from the east coast.  let me just warn you: these babies are on the nutty side.  part of some internal explorations i was in the midst of at the time.

the protector

  Work, work, work . . . It seems to be all I ever do. I suppose I shouldn't complain because it pays the bills, but there are the days when I would do anything to be as carefree as the blurred children playing at Washington Street playground. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see them smiling and laughing, but their gleeful sounds are drowned out by my screaming sirens.
    I'm always moving so fast to get here or there. Make a bust. Haul them into the holding cell. Wait to bring 'em up for a hearing. Back to the holding cell. Off to the big house. Another big bust, or a stake-out, or a week-long investigation, where I don't see the wife and kids at all.
    Sometimes, I wonder if it's worth it. Marjorie always asks me to just give it up and take a job at her father's hardware store, and I know maybe I should. I never do, but maybe I should.
    Last night for instance, I got home around 11 PM, and as I'm driving up to my house, my teenage daughter, Gloria, is making out with some bastard in the backseat of his Camaro. She hit the curb faster than a cat pouncing on a mouse, and the lucky little shit drove away before I had a chance to teach him a lesson. Stuff like that makes me see how she needs her dad around, someone to look out for her, to teach her the guys to watch out for. She was in her room with the lights off before I had a chance to say a thing.

    Although it would be nice to be home more, today is work as usual. I walk into the yellow and baby blue kitchen to my favorite kind-of morning. Bacon sizzling on the grill and filling the air with that mouth-watering scent.  Marjorie is cooking eggs, while Gloria and Stephen are getting the table set for a family breakfast. Since I don't get home for dinner that often, breakfast is the special meal we get to have together, as often as we can.
    "Oh, Margie, no one makes breakfast like you babe!" I say as I spin her away from the stove and into my arms for a kiss.
    "Hal, I'm cooking," she says as she laughs and swats my hand away from her hip.
    "Good morning, kids," I say as I grab the paper from the table.
    "Good morning, Dad," I hear them say almost in perfect unison, as I start scanning the paper to see if there have been any busts on the night shift.
    Stephen keeps talking about school and showing me the art project he made, but I don't have a chance to look up. "Great son, I want to hear about it in just a second . . . let me just check for one thing in the paper."
    "Hey Dad, I just wanted to say . . . about last night. Ah, Jim is not a bad guy you know. You always seem to think the guys I like are such scum, but really he isn't." The pleading tone of Gloria's voice grabbed my attention from the paper.
    "Well, if he is such an upstanding citizen, then why was he making out with my daughter at 11 PM on a school night," I say with my best interrogation eyes drilling through her.
    "Dad! Last night was my play. Don't you pay attention to anything going on around here!" she says with a flaming tongue. "I guess not. The play went until 10 and then we had a cast meeting. We didn't even leave school until 10:30!"
    "Well, he shouldn't have been parked in front of my house that late.”  I turned to Marge, “Marjorie, why didn't you bring her home? Why did you let that jerk drive her home so late?"
    "Hal, stop it. I was home with Stephen, and Jim is not a jerk. You don't even know the kid, so just stop it."
    "Look, I've had just about enough of everyone jumping down my throat," I say as I stand up from the table. "I was really looking forward to a pleasant breakfast with my family, but I suppose that's out. Hope you all have a nice day."
    I make my way out the front door, and I can hear them telling me to come back, saying things like I'm over-reacting, and that I need to have my breakfast, but what do they know. I'm just trying to watch out for my daughter, be a good father, and I'm always the one who is wrong. Marjorie and Gloria are always ganging up and telling me I have no idea what is going on, but it is really them who have no idea about the real world. If they had seen half the shit I see on a daily basis, they would know that I'm right to watch out for my girl's safety.
    I open the door and am off like a flash to my breakfast plan B. Driving through at McDonald's doesn't bring on quite the warm feeling of sizzling bacon in my own kitchen, but it has a familiarity that feels good nonetheless.

* * *

    After a busy day, I'm pulling up Hillside Drive again just around 11, and that same damn Camaro is in front of the house.  As I get closer and ready to raise hell, I see no one is in it. I grab the license plate number and run in to see if the weasel worked his way into the house.
    Everything is dark, so I flip on the lights. I start wandering around, peeking from room to room to see where everyone is. After seeing that both Stephen and Gloria's rooms are empty, I start shouting to see who is there.
    I panic and run to the kitchen to see if there is a note, and of course, there is:

        Hal, we're at Gloria's play. It's the last night, so we'll probably be home late. Sorry you had to miss it. Jim's with us, and he'll pick up his car when we get home.
        Love, Marjorie  

    Just as I read the end of it, I hear the car pull up. I hear some laughing in the garage, and then Gloria opens the door into the kitchen. As we make eye contact, I'm overwhelmed by how grown-up and beautiful she looks.
    "How was the play honey? I'm so sorry I missed it."
    The smile on her face falls, and she responds, "it was ok. I did pretty well, I guess. They videotaped it, so you can see it if you want." At the end, she gave me one of those shy smiles that melts a dad's heart.
    "Oh, I do want to see it. Definitely, let's get the video."
    Now, everyone is in the house, including Jim.
    "Hi Mr. Silver, it's good to finally meet you," he says while extending his hand.
    "Hi. . . You know, you better watch where you park that nice car of yours so late at night."
    "Oh, I will, don't you worry," he said holding a cocky gaze right into my eyes.
    Ooo, I knew this guy was no good. Who responds to their girlfriend's father so smug and full of himself?
    "Well, it's pretty late there Jim," I say while slapping him on the back and escorting him to the door.
    "Bye Gloria, Marjorie, Stephen. See you later," he says as I slam the door behind him.
    "Dad you are so RUDE! I HATE YOU!" Gloria screams as she runs up the stairs. Stephen follows close behind her, and Marjorie whacks me with her purse.
    "What!? That kid is no good, I'm telling you. Calling you Marjorie, and talking to me with that tone. I know he is no good, and I'll prove it to you Marge."
    "Save it ok, I am so sick of this shit. You are never around to actually be a parent, and then you jump on this high horse like you know exactly what is going on for the five minutes that you are here. You don't have a clue about Jim, ABOUT YOUR OWN KIDS, about ANYTHING that happens in this house!"
    I just stare at her, completely dumbfounded. She never talks to me like this. Sometimes she gives me a hard time, but this was more than a little jab.  What has gotten into her? Did this disrespectful little bastard turn my whole family against me?

