Gorgeous Girls for Gaza
Most mornings I’m spat out of sleep. Intermittent false starts to my day. I gasp, look at the time: 5.05 SOS time –the familiar puns of my body clock and its cortisol alarm.
I shuffle the pillows, stir my limbs and then still myself, as if cheating on my consciousness. Blank blank I tell myself. Let it be blank. And if not let it be the day to come.
My first instinct is to want to burrow in a slumber and hide away from the grief and shame of the last few months. I want to escape from the haunting effect of all the images I wish to unsee. But that’s what woke me and I’m too vulnerable in my waking state to avoid.
5.05 is an unavoidable time.
I’ve stopped scrolling for news because so often my gaze feels like an intrusion to the dignity of wounded bodies, I mean the dignity of the body, its anatomy, integrity, holistic design and function. I mean its beauty.
Everyday my body contracts in confusion as I see images of bodies, in the recognition of tissues, flesh, blood out of place. My spine twitches but I can tell how the shock has become quieter and deeper over the months, it’s less on the surface and now it yanks me out of sleep.
It feels wrong and inappropriate to write, to speak, to even feel and yet I want to fight the self-censoring fear to say it hurts. Tengo un dolor. Because it’s this resonance, this literal felt reverberation in my body of the pain and horror that seems the most tangible and truest fibre of connection. My flesh responds to the horrors inflicted on flesh. I’m holding on to that thread.
We are all trying to practise grief in beautiful and legible ways collectively.
But how do we practise when we are alone? When there’s no chanting, no purposeful route to follow, no organising to do, just our cortisol fueled bodies sweating in bed?
At 5.05 SOS time I close my eyes and let the sensations unfold, until I can’t.
Accelerated heart-rate. My gut spasms and my jaw tightens around my night guard. Heat rises to my chest and my feet go numb. Tears come out in a burst, a brief relief and then an empty feeling. Everything is quiet outside so I start to pray, which brings up emotion so my face scrunches as bracing itself to be knocked out by frustration. I am knocked out. Every second that I try to allow myself to stay in it makes itself felt.
Time slows down enough to show me the mess of what I feel, sadness pulls out a dredge of hate and blame, resentment and confusion permeate everything. I want to distract myself. I can't stay there for too long so I play tarot readings on youtube on a low volume like white noise. It helps and I fall into a light sleep for another hour or so.
*
Gorgeous Girls for Gaza says the sign held by two young women in the march. “Gorgeous Girls for Gaza!” I read out loud and giggle.
Thank you for the ingenuity, this is now my prayer, my spell, as I desperately search for morsels of innocence to replenish my sweet stocks in this cruel cruel world.
I microdose to expand my capacity. I pray the rosary with sweet devotion and call for the mother’s mantle.
The message arrives: Not all knowledge must be horrifying. Not all medicine is bitter.
In this utterly activated and exhausted state, I surrender and find that it has never been easier to love.
PS:
Here’s the link to my eclipse playlist. It’s still on repeat.