I'm Made Of Clouds And Letters

Sick With The Motion.

You will meet her through a friend of a friend or quite simply she was your friend. You will notice the way her eyes are vacant and distant, sick with apathy. You will see her childish ways and in that socially taught paternal instinct to preserve the innocent you will shield her of man made demons and ghost. You will protect her of the real threat of cruel people and violent people. You will even shield her from yourself, from ever questioning you or your intentions. You will allow the months to pass letting your life slip into repetition monotony and boredom, all the while protecting her from knowing you are not an abyss but simply a void. You will protect her from knowing that you are nothing but shapes of comfort and familiarity.

The bus came to a stop and I climbed unto it happy to get away from the glaring sun that had been following me all day. I paid the bus fare and looked around for a vacant window seat, the bus was nearly empty so I had my pick. As the bus rolled down Damen ave. I mumbled the stops along with the happy automatic voice. When I was younger and took the bus anywhere with my mother I would close my eyes and imagined a person sitting in a small booth somewhere pleasantly reminding me what stops were coming, not to listen to loud music or that priority seating was for the disabled and the elderly. I imagined that the owner to the voice was the same one that the advertising companies had convinced me had everything and was the all American person; a white man with a perfect white wife living in a nice home a white picket fence and two wonderfully white children. It wasn’t till I was much older that I realized not only that that person did not exist but that my imagined person was not sitting in a booth somewhere pleasantly naming the streets and reminding me of common courtesy. As I sat there mumbling the streets to myself I saw the Illinois Medical District approaching and I tensed up. I saw the University of Illinois Medical Center and The Jesse Brown VA Medical Center pass me by and before long my automatic imaginary person let me know we had arrived at my stop; the corner of Damen and Ogden. I stood up and walked to the door and jumped off the bus and stood there looking at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County. I stood there by the main entrance and watched the two ambulances sit in front of the giant automatic glass doors waiting…

The ambulance door burst open and two paramedics jumped out of the back pulling with them a gurney covered in blood as a man burned beyond recognition that he wanted to die. His screams were piercing blood was consuming the white sheets of the gurney.

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  • Ahhh! Help! Help me I’m burning!

The screams got louder and louder bouncing inside my head echoing louder and louder my knees went weak and I felt my lunch come up my throat. This could not be happening not now, why now?! Why! I closed my eyes and placed my hands in my eyes and waited for the screams to subside. Suddenly everything was silent I opened my eyes and looked at the ambulance than at the floor for signs of blood nothing. The ambulance door opened and a tired looking paramedic jumped out and walked toward the smoking zone where he stood clean and calmed. Damn it, damn my stupid imagination and my utter disgust and fear for hospitals. There was no burning man no pleads for help.

I shook off my fear and concentrated on walking towards the door still fearing something or someone was going to make a show of death gushing bleeding crying screaming and convulsing but I saw or heard nothing.

The months will pass, things will go fine while you go through the motions. Faking reactions and fulfilling social expectations, all will surround your grand sea of this is how things are supposed to be. You will think you love her and for a couple of months that will suffice, just thinking. No fighting no screaming no demanding of what is and what is not. No, all will go accordingly and you will confuse rhythm for love and lust for rhythm. The years will pass and you will ask her to be your wife. She will smile radiating happiness but her eyes, those eyes, will remain vacant and distant. She will accept your proposal to economically bind one another and in a small ceremony you will publicly display your commitment to this lie and you will hope with all your heart that they not notice that void in your eyes. You will hope that they not take notice of your anxiety or your vacancy. Don’t worry they will not, they are too busy caught up in their own lonely worlds where once they loved and yearned but those were things of youth, a dying youth a dead youth as they like to think.

I walked towards the front desk and stood for the receptionist to attend to me. Annoyed she looked up,

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  • How can I help you?

  • I’m here to see a patient.

  • Whats the patients name?

  • Clark in room 326

She scribbled down the name and room number and handed me the green visitors pass.

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  • Here you go the room will be in the third floor to your left.

