34. Maroussia

I’m at my piano lesson, after class. All the children have gone home. I feel so fine.

I’ve already been withdrawn from ballet classes offered on weekends because my mother one day arrived early, saw me stretch an arm behind my back, grab my foot, bringing it way over my head so to touch my nose with my big toe. She freaked. Hysterically accused the ballet teacher of imposing torturous moves on poor helpless children. They showed her the door; I had no choice but to follow.

I’m at my piano lesson now, not so much trying to learn how to play, but hoping the required discipline will sink in. Sure, I can already play by ear simple melodies heard on the radio, but I can’t position my hands properly. I'm being taught here to imagine an apple under my palm, but after a while, my hands inevitably flatten as I play.

To remind me of the correct position, the teacher has a long thin stick with which she slightly taps my hands whenever they lose their tonus. I'm applying myself with great care.

And my mother again comes in early, sees a whip, and goes ballistic. This time, I was not only withdrawn from the lessons, I was instantly extracted from the entire school itself.

So here I am at home, no school to go to for a while. My mother drunk-asleep at 11 in the morning. And I’m terribly depressed, the certainty I’ll never be allowed to learn anything.

I had a paranoid habit back then. If I deeply liked an object, or if I considered something to be of great importance, exemplary, commendable to posterity, the only way to keep it, did I honestly believe, was to feign indifference towards it. I had convinced myself that every thing I cared for, be it a book, or a pretty scarf, it would mysteriously disappear the minute I would show any form of attachment.

I could only protect whatever I needed by putting a considerable distance between the object and myself, watching it from afar.

To confuse and trick fate, I would pay attention to things that left me indifferent, giving them away, sacrificing them as a way to shield, under this clever pretense, what I cared for the most.

Such a tactic was extremely hard to maintain on a steady basis. It required tremendous strength of character. A will beyond what a child would normally want to handle. A powerful determination, a focus unauthorized to falter.

Every iota of a second involved in a match against destiny, obsessed with the idea of winning for the sake of what was worthy of my loyalty.

Thus, I was the hero of my favorite sweater because I never wore it, of a passionate novel because I would never be seen reading it, of a dozen pictures cut from magazines because I would never look at them. Everyday they all survived on account of my well-hidden, secret devotion.

I would read in bed the evening, putting on my night table before I fell asleep some work I had no feelings for (“The Blue Bird” by Maeterlinck, as an example), sure that soon the book would vanish from our house, no where to be found. And when it happened, I felt so overwhelmingly happy, having ingeniously mislead, defrauded fatality.

I felt I was a genius, my favorite story, “Maroussia, a maid in Ukraine,” safely tuck away as if no one had any interest in it.

You probably think I was obsessed with dispossession. You’re absolutely right. I was maniacally worried.

It’s in that state of mind that I was sent, eventually, to a new school located in a beautiful old building facing the river. The playground had apple trees on which to climb, rows of tall poplars shining on breezy sunny days, intense lilac in the spring.

It was a primary school conceived around the new pedagogical approaches devised in the footsteps of the Summerhill experiment. Everything about freedom, creativity, self-expression.

Many teachers, most of them Europeans. Nourishing my imagination with stories from the war. Building us into the fighters of the future so that never fascism would rise again.

Only one Canadian teacher. He befriended my parents. Came for coffee a few times, impressed by our very own in-house psychologist; my father and the teacher both loudly lauding their modern openness to revolutionary methods in education, their pioneer intellectual stance, their undiluted belief in the spontaneous happiness of the Child.

I did say it. That the creepy local teacher kept me after school to put his hands in my panties. He did so to other girls too.

What happened when I spoke? I remember being so scared of doing so. I had practiced in my mind every word I had to pronounce, afraid to become confused, afraid my mind would go blank as it often did under pressure. I had carefully rehearsed, wanting to do things right.

I recall my preparation, the courage I had gathered, repeating to myself it had to be done. Boosting my resolve thinking I would be the one to denounce him. Walking into the living room, terrified at what I was about to do. Stunned, as I see them oddly perched on ridiculously uncomfortable seats, the two men involved in their self-congratulatory monologues. My mother, an Nth glass of wine in her hand, the smile of beatitude on her face, acquiescing to everything they said.