    I can't sleep at all through the night and am so relieved to see the sunrise. Finally, I can just get the hell out of bed and get to the station. I'm going to find out the truth about this kid and show them all that I'm right.
    After another pull through breakfast, I get to the station and plug in the little dirtbag's plate number. After so many years with the force, it is second nature to memorize the plates of suspicious people. This was the key to beginning my investigation, and my gut told me it wouldn't be hard to get the word on this kid.
    Finally, the computer flashes a report. As I scan the contents, I see that a Jim is not the registered owner of the vehicle. A man by the name of Carl Blakely is the actual owner; Carl must be his father.  I quickly change programs to check on rap sheets for the Blakely family.
    Carl's record is clean, but once I put James Blakely in my system, I find what I'm looking for. There is a James Blakely with the right age, and surprise, surprise, he has tons of juvenile charges, one after another, after another. Looks like he isn't even supposed to be out of juvey right now.  He must have been one of that wave that just got let out because of overcrowding. His last charge was a simple assault, a fight at school.
    Hmmm, they must have let him out just based on the severity of that one charge.
    As I scroll through, all of a sudden I see it. The anger rises from my belly and fills my head with steam as I read that two years ago he was charged with sexual assault.  The charges were dropped, but I'm sure that isn't all there is to it. Oh, I knew this guy was trouble.
    "Captain, get out here, your late for the meeting. We have to get done early today."
    "Alright, alright. I'll be right there, I'm just finishing up some important research," I shout back as I close down the program and rush to join the meeting.

* * *

    All day I can't stop thinking about this bastard and his plans for my daughter. I want so badly to get more info, pull some records, make some calls, but there just isn't time in my day. As the sun goes down on this Friday evening, I just can't sit at my desk and fester about what might be happening. It is time to do something about it.
    For the first time in ages, I actually pack up my stuff and leave the office at 5:00 when all the new recruits on the day shift head for home. I speed the whole way determined to catch Gloria at dinner and forbid her to see Jim again. I will not take no for an answer.
    Still on my way through the door, I say, "Marjorie, where's Gloria?"
    "She went home from school with Jim, and they are going to Susie's house, and then to the movies with some friends later tonight. What are you doing here so early? I didn't even make enough dinner for you."
    "What do you mean she's out with him. Marge! Why don't you listen to me? I told you the kid was no good, and you keep defending him and keep letting her be alone with him. I am right you know! I checked up on him at the station, and I found out he has quite a few charges, even one for sexual assault! And here you are sending your daughter off with the damn predator."
    Stephen walks in. "Hi dad! What are you doing home?"
    "Not now Stephen. Your mother and I are talking about something very important."
    "Hal, are you sure about all this? I just can't believe that could possibly be true. He is really a nice kid. I met his mother at the play, and I can just tell.  She is a good woman."
    "Marge, trust me. I know what I'm talking about, and I'm getting to my daughter before it is too late." Before Marjorie has a chance to say another word, I am out the door.
    Luckily Susie only lives a few blocks away, so I can speed down to her house before there is too much time for that creep to hurt Gloria. I swear I'll ring his little neck when I get a hold of it.
    As I am pulling up to the front of Susie's house, I immediately notice that none of the front windows are lit. It looks as though no one is home, but Jim's swanky ride is outside. He better not be alone in there with her. I better get the hell in there.
    I'm not going to ring the bell and give him a chance to make it look like everything is fine and dandy.  No, I need to catch the little shit red-handed. Pull him in by the back of his neck, and let both Gloria and Marjorie apologize and thank me for knowing about Jim the whole time. Yeah, that is the way this one is supposed to play out.
    I pull the car up in front of the neighbor's house and dart down the driveway into the backyard. The pool out back is still closed for the season, and there is no sign of the kids out there, but there is a glass sliding door into the house.  It is dark in the room adjoining the door, but I can tell there is a light on down the hallway. I slowly sneak over and check to see if the slider is open.
    It is.
    As I slowly creep in the door, I can hear some voices in the other room. I stand in the darkness listening for a second, but I can't completely recognize the voices. Maybe one is Gloria, but I can't be sure. I start down the hallway towards the light.
    A girl screams, "Watch out! Someone broke in!!!!"
    Then, SMASH! Glittering shards of glass fly through my field of vision, and for a moment I feel like a figure in one of those shaken globes with fake snow whirling around. Then, I literally begin to feel myself whirling around, but I straighten up and remember my mission to save Gloria. I continue down the hallway towards the lit room, ready to figure out what the hell is going on here.
    Then, I feel this intense pain at the back of my neck. This sharp and acute sensation, digging into the back of my neck . . . then the pain subsides.  It is as though the pain surpasses my threshold of tolerance, and it sneaks beyond my ability to sense it.  First, I feel my knees hit the ground, and then the rest of me falls in a heap.
    The lights flash on, and I hear the shrieks of a bunch of teenage girls surrounding me.
    "Gloria, it's your dad! Oh my God!! It's your Dad."
    "What are you talking about? Oh, my God. Oh Daddy, I am so sorry. Oh my God. Call an ambulance! Somebody call an ambulance!" I hear Gloria shout through her tears.
    As she begins to sob on my chest, her tears soaking through the front of my shirt begin to moisten my skin. I want so badly to hold her, but I can hardly move my body. Let me try my lips.
    "Gloria sweetheart. What happened? What happened to me?"
    "Oh Daddy, I am so sorry. I thought you were a burglar. As you were headed down the hallway, you looked so vicious and were moving like you were ready to hurt someone. I was trying to protect everyone. I had no idea it was you. I am so sorry. I can't believe this happened. Why are you here Daddy?  Why?"
    I can't respond for a few minutes as the realization that it was Gloria that had done this to me soaked in. Just listening to her cry on my chest and knowing her pain.  Why the hell am I here?
    "Oh Gloria baby, it's ok. It's ok. This is my fault. All my fault. I'm always trying to be such a hero. It's my fault."  Now I'm sobbing, not from the physical pain, only the pain I can see in her. As I feel the wet pool of blood stretch across the back region of my body, I know I'm losing a lot of blood. I know these kinds of injuries. I know the outcome of extensive bleeding like this. I know that I'm not in the kind-of good health you need to be in to bounce back from something like this.
    "Daddy, what are you doing here?" Gloria gasps as she is trying to pull in some air between her heaving sobs.
    "Oh. . . I was trying to come here and rescue you from Jim. . . I found out some information about him, and I wanted to come and get you away from him. . . Baby, he isn't safe."
    "What?! He isn't safe. Dad, you don't know what you're talking about. He is perfectly safe. You didn't have to do this."
    "No, Glory, just promise me that you'll never see him . . . Uhgh . . . I ran his plates . . . and I learned a lot about his rap sheet, his priors . . . He is not a good kid Glory. . . Stay away from him, please . . . promise me," I plead.
    "Daddy, oh my God, this huge mistake and now look at where we are. Oh my God, why the hell did this happen. Oh my God. Daddy, it isn't even HIS CAR!! He borrowed the car from his friend, Carl.  He is just driving it around while Carl is out of town!"
    Gloria stops crying and just starts starring.
    In this emotionless tone, Gloria says, "what have I done." She just continues staring past me, holding this blank look.
    "Gloria, I'm sorry!  This is all my fault. . ."
    There is no response from her.
    I muster as much strength as I possibly can, and I scream as loudly as I can, "I'M SORRY! . . . I don't want you to suffer. . . I don't want you to suffer . . ." My voice begins to trail off.
    I feel myself getting weaker, but I just want her to know she doesn't need to feel all this pain. It is my fault, not hers . . . all my fault.