I took the visitors pass and walked down the off white corridor that lead to the elevators. I stood there waiting for the elevator to arrive and my stare was fixed on my reflection on the elevator doors. I stared hard at myself and tried to deafen myself to the hustle and bustle of the hospital, I stood there waiting for what seemed and eternity when I heard the DING! Of the elevator arriving and instantly the sounds around me washed over me just as I darted towards the elevator I stopped in my tracks, there a tall doctor stood behind a wheel chair where an old man sat with a distant look in his eyes. I looked down and saw a catheter bag holding a yellow liquid that I instantly assumed was pee and all of a sudden the old man began to whimper as drool dangled from his mouth and his vacant eyes looked directly at me and I felt my mouth dry up. DING! The elevator doors slid open and I was facing an empty elevator. I swallowed hard and placed my hand at the bridge of my nose closing my eyes as I took a deep breath. I had to stop letting my mind wonder into the dark corners of this goddamn place. Fuck Clark for sending me into this place. Why the hell had I come? Why had I found it compelling to come see him when I hated him and I hated his fucking guts. What the hell was I doing here? The elevator doors began to close and I hurriedly slipped pass the doors and pressed the number three and the elevator began to descend. I was not ready for this, none of this.

Things will be fine the years will pass and you will agree to producing an extension of yourself, a bridge to connect you both from the distance between the two of you. But that too will fail you. That distance that was always there but went ignored has become unbearable some nights you stay up and think about The One that brought so much chaos and anxiety to your life when all you wanted was to simply to go through the motions. You will think about The One that assured you that she knew, she just knew, that you deserve so much more. That you could be the moon the stars the sky or the universe if that’s what you wanted to be. But you coward away because she could see right through you. You felt so naked in front of her. The nights when the distance cannot be connected by the bridge, when the motions make you sick you will think of the day you broke The One’s heart, the way you sat motionless on her bed as she cried for you not to leave, to not give up on yourself and to hold on to the feeling of being alive, really alive and not just sick of the motions. You will remember the way her tiny brown eyes filled up with tears and the way the tears rolled down her cherub like cheeks as you sat there motionless sure that you had to flee that you were doing the right thing but before you could flee and hide tears rolled down your face. Stunned, you were stunned that this girl brought you to tears, tears that you had not shed in years. Embarrassed and defeated you stood up and walked away only saying this could be the biggest mistake of your life but you simply HAD to go, and you left. You left her there as she buried her face into her hands and wept. She, The One, she is the girl you think about. You wonder how she is doing what she is doing or if she thinks of you.

The elevator opened on the third floor and shaking I stepped out of it and began walking towards room 326. I stood in front of the white door marked 326 and heard only silence and a symphony of medical machines working around the clock. I stepped forwards and slowly opened the door. I saw nothing at first but as the room opened up to me I saw a small bulge facing away from the door slowly breathing as the sheets rose and fell to the rhythm of a breath. I stepped into the room and softly called out his name,

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  • Clark?

I waited nervously for him to answer but I he didn’t. What if he had died? What if I was too late and he had had complications and was now stiffly laid out on a morgue table as doctors worked with precision and speed to repossessed his organs as he had requested upon death. I began stopped myself before my imagination could take the best of me and called out his name once more.

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  • Clark?

I saw hi leg move and watched in horror as he turned over to look at me, goddamn those brown eyes! Those brown eyes that always looked lost and pathetic now looked sunken and even more distance puffy and glazed with a light pink. Pink? Had he been crying? He the man of steel cool and unwavering coldness?! This couldn’t be! That was not him but than again what had landed him here? This was out of his ordinary and everything about it was unorthodox of him. Clearly this was someone something I did not know didn’t wish to know but here I was. I was there standing in that room looking at his normally pail skin two shades whiter and his small frame two frames smaller delicate and exhuming death. Our eyes met and he just laid there looking at me, not being able to move the muscles in my jaws I said nothing.

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  • What are you doing here?

His weak voice floated towards me laden with embarrassment and anger. I looked down at the floor ashamed of his state, disgusted by his anger and weakness.

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  • They told me you were here.

Still I looked at the floor not wanting to look him in the eye afraid that he would see the anger in my eyes. I didn’t want him to see that I gave shit. Why had I come! Why did I make this stupid trip to see him when we hadn’t spoken in years. He continued to pierced me with his stare and asked again,

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  • Why did you come?

