Kaitrin's Journal

 My aunt was my sole guardian since I was 5;she killed herself when I was nearly 15.I found her body and I lay with it in bed till the dusk cleared and the light went level in the windows,as filmy and pale as water in a glass. I suppose,all my life, this will remain the most shocking thing that has happened to me.

  My Aunt abused me; she was also the only person in the world who crossed--even fleetingly --into the border of loving me.She broke two of my fingers in doors and yet, she taught me,as well,  how to play notes of songs on the piano.I remember her hands then not fists but moulding,measured curves,guiding me, above the even field of keys.(And you will reap...all you cannot sow, in this world...in the next.Amen..) She bropke my jaw with her fist but she also,routinely, for 3 years, brushed my long hair at night,her hands not fists but supple and graceful, as certain,in their motions against my long head, as bird's wings. She made my eye bones go grey  then black like dusk to dark with the hail of her hard hands,the palms enclosed---but then,too,she also always took my hand before we crossed a street.Even if only as impassively,as thoughtlessly,as her same hand would seek the key in her purse when we neared her car.

        she loved me but she wanted,still more,to be cured of my existence.To have me vanish from her reign of neeeded vision. She had never wanted to see me.Or:it was as though I impeded her eyesight of things  which she strained to see just beyond me,my unyielding and unparting form---things which she knew she wanted;things which,because of me, she'd never glimpse for long enough to reach.

When I was a child, reality was as much what I saw as what I learned to hide from.There was so much that was,unexpectedly,almost always safe: a kettle,for instance.

the way a teakettle seems to hover,raging,below its stringless kite of steam;the  way it tremles,then throbs,as if in real pain,while the water makes its whimpering boil ruptire through the invisible air.And yet, when my Aunt burned my inner wrist with one--though I feared kettles a short time thereafter--I overshadowed that fear.It was my Aunt's hands that had caused me to suffer.Like me,the kettle had merely been in her way.

        A kettle:few other inanimate objects could cry out when in harm. I knew so.I identified,as a child,with inanimate objects far more than with anythig or anyone else. I knew that they would never hurt me,and that when my Aunt hurled them at me,different objects,they  did not fly towards me willingly--like me, they had no choice but to yield to her strength.I was the same, for years,and so, I held them blameless.More than blameless:I saw them as my only--if multiple--allies.

I was raised as a Catholic,but only out of conveinence.We lived in a part of Hollywod in which, the rumor resounded, the district school was "unsafe"--and so, I was bused nearly all the way to West L.A., to Catholic school. The other conveienence of the Church for my Aunt was that there was one just 2 blocks from where we lived, which was also relatively safe. When under one of her "spells"---or while just healing from a tantrum,still tender and raw--my Aunt would covet her privacy,and thus bid me off to that small local church, to derail me,for as long as she needed me withled.I think that church could have been any denomination--it just happened to be Catholic,my Aunt's born religion---for it served the only purpose my Aunt wanted of it: it got me out of her way,and into a place that provided me with at least  some basic standard of protection. The bodies and faces of peole in prayer there, around me, looked to be exorcised of their wandering and sorrowful spirits. I leared,from watching them,the exact,the unsuspect, uniform gestures and anthems of prayer.

            My Aunt,who was the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, disliked her religion.She disliked it just as she did the parents who had  raised her to this religion as a substitution--and as penance--for her sharper,earthly need for their human love.Their belief was that the only true,important love was otherworldly,and pure: it belonged to Christ; it had nothing to do with the weak and culpable flesh forms that were our bodies, our selves. Only perfect,completed love mattered, and humans have no capacity for that:thus,her parents had seemed to shun love for their normally volatile,changeable children altogether. Love,they believed,  could come with the next world:it was what my Aunt--and my mother--were essentially told.This world was merely the lobby outside love, the lobby in which you waited,stiff with condensed,restless patience, for Heaven. 

   So my Aunt had no fondness for organized religion, but by the time I was 8, she sent me off to Sunday Mass as a way of expelling me and reclaiming her own, tiny freedoms in our crowded,entrapping apartment. I grew to like it;I learned things,at church.I was a child and so,of course I absorbed what I was steeped in. It was a safe place until dusk;there were always priests around,almost as often adults with palms touching,kneeling,praying alone.Their eyes always closed,the way I'd sen grownups on T.V. always close their eyes before they kissed.The praying adults had their heads always bowed,as they prayed,so it semed to me at first they were ashamed.