secret room

    I always felt my mother was the only one who really understood me. Like me, she was special: beautiful, and powerful. As a child, I remember the looks I would see men give her when we walked through town. They were ready to fall at her feet, if she threw them even the slightest glance.
    Mother channeled her power into spells and concoctions to attain anything and everything her heart desired. She taught me her ways, and we would laugh together locked in her secret room. No one knew the secret magic we practiced.
    When I turned 13, my first love stirred the greatest desire I had ever known. There was a boy who shined with this wild exuberance that enticed me. He was rarely at school because he was always falling ill in one way or another, and this distance kept me from being able to dazzle him with my beauty, or slip him a secret potion. Making this boy love me became my absolute infatuation, and I craved to use my powers to draw him into my web.
    One afternoon, I came home and tugged my mother’s arm as I lead her down the dark hallway into the secret room that she hardly visited anymore. I told her about this boy. I told her I wanted to heal him and needed her help. She looked at me with this oddly puzzled look on her face and slowly began to shake her head back and forth.
    "MOTHER!" I yelled. "For the first time in my whole life I need you. I need you to be there for me, to help me, to use all the tools you have shown me to make MY dreams come true! So many times, I have followed along and assisted YOU in YOUR magic spells, and now it is my turn!"
    As I threw my tantrum, I could see her soften and just about ready to give in. Just then, I snuggled in close to her and cried a few small tears.
    "Oh Anastasia," she said softly looking deeply into my eyes. "I have seen a great darkness in the magic. I just know I have to stop."
    She paused looking down at the ground before she continued. "I had a dream.  An women, in a long white gown, I don't know, maybe an angel.  Anastasia, she told me that I am abusing my powers. She told me there will be consequences."
    I looked at her face after sensing the shakiness in her voice. Mother looked more fearful and frail than I had ever seen her.
    I shuddered but quickly refocused onto my task. "Mother, I will never again ask you to do this. Please. Just this one time."
    After a long pause, Mother finally said, "alright Anastasia."
    "Oh thank you Mother, thank you so much," I said as I planted a string of kisses on her cheeks.
    Her face had changed to a lighter smile. "Do you have anything I can use to connect to him?"
    "Ah . . . I have a some paper with his writing on it." I ran to get my school bag and found a note he passed me.
    I gave her the paper, and she breathed long and hard. She closed her eyes as she held the paper. As she sat there concentrating, she began to shake. I started to get a little worried, until finally she opened her eyes.
    "No doctor will ever be able to cure him. Anastasia, he is destined to die very young."
    Her forlorn expression made me crazy. I was too young to be helpless, and too full of my own power to feel hopeless.
    "There has to be something that we can do. Help me find a way to heal him," I demanded.
    "There is no way." She wouldn’t look at me, so I knew she was lying.
    "What must I do, Mother? I’ll do anything."
    "Oh Anastasia Dear, please let this go. Please."
    "No Mother, we have to do this. For him. For me. For us. We have to do this. What do you need me to do?" I spoke as sternly as if I was a parent scolding my child.
    "Oh Anastasia, fine. Damn it! Fine, bring him to the house, but let me be absolutely clear that this is the very last time that I will ever use magic. . . the very last time."
    About a month later, the opportunity came to get Ranee to our house. It was a spring day, and while we were outside for a break, I slowly walked up to him and flashed the most provocative smile I could muster. I caught his attention and inched closer and closer. I allowed myself to come just close enough to rub my breasts lightly against him, and then I slowly moved away, as though I didn’t notice I had touched him. I turned away and waited for him to respond.
    Of course, he did.
    "We should sneak into the woods behind the school," he whispered in my ear.
    I looked around to realize that no one was looking at us. "My house is much better and just up the road," I replied.
    He looked incredibly stunned at my forward invitation, but too foolhardy to decline. We quickly ran down the road before anyone noticed.
    We came into the empty kitchen to find a kettle whistling. I turned it off, poured my mother’s tea, and headed back for her bedroom. Ranee looked so uncomfortable. I lifted my index finger to my lips and then pointed to a kitchen chair, as I headed down the dark hallway.
    Mother was sound asleep when I entered her room. I shook her violently, and in a loud whisper said, "he’s here. Momma, he’s here. Wake up.”
    She could barely open her eyes, but finally she knew she had no choice. "Oh Anastasia, please let me rest. I feel so tired and weak. I can’t do this now. I can’t. You’ll have to leave, and we can do this another time."
    "No Mother! You don’t even realize how difficult it was to get him here, and now he is here. We have to do it now. I’ll do it, you just tell me what to do. Now, Mother. Now!"
    She looked so angry at me, but at the same time, I knew she didn’t have the energy for her anger. She reluctantly lifted her thin frame from the bed and stood weakly in front of me.
    "Why aren’t you at school? What are you doing here?"
    "You said he needed to be here, and I got him here. That is all there is to it. Meet us in the secret room."
    I abruptly left and knew that she would be there. I went back in the kitchen and took Ranee’s hand. I raised him from his seat, and in the kitchen, we shared our first kiss. I held his face in my hands, and I could feel his heart beating so fast against my chest. His strong right hand rested on the small of my back and pulled me in closer. With his left hand, he gently touched my shoulder, and I felt such strong passionate feelings for him in that moment. I knew this was love, and I would do whatever I must to have it.
    The heat started to rise, and then I told him that my mother wanted to see him. I wanted her to meet him and approve, before we could be together. I told him how badly I wanted us to be together, and I gave him that sly and seductive look that most 13 year olds wouldn’t have pulled off.
    He was completely helpless to my wishes at this point, and like an obedient puppy, he followed me to the secret room. Mother had lit a number of candles. She looked tired, angry, and even ugly. I felt a slight shame come over me as she commanded Ranee to get on her table. He looked at me, completely confused, and I nodded my head and asked him to do it.
    I whispered to him to close his eyes, and I said that everything would be just fine. I told him not to worry; he could trust us.
    Mother told me to stand down by his feet, and she stood by his head. She began to move her hands over top of his body. For several minutes, Mother moved all around floating her hands above his body, scanning the surface. Then, she pulled me into the corner and told me that she was going to perform the healing with my help. I was to stand behind her, put my hands on her waist and feed her energy. She was going to channel both our energies through her hands and into his body to heal him.
    "Whatever you do, Anastasia, you cannot let go."
    She approached the table, and I nervously grabbed her waist. She put her hands on him, and he began to speak. He started asking what she was doing, and he said he wanted her to stop. I told him it was ok, and it would make him better.
    "Just lie down, Ranee."
    "Stop! I am fine. I don’t want you to do this to me."
    He began to try and get up, but Mother pushed him firmly back onto the table. She kept going, and finally, he stopped fighting.
    After fifteen minutes or so, I began to feel too weak to even keep standing up. I needed to sit down, or get a drink, or lay down. I whispered to Mother that I needed to rest, but she didn’t hear me. She was so entranced in what she was doing, so I kept holding on.
    Until that piercing scream roughed me from my unconsciousness. The sound of Ranee’s scream startled me into action, and I stood to find Mother laying on top of him.  I used all my might to lift her off him, and he jumped off the table and ran out the door. I heard the door slam, and his distant curses as he ran from our house.
    Mother fell limply back onto the table, and I couldn’t get her to wake up. I was able to swing her legs up onto the table so she could lie down, and when I had her flat on her back, I kept whispering in her ear and gently shaking her, "Momma, wake-up, please Momma, wake-up."
    She was still warm, but there was something so eerie and lifeless about her body. I started to panic and wonder what I was going to do, when she finally opened her eyes.
    She looked at me with a cold glance and said, "Anastasia, I shouldn’t have done this. . . I gave him all the good energy I had left. I love you so much that I would do anything for you, but now . . ." Her eyelids fell heavily shut.
    Panic. . . Tears . . . Fear. . .Hysteria . . . and finally sleep.

