“Andrea,” she said.  “You won’t be having a birthday this year, I can’t afford it.”

 I did not understand her words.  How can I not have a birthday?  Everyone has a birthday.

            The idea overwhelmed my young my mind and to make sense of what she was saying to me, I told myself that it was a lie.  It was a ploy, a diversion of some kind.  She must be throwing me a surprise party.    That’s it, I thought, a surprise party. 

            For the next two weeks whenever I thought about my birthday, I thought about the party.  I envisioned my family: my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, my little brother, Jeffery, hiding in corners, against walls, under the table and jumping out at me as I entered the house yelling- Surprise! - like families did on TV.

            When May 29th arrived, I walked home after school anticipating my surprise party.  My eagerness grew as I got closer to home.  I walked up our back stairs, opened the kitchen door and stood in the empty kitchen waiting for it to fill up with people who loved me, people who would come together and make sure that I had some kind of a celebration on my birthday but nothing happened.  There was no cake in the refrigerator, no birthday cards, no gifts, just a silent house. 

I went into to the living room seeking out something, some acknowledgement perhaps, some sign that this day was important to anyone but me.  My mother was sitting on the couch watching The Guiding Light.  I stood in the doorway waiting for her to say Happy Birthday but she said nothing, she would not look in my direction.  It was then that I realized that she was telling me the truth, I woud not have a birthday.  I said nothing to her, I pretended that it was not my birthday as my birth suddenly became something shameful.

It was such a devastating feeling of not mattering that I never really recovered from it. 

I am still waiting…for something.  I have been that eight year old little girl hoping that the people I love will one day surprise me and show me that I matter. 

But they never do and I realize only now that they really can not afford it.

“I know what it is with you” or “That’s why I like you” is their response.

But…but I am a control freak, a selfish person who judges and feels superior to you all. Your value is little to me and I would soon as cut off your head than to actually take the time to build a real friendship…

Yeah- that’s what I like about you.

One love, lover, love-ly man told me that I usually make it to step # 5 and then I am ready to bounce.   He knows what it is with me.

I wondered why…why my ins and outs are accepted.  Is it a beneficial thing for me?

Granted, when I started having unfinished relationships, it was unlikely that anyone could stop me.  I ran like a runaway train, steamed up and grinding furiously across hard cold tracks.

But one person- only one (well, the only one I listened to) tells me that my actions affect others.  Affect him.   He tells me that he wishes I knew or could feel what it is I do to other people.  What I put them through.   I don’t have clue.   I imagine that no one cares if I am IN or OUT.  I don’t care if most people are In or not In.

The person I do care about is the one that won’t let me get away with my transient behavior,  well, not entirely.   I do come and go with him also—when I am in, I cause havoc, mental flooding and then I am gone. 

I would not put up with Me or perhaps that behavior from someone other than me.   If that’s true, what is it about ME?  Why has not one person told me to beat it?  Even HE holds on when I run.

I tried to apologize for bad behavior and was met with thanks.  Thank you for being you, I was told, because it made me evaluate me—the trigger.

People are full of madness…me too.

Perhaps what I love about the Brotherhood parties is that I get to be surrounded by people who accept me as one of their own.  I am Arlene & Binky’s daughter, a child of Lynn, like them.    Some of the folk that gather there have known me since I was a frolicking child with bouncing banana curls following behind my young mother; some have cradled me in their warm thick arms when I first enter this mixed up world.

All have nothing but Love for me.

In my own world, I am an outsider.  I exist between pages.   It has always been this way for one reason or another and I am reminded of it constantly– too black for some; too white for others…too deep for some; too fashion conscious for others; too emotional for some; too introverted for others…the comparisons are endless.  I seem to orbit around my own sun.

At the Brotherhood, I’m just someone’s daughter and that is enough.   Perhaps it reminds of those days when I ran to keep up with my boy cousins and my Uncle Aaron, who was only two years older than me, and my protector.  We loved being around the old folks at the barbeques, listening to their music and their signifying.    There is that air in the bar reminscent of those old times.

