Letter One

I started off a writing chain with this piece.  Didn't have much time for editing :|  but here's hoping it turned out okay!


Muy señor mío,

My voice is screaming torture sounds out through my fingers in wild cursivesque letters, transcribing class quote unquote notes. I crack my knuckles again to keep my inner space in check, prevent the noises from entering the auditory world in a more profound way beyond the click click click. The shifting up and down and sideways in my seat, the rough hand-squeezing of my neck, the sensuous rolling of my shoulders, the sitting up straight and slowly coming back to a slouch are all signs that the psyche is ever-so-slowly slouching, crawling toward a secular Bedlam.

Elaine Scarry tells us that what is so impossible for the person in agony to ignore is identical to that which is so impossible for her companions to notice: the reality of her suffering is perceived by her, alone in a private universe. In my brain, that irksome muscle that is the center of this pain with its nociceptively-attuned cerebral cortex, I can tell myself that this suffering is useful for sustaining me in the now. I do this using electrical signals or chemicals, or whatever it is the neuroscientists now clutch to as Truth. It will be outdated by the next sentence. But then, there’s no point in becoming a creature of the present if all that truly exists is of the scientific and quantitatively recorded in a database, analog world.

Of course, you would teach us your science as though it could do no harm. As though Blumenbach never severed humanity into five parts like a ruined, fingerless hand. Gey never took and did experiments on a terminally ill Black woman’s cells without her consent or knowledge, sharing what remained of her life for all the world to toy with. And Descartes never sliced a living animal open to see its parts moving in agony, proclaiming, “It has no espirit—it cannot hurt.”

You talk to us as though we don’t know there were ever such things as A-Bombs, or H-Bombs, catapults, guillotines, electric chairs, AK-47s, nooses, ballistas, canons, gunpowder, warships, bayonets, tanks, knives, boomerangs, slingshots, howitzers, katanas, submarines, battleships, EMPS, shivs, iron maidens, brass knuckles, sniper rifles, lobotomies, tomahawks, machetes, spears or javelins or IEDs. In your simplified psychology of the world, we circle pictures of ☺ or ☹ to show our mood, and Kitty Genovese, Patty Hearst, Kinsey or, come to think of it, John Money and Silas Weir Mitchell are all forgotten. The physician, not the actor.

In the motherland, when someone dies, all the mirrors in the house are covered in cloth. They say the soul of the deceased wanders after leaving the body behind, and can become trapped in mirrors on the way to the next world. My first girlfriend was an astrologist who did our charts weekly to see how long our love would last. I read runes and did tarot readings. We thought, one day we’d open a psychic practice. Who can say which of us first knew the romance was slowly winding to an end?

“Poppycock!” you say, “Superstitious nonsense.” But we know better. I watch the ghosts sit among the desks and chairs. Sometimes the politely ask why we read about the British Light Brigade but never las soldaderas. Sometimes they give voice to my screams heard only by the third ear you also have no use for and the eyes you claim are a mutated form of the color blue. La Llorona weeps for this, the thinking that brought about the end of her children.

The fantasmas lean over my shoulder and whisper radical discontentment into my head, dialoguing with me telepathically and clairvoyantly in whispers, screams, sign, gesture, and spit. Kitty wonders aloud how the violence against her could so have been transformed as to be remembered only through the context of the people around her, her name given to the group of secondary murderers who were her neighbors.

“We’ve all been there, baby,” someone says, and I think it must be true. After all, we still are here, aren’t we?

My physicians have told me that stress increases the pain of my condition, such that too much can leave me bedridden for days like a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story. And this ache is continuously growing as I sit in your unhumbled presence. So, when I eventually and quite self-assuredly daydream myself away from this place where the word “imposter” is written 10,000 times in invisible ink, try not to take it personally.

It is simply an “old world” form of self-medication against those who know all except how to even brush their fingers against revelation.

Cordialmente,

Mandy