BESIEGED

Pushing through the insidious hours in the tunnel to September 11th, I am assailed by the confluence of opposing needs: productivity and grace. I want to write, reach, submit, yet find myself besieged by the inevitability of sharp presence contained within the eighth page of the calendar. After twenty-three years I know this beat by now, yet the shadow anxiety always niggles into the house like a field mouse before I’m swarmed, standing on the kitchen counter, screaming.

Today’s post is a surrendering of what I hold as publish-worthy prose to journalistic testimony in the raw. In the spirit of old-world blogging and the wave of Substack newsletters, I am validating anything I write as worthy of the page. Productivity and grace.

8/27/2024 – Tuesday, VT. 12:05 AM:

Terminated my mother-in-law’s aide. Turned the guard over to RG. Returned to Vermont Sunday night. Cat held his bowels.

My brain is a hot mess. Feeling lost in a cerebral quag of spatter and mire, where synapses fail end to end. Absentminded, unfocused. Lost in days of lofty goals, plunging into nightfall plundered by the black raven culling Threads in my phone. Last night I shut my eyes at 3 AM. The night before 2. And before that 1:30. Restless. I keep gripping the night, reluctant to slack into another dawn, then another… Seized in a world where nothing changes but the deepening fissures of lip and brow. My husband is still dead. My son is still dead. My other son is mortgaging a one-bedroom. Dreams are vapor. The generation before me is degenerative. With no new life to embrace, my circle narrows, aloneness broadens, echoing ever-longer. Persephone! Lead me back to forever, to the World where forever was a concrete noun, like—table, wine, skin, home.

© 2024 Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved. Photo by Deborah Garcia