behindtheax

another old journal entry

I found this last night also. I must have been having a really off day? but i kind of like it so i thought i would post it.

Monkey on a Chain (1997)

I sit next to my new found friend
a nanny,
as my children and the children in her care play in this city park. The summer sun is hot on their well-protected shoulders.

She talks of the Philippines during rainy season.
When she was a child the ditches in back of her home would fill with rain
water in less than a day and she and her sisters and friends would run naked from their homes, through the downpour, and into these overflowing swimming pools.

She also tells me of the monkey they kept chained outside their home and how cross it became as the years went on. How monkeys have menstrual cycles just like we do but this one had the habit of wiping her monthly blood across her fur.
(Perhaps freedom would have solved that problem.)

As I sit in this park surrounded tightly by city, watching my children play while listening to my friend as she begins to drift into a monologue about her Pentecostal God and the evils of Yoga, I dream.
Dream of freedom that I never owned except perhaps when I was nine and lost in a created world of artic cold and huskies

I dream that I am standing on the shore of the Atlantic with the salt air spreading over me while the waves talk to me in their ancient voice. I stand there like a fruitful tree with roots deep in belonging. I stand until the stars and moon come out to curl around me and the darkness finally grants me ownership.

Then my oldest cries and my company ends her sermon and a siren from a fire truck sounds it urgency as it speeds down Gerrard St. and my head pounds and I think of supper and laundry and the monkey and how freedom is such an elusive thing.

posted by mary j. @ 10:06 AM