I'm first staring at the tableau, the feeling of familiar unreality back again. The images are standing at the end of a long optical tube. Before I can reach this portrait of pedantic mannerism that's hanging in the living room, there's a tunnel of dark coldness awaiting to be crossed. A zone of black ice, where dematerialization proceeds, sharp crystals in lieu of warm blood, frozen ash floating away from me.

Then, like an automaton, I opened my mouth, a miracle and the sound came out. I spoke. I said it. And then, the memory ends. I don’t know what happened after that. Except for a lingering: the vertiginous stench of shame.

I was kept in that school for six more years, as was the pervert. To distract my mind, I entertained myself climbing trees to catch a glimpse of the horizon, sharpening my skills at spotting fascists. Safe from piano and ballet.

With time, I came to dementedly despise the posh, aerodynamic Scandinavian-style teak furniture typical of the suburban sixties my parents had bought for the living room. Because they gloated about it the same way, with the same kind of shallow pride they used when talking about their sophisticated far advanced avant-garde views on how to raise children.

On the last page of the book, Maroussia, in the prime of her youth is shot to death while running through a bright yellow field of undulating wheat florets.

A red flower springs to life where her head, a crimson-colored scarf to hold her golden hair, hits the ground.

Written in the 19th century by Marko Vovchok, a pseudonym for the well-hidden name of Mariia Vilinska, the tale belongs to Ukrainian folk stories where the predicaments of young women find their way into the traits of brave, but ill-fated romantic heroines. Peasant girls crushed by serfdom or victims of intestine wars, unable to escape their plight like the one epitomized, in my own personal legend, by the stylish pieces of Scandinavian furniture that polluted my childhood's decor.

My triumph perfectly concealed, the story I've just told you never taken away from me, as no one would ever see me, would ever catch me turning the page.

Laolao

33. Butterflies

A wee itsy-bitsy crisis, darling.

I ache as if I had plunged head first, and from the highest summit, to hit the bed of a dried-up river. I can’t see you on any cosmographic map. I’m blind, deprived of prodigious, timely observations, grating my body against the charred areas of the moon. Lunar mountains, lunar rocks harassing me with insufferable geological questions I’ll never be able to answer. The nightmare.

Where are you? My son? My daughter? My grand-daughter? My grand-son? Centuries of separation. Anxiety descending in a compact, ovoid punch, but not a single raindrop falling to cool my quavering hands. The rustling of leaves, though, having come to an inexplicable halt.

A primal urge to make a phone call. It’s forbidden. No help. Static electricity crippling my gland secretions. Evading weapons fire, or are these thunderclaps? Millions of suns, the cosmos blowing apart, a hundred million years about to fall grotesquely into black holes. Red-shifted projections of a worldwide microscopic revolt. Hypersonic alerts leaving dense signatures on relic matter collapsing onto itself. Collisions of heavy ions. The super-symmetry of my habits suddenly deranged by cataclysmic satellite explosions. My balance catapulted right in the aftermath of the Big Bang, the departure of speedy projectiles hailed in a mad, deafening applaud. Generations of quarks, and all their possible timelines, branching into historical divergence, a tangent universe, multiple world interpretations, anachronistic life-forms angrily tampering with improbabilities. Nanoseconds making a huge, terrible difference. Mirror-universes chattered, a prelude to wide combinations of bad luck. Compulsive memory like water impossible to track. On impulse, remotely detonated monosyllables cracking my brain like a peanut. Wordlessly, registering dislocation. Ruthlessly, without a cocoon. Excruciating pain, right here, bracketed by sharp, mercurial fangs biting my disguise.

How far away yet to nightfall? To harmless homelessness?

Behind sunglasses, I wait, impenetrable.

I’m good. Now brushing away with a finger the puff of leftover dust from my shoulder.

Just a wee itsy-bitsy tipsy, hanging in there since 1953. So tired. The thumb still twitching a bit. Maybe a butterfly flapping its wings, an imperceptible change, a movement in a dynamic system prone to chaotic events. A butterfly thereupon flapping its wings, because the last tornado didn’t vaporize it.

Make a note: The butterfly, it’s after, not before. Gee whiz, they're hard of understanding when trying to explain life's ripples.

Laolao

32. The 11th dimension

They mentioned it on Discovery News, in theory “it is possible to travel faster than light.” Except, we wouldn’t move.

