I dream I’m safe in my hotel womb.
Soft and soul made, it’s a wonderful room.
I wish I’m back in my hotel womb.
Slip through the crack, to that wonderful room.
Being touched and held is a basic human need, I think. Not as crucial as water, food, shelter, money; a job. You can go for a long, long, long time without being touched, and imagine you are quite okay. Until you are touched again, and realize how much you ached for it. Then, that one touch, no matter how gentle and loving, could kill you. Just one touch can blow apart that construct in your mind that tells you how perfectly well you are doing on your own. Alone. Where no human being is really meant to be. One touch, and that fallacy will crumble into so many lies. All you’ll want then is to be held. Nothing else will matter. You will be as a child again, with a limited vocabulary preventing you from articulating the storm that has passed inside of your head, and you will only be able to reach out wordlessly. If you are held then, that one moment will be your Paradise.
It’s such a nice dream, and it seems so natural, something that we usually take for granted; held in our father’s arms, safe. The first night I met my father again after twenty-five years apart, he held me. I wanted it to be Paradise. I wanted to feel safe. But I felt afraid.
So much of my childhood seemed to me like a book missing key paragraphs; a pampliset, unfinished. Crucial data has been excised, like in a CIA document released to the public with names, locations, and entire conversations blacked out, as if it’s perfectly natural to turn down the sound on the video for half the movie. I had come there seeking the executive order that would let me see all the documents, hear all the soundtracks. Instead I got more lies and evasions, more brain-numbing anxiety, more nightmares; even less information in the flood of data that didn’t answer any of my questions. My father wanted to be the perfect daddy. But something went wrong. He touched me in ways he shouldn’t have. Now that I know what is wrong, I’m better with it. I’ve learned that I am a certain way. Just as some people are paralyzed, blind, live with a couple of fingers that don’t feel, have a crick in their neck that won’t go away, or have pins in their knees or a plate in their head from an old injury: I have post-traumatic stress disorder. Mine’s permanent. It means that I flinch.
The anxiety that I have, being held by a man, is waiting for the moment when I am going to be forced to do something. When my hands and arms are going to be forced to move without my permission. When the hands caressing my head become steel vises clamping me painfully. When the soft breathing of my father becomes ragged because of something he is making me do to him that I don’t understand. No matter how trustworthy the individual, no matter how much he loves me, no matter how much I might love him back; even if he could be my father, something inside me waits like a coiled viper, waiting for the attack.
That same something, that waits cold-blooded in the dark, that feeds off rats, that is powerless most times to do anything but watch: that same something aches. For childhood. For safety. For the day when there will be no flinching. That something dreams of reconciliation with that piece of me, the child who was me, the one who wants to be in a soft room full of caring.
I say, why are you people wearing those masks?
I say, can we be reconciled?
She says the mother of the storm has to roam the sky
Searching for her child.
Who wants to touch and be touched. Who waits, and yearns, and dreams of a place, like a womb, like a celestial city, where there is no anxiety. Where she could go back.
To Paradise.
