Secret Meena (aka Fremlin)

I feel sometimes like a secret.

A cat can be a secret, can't she? And what am I if not that, loitering in doorways, scratching at windows I'd be too afraid to leap out of. I prowl the hallways at night, unable to keep myself from wailing I am lost, I am lost.

What compels this? What clockwork in my heart grinds to life?

A secret, abandoned. Like four and twenty blackbirds I exist just below the surface of surveillance. I coast, I hum, I caterwaul (and damn my feral lungs for their clamor); and am unnoticed.
 

So I might say I love you, Christmas tree, I love you and by this mean nothing, for who hears but the glitter approximating snowflakes dusted across my forehead? Who notices besides the artificial village?

I'm the maid in the garden, aren't I? And the blackbirds bear down on me.

But why should I seek to quiet this swelling feeling? This expansiveness barely contained by, let's say, pie crust (if you don't mind my fascination with a nursery rhyme - it's just so gruesome, so cruel - an apt, if brutal, metaphor for injustice eternal).

It seems to me I ought to feel hopelessly alone. And I do, but I don't. Perhaps just not hopelessly so. I do sometimes feel abandoned, yes, and I began this post by informing you a cat can be  a secret.

But here I am also an apex. Of what I'm uncertain, but of something. It bubbles within me. A potential. And in streaks the hope, out the lessness.

 

I am small or I am large and yet it persists regardless. Happy Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanza. Happy happy happy happy. A word maybe stranger than we understand. Originally it meant something more like lucky.

Am I lucky? Am I abandoned or am I found or am I both or neither? Does it matter what I call myself when I stalk the darkness? Who is this moaning creature who has become unmoored within herself? 

Let the wildness roam. Let the feral speak. Let it pour from my lips like breath.

I will find solace here in this fake village. I'll move in, make do.

And you can visit. Ask me why I've changed my name, my home town.

You can bring tea. You can sit with me here. Do something with this pocket full of rye. And find the king and find the queen and save the poor maid - me? - who, like you, toils under the falsehood she is anything other than as artificial as this newly painted snow.

And yet we are something far more than lucky; the fact that we even in this moment exist is extraordinary. How rare we are, and how infinite. How alone and how interconnected. We thrash ourselves to insomniac frenzies and feel desolate, but these tantrums are fractals of experience - my grasping is your pulling is my scaling is your falling is my attenuating body is your breadth is my love is your love is my love is your love is existence repeated in winding strands alike to glinting tinsel on a tree.

And whether my nose is snatched off in the beak of a blackbird, I know you and I are both flecks of gold and silver. Transient. Illogical. Wild.

We are each a kind of crescendo.

 

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.