***

    "Anastasia. Anastasia, what is going on here?!" I was being shaken, but I didn’t want to open my eyes.  I didn’t want to return to my nightmare and have to explain or accept. The shaking became more violent, and finally, I knew that it was Auntie.
    I opened my eyes only partially, and I looked at her tear stained face. I was on the floor of the secret room, and through the small parted space of my eyelids, I could see that my mother was no longer on the table. I pulled Auntie close to me and just cried. I just cried and cried and cried. I was too afraid to speak, so tears filled the space I could not fill with words.
    I never explained or answered a single question. I just got very upset whenever anyone asked me what had happened. They assumed I had suffered such a trauma that even I did not remember what had happened, but I did know. I also knew the only other person in the world who knew what had happened that day.
    It was about a month before I returned to school, and the first day back, there he was. He looked healthier than ever. Full of his own strength and bravado, he had a confidence that bordered arrogance, and he looked at me in a way that made me wince. The dynamics of power had clearly shifted between us. It was still morning when he pulled me into a shadow of the school to talk with me, privately.
    "I don’t know what you two witches did to me, but it worked. Huh? Can’t you tell? I feel fantastic, better than I’ve ever felt in my life. Now, I’m not thanking you because you had no right to do what you did. It was sick; it was weird; and no one has ever scared the crap out of me like you did that day. I’m not thanking you, but I will tell you that I did not tell anyone.
    "I heard that your mother died, and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want you to get locked away like a crazy witch, now that you’re an orphan, so I won’t tell. . . Unless you give me reason to tell."
    In the dark, I could see glints of light shining off his teeth grinning an evil smirk. I was utterly speechless, but I must admit my discomfort mixed with relief that I could appease him to keep my secret. To me, no one ever knowing what happened was of the utmost importance.

    As Ranee became a bigger and bigger part of my life, Auntie started asking questions.  I just kept putting them off until she started teasing me about my little boyfriend.  It felt somewhat less dirty, less shameful to think of him as my boyfriend. Maybe I could just happily go along with this, and everything would be fine.
    Our relationship began to evolve into a truce. There was a good deal of laughing when we were together, and when he pressured me to do things to him that I did not feel completely comfortable with, but I did them and did not complain. I wouldn’t say that it was something I liked doing, but I could handle it. I felt more like I was working off a debt, than like a victim.
    One afternoon, we were lying on some grass near his house, when a few of his friends showed up, saying all sorts of rude things to me.  
    "Hey guys, get the hell out of here. This is my girlfriend, and you are not going to talk to her that way. Get the hell out of here before I kick someone’s ass!" Ranee had a look of rage on his face as he shouted at them that I never expected.  In that moment, he transformed before my eyes from my warden to my protector.
    As the boys ran off, I looked into his eyes and said, "thank you for standing up for me." Then I stammered, "Do you really think of me as your girlfriend?"
    "I didn’t. But lately, I can’t stop thinking about you, Ana. Even the way you helped heal me. I owe you so much. I love being with you. I love the way you look, the way you feel. Ana, I love you. I don’t know how this happened, but I am just glad we are together."
    He hugged me tightly, and I was glad he couldn’t see my face. Although I felt like his words should have made me happy, they made me scared. I felt a creeping panic in my chest realizing that the ransom stakes had now shifted from my body to my heart.
    I just held him tightly unsure about what else to do. Tears started to well up in my eyes, and he pulled back.
    "Oh Ana, you don’t have to say a word. I know," he said as he pulled me closer again.

