12 april

It occurred to me today as i sat on the couch at my grandmother's assisted living. she sat opposite me and Mother, her and Jack; she rubbing little circles with her finger into the back of his hand, he smiling with the cowlike serenity of the domesticated old. Jack is not an unattractive man. his eyes are clear and blue in his old age; his face is creased into the tan satisfied smile of the contentedly deteriorating. they have known each other for two months, and they think that they are going to get married.

It occurred to me as i watched her thumb press its smooth little circles into the back of his hand, unconscious circles of affection that i had pressed so many times as well, that she and I and Mum are all the same. we are one three-generation clump of fatherless men-failing women. every man which has waltzed into the fabric of our lives has ruptured us, has cankered us, has failed us. Drowning in a lack of protection we grow lumps of self-sufficiency, like a tumor; because if we are impregnable we need not be protected and cannot be harmed. if you cannot see me you cannot reject me and i am safe.

But their power is a haunting power and so to our desecrators we always return. we know nothing else. we do not love them, all that love is a Sham; it is their long dominance and our oft-enforced worthlessness that charades around as love. and so we find ourselves handing out chunks of ourselves to passing men, in hopes that one will love us, but never really giving ourselves away. always we nun-tend the important parts in secrecy; our nameless faceless sanctity of Self.

My grandmother talks about Jack all the time. "We're in love," she says euphorically, downing her third cup of morning coffee. Jack creases into a cow smile and sagely remarks, "I love her and she loves me, and as long as that's so nothing else really matters. We're in love with each other." The floor nurses smile patronizingly and whisper, "He's further gone in the head than she is. Leave him alone for a few hours and he won't recall Loretta at all. To his family he only mentions her every now and then, as a friend."

Oh! is not such the way of men? i was of the same serendipitous blindness, and my J samely drifting between lust-love and apathy. i was of the same eagerness to entrust myself to someone, to be handled, to be tamed. (beware of the Tamer, however: one will be nothing more than an object, than untouched skin; and what more is there once you are Tamed?) to fail and be failed by men, for one soured love replaces the last. (and so all is well in an eternity of flawful men and disenchanted women.) one must learn to build oneself up to a Singular state, away from the flaws and the contortions and the dominance of others. there is hope, however, i cannot help but think; and as long as there is hope we will continue to love and to love and to love. such is the way of women that we hand ourselves to men.