Growing up in Lynn, standing on the color line was no easy task.   I had to navigate my way into womanhood combatting jealous fists and damaging rumors all in an effort to maintain a sense of self.   I did it.  I survived.  Fought back, never backed down and in someways became the person I was rumored to be.   I survived and then absconded.

I’m older now…just looking to be.  Be comfortable and accepted for me.  Be a part of a world that is just my size.  At the moment I don’t…fit.

Once a year though, I am embraced in the arms of those same beautiful, sad Black men & women whose lives I know little of.  I see them settled in their spots around the bar drinking, escaping, drowning and on the dance floor searching for their freedom. 

And I escape with them, into their world, my world, and feel free.

She had the good taste to fall in love forever.

The silence remained afloat

The ache pulsated to an off-beat rhythm.

There is no public ceremony held for secret desires.

Pretty Seduction.  Word Penetration.  Nubile-ation

She imagines his kiss where her legs become legs

She loved him without him.

Bereft.

Just as unrequited love sires poets with stanzas of melancholy rhymes.

He had the good taste to fall in love forever.

The silence remained afloat

The bet ended on an off-beat rhythm.

” World Class Cancer Cure…”

This is the second time I’ve locked my hair but this time it’s like each lock, single or doubled, is part of a compass leading back home, setting me back on the path that I keep stumbling off of in pursuit of temporary distractions or following the calls of lost voices.

I’ve learned to understand the limitations i’ve imposed on my life.  Limitations that were perhaps taught to me or that my own short focal-length created around my perceptions of life.    I learned by detoxing the demons, the past, the fears and by falling into a dark cold hole where I gradually recognized all of it as myself.

I was alone in the hole.  Almost alone.  I would drag someone that cared about me in once in a while and expose him to the madness that crowded my head.   He was a good sponsor but he was not family in the DNA sense, he was not my lover in any traditional sense and he was not my friend in the I know him sense.   He was someone I dragged into a hole with me until I was able to pull myself out.

Once in a while he would poke his head into the hole on his own to see if I was okay.   I find it interesting (not as new phenomena because it is typical of the people I know) that my people stayed away in my darkest hours.  They always do.  They only come around when they want something from me but They seem to have their antennaes in tuned to the stages of my growth.   Now I don’t want to paint a picture of opportunitistic parasites who only feed of me.   My friends and family do check in on me occasionally.  I also do not want to give the impression that I am asking them for help.   I know they are not equipped to help me because they are unable to help themselves.   They are human and are struggling to live in world that is not conducive to human life.  The history of mankind has demonstrated that.   People have always had to fight just to live and now that the essentials are more easily acquired by our own advancement, we struggle just to find reasons to continue in a life that is lonely, violent and cruel at times.    I see it in their faces, the loneliness, and I saw it recently when they looked back in celebration of my returning health. 

The old habits of their inconsideration aside, my healing body sat exhausted from the effort of making my house presentable for company.  I was excited with the lessons that I had learned, the renewal of optimism and the freedom of possibility of which I now possess.    In my excitement I forgot that they had not detoxed their demons, had not chosen to look at themselves in an effort to move beyond their limitations.  They did as they always did…one took advantage, they all smoked their chemically laced organic and then they sat there lifeless with nothing to offer.    In my sober state I saw them, as I do with most people, as characters in their own life.  I wrote their stories in my head.   I saw their boredom, their lack of aspirations, the way in which the fill their void with unsatisfactory relationships, food and gossip and I saw the connection to me.   In their own words they tell me that I am their ticket out.   Whatever I do they are going to hitch on to me.  Maybe not in the literal sense but in the Plan B sense.   They need me and my dreams as the secret door for their escape fantasies. 

They do not really understand me.  They are quick to point to a flaw, a gray hair, the need to gain weight and at one time that would make me sensitive because it was not behavior I exhibited to them….I was cognizant of their feelings.   Now expect it, predict it and they do not disappoint.     I  remind myself that they do not understand and that does not make them any less important to me than if they were travelling by my side on my chosen path.  

