Sunday Scribblings - Nemesis

I've given this some thought, and I can remember having a nemesis as a child. Her name was Amy and she was a part time "friend", full time enemy from the age of about 9 through to 13. Somehow we got to be friends when we were nine and I remember basically changing my personality to be more like her - and she was mean. I remember going around the playground with her and telling everyone not to play with a girl named Beth, because Amy didn't like her. I remember being shamed by a better person who told me not to be so mean and deliberately played with Beth so she wouldn't be alone.

Somehow, Amy and I stopped being friends. When we were 11, and about to leave our tiny primary school for highschool, I had my own best friend, and Amy had started to hang out with the popular group. In a truly mean girl way the popular girls had a mean plan to dump her right before highschool so she'd start high school without any friends. They did that, and even gave her a dog bone for Christmas. At the time I was glad, after all, she was my arch nemesis! But fate had a cruel trick to play, and now that Amy didn't have any friends, she came back wanting to sit with my friends and the new group we had. And so she did - and basically drove me out of that group to sit with some new friends, and in the process I lost my best friend. Of course the loss of my best friend wasn't Amy's fault, but it seemed like it at the time.

I met her a number of years later at our high school reunion. She'd lived a fairly hard life. Moved in with her boyfriend at 15, didn't finish high school and didn't appear to be doing a lot with the talent for song and dance she had shown as a child. We spoke briefly, but there was not much there of interest for me. She seemed lost, and when I think about it, she probably always was. Relentlessly searching, but more impatient than the rest of us. I wish her peace.

I don't have an archnemesis any more. I can't be bothered fighting with people I don't care about for things that just aren't that important. Actually, I think I am my own nemesis these days, and that makes me uncomfortable. I am the one sabotaging and defeating myself. I'm the one who doesn't believe in me. I'm the one who puts me down. Good God, I'm my own Amy!

I want that to change. I want to be my own friend rather than my own nemesis. I will be kind to myself instead of harsh. After all, if I am not my own friend, who will be? So raise your glasses of soda, ladies and gentlemen and let us make a toast - to being kind to yourself and defeating the nemesis within.

*clink*

Sunday Scribblings - Hero

I do not know what a hero is. I know I am not one, except perhaps to my golden retriever, Hopie. And that may be enough. I think parents are heroes. They take on the most important and unrelenting task in life and somehow make it work, the best they can. Survivors of grief are heroes. We watch our beloved die, watch their lives slip away to somewhere that the hearts beating in our chests and the electricity firing in our brains prevents us from following. And then, after suffering unimaginable loss and left with obscenely gaping holes in our lives, we preceed to get up every day. We breathe in and out all day long. We live, we laugh, we care.

That is perhaps the most heroic thing - to live life with hope, with some sense of purpose, after you have met Death. Death came to that room in my house, it stood there, as implacable and untouchable as the stars that sparkle in the place some call Heaven. No apology, no fanfare, no pain. And it just took him. Like it has millions of others. We only borrow our lives, I think. And we borrow with the knowledge that one day we'll die.

Dying is actually very easy, if you're the one doing the dying. If you're the one left behind, well then...that makes you the hero. To hear the song of life when you have heard the refrain in D Minor of death is a heroic deed in and of itself.

Dreams of Extraordinary Women

I had a dream a while back - at least I think it was dream. It could have just been one of those thoughts that popped into my head without any discernable origin, which my mind labels as a dream because it's easy than entertaining other possible origins. In any case, in this "dream" I was living in a Mexican village. The villagers thought I was strange and I knew that. I lived in a tiny little house which was crammed full of faded furtniture and chests full of old clothes and plates and books written in spanish which my fingers just itched to explore. I was in bed asleep when two men came and took me from my bed and dragged me to the village tattooist. They stuck a needle in me so I was out of it, although I still knew what was happening. There was burning on my left wrist.

Then I was back in my bed, and an older Mexican woman was giving me water. My wrist was throbbing. She was mumbling something, but my spanish is minimal, so we weren't really understanding each other. I felt sick from whatever drug they gave me the night before. She fussed around me, then left my house. My left wrist was bandaged and when I undid the bandage, they had tattooed "bruja" on my wrist in black ink.

I am not sure what the dream or whatever it was means. I sometimes feel it was a gift from the muses and that one day I will write about this Woman Who Was Branded. At other times, I feel that I am that woman, someone being hauled into their destiny and pushed towards what they should be doing.

I have often considered getting "bruja" tattooed on my wrist. I know in spanish it is not a word spoken with any kind of warmth or fondness - it is more of an accusation. A dirty word for someone whose intentions are misunderstood. Sort of like the english version of "bruja" - witch. I think I will get that tattoo. Perhaps it will open new doors. And close old ones.

Speaking of old doors, I had a confused dream about my first lover the other night. I only remember impressions - fleeting feelings of love and betrayal. Oddly, I saw a photograph of him the other day. He looked older, which was comforting to me in some way. Of course he never photographed well (neither do I) but it was interesting to "see" him, some 4 years after we said goodbye. I wonder what it is inside of me that sees something inside of him. Sometimes I feel very external to my feelings for him. Like a spectator, watching something take place from the sidelines.

This has been a good first post. I am pleased.