***

    Ranee and I dated very seriously all through high school. I suppose we had a fairly normal relationship to the outside, but I always had this strange feeling of having no way out.  This secret did not make me love him, but his love for me made me feel safe and secure.  It eased the guilt I felt inside and made me feel lovable despite what I had done.  It made me feel that my secret was guarded by the walls of his strong love for me.
    After our high school graduation, Ranee and I went to a friend’s party, and he introduced me to his childhood best friend: "Ana, this is my good buddy, Glenn," Ranee said as he slapped Glenn on the back and gave him a huge smile.
    I reached out my hand and shyly said, "it’s nice to meet you."
    When I made eye contact with Glenn, my heart began to beat faster.  I could barely hold eye contact, and I could feel the perspiration begin to build in my palms.
    "It’s my pleasure to meet you Ana," he said with the kindest smile, looking so intent and interested in me.
    Quickly, Ranee escorted Glenn outside to talk with some other friends. As they reached the door to go outside, Glenn looked back and caught my gaze again. I lost my breath and ran upstairs to the bathroom.
    I splashed cold water on my face and looked in the mirror. In a single moment, a solitary glance, my whole world felt different.  My arrangement with Ranee which seemed so safe and tolerable, now seemed suffocating.  I had never felt interested or attracted to someone else, so I didn’t feel like being with Ranee was a sacrifice, but then I wondered if this intense feeling running through me was love at first sight, maybe it wasn’t, but either way, there was nothing I could ever do about it.
    I pulled myself together, and ran down the stairs to tell Ranee I had to go home because I felt sick.  I ran into Glenn before I had a chance to talk to Ranee.
    "Where are you off to in such a rush?," he asked with an intense stare.
    "Oh, I have to get going. I don’t feel very well," I muttered while darting my eyes all around the room trying so desperately to avoid looking into the warm wells of his eyes.
    "Before you go, I wanted to share something with you. Ranee told me that you love art, and I have some paintings with me.  Please come, and I’ll show them to you," he said so innocently that in that moment I completely believed everything would be ok.
    "Well, for a moment, I guess," and as I said this I couldn’t help but lock into his gaze.
    I followed him outside to his car, and he showed me his paintings.  They could easily have been images plucked from the landscape of my own inner world. There were paintings of the sunset, old buildings and bridges, the night sky.
    Then, there was an image of a girl . . . that truly took my breath away. The likeness to me was uncanny; her hair color was slightly different, and the shape of her face a touch more round, but this painting could be one that was intended to be my portrait.  I turned to him in awe and confusion.
    "I know," he said. "I painted this one several years ago, and when I saw you I couldn’t believe how much you look like her.  I’ve painted lots of people, but this is the only portrait of someone that I created out of my mind, someone that I didn’t really know."
    “I just wanted to show it to you because of how weird it is, you know.  Just a strange coincidence.”
    “Did you show this to Ranee?”
    “No, no I don’t know what he’d say.  He isn’t really that interested in coincidences, or art.  No, I just wanted to show you because I had the paintings in my car.  I’m going to be here for the summer, and I brought them to show my grandmother.”
    "Oh,” I wasn’t sure what else to say.  I also knew that anything I wanted to say wouldn’t be ok.
    “You know I really have to go.  Please tell Ranee I had to go." I ran more quickly away from that house than I would have if it had been on fire. I just ran and ran.
    When I was out of an earshot, I cried: for the life I had lost, the mother I had killed, the choices I had demolished, and the feelings of love I’d never explore.
    All the grief, pain, violation, guilt, and suffering that I had stuffed away in the years since my mother’s death flooded back. I was the small selfish little brat who pushed her mother into her coffin, the dirty whore who sold my body to have her deepest and darkest secret kept hidden.  The worst tragedy of all would be for Glenn to ever know.  I couldn’t bear to tarnish the pure looks he gave me.
    I hid out in my house for the first few weeks of that summer under the guise of having an illness. I didn’t see Ranee until finally he would wait no more.  Late one night, he snuck into my bedroom window and woke me with a kiss.
    "Ranee, you shouldn’t be here. You could catch what I have. Stop."
    "Oh, Ana, I’m sick without you. I just needed to see you. Just for a minute. How are you doing?"
    "I’m doing ok," I said through a small coughing fit.
    "Oh, baby, I’m sorry. And, the weather is great outside. I was really hoping you would be able to go on the canoeing trip this weekend."
    "No, I won’t be able to make it," I said trying to fight off the desperation I felt to have him leave. Looking at him now, I just couldn’t take his feelings. I could see his love, his attachment to me.
    He felt my coldness and said "Ana, what is wrong. You’re acting really weird."
    "Nothing Ranee, I just don’t feel well. You better go."
    "Look, don’t think you can brush me off. You know how it is, right? I love you so much, and I won’t let you go so easily.”  He looked through me.  “Come on girl, get better,” he said with a slight smile.   “I’ll see you real soon, ok?"
    "Yeah Ranee, whatever you want."

***

    A few days later, I finally emerge from my room.  My Auntie convinces me that I need to get out, and she draggs me along to the annual church picnic at the park.  Ranee is on the canoeing trip, so I feel safe being out.
    The summer sunshine feels so good.  A cool breeze melds with the warmth creating the perfect temperature. The peaceful sound of the wind moving the branches calms me, and it feels good to finally turn my mind to something besides the tortuous thoughts I had been spinning.
    Taking care of the young kids had become my ritual at the picnic, so I quickly move into my role. I start a little game of hide-and-go-seek among some of the kids. I completely lose myself in this child’s game; it feels wonderful. I giggle and carry on with them, as though I was just another nine year old.
    Then, I feel a light tap that sends a tingling sensation through my body.  It jolts me from my giddy good time, and I nervously swing my head around to see who is there. Glenn smiles down at me.
    "Hey there, Anastasia," he says. "Ranee told me that you’ve been sick. I’m glad to see that you are feeling so much better."
    "Oh, thanks, yeah I guess I am feeling better . . . But, uh, not entirely better you know. I still have to get my rest." I fake a horrible cough as I turn back to the kids to rest from his stare.
    "Well, watching you run around with these kids, you look so healthy," he says. "You are glowing you know."
    I nervously laugh and can’t control the rush of heat to my cheeks. "Oh, well, I um better get back to the game. It was nice to see you," I say as I turn away from him ready for a full sprint into the best hiding spot I could find.
    "Anastasia, you don’t have to run from me. I am not trying to make you uncomfortable. I know you are with Ranee, and I don’t want to cause you any trouble. I am only here for the summer, and I just hoped that maybe we could all be friends," he says.  
    I don’t want to turn around and look at him because his words are breaking down my walls. With each sincere gesture and loving look, I feel weaker and weaker in my resolve to hold up this charade that I am in love with Ranee. I feel less and less able to pretend. Slowly, I bring myself to look into his eyes.
    "Glenn, there is so much you don’t understand.  I can’t explain.  I’m sorry." As I look at him, I feel that there is more honesty in that moment than ever in my life.
    I lean over and give him a kiss on the cheek before I run away.
    Quickly, I find Auntie and convince her it is time to go home.  I tell her I desperately need my rest, and she quickly gathers her things.
    We aren’t home for more than five minutes when there is a loud knock at the door.  I run upstairs to my room saying I need to get to bed right away, and as I make my way up the stairs, I hear Auntie talking with Ranee. I hear his loud footsteps pounding down the hallway toward the stairs.
    "Ana, I want to talk to you."
    "I was just going to get some rest. The church picnic really wiped me out. Let’s talk later," I say without turning around. I just continue up the stairs.
    "No. We are going to talk right now," he says with fire in his voice.
    I stop and turn my head back to see this expression of rage on his face. I feel terrified, but I spring into action. I quickly turn around and head down the stairs. "Let’s go sit out back."
    He follows close behind me as I head for the back door of Auntie’s cottage. When we are sitting in the chairs behind her house, he finally says, "what the hell is going on with you and Glenn?"
    "Nothing. He’s your friend," I say trying to look in his eyes, but unable to force myself to do it.
    "Well, so do you make it a habit of kissing all my friends?"
    "No, of course I don’t. What are you talking about?"
    "You know what I am talking about you lying bitch. You crazy little witch. After all that we’ve been through, you would lie to me and go behind my back, huh."
    "No Ranee, you don’t understand at all. I was telling him that I didn’t want to see him. It was just an innocent kiss on the cheek. I wasn’t doing anything. I want to be with you."
    "Tell me you love me. Look straight into my eyes and tell me how much you love me. Right now!"
    Tears are flooding my eyes by this point, and I want with everything in me to shut them down and do as he asks. I look into his eyes and say "I . . . do. I . . .love," but before I can get the words out, I drop my gaze to my shoes. I just start crying hysterically, knowing what all this is going to mean.
    Before, I have a chance to say anything, Ranee is gone. I run after him screaming his name, but he just keeps going.
    I run to my room past Auntie. She tries to stop me and find out what was the matter, but I can’t speak. I just run into my room and start moving my dresser to block my door. I lock the window, close the curtains, and then heap myself on the floor.
    So many questions spin through my mind: what would happen as Ranee told everyone my secret, how would Auntie feel about me, or Glenn, or everyone else? Would I go to jail? Overwhelmed by all I have been hiding from for so many years, I reach for this old knife with a handle made of pearl that had belonged to my mother. It is one of the only things I kept of hers. It is so unique and beautiful: this dainty little weapon.
    Today, I realize why I hung onto it all these years. I pull the blade from the leather sheath, and quickly, before I have a chance to think of the pain, I slice it across my wrist. At first, it only makes the smallest scratch, so I push down with more pressure.
    Then, I just lay there watching the blood quickly spill out of my body. With each gush I feel closer and closer to ending this nightmare that suffocates me. I start to feel very sleepy as the pool grows bigger, and I let myself drift off.  Making everything slowly slip away.