I don’t always understand.    I do not understand the man in the hole with me but if it was his shoulders that supported my climb out of that dark cold prison, that is all I need to know.   If the man in the hole joins me on the path where butterflies flutter and the sweet nectar of life enriches my womanhood, where grace and peace feed my ability to accept and take in all the love that I can give, then I won’t question or fear him.  I will grab his hand and share my warmth and rest my head on the shoulder that once lifted me above the dust.

They died almost a year a part from one another, my grandmother suffered from cancers, from old age and neglect in her 80′s.  My mother died from lung cancer at age 57.   They were my parents and when they died they left me alone to navigate my way through my life without their wisdom and without their strength and knowledge of me. 

I looked for substitutes, sought to learn from others who seemed to have something to teach me but I could not learn from teachers I did not trust. I tried to become part of and create some other ring of women who  would join arms and tightly form a womb of protection against purveyors of fairytales and pretty words but it seemed that fables were enough for them.  

My mother listened to Billie Holiday and souful ballads when she was in pain. My grandmother had more faith in money than anything else in this world.  She told me to marry for money, not love- “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor man.”  (There was a lot of music and a lot of money in their lives).

I always fall for artists,  they are hardly ever rich. 

I saw these women storm through life with heavy loads, getting knocked down and dragging themselves on their feet to get knocked down again.  World champions fighters they were.   They taught me to fight and be hard.

I felt lost ever since my mother died.   I found myself just last week, right before Mother’s Day.   I went home…to what’s left of my family and felt the arms of their love.  My Sister, reminded me of who I was, the fighter yes, the fighter always.   A soldier.   Someone who never needed anyone else and when I did need people…they didn’t have a clue, that was not the image I allowed them to see.

I went home to Lynn, where I sprouted up, a lotus in a mirky little city and I got my strength  back.  It was waiting for me.

And without the actual words of my grandmother or mother I heard them tell  me that the soldier has no war to fight, that the tomboy has no boyz to tumble with and identify to.  The survival roles and reactive personas, the armor of the frightened girl elbowing her way through life to break through the ceiling that my family’s womanhood suffocated under can be retired, hung in the museum of my past. 

I felt lost without my parents, the women that taught me to survive and even though I only asked for their advice on occasion, I trusted the wisdom of their words for I knew of the experience from which those words surfaced.   They trusted that I would be okay without them, I was not the child that they worried about. 

I grieved my mother’s death for two years, alone, no one close to me understood what a loss it was.  My sister said she was relieved and felt my brother was also relieved when my mother was gone because she was difficult at times.   I knew why she was difficult, I witnessed her life.    (She was human and should have been accepted as such….but she too had the armor of a fighter…)

This Mother’s Day I thought of my mother and of children who were visiting their mothers with flowers, having brunch or barbecues.  It was a warm bright day.  Quiet accept for the void that hovered loudly around me and the words in my head that kept repeating,  ” I don’t have a mother.”  

One person knew what the day meant to me, only one, and he made it special by that acknowledgement.  He remembered me & he remembered my mother. 

My mother taught me to fight and now I am learning to love …on my own.

She would be proud of me.

     “I always thought I would lose my virginity to someone that I loved,”  says one in response to the other’s rushed plan to lose hers to the older bachelor whose window they spy in as he sits in the dark an watches Nickolodeon.

   The scene cuts away and we never see how these sexually curious girls make the passage into womanhood. 

I never had the conversation with my best teenaged friend about the romantic setting of our first time.  I never picked the most popular boy or the odd taciturn friend in which to give what I could not get back.

My friends had all had sex by time they were 15.  They were smoking pot in elementary school and taking pills in Junior High.  Sex just followed their dazed existence.    My friends were all white, they stood in front of liquor stores on the weekends and asked adults to buy them beer and they sat in the woods and got stumbling drunk because there was nothing better to do.   From these friends and their older siblings I learned about mescaline (which i tried) and LSD (which i didn’t try) and watched as they all fucked each other and then talked about it when the “romance” ended.    There was one boy that all the girls like, PJ. He was a pretty Irish boy, with light eyes and soft skin.  He fucked everyone, except me.    I was too brown for the little  white boys to pursue openly.   I was everyone’s best friend.

