disconnect

I sit on the kitchen terrace and stare across this strange town, the rooftops chipped and aged, the endless sea of laundry hanging up to dry in the horizon. It's almost November now, but the palm trees in front of my apartment, and the mountains of Morocco in the distance remind me that the cold I'm so accustomed to waiting for will never come here.

I'm a nomad. I guess I've always been at the core. I try to root myself...but the wind always picks me up and blows me elsewhere. So here I am with a suitcase from my life back home, using things that don't belong to me, sleeping in a bed that isn't mine. And on the weekends, I leave my little town to seek more adventures. I guess I never really did listen when momma told me to sit still.

But who can argue with this view?

Still, with the world wide open and my bags already packed, I hear Arkansas and its people calling me home from time to time. Perhaps its asking me not to forget. (But no te preocupes, that could never happen).

 (photo taken by my lovely sister, back home in Arkansas)

With all of this time to reflect, after a month of reading Vonnegut, Borges, Extebarria, and soothing my mind with the only medicine that calms me, poetry, I started thinking about Sylvia Plath and the Bell Jar.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.  From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.  I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

 So here I am, Sylvia, sitting under your fig tree, a thousand branches above me and all of the possibilities coming to fruition. Which will you have me choose?