***

   "Anastasia Dear, it is all going to be ok," says a calming voice that seems so far away. Everything is dark and the sounded is muffled, like in a dream. I try to open my eyes, and finally I see light, then blurry objects. Unclear images of faces I don’t recognize, a man and a woman. Their lips are moving, but there's no sound. I lay there wondering who they are . . . who I am, and what is going on.
   I just keep staring until my vision clears, and then I see a woman I recognize push the man at my bedside away. She grabs my hand and repeats, "Anastasia Dear, it is all going to be ok." The woman smiles sweetly.
   As I focus in on her face, it all starts coming back to me. My aunt, my mother, Ranee . . . the pearl knife, the blood.
    I shut my eyes as tightly as I can, just hoping and praying that Auntie is wrong. I don’t want to be ok. I don’t want to still be here. I don’t want to know what happens next.
   "Anastasia, it is ok. It’s me Auntie, and everything is alright.  Don’t worry dear."
   I think, "she doesn’t know yet."
   Then, I open my eyes one more time and notice that someone else is in the room. It's Glenn, and he begins walking toward my bed with flowers.
   "Hi Anastasia. I’m so glad you’re awake," he says.
    Then, this man in white ushers them all out of the room.  He turns around and returns to my bed, and he says, "Anastasia, are you a bit confused?"
  I nod.
  "You just need to rest, let-go," he says.
  "No, wait. First, I have to know something."
  "What do you need to know?"
  "Uh, my boyfriend, Ranee, why isn’t he here?"
  "He helped us understand why you did what you did.  I think you know why he isn't here."
  "Oh."  Did they all know?  Could they have forgiven me?  Could it really be ok?
  "Alright, now," the man says.  "I think you know enough to take a rest, to let go."

shadow before me

    How did I end up on this hill?  Looking down at the river I can never bathe in, watching the sunset over hills I can never go visit, living in a marriage that will never give me love. I fool myself by looking out and believing I have so much. I let myself believe that I have been rescued from a life that was tragic, but then why do I daydream about those days?
    Those days when he would come to visit me.  He was a man of power, so really he could have me whenever he wanted.  He was the first man in my life to ever ask me what I wanted. He was the first man who ever kissed me as a girl, a treasured girl. He was the only man that ever made love to me.
    Back then, I lived for my time with him. Every time my door opened, I hoped and prayed that he would be the man to walk through it. I focused on his every move, his every word, every feeling, every look.  I moved into an obsession that consumed my life, and day by day this new emotion enticed me to want to feel more. With each sensation of pleasure, I allowed myself to open to more feeling, more love, more pleasure.
    The difficulty with our love affair came when my openness led to feeling more during my other liaisons. With other men who called me a whore and commanded me like their personal slaves, I felt pain. I felt disrespected.  Physically, I felt torn. I had opened myself to see and feel all that was really going on around me, and in the process, I had found myself in a life I could not tolerate.
    The great love I felt for this one man was greater than anything I had ever known, but I no longer could just move through the motions as a numb machine performing a rote task. I felt everything, and I could no longer take the extremes.
    I knew there was no way I could continue on this roller coaster. Paying the price of excruciating pain was too high, even for the immeasurable pleasure I felt with him. I believed that he truly loved me, and I thought I could have it all. I felt ready to ask, can I have it all?
    After making love one afternoon, I stared into his eyes and told him the pain I felt being with other men. He said he felt an emptiness being with his wife, when he felt such love for me. I told him that physically I felt pain by the way the men treated me. I told him it was too much pain for me to bear.
    With this he sat up. He looked very seriously and sternly at me and asked what I was going to do. I told him I wanted to leave. I was ready to run away. I needed to leave this life and start over, and I needed him to help me.
    As the words left my lips, he turned away. Quickly, he got up and walked away. Tortuous moments of silence filled the space between us, and he buried his head in the wall. Finally, he turned around and came to me.
    "I want to help. Really, I do, but I just can't," he spit out and left in a rush.  I sat there in a complete daze.
    He visited me early the next day, a sheepish grin on his face.
    "Hello, my love," he said so sweetly as he kissed me gently on the lips. He held me tightly, until I wiggled from his grasp.
    I gave him a stern look as I turned my head to face the small window in the corner of the room. I walked away from him over to the window, so he wouldn't see the small tears beginning to form in the corners of my eyes.
    He walked up behind me and grabbed around my waist from behind. He started planting small kisses on the back of my neck, creeping around to the front and up to my ear. He had learned over the last two years that this was my weakness.
    But that day, I did not feel weak.
    "Stop," I said firmly with no equivocation. "I won't do this anymore."  I didn't even turn to look at him, I just stared lifelessly out the window. After a moment of hesitation I said, "go and just leave me alone . . . if you won't help me."
    I stared out the window. I let myself be hypnotized by the color and movement of the people walking in herds down the busy street. I focused in on this woman selling her fruit out of a hand-made wooden stand. The bright colors of the fruit stood out to me. The rich and shiny reds, yellows, and greens spoke of paradise, a place of dreams, where unhindered love can exist. As I stared, strange noises pulled me back to the room. I just listened without turning, and finally I realized they were muffled sobs, sniffling moans.
    "Please, stay. I beg you to just stay here. Things aren't that bad . . .are they? I wish I could save you, I want what you want so badly," he said in a strained a high pitched tone. "I need you. Please don't do this."
    A part of me wanted to say ok and to just live in this sea of pleasure and pain. In moments, I thought I could say yes, but my lips would not let me say the word. I just listened. As his pleading continued, my tears disappeared. They evaporated into nothing. I just stood there, staring out the window, waiting for him to walk away, forever.
    After he left, I tried to live the life I had lived for so long, a livelihood of sex, but I could not.  I had opened to the abyss of feeling, and I could not stuff all I had experienced back inside. I had healed the part of myself that went numb, but now I had an entirely new beast to slay.

