Fremlin's Translation of Life

I'm a particle of dust. Mote suspended.

The words I speak, the searching glances - all for nothing. No one listens. No one bends close to me. It should probably depress me, but it doesn't, not really. I've gotten used to this kind of thing.

"Move over, Fremlin, and let the dog lie in the sun," they say. I oblige because I always oblige. A domesticated feline if ever there was one.

And yet, sometimes when I lose myself in Mingus' golden eyes my bones become more brittle, my stomach quivers, and I clench my teeth to think of all that I could've had. I wonder if I pine for freedom in some still place, my liver, for example, or if folded into my kidney some wild beating thing persists.

Maybe there's a part of me that whispers back at the dark shapes forming around me.

Maybe I want more than I let myself know.

Or maybe I'm an old lady, prone to daydreams, ill with daydreams even. I say I love Mingus, but do I? Do I even know him, or is it for an avatar of him that I grow heartsick and more heartsick still? A Mingus I've created from deepest recesses - and, but does it matter?

Would MR throw open the door for me as she does Alfie if I could better enumerate my despair? A list of loss:

1) I am old and no one remembers to touch me.
2) They-that-would-ignore-me make mock of me if I ever so much as gesture toward them.
3) Food tastes of laminate and nothing else.
4) The walls of this house, seemingly more a prison with every sunrise, press in against me.
5) My face forgettable; lamentable the hours I've spent mirror-staring, hoping to glean from my reflection some refraction of worth.

And if she did the door open, would I have the courage to walk Outside?

In my frenzied dreams I am more than mote, I'm burst-open spoke of light striking through glass. What wildness stalks my DNA? What tucked into meaty membrane pulses with ambition?

Am I to old to experience these emotions? Do I summon them; sorcerer-cat dictating desire to writhe forth from the mire-that-is-my-truest-heart?

how can anyone

knowing the cool of raindrop

seek out that which burns

and burns through single leaf note

book words edged to ash struggle

form flowers of ash

form snowflakes of white-as-death

that whirl as they fall

I call myself domesticated who is not tamed.

Oh, but I am. Who am I trying to fool here? Myself, surely. You're probably wondering why I even bother to question my place. Why I'd lift my eyes to the sun.

That mirror will never shine back to me beauty. In it I will never glimpse love. But I keep looking, searching. I keep dreaming myself into stories where I don't belong.

Would that I could quit this. Lie on the couch. Struggle with dreams. Lean my face into MR's palm. Would I were calmer, even-tempered, easy with confinement.

And I am sometimes. I know this.

But stormy days such as these move me, lightning-strike into my breast a fire.

A fire that will not be slaked.