Using the principle of the Alcubierre drive, we expand the fabric of space behind our ship and shrink it at the front, letting the ship rest on the bubble we’ve created, space itself rolling, moving beneath us.

Don’t think your Laolao will accomplish this anytime soon. It would require way too much energy, much more than I have at my disposal. I’m very tired, remember.

And I would need to perfect my understanding of superstring theory, enough to expertly manipulate an hypothetical 11th dimension.

But I still can find interesting the project of letting the universe do the hard work, inflating, deflating itself while, aghast, we watch.

The swollen bubble, they say, would be made of dark energy, the very energy that speeds up the universe as time flies.

Once in a while, I enjoy classifying galaxies and spotting stars. You should try it. I do it online, at Galaxy Zoo. But I find it’s the intergalactic void that’s fascinating. It is believed that around two-thirds of the space seen in those incredible pictures sent by the Hubble telescope represent dark energy; less than a third would be dark matter; while stars occupy no more than a few percent of space. The invisible more significant than the visible.

This negative pressure, this cosmological dark energy permeates the entire universe, accelerating its expansion. Instead of the collapse gravity would otherwise guarantee.

You see, energy - depending on which one we’re referring to - either decreases or increases the amount of space found between things. And the “things” - stars, clusters, all the way to the molecule - trace the boundaries of the void, like the membranes circling the holes of a sponge (the simplest of all multi-cellular animals, the Porifera, which resides at the bottom of the sea).

Oh, so deep regrets, why didn’t I become an astrophysicist? Or a marine biologist?

I was once good in science, does it surprise you? Always a perfect score in chemistry before they kicked me out of high-school for displaying the wrong behavioral attitudes. And when I managed to get back, enrolled in a small school for misfits after my release from the psychiatric hospital, I naturally qualified for the Canadian national contest in mathematics. Did very well in geometry, not so well in algebra, sorry.

I didn’t know one had to study before the big day. No one coached me. No one told me what to look at, what to prepare. You see, I had qualified without knowing I was qualifying.

I never made any mistakes in chemistry or geometry due mainly to an absolute lack of imagination, because I didn’t know mistakes were possible.

I wasn’t studying. I just loved the rules, the nomenclature, the perfect set of beautiful, infallible recipes. It was a game where nothing could go wrong. There were known parameters. The motions of the mind step-by-step evolving with clarity. Impossible to get lost.

My father was a special kind of psychologist, he was into organizational behavior with an edge on the study of higher intelligence. Even more specific than that: he cared about the interaction between personality and intelligence with the goal of explaining and improving efficiency at the organization’s executive level. That was his exact field of research.

Elitist?

No. He was too much of an ass-hole for that appellation. Look, when I went all the way to his office to proudly announce to him I had been selected for a fancy math contest to be given nation-wide to top students, he went “Heeuu…” and didn’t even look at me, mismanaging, fumbling some papers on his desk. He didn’t reply, barely mumbling something about being late for dinner.

I mean, if at a respected university the guy in charge of superior IQs is not impressed, why should I be?

So, you see, sweet one, I was an idiot and so was he. I can’t help thinking that one word of support, something kind, a tiny smile of pride, a look of praise even, would have perhaps suffice to change my life.

Consider the facts: One minute I'm good for the nut house, the next I'm invited to check my abilities in a club for smart kids. If that isn't perfectly in line with his professional concerns, then what is? Let's forget him as a father for an instant. Let's just look at the situation from the point-of-view of an excellent case study

He missed out on that one. Thoroughly.

So unconcerned was he, that the day of the competition came and went, and he never inquired about what had happened.

I still find it sad, honey.

I had changed my mind about attending the test, but at the last minute decided to show up, not a clue about what to expect. I finished somewhere in the middle, result-wise, nothing to brag about. Got screwed, I know, by algebra, which would have required beforehand some serious reviewing.

To this day, I’m proud of one thing only. That morning, I got up early and made it to the test venue without being late. True, hadn’t brought any pencils with me, had to borrow some, and had no ruler either. Hadn’t planned anything.

I kept thinking instead that nobody at home when I left had asked me where I was going. Had my priorities wrong, see. And I didn’t know it.

Here’s a revelation: I never finished high-school, baby. Your Laolao dropped-out. I eventually registered for the final exams. Passed. That was it. Kind of plain and depressing.