***

    It was clear I needed to get out. In the middle of the night, I crawled down the fire escape to the deserted street below. As I ran along the dimly lit street, it occurred to me I had no place to go. I knew no one that would help me, that would hide me, that would give me any money or food. I didn't have family, and I never had a friend.
    I just ran down the streets and alleyways that seemed so unfamiliar to me wrapped in shadows.  This street was a bustling open air market during the days, but since I had been here, I never walked alone in the empty streets of the night.  No people, no colors, no sounds.  The night filled with heavy silence, not a bird, not a car, not a soul. Nothing animating these empty streets, and there was just an endless reminder that I was completely alone.  Isolated.
    Just then bright lights shined at my back, and I could see my own shadow before me. I looked back to see where the light was coming from. It was a bus. It had just stopped, and a woman was getting off.
    I had enough money for a bus ride and a meal wherever I arrived, so I went for it. As I got on and handed the majority of all the money I had in the world to the bus driver, my heart was beating so fast.  This was the scariest thing I had ever experienced, and at the same time, I had this overwhelming sense of freedom and adventure. It was probably the way a young bird feels that first time he leaves the nest. The magic of flying right there, and at the same time that possibility of crashing into the solid ground below. Such a prize for such a risk.
    I made my way to the back of the darkened bus and kept my head down. I was sure not to make eye contact with any of these strangers, and my face was well hidden behind a large black hat. I felt securely masked from my identity on my way to a place where no one would know me. No one would hold me to the reputation I had built here. As I took my seat, my heart beat finally began to settle. I finally felt a glimmer of hope that everything would be alright.
    I slid on the seat over to the window. As the bus pulled away, I watched this familiar place get smaller and smaller. As we moved down the streets, each turn brought me further and further from what I knew. Finally, the window revealed scenes I had never laid eyes on. Buildings I had never seen, street corners I had never walked. This thought was accompanied by a slowly creeping smile. I was still very scared about the next step of my life, but at least, there was a next step. Nothing could be as bad as where I had been.
    I fell asleep with my head pressed against the window. It felt cool and soothing. The bumps as the bus traveled over the dirt roads lulled me. It was a peaceful sleep, deeper than any sleep I've experienced, but quickly I was snapped out. The rough terrain must have banged my head against the window just hard enough to wake me up, and I was startled by the sunlight as
I opened my eyes. I must have slept for hours.
    As I gathered myself, I noticed my hat had fallen off, but I could not find it anywhere. I looked all around on my seat, but it wasn't there. I looked under the seat, but still it was not there. I began to panic, as I sat in the exposure of letting all these people see my face.
    Just then, a man slid into the seat next to me, and he was holding my hat.  As he turned to face me, I recognized him right away. He gave me a sleezy smile as he handed me my hat. He was a man who I had serviced once or twice before. It had been quite a while, so I couldn't remember too clearly. I didn't remember any violence, but I seemed to remember that he was one of the dirty talkers. One of those men that just seemed to get off on calling me names and saying the nastiest commands. His smile didn't lie; He was definitely one of those vile men.
    He asked me where I was going, and I did not answer. He would not move from the seat, and he began taunting me. Telling me he knew that I had left without permission, and he could tell them where to find me. I gave him the best glance of death I could muster, but he just seemed amused and stimulated by my attempt to push him away. He wanted a little game of cat
and mouse, and the truth was that I did feel like a scared little mouse. I wanted to run, but the moving bus left me no where to go.
    He started moving closer and closer to me. Whispering promises to protect me if I would do disgusting things to him. He was so descriptive and perverse that it was no surprise that he wasn't wearing a wedding ring. I tried to change the focus by asking him about himself. He briefly bragged about his money and his line of work, but quickly returned to his advances. As he moved closer and closer to whisper in my ear, I felt smaller and smaller, weaker and weaker. My world was spinning faster and faster.
    The bus abruptly stopped, and as the door creaked open, the driver yelled for everyone to get off. I collected my things and stood up, but the nasty man would not get out of my way. He just stared me down, waiting for an answer to his proposition. Everyone got off the bus, everyone but us. The bus driver got very impatient and told us to get moving. The man just stared me down, until finally, I said "fine, whatever you want."
    He flashed another one of those smiles, and let me pass. I felt his eyes disrobing me and violating me as I walked in front of him off the bus. He put his arm around me as we walked away, and I just wanted to shrink down into a hole in the earth. I was so small, so defeated, not free at all.
    From there he lead me to a car waiting in the parking lot. A small red car that was an absolutely filthy mess inside. By the size of the pile of stuff on the passenger side seat, it seemed that no one had ever sat there before, and no wonder. I thought of running while he was there cleaning off the seat, but where would I go? I didn't even know where I was. I was stiff and
scared, so I allowed myself to be led.
    I was lead to his house, up on the hill. This house with so many windows. So many places to look out to the rest of the world, but not one window opened.  They were just places to longingly peer out, but nowhere to gain a breath of fresh air, not even a patio. From the time I first walked through the door, I felt a strangling hold around my neck. This house was a beautiful place, but it felt more suffocating than the small room where men used to visit me for sex day and night.
    After allowing him to do unspeakable things in the bedroom for a few hours, he finally was finished.  He left the room, and I quickly got myself dressed.  I walked out into the living area, and he was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette.  He offered me one, and I accepted.  I sat in a chair and leaned over for him to light my cigarette. It was so obvious that he was enjoying this sham that I was there by choice with him. He probably never had a woman he didn't pay for.
    He started some small talk, telling me about his family, about his house. I listened and started thinking that maybe he wasn't the most disgusting thing to crawl the face of the earth. He smiled very sincerely after a long story about when he bought this house and how lonely it was to live there by himself.
    "Would you stay here with me," he said.
    I was completely startled by the question and the soft tone of his voice. I just stared in disbelief.
    He continued, ". . . and, be my companion." He flashed that same nasty smile from the bus.
    This wasn't the freedom I expected, but I didn't see any choices.  I had no money to make my own choices, and he looked desperate for me to say yes.  I felt desperate to change his glances to respect. Maybe I could stay if he would show me the respect my lover introduced me to.
    "If you marry me," I said. "Treat me with the respect of a wife, and I'll stay."
    As I listened to the words coming from my mouth, I could hardly believe I was actually asking to attach myself to this man.
    He looked shocked by the request and pulled in his cigarette for a long drawn out drag.  As he sucked on his cigarette, he gave me an intense stare.
    He took a few more drags, and we sat in very intense and uncomfortable silence. I turned away to look out the window, and then I just closed my eyes. I let myself drift off to another time, a time with my lover, wrapped in his arms and warm with his love.
    "Yes. Absolutely! Let's get married baby," he said with this rowdy cackle.  I was yanked from my daydream back to the smoke filled room unsure whether I should be happy or crushed. It was freedom in a sense, and a whole new breed of prison, but one that carried with it status and respect.  I was ready to be a person of respect.
    I smiled and stood up to go into the bathroom.
    "Where are you going," he asked very suspiciously.
    "I am just going to use your restroom . . . if that is alright," I replied.
    "Well, I will come in with you. Shouldn't we just start doing everything together," he said.
    "Please let me have my space," I asked. After a pleading look, he let me go unescorted.

