LOVE DROWNED
It feels like I got away again. Leaving behind a family that is not mine, a tribe, a race, who knows...despair, abuse, total trashy homes, bad manners, shitty eating habits, lovely children, and wild crazy adults. The fairy tale is finally over.
Who are you then, who can tell me that you love me, always will, always have only when you are drunk. Who knows that I love you, always will, always have - even when you are drunk.
I watch you dancing, stumbling over the wet grass, barking at a dog, hugging trees, animals, farmers, the whole world while cursing all of us.
You know, that you and your drunken buddies almost broke me. You seemed to think I needed breaking down to be put back together. What for?
Well I love you, but this love is shifted into the spiritual realm. You stink and I am happy that I do not have to kiss you. I watch from a distance and I enjoy the distance.
No more failed attempts to find in the cracks - between an almost sisterly concern for your health and anger over the dumped on me, taken up by me, responsibility for business, home and money - sparks of desire.
No more guilt about lost passion overshadowed by emotional exhaustion.
Your eyes turn up, your speech gets slurred and words fall out of your mouth together with spit and bread-cramps.
You cough up 50 years of cigarettes.
Maybe that’s life, maybe that’s freedom - but certainly not for me.
Your so-called mixed heritage is not belonging to neither white nor red world, if there is a thing like that.
I do not know, where I belong and sometimes I miss an identity- sure I am white, but from a long gone second world, where different exclusion fights took place.
You hug me while I drive, you punch me in the shoulder, you grab my hand and thank me that I drive you and the symbolic gravestone over to the rez. You call me a cunt because I will not turn around to collect the fish you forgot, which you need to give to the dead for nourishment on their long journey. I offer you a chocolate bar, and think that I would rather have chocolate than a stinking fish on my grave.
Why did your adopted sister could not put a gravestone up in so many years for her murdered brother and his murdered son. They might have died because they are natives, or because of alcohol or both or who knows what – like usual I don’t really get it. What I get is how upset all the women are when you walk in drunk already in the morning.
Your Indian sister, for instance, who is sober for two weeks and her daughter, whose memory at her brother is, that he was the first person she smoked a joint with, when she was ten. Great, do I think, I am just not cool enough. I would have at least slapped him, since he was already twenty. The young obese woman, herself twenty now, who tells me that she grew up in foster care, was drug addicted and just cleaned up and came home. She tells me that she does not like booze. I tell her that I do not like booze. Like an honor badge I mention my 8 years of soberness (and believe me, I know that booze made me aggressive and whiny and an asshole.)
What life and pride here?
Yes, I know about the cultural and real destruction of the Indian. But do you guys really have to finish the job?
Where is the critical voice that tells, that life on welfare is not freedom, that you must stop poisoning your children, that maybe even rules are not bad for them and learning how to cook would be better than learning how to roll cigarettes and make moonshine. Or maybe even how to clean a house.
What values do you got to offer? Spirituality? Sometimes when it’s not in the way?
You talk about nature and through everything from cigarette butts to whole households around.
How about the young people, who make so much money out west, use it to build greenhouses and community halls, instead of having to spend a thousand dollar a day on booze.
What alternative life, beside broken dreams and yards full of broken cars and trash?
A life where a ten-year-old girl tells me where best to hide the booze. This hurts my love.
It hurts to see the children's disappointment, you fallen hero.
My urge to defend you somehow, followed by rising anger fueled by helplessness.
Which demon is riding you this time?
Maybe I finally grew up though, the children and I, we stand and hold our bellies, unable to stop laughing. We are laughing hysterical about you discovering the bouncing world of a trampoline. Finally, you fall on your face and a short while later you are asleep.
The girl says, if you burn a hole into her trampoline with your cigarette, you got to buy her a new one. I fully agree. A ten-year-old, who shows me the car her uncle bought her for when she turns 16. (I am sure he was drunk, while he bought it) ... and which your son smashed it into the tree, while drunk.
Thanks god, she did not like it anyway.
I hear from you and your son, nephew and sister how you never got respected in either world. How people looked down on you. You are surprised when I tell you, how looked down I felt by you guys.
How arrogant you all are.
How self-righteous.
You still think it is part my fault that your drunken son and his drunken friends became violent and threatened me, one even to kill me - because crazy me, I threw their beer away, tried to end a party (you were there too, already passed out, drunk) and asked them to leave a place they had no right to be, in a shop that was half mine, where all the fines and lawsuit would have been mine....
I guess, I should have just said, thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn.
What debt was I supposed to pay off? White woman's guild? Never did you tell them, that it is utterly asocial to live of other people’s work, destroy and steal ....no - the asshole was me, who did not like crazy drunken young people drinking my money away, destroying my apartment, pissing on my cd’s, having their dogs shit on my parsley and leaving it to me to clean up. When did one of them ever came by sober, maybe with some food or the offer to clean up, or help or to play me a song -hey?
But no, I am a princess, because I do not like to sleep in a blanket where recently 3 drunks, who last showered the summer before, passed out. And manners are stupid and white European middle-class.
In this world, it was excusable to pass out anywhere drunk, disappear for days without a word, empty others credit cards, get in knife fights, threaten your friends and insult them in all possible ways.
What was not acceptable was for me to have an affair or how you would call it - fool around, or at least doing it sober and deliberate. That was like the deadliest of all sins, - maybe because you were never interested in it because you were too drunk.
Well fuck you my love, no more guilt from me.
Whatever...the car is gone, maybe I pay the phone bill for another year, maybe you should take our house and stuff it up the hole in YOUR culture (thank you Leonard Cohen for this wonderful expression).
One day maybe you will even give me an answer to my question about the other house you bought last year with my money...where you promised so many things again...
What can I say, I am still alive, not broken, still sober and quite happy. Maybe you cannot remember me happy, because you guys made me often so miserable...or I let you, or I was too much a coward to see that I got to go.
I am sad as well and I hope you are happy... My crazy brother.
Last year a colleague almost made me cry when he told me that I am a good person.
One day maybe we can be close again.