Angry I looked up and stared him right in the face. Fuck him! Let him see my anger and disgust towards him. I didn’t want him to think I pitied him, I didn’t want him to think that I was here to coddle him and tell him everything was going to be alright. I wasn’t going to make promising of things getting better. Why was I there? Did I want answers? Answers to what?

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  • I, I don’t know why I came.

Staring back at him I saw tears form in his eyes and I wanted to look away. I didn’t want to see him like this. I started to feel lightheaded and searched the room for a chair far away from him and saw one close to the door. I sat on the chair and looked at him but the tears that rolled down his face made it hard to look him in the face. I stared at my hands and asked him,

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  • Why, why did you do it?

I stumbled on my words and waited for him to answer but he sat there silent looking at me. The silence was suffocating me and before I knew it tears were rolling down my cheeks. I stood up and angrily shouted at him,

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  • Fuck you! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck you!

I darted up and grabbed the doorknob and in a pathetic shout he said,

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  • Don’t leave! Please don’t fucking leave!

I stopped turned around to look at him,

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  • Please don’t leave stay. Stay this time for me.

I felt my hear tighten and I stepped away from the door and sat back down on the chair and placed my head in my hands.

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  • Fuck you! Fuck you for dragging me here for making stay here. FUCK YOU!

  • I’m sorry, OK, I’m really fucking sorry but I didn’t ask you to come.

  • What was I suppose to do? I felt like I had to come like the only reason I was told that you were here was because I was supposed to come.

  • I didn’t ask anyone to come nor to tell you to come.

  • Well I’m fucking here so what now?! Why don’t YOU tell me WHY you are here than.

  • I don’t know I just am.

  • Seriously?! The age old answer to everything about you. I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know! What the fuck do you know?!

Raising his voice tears still rolling down his eyes he sat up on his bed,

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  • You want to know what I do know? I know that you fucking left. I came back and you left me for fucking good so I’m asking myself now why the fuck is she here. WHY!

  • Are you asking me why I came or why I left? I don’t know why I came but I can tell you why I left. You want to know why I left?! Fine I left because I needed to put a stop to your narcissistic bullshit. I wasn’t going to be your emotional crutch so you could wallow in your pain wile mine was too much for you to handle!

  • You left me in the end you left me.

  • Yes I fucking left you! OK I fucking left you but don’t you forget YOU LEFT ME FIRST! Remember! You fucking left up and fucking left. You left!

I stood by the chair angry yelling at you trying really hard not to walk up to you and just shake you and slap you. Why had I come why was I here defending myself from your abandonment. You were the one that left me and here I was facing accusations of abandonment from the abandoning.

I grabbed the door know twisted it and walked out and I could hear you shouting for me to come back but I wanted to leave to get out of there. I stopped at the elevator and I heard your screams fall silent and the guilt washed over me. I looked back towards your room and the guilt carried me back. I stood by the door of your hospital room and looked at you as you hopelessly stared back at me and with a painful whisper you said,

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  • Please don’t leave, come here.

As you signaled to a space on your bed next to you. I stood there fighting my disgust my shame and anger to give myself the courage to at least stand close to you. I walked over to your bed and stood there. The words you spoke slowly and grudgingly moved pass the thickness of the silence between us and slapped me across the face,

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  • I missed you.

That was all you said just I missed you and it was enough to bring a stinging sensation to my cheek. I looked at you stinging still and said,

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  • I don’t believe you.

  • I did, I missed you so much.

  • Please don’t do this.

  • Do what tell you I missed you? I know you missed me too why else would you be here?

  • I don’t know why I am here but it was not because I missed you or want anything from you. I just wanted an answer to my why. Why did you do it?

  • I don’t have ans answer to your why. I don’t even know why. The pointlessness maybe. The monotony of every day. I didn’t ask why I just did it.

I saw the sincerity in your eyes and I started to cry as anger kept washing over me in waves of memories with you. Those memories they were all mine your secrets were all mine. I compared your fake smiles and pleasant conversations with others to the happy and lively conversations you had with me. To them you were a small and unimportant to me you were monumental and imperfectly perfect. I looked at the tiny wreck of a man you had become and wondered why things happen. Why those things happened to you and I.