Instead of going to class, I spent entire days bumming around downtown in coffee shops and hang-out places where they played Bob Dylan. Do not think I was serene and popular because I knew all the lyrics. Remember what I told you, much void before we bump into a single reliable molecule. On a cosmological scale, matter is rare. As said, scientists these days joggle with the idea that immense oceans of antiparticles are gradually leaving the small islands of matter that exist in the universe. Antiparticles that are simultaneously self-repulsive and matter repulsers. I used to function in a similar way, through my own personal version of space-time, floating on the curvature of the universe, going away, pushing others away, wondering whether my life would eventually reveal itself as nothing more than a mathematical figment.

This mysterious 11th dimension? The quest to unify all matter, all forces? A theory of everything? One idea able to contain all possible representations of the same thing? They say the key is with M-Theory. Answer me, please, anyone, is that M for mother?

Laolao

31. Empedocles

( … ) this is the place where is found for the most part what men call Thought; for the blood round the heart is Thought in mankind.
Empedocles, (490 BC - 430 BC)

I’ve had a tragic problem with Empedocles’ ideas since my first menstruation. Do you see why?

Are they important thoughts those being lost on a monthly basis? Is it knowledge flowing out, unstoppable? Is this Reason, the red viscosity dripping between my legs?

When I suffered from purpura, my skin was covered by thousands of little red dots. Bleeding under the skin, an ugly ecchymosed body. To check my level of platelets, they would draw blood everyday at the hospital, mostly pricking my finger to get a drop on a small glass plate. As they topped it with a second plate, the blood would spread into a flat shape with irregular contours, never the same design. I watched the new pattern made by my blood every time, to read its meaning.

When later, in high school, I became acquainted with Empedocles’ writing, I was ready to relate to it.

Unsurprisingly, I had extremely painful periods, enough to keep me curled up in bed, moaning for a day or two. A sword I would have heroically planted in my abdomen to perform hara-kiri wouldn’t have hurt less. But the danger didn’t lay in the physical punishment. It was the emotional turmoil that posed the trickiest challenge.

It’s a smart nurse who helped me out. She noticed this teenage girl being brought in by ambulance at relatively regular intervals with her stomach full of pills, or her wrists slashed. She brilliantly thought of correlating these visits to the emergency room with the dates of the girl’s menstrual cycle. It was a perfect match.

Her theory was that on those days, I exercised less control on my mental state, barriers fell, I was exposed, my endurance indisposed, energy swallowed by some punctual stress.

It didn’t contradict at all Empedocles’ view. Short of thoughts when blood oozed out, I became indeed vulnerable, precariously dumber, lacking the quixotic whirls of my intelligence. My reason absorbed by a sanitary napkin.

Empedocles did write: “The intelligence of Man grows towards the material that is present.” A truly awful verdict.

I discuss this now because I want you to know that menopause has been the most liberating event of my life.

I can now retain the entirety of my intellectual resources.

If I’m to bleed today, I can see the wound and watch it heal. It’s no longer an ontological one promising me the fate of a brain-dead. The mind metabolized by porous tampons.

You see, I was never able to pretend, like many well-educated people, that faith in Reason is enough to keep one afloat. For I know that faith has nothing to do with Reason. Carried by strict ethics, I can’t, in all honesty, use what contradicts rationality to lay my claim onto it.

As a teenager, I therefore had no faith whatsoever in Reason. I just stood alone by my peculiar rigor, watching to see if Reason would choose once again to defect or not. And when ineluctably it did, the hopelessness that rose was of a mad, reckless kind, churning its violence against faith - a separate, independent, completely different issue. With thoughts long gone.

Happily I've discovered a few years ago that I'm built to be old, although, true, I often came close to not making it.

And I'll tell you a real thought: These monthly battles were never won by the intervention of pure Reason. So many strangers like that nurse had, by its very definition, an unexplainable faith leading them to come forward and speak to me. So often. So many times. Always there. To gently pull me up.

Let’s wonder then how our philosopher, this un-bleeder, felt when he jumped into the crater of Mount Etna to prove his immortality. Yeah, smile, little one.

He only showed faith to be a more powerful master than Reason, period. Or no period, certainly not making him any wiser.

