Entry 5 – Of the Coming Storm

I don’t remember much about the old war, I was only ten at the time. All I remember is the way it felt right before it happened. We were living in a small house with several other families and not nearly enough room, but we had a TV. There was a constant tension in every program and people started talking in absolutes that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The US had it out for immigrants long before the war, but it went from a government problem to a civil one. The government action was just as much to stop people from acting as to contain the immigrant problem. But that tension, I feel it coming back. Even Esau is becoming more bold, a hard feat to accomplish if you are the leader of the free black world.

My therapist, seeing that I am “slacking” in my entries has given me another assignment. Usually, I would feel like slitting his throat for this kind of patronizing bullshit. However, the question he posed has really had me thinking for hours now. I had planned on waiting until the morning to post it, but I’m having trouble thinking about anything else. What he asked was simple enough:

Where do you see yourself in twenty years?

The only answer I can come up with is dead. I see myself dead. Buried in a military cemetery with a statue praising me as Esau’s daughter and a Commander in his great army. I can only imagine there will be no flowers there, as there will likely be no one left to mourn me. Esau may still be here, but I doubt he will visit my grave unless he makes a show of doing so once a year as he does Kali’s, but I am not so ignorant of his disdain for me to think that is a probability. As for Safi, my adopted mother, I don’t think she will live that long either. The only people that will leave are my jilted ex-lovers and bitter ex-soldiers. They may come to the burial itself out of a sense of duty, but I doubt they will bring flowers.

I’m not sure if I’m sad or not. There is no one I care enough about to hope they are there and a military death is how I want to go. If I can’t go down on the field, I’d have to kill myself. The last thing I’d want is to die in my bed in a loveless marriage or paralyzed from too many battle wounds.

What else is there for a woman like myself? No, I think death is all there is. I can’t even get a picture of myself at forty years old. I guess I’d better get my fighting and fucking in while I still can huh? There’re still a lot of poor repressed girls out there to corrupt before the end.

Like I said before, I think the battle’s coming soon. I can’t see myself living through to the other end.

Entry 4

Apparently, I'm finally taking this seriously enough. My psychiatrist was very impressed by my last post in its "honesty" and "raw emotion". He says I should try and bring more of that to my journal and that only through that process can I truly work out my "problems". I then shared with him the raw emotion I was having at the time. He didn't seem as bothered as I thought he would be at the image of my scooping out his eyeballs and feeding them to him. I think he's been threatened before.

So, today I am supposed to write about my father. Not Esau, who is my adopted father, but my real father. I don't know exactly what he wants me to say, but I have to start somewhere.

My father was a scumbag. He was a thief, a liar, and a con-man. After I was born and he was forced to marry my mother, he had the bright idea that America was the land of opportunity. He made my mother pack up and leave her life in Port-au-Prince to enter the states illegally. At that point, the fires in the west were at their worst and with all the people fleeing from the Midwest he was sure that no one would ever know that we weren't locals.

I suppose it worked for a few years, until they started rounding up all the immigrants and putting them into camps. That camp in Florida was the last place I saw him. I figure he died with the rest of them, not that he ever meant anything to me. His last great act as my father was to sell my mother to the guards for extra rations.

Do I hate my father? Yes, but not nearly as much as I hate my mother. That man at least gave me something useful, the skill of survival. Had death come for him in any other form, he would have dodged it no doubt. Meanwhile, my mother was one of those helpless wives that just let herself and her daughter get dragged into the abyss.

Entry 3

You want to see some fucking anger, I'll show you fucking anger. I'm and sick and fucking tired of people assuming that the fact that I'm angry has something to do with the fact that I'm a lesbian.

I like women, love them, have since middle school and that is that. I'm a lesbian because I like women. That's how that works. Suddenly some asshole wants to call me a "bulldyke" behind my back because I make him do laps. If he had the intelligence to do what he was supposed to in the first goddamn place he wouldn't be running laps. The fact that I then have to discipline him for fucking around has absolutely nothing to do with whether I like dick or pussy. I'm tired of it.

Yes, I broke his fucking arm, serves the son of a bitch right.

Of course that earned me a second trip for the week to the psychiatrist, who naturally noted that I hadn't written in my journal the night before, so that must be why I had so much pent up frustration. Yeah, that must be it. It's not the fact that the motherfucker was talking about me, he superior officer, behind my back. It's not that somehow when people know you're gay they think that's grounds to disrespect you. It certainly has nothing to do with being an orphan since I was six years old who got to watch my mother raped in front of me. NO IT'S CLEARLY BECAUSE I DIDN'T WRITE IN MY FUCKING JOURNAL.

Doctor, I know you're reading this. Don't you sleep too fucking deep tonight, cause one of these nights I'm going to come into your house while you're asleep and I'm going to slit your fucking throat. Did you lock your door when you came in tonight? Better go check again.

Fuck it, I'm going to the gym.