By now you built a little life with a little wife with a little baby with little hope of ever- ever feeling alive once more but you will go on. The motions will go on because they don’t stop until death. You will be husband father and grandfather vacant and lonely. Lonely always lonely, having realized that the bridge you created did not alleviate you of your uselessness. The years will pass and pass and your life will end just as you knew it should; alone. But still as you go you will think of The One and how she made you feel so alive and you wouldn’t know it but she lived and died living more than you will ever live and ever know. She lived and died living more than you know you never had but could have if you weren’t such a coward. If you weren’t such a fake. If you would have just never met her than you would not feel this way and all you want to do is run, run away but you are trapped, were trapped, you will forever be trapped inside of you.

I moved closer to you and laid down on your hospital bed and inhaled the sterile smell of cook country hospital seeping through you. I took your once big strong hand in mind and my heart tighten with love and my mind raced with logic. I watched as you hand shrank away from mine and your hospital gown wither without your body. I sat there crying as you climbed the mountains created by the bed sheet slowly making your way towards me tiny and fragile as naked as the day you were brought into this world. You were yelling something at me but I could hear you, I bent towards you and heard a faint,

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  • Take me with you

I laid back once more grasped the edge of your empty hospital gown trying to solve the puzzle of what we were together. I looked around to see if you were still there with me but if you were once you were no more. I stood to leave the room and walked out into the hallway towards the elevator when I felt a tight hug around my heart and a pinch in my nerves. The elevator doors open and I pushed the number one as tears rolled down my face and the feeling of falling from the elevator made me nauseous. As soon as the elevator door opened I ran towards the front door as I heard someone yelled after me not tot run and as soon as the big automatic glass doors swung open I ran towards the bus stop stopped cached my breath looked back at the hospital and all I could think was what a godawful place. What a godawful feeling. 

La Negra Tomasa

La Negra Tomasa

Around the corner where I used to live on 47^th and Rockwell there was a dollar store that was littered with cheap and tacky merchandised mimicking the televised necessities of the everyday consumer fad. There were imitation designer bags, porcelain dolls erect in stands that gripped their waist’s under their dresses, knock off toys with obscure names, tiny figurines of ballerinas saints elephants babies being carried by storks and the sad eyed monstrosities mimicking the ever woeful precious moments characters.

My mother was fixated with the precious moments knock of figurines and the eerily glassed eyed porcelain dolls dressed in old fashion dresses with tiny pursed lips and realistic looking eyelashes matching the color of their always long hair. Those dolls use to scare me and were the main reason why I never entered my parents bedroom, my mother had them all lined up in her dresser facing the night stand. There on top of the nightstand sat the main piece my mother was most proud of, a ceramic oversized crucified Jesus Christ looking warily at you as it bled suspended in its cross with its agonizing eyes demanding that you justify your actions to this man that died for you, you who he never met. The whole room was a damn nightmare but at least my fear of the bleeding Jesus was justified, there before me pitifully portrayed was someone in agony that was to inspire hope and faith- seriously? All it did was inspired me to want to remove the crown of thorns, pull out the callous nails, bring down the man from his cross and send him to an emergency room for doctors to take a look at those bleeding wounds. My father’s fear for my mother’s dolls were not as compassionate as mine but rather they stemmed from the conscious of the monster that he was. He hated those lifelike porcelain dolls and often complained about having them in his room but no doll scared him like La Negra Tomasa.

When we use to live in Back of the Yards by 45^th and Wood we used to walk to the nearby Goldblatts that was located in the corner of Ashland and 47^th street. Entering the first floor you found yourself facing a barricade of clothes hanging from steel racks and to your left rows upon rows of shoes for men women and children of recently fashionable models and colors. In the second floor every imaginable household commodity was thrown into large wire cages or tables overloaded with merchandise spread across the sales floor. The best part of the whole store however was the basement filled with toys upon toys. There were whole sections glowing pink modeling the latest appendage to motherhood and womanhood. Plastic stoves, babies that cried, plastic irons with their ironing board all screaming out THIS IS ALL FOR YOU LITTLE GIRL! And then there were the sections glowing blue with tools and cars and action figures displaying the props necessary for induction into the Cult of Manhood, where masculinity reigned on your boyhood.