We play, as a last resort, with the gestures of death never, of course, to live forever, but to stop from doing so all those undesirable people who’ve managed to inhabit us. And when in the process we end up hurting ourselves, it’s really a matter of mistaken identity - if the lights blink, for a fraction of a second (that's all it takes), it can really get dark down there, and we do run the risk of zeroing the wrong target.

Your Laolao

30. Cardinal fallacy

Now, lets go for a very short story. This thing about me not recognizing my father, it wasn’t true all the time. There were precise moments when I knew exactly who he was, I was just mistaken about the directions he took in terms of cardinal points.

Take this instance in the suburb. I’m sitting on the floor, playing. It’s almost noon. My mother is cooking lunch. I see her legs in front of the stove a few inches away from me (we weren’t yet using the metric system). When I turn my head to the left I have a full view of the front door.

My father’s there, stoic, like a statue, a brown suitcase next to him. He’s not doing anything. Staring in the distance, but not seeing us it seems. After a while, I look at my mother and, meaning to be of service, since she's busy and doesn't appear to have noticed him either, I tell her: “Mom, dad’s leaving. He’s waiting to say goodbye.”

It was quite logical. There’s a man there, wearing a coat, a suitcase at his feet. The door’s wide open, and he’s not moving.

“You’re an idiot,” she replied rather dryly.

“He’s coming back.”

I always disliked the way my mother found fault with my logic.

Much love,
Laolao

29. Delirium tremens

I haven’t told you yet about my paternal grand-father, your great-great-grand-father.

He had been a barber before becoming destitute. By this I mean he tried to work a little bit at one point in his life, between episodes of absolute ethylic delirium.

My grand-father was famous in the village he came from. When I was a child, I would hear the women, while they had some tea on the balcony or prepared vegetables in a kitchen, repeat and repeat incredible stories about him.

It’s not that he drank non-stop for an entire week until collapsing that people found astonishing. It’s that he didn’t sober up after that. He would stay drunk day after day after day, too drunk to drink a single additional drop, passed out or hallucinating, unable to care for himself, shaken by tremors, scratching his skin to blood, screaming at imaginary perils. In his younger time, often up to 10 consecutive days would he stay delirious. He held the delirium tremens record in a region where men, when they weren’t in the woods logging trees for weeks in a row, were known for drinking their pay while wives and mothers despaired.

Whenever a charitable person brought my grand-father back, half unconscious, my grand-mother would lock him up in the basement and leave him there “in his own vomit, shit and piss” to quote relatives, without water, without food, disappointed a week later that he was still breathing, rambling on nonsense.

“He was a real force of nature” would say for a hundredth time an aunt or a neighbor.

I never heard them add that my grand-mother was cruel for treating her husband so harshly.

But then, it is true that she had owned a small hotel. My grand-father “drank” it, as they say, in a flash sending the business into bankruptcy. She had often tried to hide whatever money was in the cash register, the ladies would go on, but my grand-father would beat her up and get hold of the family's income.

I remember the hotel, the only one in those days servicing two or three villages, the clientele mainly made up of traveling salesmen. It had a big hall with lots of chairs and tables. Not much light, a dark place with too few lamps all in the shape of candles hanging from the ceiling. At the back, wide swinging wooden doors opening unto the kitchen, each with a round glass plate like the portholes on the side of a ship.

In there, on a counter, there’s a huge wedding cake. I see it. It’s white and pink with dashes of yellow. I can’t see the top of the cake, it’s too high, just it’s base. A marvelous frosting, so inviting, so available, with waves, curls, ridges, flowers and leaves. It’s so nicely done. I’ll just have a tiny bit, my finger poking at the creamy sides, a quick taste, the white, the pink, the yellow, a little bit everywhere so it won’t show, it will be the same all around.

I miscalculated, carried away by my greediness. I did in the end destroy the looks of that cake. At the last minute, they had to redo the frosting. But my grand-mother laughed good-heartedly at the incident.

So I knew for sure, when they talked about the mistreatments she had in place for my grand-father, that she couldn’t be an entirely mean person.

Years later, my grand-father’s health considerably declined. Only skin and bones, his back like a half-moon, never straight. He would walk, but so slowly. He slept in a separate room, away from my grand-mother. She stressed the fact so often to me. I think it had great meaning to her.

