I was a poor soul on the bed as the first wave of real loss hit—the coming home still had her face attached at the other end of something but now there was the complete rip—I was in the throes of a divine madness, one created one obsessed with Ramona...why these things manifest in the stomach, principal organ of digestion, that through four layers serous, muscular, areolar, and mucous the awful feeling of loneliness burns...what seat of worry and despair is lodged there deep in the circular fibers, anastomosing with thoughts and the anima, creating ribald songs of plaintive cry and wail...somehow the panic takes on an everyminute quality, a grey malfecence, a mocking neckhold full-nelson on the logic board of the insane...think think think, something else, move around, stare dim spacely, get up, get down, look out the window at the sun and sand and sea, leave the room, cross thresholds, open a coke, take yourself into the bathroom and make the fat kid pay..., take a bath, anything, just remember to keep “La Dangereuse” in the tower of your mind...and after all this?
NOTHING OF VALUE CAN HAPPEN TO A MIND THAT KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT IT WANTS.
“The state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experiences...”
And the way my mother started to look at me, already knew that her son was going to be hurt and tho’ she knew I was the fool causing my own folly, better to just allow for the myth of the superwoman to have its way for a while and then come at me with routine...we had routine developing down there, and I was beginning to see all that grief still coming would be eased by simple rhythms of mother and son providing for each other the basics of human existence...What I think I enjoyed most, especially this day after moping around, sending emails to Ramona, stealing a nap in the afternoon, after my run down the beach for a half hour, I think it was the onset of repast or supper that I took most refuge in...my mother hadn’t lost her love of eating now that she was healthy, and so by the afternoon she was wont to make plans for dinner and our choices were how many, varied and simple wonderful given the great local food, and our trips to the Arab-owned groceries, where one could handmade tortillas, hand cut tortilla chips, sweetened condensed milk and boiled-in-can Caramel which was terrific, not to mention lobster, conch, and snapper...so our meals had some kind of gnosis, for my mom had bred in me a faith of experience in her kitchenary prowess, having gone from eating almost nothing she cooked when I was younger to the opposite when I hit my teens when I couldn’t eat enough... This night, as with many, we decided to cook for ourselves...the simplicity of preparing a meal with your maker...a roundelay of vegetables—green peppers, tomatoes, avocados, purple onions, chop chop, tis never too late to chop chop, me in charge of salad, chippety chop, fine pieces like teeth and ribs, to prepare for the condition that will inevitably come...Chop eggplant, chop tomatoes, onions, basil, pinenuts, garlic, olive oil salt, boil linguini, (mom) and on the stereo her maddening romance novel replacement music like Jimmy Buffet and Yani and Jim Brickman...but you just let it come through the open windows and doors just like the dogs scare-barking, children play-screaming, and the three-wheeled bicycles with their coolers and a young boy yelling “Tamales” and honking a clown horn and little children running out to buy the hot and simple goods with their parents’ dollars and coins...
-Michael Price