       I loved how clean the Church was.It was unfamilar and exotic,cleanliness.My Aunt's home smelled of trapped cigarette smoke,always something else mildly burned within the background.There was a film of dust across many things there as dark as soot,and long gray hairs of it on the floors, and the rooms were full of stained,sagging furniture and impermanant, breakable objects. The church refracted dirt, and all human residue,it seemed to me,instead.It had neat long blonde pews polished until they had a gloss,a lucent sheen like dew across them.The sepia tile floors had a vibrant gloss, too,and everyone seated  was as calm asd they were clean.The stained glass windows were like colorful quilts--windows which remained,even in bright light,transparent yet opaque at the same time. Even the bald head of my favorite priest there seemed to glow faintly,like a hanging, pale lantern padding the walls of the dark. (Only the stark crucifix confounded me:If Christ was suffering--if he was being abused--why did no one help him off?How could everyone just watvch,and witness this,and still do nothing?) I saw love in the church too,human love.Not the violent,urgent kinds I saw out on the streets---friends who shouted at each other and hit one another's backs hard to say hello; teenagers kissing and emracing,sloped against walls---but something varied.Elderly people whispering secrets close to one anothers ears,secrets as invisible as memories.A man and woman stroking the backs of each others hands,as if writing words there.A young mother's palm tenderly swirling the top of a baby's thin hair,which was as pale as a pollen.

        My favorite part of church became my gradual,enlarging birth  of  belief that I had A REAL FATHER,after all. "Our father"--that one.(How I loved the fused,collaged look of the near faces as they chanted this,Our Father,all channeled into one,serene,intense expression):"Who Art in Heaven..." Because:As far as I chose to know,I myself had no father on this earth.This meant that when I began to have hope in a God, in an "Our Father", my father's absence seemed to matter to me less. Yes, perhaps this father--this God---was visually absent, too---but He belonged to me,just as much as to everyone else. And:this father wanted me.He waited for me,even. He had  not deserted me;in fact,He did not for one moment remove his gaze from me.

      As  I grew older,I reasoned it out more.Even if God appeared to be intangible, well, people did hear from him.Priests,for example.Nuns knew Him so well,they married Him.And even plain churchgoers--they would occasionally speak of how God came to them in dreams, or pure daylight.Perhaps this would happen to me,if I believed enough.I might see God--my first father.If I was good enough--it could happen..If I tried hard not want it too much.

 For,to want something or someone too much on  this earth was wrong: it would only ever be fatal.I would understand that soon enough.Again and again,though,I committed that one sin:I wanted.I wanted a faher I could find.

         (And then,soon enough--far too son--I would find him.) 

 I daydreamed;I was already too greedy.Even in Church, at the hearth of a Father who Loved me,too--I wanted to be loved as one child only. I would imagine my own,unshared,biological father sometimes:and all that I coveted in a father,those attributes,I gave to him.I formed him in this way.I was arrogant.I sinned: I tried to take God's place. I tried to create,myself, an actual, other human being on this earth.

                It was a bilingual Church.Spanish and English words were overlaid there, overlapped, like a mosiac, bouyantly colorful patterns and ribbons of sound. Mexican women smiled at me especially kindly;when I could muster courage,I'd smile steathily back. Often, they had several children of their own beside them,too many to add me,of course. But the petals around my usually downturned heart would open,just a minute, when they looked at me that way. I'd duck my head, ashamed that I'd been happy.God gives us exactly what He takes away.

         Some  days,there would be an English Mass,and then a Spanish,and I would sit through both---and still, my Aunt would not appear,to take me back.It happened,finally, just about as often as not. And so I came to realize,here,more than anywhere else,at church,that I had no true home outside it.That the church was my lobby not to Heaven but,perhaps,one day,to a true home. Which would be,surely, a kind of reflection of Heaven on this earth.

If there is a God, I have not yet been healed from wanting Him for too long, and on my terms. For certain,though,I had a father.One part of me had understood this for years. When I was nearly 10,he came as if to visit me.It was a visit from which certain, essential cells of my body have not and will never recover.

      God forgive me for trying to conjure him into existence at all.