My grand-father by then had his own spoon, as well as a fork, a knife, a bowl, a plate and a glass all to himself, stashed away in a distinct cupboard. He wasn’t allowed to use any of the kitchen’s regular utensils or dishes. “Not to dirty them, irremediably” would whisper to my ear my grand-mother as I sat on her lap, both of us swinging in her rocking-chair, her shawl nicely wrapped around me.

My grand-father also had a bench on which he was allowed to sit always at the same spot, at the right end of the table. I wasn’t allowed to use that bench. It was only for him.

He would prepare his own food. Often, a tomato that he would carefully peel. And a boiled egg.

I was mesmerized by his gestures. An eternity it took. In silence, his head bent almost touching his plate, fine, long fingers slowly lifting the skin off the fruit piece by piece. Then, delicately he would slice the red flesh, minuscule lumps to make almost a puree. So much time invested in that tomato, it felt like a feast.

There were three things I was permitted to do with my grand-father: Fetch wood at sunrise for the stove, roll hand-made cigarettes with him, and go fishing in the afternoon, not far away, on the quay – old gray planks without a ramp next to the dock.

My grand-father would drag his feet down the hill leading to the sea as I slowed my pace to keep at his level, the fishing rods expertly leaning back against my shoulder.

We never caught a fish, but it felt good to stand in the fog, the loud rhythmic phonetics of the waves, the smell of wet salt everywhere. Only one color as far as the eye could see, a deep grayish tone transforming the world into a single, uniform place. Without alterations, not one blemish in that immense watery page. Nothing in the vast standardized expanse, except the depth and quality of the acoustic.

I think my grand-father liked it too. Perhaps, I venture, for the same reasons. Nobody but us fishing there in the cold.

He died a few months before my grand-mother. I was 14 by then. My dad received the call one evening that his father would not recover from pneumonia. I waited.

Not a single plan seemed to follow. So the next morning, I asked my father to pay for the train ticket, I would go.

It was not hard at all, baby, to help my grand-mother wash and feed my grand-father. She showed me how to, in a steady way, without flinching, doing everything in the right order, precise in her gestures, applied and focused, never giving up. She made it natural and easy, sitting at his bedside, watching over his needs.

But who would know? Not a single soul showed up at my grand-parents' place all the the time I was there.

Everybody likes to say how much they despised each other. I never believed it. They were too anchored in a shared set of manners. They may have had, it's true, a unique kind of relationship, mainly based on time and unifying routines, surpassing far and clear the transience of feelings.

On January first, a tradition: Kneeling in front of my grand-father to receive his blessing. I asked my grand-mother one day why the task fell upon a man so brittle, devitalized, hardly able to speak. I had wanted to say that she was much more competent and alert than he was. She replied, stretching her neck with pride, her face stern and decisive-looking: “Of course, because he is the patriarch of the family.”

Not long after my grand-father passed away, my grand-mother, who had never been sick, died in her rocking chair, as if falling asleep.

And I was happy for her. For that unadorned, effortless, limpid act of disappearance. "To go and join your grand-father," had she once mentioned to me, as if an item on a list, the same way one would simply state the most obvious thing to do.

I might be the only person alive not just remembering them, but idealizing them. Do not forget their names: She was called Elmire. He was called Amédée.

They mostly lived in a world with hardly any cars, and no TV. Strawberry jam had to be made at home, kept in jars sealed with wax. Yes, you've guessed it right. I used to pour the hot, whitish liquid wax, and wait for it to cool off before tightening the lid on dozens of jars. And I'm the one who would also cut the floury dough in all sorts of weird animal shapes before it was deep fried. I have a strange intuition that, back then, I had a name too.

That name has totally been forgotten. It's not the one written on my birth certificate. I feel it's a name that came before the name of Bruno, the boy who died at birth, my mother's first pregnancy. But I was told I replaced Bruno.

Do you see the baseball glove on the fridge, near the window with a milky green frame in my mother's kitchen in Montreal? It's meant for Bruno. Or am I confused?

There's a box on my grand-mother's table, a sort of time-warp effect, and hundreds of kilometers away, wrapped in colorful printed paper. It's for Bruno too. But he died. It's been explained to me. I will never see who he is. And that very tall man dressed in a dark suit walking away towards the door, - my grand-mother says he's my father - he won't give me the box. My grand-mother pats my head and tells me not to speak. I remember it because her voice was simultaneously so firm and calm, a reassuring imperative. I am at an age when, standing on the tip of my toes, I can barely see the surface of the table. It's such an endless, shiny table, with a gift on it, out of reach. I guess I'm mixed up.