There, in the basement of Goldblatts amongst the piles of toys, my mother found La Negra Tomasa leaning up against the wall in a pink box. Inside the pink box stood a chubby round face black doll with green eyes in a pink floral dress. My mother looked at the doll and her dark brown skin and fell in love with it. She later nicknamed the doll La Negra Tomasa or the Negress Tom after the song Negro Tomas from the Cuban singing sensation Celia Cruz, a song about Toma’s liberation from slavery and his refusal to work in the plantation anymore. Ironically enough, that was the extend of my mothers likeness for the black masses. She grew up in a small town in Mexico and had never truly seen a black person, when she migrated to Chicago she was told the horror stories of other Mexicans and their encounter with the black community. Now, Back of the Yards has always been a poor neighborhood with a big problem with gangs and crime. It was no surprise to hear embellished horror stories about being robbed by a black man or mean mugged by a black woman. Those stories embellished with generalizations prayed on my parents ignorance and made them just as bigoted as some white American who in retrospect hated Mexicans just as much. Yet, in Back of the Yards, being robbed by a Mexican was much more common but never once did my father take it upon himself to demean our whole race, como they were simply misguided paisas, well sometimes, other times he railed against the Mexican gangsters calling them good for nothing and blaming them for being Mexican-Americans and not REAL Mexicans with morals.

Regardless of their ignorance, my mother bought La Negra Tomasa and cared for her like if it was her own child. She bought her clothes and talked to her as if she was a real child and never EVER let anyone touch it. I was always scared of dolls so it was not hard for me to stay away from La Negra Tomasa but my father on the other hand DETESTED the doll. On the days he used to come home drunk and stumbling on himself he used to fear going into the bedroom him and my mother shared because he thought the doll followed him with its eyes and it didn’t like him.

When my dad told my siblings and I about La Negra Tomasa’s judging eyes I looked at him with big scared eyes and as the beating of my heart increased I believed him wholeheartedly, how could I not?! I had witness with my own two eyes the same evil doings of a bewitched doll last Halloween! Despite my mothers warnings, I spend the previous Halloween glued to the television watching Vacaciones de Terror an old horror film from Mexico starring Pedro Fernandez and Lucero, my two favorite Mexican singing sensations when I was just a snot nosed little girl. So in love I was with them that I begged my mother to let me watch the movie despite that it was a horror film. My mother gave in and my siblings and I sat in the couch with a cover over us and the lights off enthralled with the movie. With my hands raised to my face ready to cover my eyes, I sat and watched the whole movie despite that I was scared shitless, I didnt want to walk away from the movie if I did my siblings would have branded me a baby and THAT would have been worse than having the shit scared out of me. The whole basis of the movie was ridicolous now that I think about it. In the movie a little girl finds an evil doll at the bottom of a well and every time the doll would move its eyes bad things would happen. After watching that movie and the Spanish dubbed reruns of Child’s Play (ironically filmed here in Chicago) I was convinced that my dolls could come alive and that same night I placed all of them outside the bedroom door of the room I shared with all my siblings.

I was so scared and so convinced that dolls could come alive, I didn’t doubt for a moment that La Negra Tomasa had it in for my dad when in fact it was he who had it out for La Negra Tomasa. My dad hated black people but ESPECIALLY black men, one night while walking home completely drunk he got mugged by two black men. Now, here was a man that had never commiserated with a black person in his life despite the fact that chicago has one of the largest black population but that mugging served as the focal point of his bigotry. After the mugging he became a pseudo anthropologist and SWORE that they were all alike. He went on rants were the word mayate (a derogatory term equal to the word nigger) was littered everywhere. It was always Esos mayates no sirven para nada (Those damn niggers are worthless) and Pinche mayates son unos puercos (Fucking niggers are a bunch of pigs). When I was young I didn’t understand what the word mayate meant nor that it had such a horrible meaning. Now that I am much older, I cringe every time I remember him saying such horrible things, especially because it was him; an alcoholic abusive manipulative human being passing judgment as if he was righteously entitled! No wonder La Negra Tomasa followed him with her eyes, haunting him. I would have wanted to scare the shit out him too but neither La Negra Tomasa nor I could have accomplished that better than his conscious seeing that it was his conscious that was haunting him.