***

    For years, things continued along these lines. I did what he asked, and he gave me a little space to be alone and sink into my fantasies. When I would get really lost, imagining my lover when I was having sex with him, he would slap me and ask what I was thinking. His slaps were worth the pleasure I would get from just a second imagining that it was the man of my dreams inside me.
    As time passed, the violence grew and the control became overwhelming. I could never leave the house without him, and I could not even leave the room he was in without his permission.  He wanted to control everything, down to my thoughts, but that was the one freedom he could not touch, the one place he could not go, my only place to be happy. I lived in this far off space in my mind as much as I possibly could.
    I would dream of how my lover had been searching for me ever since I left town. He had figured out that I ran away, and which bus I must have taken. I dreamed that he knew where I ended up and that he was endlessly searching for me. Every single time I was in public, I imagined a chance run in, where my lover would whisk me away from this life, and we could be happy together. I remembered his tears, our love, the way it felt when we were together. It just was not fair for us to be apart. It was not right, and at some time, I just knew it would be made right.
    My existence had become these fantasies.  I allowed myself to walk through the motions of my actual life, one of pain, suffering, and violence, while my mind and spirit were hidden far away from my body.  I became a master at separating my internal and external worlds.
    I ended the roller coaster of extreme ups and downs with my lover and prostitution because it was too much.  But then, I just recreated the same situation in my marriage. The extreme highs experienced in my imagination balanced the extreme lows of my every encounter with my husband.  I gazed out the eye of my mind into a life I wish I had, and the windows of my house into the world I wish I could explore.
    After about ten years of keeping my dreams only in the intangible space of my head, I finally began expressing these fantasies in writing. The first day I chose to write personal thoughts in a small notebook I had bought at the pharmacy, my heart was beating ferociously out of my chest. I was so scared that he would walk up, that he would find me, that he would grab these pages from my hand and find out how I really felt. I feared a beating even more relentlessly than usual.
    My fear made me very careful about securing my most precious writings in a loose floorboard under the bathroom sink. These journals were where I wrote my thoughts, fantasies, my truest dreams and desires, my love for a man that was not my husband. I wrote in explicit sexual detail I could remember of my lover, and all my dreams of the experiences I wished to have. I wrote about the way sex with my husband repulsed me, and my dream that one day my lover would rescue me, and we would leave this house on the hill. We would leave laughing and in love.
    With so much of my truest heart and vulnerability exposed on those pages, I guarded them with my life.  I spent hours in the bathroom late at night filling the pages of my journals with my secret thoughts.  It was my place to play, my place to explore, my place to really live. In recent years, becoming slightly more comfortable in my home, when my husband was not home I snuck out into the bedroom to write on the softness of my bed.

***

    Today is one such day.  The door swings open and bangs against the door stop attached to the wall; I shudder. The startling noise lifts my attention to my husband standing in the doorway.
    "Come on, don't you have that stupid hair appointment. Let's MOVE. Get in the car you lazy bitch!"
    I slowly shut the night stand drawer as nonchalantly as possible. I wonder if I should try to stall him, so I can quickly sneak into the bathroom.
    "Ah, ok . . . ok, I'm coming. Ah. Um. I'm coming." I follow him out to the car with my fingers crossed behind my back.
    The long ride to the salon leads me to the longest haircut ever. Each snip of the scissors rings in my ears. I feel like a solid rock sitting in this squeaky plastic chair with my facial expression frozen and my lips sealed shut. I am afraid to even move my thoughts, for the great tidal wave of fear that would be jarred. Each time I hear the bell attached to the door ring, my eyes dart to see who is walking though. Then, finally, he enters the salon with his head down. He stares through me while the beautician finishes my style. The blow dryer muffles all sound, but his stare unmistakably communicates a message to me.
    As I sit there for the last moments of pampering, I think of running, screaming for help, showing people my bruised body and asking them to protect me. . . . No, they won't help me.
    He very abruptly throws more than enough to cover my haircut onto the counter as I walk toward him. His fingernails sink into my arm as he ushers me to the car. He slams the door and rushes around to the other side. We do not say a single word in the car on the way home, but still worlds of communication happen in the space between us.
    I feel his anger, and I feel his threats and promises of retribution for the way he is feeling. I send pleading looks and smiles that beg for mercy and understanding. I want him to know that there is love and gratitude for what he has given me. I am grateful. Really, I am. I silently pray for him to allow me to make it up to him.
    We arrive at the house, and he waits for me to get out of the car and then follows tightly behind me as I enter the house. As the door opens, I see my notebook on the table right in front of the door. Immediately he grabs it, looks deeply into my eyes, and whips its pages across my face. The sting is unbearable, and the force enough to break the skin. Blood stains the white wall to my left.  As I look at the journal with my own blood splattered upon it, I feel an odd sense of peace. A sense of knowing that this is the one place where I have truly lived.  This is where the blood flows through my veins. This is my truest body.
    The vessel that I walk around in is a lifeless and tortured object that I constantly escape from. I don't live in this body that is constantly made to do things I do not want to do. No, this is not the place that houses my soul, but these secret pages are my true physical home.  I am glad that he finally realizes that he hasn't touched the real me.  I am glad there is a real me.
    He is determined this one last time to reach in to get me.  His rage grows with my despondency as he beats me. I allow my awareness to drift out above the scene, and from this vantage point, it is like watching a taunted and tortured child trying to capture a ghost. He begins crying and screaming, and he just lets my body fall on the floor before him.
    He runs to the kitchen and grabs a long sharp silver knife. He runs in and shows it to me. He asks if this shows me how serious he really is.  He asks if this is this enough to make me love him, if it is enough to make me submit to him.
    I do nothing. I am beaten too badly to command anything of my body, so I just lay there limply, watching his antics. He hugs me, he cries, he asks me why I don't love him.
    He grabs the knife, and as he shoves it straight through my chest, I feel a pang. Just a slight pang as it goes through, and then peace. Warm surrender that finally releases me from this cage.
    Finally I am free, and he is alone with the mess.