It’s very early; not yet 5:30 a.m. I’m listening to one of the Public Radio shows that my animals and I listened to for years. It goes on for two hours: I won’t be able to stand it that long without them. I never can.
This is the wandering blog, the one I’ve singled out for that concept. And yet wandering, of the body and of the heart and of the memory, is there in every blog I’ve made since April of 2008. Haunting - ghostish, wraithy - came up new this year in this blog. Haunting is what I very often do, and haunted is what I mostly am. The ghost of Christmases past, and only the past, because that is the only temporal place where my own life now lives. Where fourteen stolen, executed friends now wait for me, who waited for me for years and more years, every time I went out the door. No words describe better who I am since the day I saw them for the last time than ghost, wanderer, haunted.
Today is the sixth day that I’ll wander these streets in search of our Christmases in this poisonous town. Twenty-two of them. I’ll listen to journal cassettes of a very few of those Decembers. I’ll try to feel us. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not. This is the only deep and real thing now when Solstice and Yule appear on the calendar again: to feel us. Gifts are bought and wrapped for two human beings, only two. Gifts are bought for the guinea pig princess. A few decorations exist, but no tree. No more trees. No more the daily playing of the season’s music, which for us was a daffy, elcectic stew of baroque and renaissance and folk and classical and all the old standards. Silent Night in how many languages? Oíche chiúin.
Will I ever fry bacon again? So far I can’t. In 1999 I started a new yearly tradition of bacon on Christmas morning. Bacon for me and for cats and for dogs. We lived at 59 L Street then, Nookie’s insane asylum for drunks and druggies, he himself having been a member of that sterling club. Will I ever listen on the 24th and 25th to The Nine Lessons and Carols, sung by boys in England? So far I haven’t. Those nine stolen, lethally injected cats will never bat ornaments off the tree again and roll them under the furniture. Those three stolen birds will never chirp at the top of their little voices to their own particular favorites in our Yuletide musical canon. The stolen dogs, those two who remained, one half of what had been my pack, will never drool over the bacon and beef and lamb and turkey and pork again, or have their Christmas walks with me again, or lie down beside me for the Christmas day nap. So I wander around past the places we once lived and the places we once walked and wait to feel us, a ghost and an exile who can never step into those yards again, walk through those doors and take a look at those rooms we shared again. Barred, and barren, and a baleful little wraith.
Oíche chiúin. Yes, the nights are silent. Christmas Eve and Christmas night and Solstice, and all the nights of the year. There is an ocean of silence, a jabbing abyss of absent sounds that were part of my nights for fifty-five years: snoring dogs and breathing cats and nocturnal trips to the food dishes or the water bowls. A bird suddenly waking up and speaking in the dark. And breath, breath, breath: beside me, above me, around me: my friends, my children, breathing and sleeping in innocent peace. There is a huge chasm, a great ghostly vacuum. There is, having been brought about by the viciousness of unholy christian human beings, an endless string of lonely and grieving and murderous silent nights.
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read… Being toward death… Stolen stars…
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2009-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
