The Last Time

4 April 2008

 

 

It is Friday afternoon, April 4, and I am thinking about that shot ringing out in the Memphis sky.

 

I may be white, but somehow, many of my heroes are black. And Dr. King is certainly one of them. The vision, the dreams, the words, the courage – he had them all. And if just a few people carry the seed of his dream and try to awaken it within our cynical and defeated time, then his spirit and that dream will live on, no matter the hatred and fear that still surround us.

 

I was very young when it happened, and I don’t recall the impact at the time. I was twelve years old, and I did pay attention to the outside world, in the midst of worrying about zits and schoolwork and my parents and my own head.

 

I’ve been told often that I live in a “dream world” or my own world. Maybe I do. Lately, I have thought that many of us live in our own little worlds, be they someone like me or even those I don’t understand, who go to work every day, come home, eat dinner, talk to their children (however briefly), and go to bed so they can get up and do it all over again. I don’t understand how that is living; I don’t understand how anyone can that that life of quiet desperation. But many do, and I suppose they, too, are living in their own worlds, because they have to. I look at my own brother, bipolar and unable to deal with the world at large, and know that he has created his own small world, one in which he can (barely) function and survive. And that is okay; it allows him to survive, however small and narrow his life may be.

 

My world is vast. I have a rich, vivid interior life that surrounds me like a cushion to keep me going (most of the time, at least) when that outside world beats me down, as it so often does.

 

I peek out occasionally into that world, and there are times my heart rises in hope. One of those times was back in 1968, when Martin and Bobby were alive, and a cultural revolution was taking place, and music was alive and real and exciting (as opposed to the ugly, toneless talentless corporate thing it has turned into today). I loved Bobby Kennedy; I somehow knew that he was, after Dr. King’s death, the one hope for the future of the US.

 

And then he was assassinated, just like Dr. King. I can never get those sounds and images out of my head, though I have tried over the years. The screaming man “Get the gun! Break his hand if you have to!”, and the blood on the floor coming from Bobby’s mortal wounds as he lay there dying are imprinted forever on my brain. Hope ended that day. Until now.

 

And I read the BBC news feed today, as I do every day, and find that Barack Obama is the only one of the candidates to mention not only Dr. King, but Bobby Kennedy as well. And I am daring to allow hope to rise in my heart again, because I believe there is hope with Mr. Obama, a future of change like none we have heard the whisper of since those nights in April and June of 1968.

 

Even lost in my personal pain, I can look out through my misty glasses at the rest of the world and see. I do not need a mirror to see the world; unlike The Lady of Shalot, I dare to look out the window daily. I do not like so much of what I see. And there is no Lancelot waiting for me. But I look, and wonder, and dare to hope again, foolish as that may be.

 

But my own world is one I know, and the personal pain of it is something that engulfs me right now, a terrible prison that allows no escape. I float by and see the world outside, but I live in the world inside — my world.

 

I made the mistake of Googling “VIN surgery”. And found a British site that, while complete and well-written, with compassion and clarity, left me terrified and shaking. I have not stopped crying since last night. The horror of what they may do to me, the horror of what it may mean for my life, was there in stark pictures and language.

 

I shake and think “I cannot do this.” I will be mutilated again, violated again, left in tremendous pain for a time and possibly unable to ever make love again.

 

I can’t bear these thoughts.

 

I feel like my life is over.

 

I feel like I will never be a woman again.

 

I am afraid I will never be loved again, never be touched, never be gently cradled in someone’s arms who loves me, never feel the fire of passion, never feel the wonder of merging with another.

 

I miss my lover. I need him. I need him now. But he does not know these things, and even if he did, they may just push him further away from me.

 

One time, before they do this terrible thing to me, one time, before I am no longer who and what I am, one time before I cannot be a woman anymore, I want to feel his arms around me. I want to feel the passion that moves between us in a fiery way it never has with anyone else. I want to feel his warm breath on me, feel the waves and waves of orgasms flowing over me until I am satiated, content. I want to feel his kiss, his intensity. I want to feel his warm body, hold him tightly, feel the fire between us.

 

But I cannot ask this. I cannot even speak to him. He forbids it.

 

He could not handle my suicide attempt two years ago. He raged at me in e-mail, spent cruel words like a millionaire, refused to even listen to me. “Don’t give up on me,” I wrote. “Don’t give up on us.”

 

I have not seen him since that day. There have been detached e-mails, and a handwritten letter from him, and I responded with truth that probably cut him like a knife. He does not know if he can ever see me again.

 

The worst of it is that the last time we were together, the last time in my bed, where I am supposed to feel safe, he took me in anger. It was awful, and I cried for days. He hurt me, both physically and emotionally. And did not seem to care.

 

I was devastated and did not understand. And still don’t. All those times where the fire burned between us with passion and love, all those times where I fell to joy and delight under him, and he leaves me with this quasi-rape.

 

And that will probably be the last memory I have of my sexuality, battered and bruised. Cold and unfeeling. I can’t get warm anymore. The cold has seemed into every pore within me.

 

I cannot forgive him this. That my last time, my last time with him, will probably be that horrible anger and abuse. I will have no last time of hours of passion to remember, no last time of immense pleasure and joy, no laughter, no love.

 

And I want to ask him for that last time I wish. And I cannot.

 

And so this part of me that will be dead is already dead.