After the cycle of teenage girls had dried up then I was considered.   I don’t think I ever thought about it or me in relation to boys at that age. In fact I was oblivious to the fact that boys even noticed me ( I admittedly still am at times)  until a young man who worked at the liquor store stopped us girls and said to me, “You’re the prettiest one and you don’t even know it.”    Even at that age I was an over thinker and while I tried to pin point the exact meaning of the man’s statement my friends Robin and Colleen were adventuring into uncharted territory.  Their choice of boys in our circle  had dried up too and they soon found dangerous suitors in the projects.

It was dark and we had bottles of beer in brown paper bags.  I, the third wheel, was lost in thought until two boys jumped out of the shadows. Two white boys, Bobby and Danny.    Bobby was pretty with curly auburn hair and a tight athletic body.   He now garnered all the attention of the girls that were hot to give it up.  Danny  was blonde, bow-legged and outspoken.  He had bad manners but I found he brass humor amusing. 

While my friends displayed their sophistication with eyes coated in mascara and their ability to guzzle beer,  I became sandwiched between their intended dates.   

“What’s yor name?” asked Danny.  “Yor FINE!”   

He got uncomfortably close. It was the first time I had felt a muscular body rub up against me.  I moved back and then laughed because I had never heard white boys say “Fine” before.   Yeah, the project kids digged me.

I did not fuck Danny or Bobby but  not for their lack of trying whenever they saw me.  I was just shy and not thinking about sex. 

Maybe it was because I grew up with boys.  I could never imagine kissing one. 

I did not have sex for the first time because I was in a relationship with someone who said they loved me.  I didn’t have a steady boyfriend who was obsessed with losing his virginity.  And I did not share the experience with anyone or do it in anyway that made it special.

At 15 I had sex because I wanted to know what it was like.   All my drug friends were having sex and had boyfriends that they planned to marry as soon as they graduated from high school.  They got deeper into drugs and I changed scenes. 

My first time was with this 18 year old brotha who was cheating on his 15 year old  white girlfriend.   I was friends with his cousin and as was custom he would try to get with me as soon as his girl’s back was turned.

We did it on the mattress in his grandmother’s basement.  He took me down the stairs and sat me down.   The bed was not made and I quickly covered my bare body with the sheet as I watched him undressed. 

I felt his weight and then his hands and then a burning pain.  It hurt and my leg began to tremble.  Then it started to shake.   He teased me but I was so embarassed I ignored that leg and let it answer for itself.

I don’t remember if it lasted long.  I didn’t bleed and the boy questioned my claim of virginity.   That was it.

After we dressed we went up stairs where he sat me down again.  This time at a tiny square table  with two chairs that was positioned against the wall of a small cramped kitchen.  He talked at me while frying chicken, boasted about his culinary skills and advised why the raw flesh should be coated in corn flakes instead of flour.   The hot grease crackled and popped as each piece was tossed into the skillet and I sat shy waiting for my chance to leave as the warm achy sensation grew between my legs.    He insisted I try his chicken before I left.

When I left I felt nothing.  I felt detached.  I wanted to know what sex felt like and now I knew.

I wish I wanted to know what love felt like.

I feel detached but at the same time obsessed, obsessed with my ass, what comes out, what goes in and how it all affects my body. It’s like the first time I watched hard core porn and saw a woman accept erect cocks in every place an erect cock could fit. I sat in a dark room with a small flickering television on top of a bureau next to a man who thought watching a foursome would somehow get me in the mood. I watched, mesmerized by the grimace on the woman’s face as she suffered the synchronized thrusts of the two men that were penetrating her both vaginally and anally while the camera crew zoomed in on the perfect angles. She was a human condom and before she was thrown away one more penis was shoved into her mouth. She choked and moaned and fed the fantasies of repressed men including the one sidling up next to me.

On second thought, my colitis is not like that porn flick at all.  

But I am still obsessed with my ass and the idea anal sex.   Can I have it?  Did it cause my sickness?    

I was tempted to ask my doctor once but I couldn’t figure out how to fit that in the conversation, and besides, what if she said…No.