october 18, 2004

Ice Queen — drop by painful drop

each man each night seeped in over the years • over her life • the chill in her created a block that no days in the sun could ever melt • sometimes, as it happened some years ago, the ice would break and melt, crack enough to wet her skin, but eventually a howling hardened her back, constricting the walls that enclosed her.

in detail: describe the day,

describe her physically and her surroundings. It is the day she has chosen to be her last. She reminisces of childhood interjected with grown-up relationships | comparisons. She lost her parents and distanced herself from family. Only child?

the pain she has caused punishment for the fury left in her. she was ready to die before the age of ten. and she did.

Her family traveled to Italy, her father’s ancestral home, where she lost herself in the catacombs (?) … twice. Begged and cried to remain in a place

where she couldn’t understand anyone

and vice-versa. The time and work it would take to surpass that would keep her busy, thinking of | struggling with survival instead of thinking. Then there’s God. He who she prays to and hides from, sheltering her truths through the darkness of oblivion by turning away and shutting off the undesirable,

as if by pulling down the curtains

of indifference, it would disappear. For thirty-seven years, she has lived with fear; no, not thirty-seven. She was 8 when the truck went away on the sidewalk of her childhood. Was it time to let go? But the

only thing she had to let go of

was herself; everyone and everything else had been erased … though they lingered inside, clung to the ropes that had tied them back then … ropes that still bind them today.