:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Sunday, January 29, 2006 ::

Tomorrow's the day of course. I was just telling a dear friend that the build up is usually worse than the actual anniversary. It seems to evolve, so I never really know what to expect.

Right now I can't get the thought out of my head: "Don't do it, don't do it!" I see the 24-year-old ghost girl under the sheets thinking "Tomorrow it will all be over. Oh, I don't want you to die, little one! How can I keep you? PUT THAT OUT OF YOUR MIND! I can't, I can't! I can't DO this anymore! It's me or you, kid... and it's NOT going to be me."

I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not that mother anymore. But I see her in the final minutes before the death of pretty much everything. I see her and I scream through the vortex of time. She doesn't hear me. She won't.

I would still be waiting for my husband to come home. What would he be thinking and doing at work the day before he took his wife and child to die in a grungy abortion clinic in Orlando where the oranges hung fat on the trees? I thought they were mocking. I see they were imploring. "Turn back, turn back." No, mother trees, I can't eat your children if I don't devour mine. For an orange, you see. I did it for an orange. You will remember I had fruit salad afterward. Fruit salad and hotel treats.

My child is fresh-slain by my hand
my hand that short moments afterwards lifts
strawberries and chocolates up to lips
lips that will never kiss a child
a child broken
by a mother's dysfunctional heart.

Above the noise of the TV I hear him coming through the door. Tomorrow Big Trouble in Little China will feature Kurt Russell, and I dream that I will finally be able to care. But I won't. I never will again. Big Trouble in Little Orlando.

Since every moment is a precious jewel of pain I sleep at 6 or 7, unheard of, until the dark 3 AM hours of the next morning, but tonight, "the night before", my husband is in a fog. He doesn't hear me or seem to care about my comfort or my sick hours. I must sleep; get me to the gurney, get me to my life again so I can bathe and eat and walk and work and put this all behind me. He is in a world of his own, drawing out the moments. Saying goodbye or holding on.

I have spent long hours in the day saying goodbye and dying away from what I know I should live for. Whispering goodbye and clutching my belly wailing like a mother who is clutching her belly and saying goodbye to a child she will kill as the rooster crows. I have opened every Easter egg of hope, releasing the breath of life into thin, indifferent air. Ruptured every moment with perverted lying love. Sliced permanently through all good things to unfetter me from transient shackles. Traded an ephemeral sentence for death and life in the Cell.

"Turn off the TV. I want to go to sleep."
No reply.
"Turn off the TV. I need to go to sleep. Don't you care? I need to sleep!"
He doesn't hear me. I am shocked enough by his odd behavior to leave him alone. On into the night he watches TV while I fade in and out of the dream called "It will all be over tomorrow."

I am thinking of who I was then, of how glad I am that in that sense I am dead, and of a child who will never benefit from the moral of this story. I am counting down the minutes, watching the ghost shadow under sick sheets going so horribly wrong, making, by far, the worst decision of her pathetic, stood-for life. I am screaming to her through the vortex of time. She doesn't hear me. She never will.

January 30...
tomorrow is yesterday again.

:: ashli 4:26 PM # ::
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