Taking into account the nine months needed to have a baby, I don't understand how I can be witnessing this in Rimouski at an age approximately the same as the one I had when my sister was born in Cleveland. Something's wrong, sweetheart, with chronology, and with my sense of geography. And perhaps a bit more.

Laolao

28. Rock-paper-scissors

Of course, souvenirs play tricks on us. We remember tensed moments much better than casual ones. Just to name a few, we certainly wouldn’t forget a self-declared martyr posing in front of our eyes, the agony of self-reproach, or any of our psychological needs when they’re thrown off-balance. But when we try to recall being satisfied, the presence of a benevolent mind by our side, the subtle essence of pure understanding, we seem to set the unreal into motion, and fall victims to metaphysical skepticism.

I wish I could tell you I was a happy child. I wish I could describe some fun events without suspicion having to invade the entire domain of my experiences.

Since she was a fashion designer, my mother was entitled to carry around the largest, sharpest scissors you can imagine. They were made of long, heavy blades. Their black handles so large, my hands could almost go through the holes.

She did try a couple of times to stab my father with them. I would be in bed downstairs, listening to my mother’s shouts, the accusations: A mistress here, a venereal disease there, money running out, spent on seduction masquerades. Never heard my father reply. He wept, feeling sorry for himself, working at staying out of reach of the scissors.

I disliked my mother’s outbursts, but I thought she was basically in her right to be pissed. I wished though she would have dropped the scissors. And perhaps my father, on his side, could have helped appease the scene by uttering something like “stop” or "sorry."

The scissors terrified me. They were my mother’s weapon of predilection whenever she ran out of insults. She actually didn’t know that many. Her vocabulary was modest. A thing rather than a flux. So the scissors often came in handy.

Conveniently, I can’t remember how our fight had started: I see my mother’s strong hands tightly squeezing mine around the handles of the scissors. I’m trying to free my fingers without making the scissors jerk. You see, my mother is pulling the scissors towards her stomach. She has the blades against her own body. She yells that I should kill her. As I pull in the opposite direction with all my might, I’m crying ‘Please, stop. Stop this.’

A proof by the way that I was much more articulate than my father.

A million thoughts go through a kid’s mind at such a moment. I can’t free my hands. She’s trying to puncture herself using me as an assassin. And I am so tired, baby, I am hoping that these melodramatic clashes can end right now. What if, for a fraction of a second, I stop pulling the scissors away from her? What if I simply relax my muscles?

Yes, the plan did germinate in my mind. And it’s not love or caring that prevented me from letting my mother fall into her own trap. No. It was a selfish move. I wasn’t sure at which age people could go to jail. At 10, I felt I was already a grown-up person. Who would have believed that my hands on the scissors had been forced?

So I pulled and pulled the scissors away from my mother, saving myself, not her.

My mother would always remind the world that she didn’t have a mother, therefore no role-model for her. She claimed to have done her best under the circumstances. I sort of believe her.

I taught myself to be a mother watching her, and I raised my children equipped with that oblique hint. In turn, they are now educating you, my grand-children, also readied by that history. There’s little I can do to change that, except through theoretical attitudes, unmasking the underground constructions that marked our family’s sub-culture, the dominance-submission rites we savagely danced to.

My memories, as you may have noticed, always seem to rise from such manipulative, reified debris.

They’re totally indoctrinated by a sense of ethics born from ancient reaction patterns. Redefined by a world essentially made of testimonials sentenced to destruction.

Sacred dreams of fairness, justice, equality vacillating between denied potentialities and self-proclaimed repression.

There’s no beam of truth highlighting my childhood souvenirs, no exoskeleton to protect them. Instead, it’s a sort of dissipated, undisciplined holographic light blurring all the way to non-existence formless fears, beyond rescue, sometimes diluting them in a vein of raw senseless insanity.

Cavernous expressions molded to fit the wretchedness typical of missed chances, but - bravo! - instantly canceled by honorable oblivion.

Understand what you can, dear.

Don't worry, it will be fine.

Love, Laolao

27. Taedium vitae

I won’t be working for the next two weeks. I’ve counted the days, the hours up to this break. I need it so much. I find it hard to describe how tired I feel, it’s beyond words. A deep feeling of lassitude getting hold of me the minute I open my eyes the morning. It’s the first thought as I get up, an awful awareness that sleep hasn’t done its job, hasn't repaired me, hasn’t made me better. A dull, constant pain – not acute – more of a general nature, spread evenly throughout my body.

I’ve always had it, a tired child with legs, arms, a back, a neck, feet, hands, fingers hurting. Nothing like a blow or a cut. No, more like an intrinsic part of everything that I am, a diffuse unpleasant pressure draining energy, an ache painted all over my bones, my muscles, my nerves, not a single part escaping the discomfort.

Soreness would be the best way to call it. Not a disease. I would say a sad affliction, an insidious permanent condition.

I first used the word ‘tired’ to talk about myself when I was three. I’ve never forgotten the scene. We’re in Cleveland. Our apartment resembles a dark, long tunnel, the rooms at the front and at the back linked by a narrow corridor where freshly washed clothes are hung, dripping on the floor. There’s a big blue metallic chest, a trunk, against the wall, half way through, blocking the way, making it hard to navigate that corridor. White bed sheets are drying, hiding the chest on which I’m sitting, my legs crossed.

I feel I’m at the right place, at the right time. No one can see me. I have disappeared. I no longer exist. I hear, so far away, the voice of an adult calling me, but I am gone. The voice gets lost in the infinite distance, I can't tell whose it is. I’m no longer here. My hideaway place has disconnected itself from the world. I close my eyes to make sure I fully extirpate myself from the universe I know. This little corner made by the chest and the bed sheets forming a curtain have eliminated everything outside their boundaries. I am absolutely certain that I will be here forever, and I know I can do it. That I don’t need anything. That I will never feel any regrets nor desires. That I will never, never feel lonely or miss anything. I have the power to erase, nothing else matters. I am simply so fine, so comfortable. A perfect existence.

Of course, eventually I was found. I don't remember by whom. When the bed sheet was lifted, an incredible weight instantly crashed upon me. Something reached for me, - was it a shout, a slap? - my eyes were hurting while every part of me became immensely old. I felt it, a distressing sensation suddenly running through my veins, attacking every fiber of my being, forbidding escape. In a second, I reached an incalculable age.

I recall an all-powerful surge of feeling before the memory goes blank: Hatred.

Directed at myself, I think. I had truly been meant to become an invisible being. My anatomy was therefore defective. I couldn't understand why.

Ever since, sadly enough, there hasn’t been a moment untouched by this pernicious agony running under my skin.

Every step I take, every letter I type on the keyboard, every time I turn or bend my head - the tiniest movement is undermined by pain. A wave malevolently echoed deep inside.

Back then, my abrupt re-entry into this world must have damaged me. That’s how I see it.

More than 50 years later, my state hasn’t improved. On the contrary. It has worsened.

Doesn’t matter how long or how little I sleep, a slight stretching of my ankles, my shoulder twisting to get up, my wrists pushing on the mattress to lift my back, all of these cry from the knowledge that once again, I’m not rested. Still deliriously depleted. Endlessly fatigued from the effort and the struggle.

Younger, I drank a lot, took dope, danced, spinning my fright like mad. A sublime negation of my physical limitations. An ability to transcend hardship. To command analgesia. Winning for a few hours.

Today, when I don’t need to work, I let go, sinking into the pain as a way to recognize where my existence stands. Every part of my body delineating its shape and consistence using the heat traces left by exhaustion.

I’ve never tried to position myself on a pain scale. It is believed in some circles that when suffering reaches a certain pathological threshold, it does so as a way to distract the mind, diverting it from repressed emotions. A form of protection, would say a shrink.

I wouldn’t know for sure. Lets leave to those wealthier than us the care of articulating the philosophies of pain.

I am sharing all of this now because I want you to know me. My somatic experiences, their duration, their chronic intensity, their throbbing patterns, as well as their demoralizing effect. Whatever unconscious survival benefits they may be said to hold.

I will stay home for the next two weeks. Not to rest. But to be silent, in closer contact with my debilitating joints. Too many cells in my body having a conversation of their own, every syllable deeply accentuated, hammering a meaning that has always kept me so busy: Listening, deciphering all the way to weariness the cryptic connotations of sensory perceptions.

Laolao