My first chosen project was a journal, jotted alternatively with love notes and signatures of civil war. I lay below my emerald awning in the evenings (a dense Dorothy), entertainting, articulating, escaping inside to Lebanon. When I open my books today, they overflow with love, the littlest of notes and flat photographs begging the bored blue of his eyes. I know I chose because of him; and while embarassed, it was my youth, it was my doorway into this messy, bloody, broken world. My own edgy rabbit hole.
So here in the world of Alice, of unlikely love, I transfer myself back to such a sordid time, of tough tears for those I did not know, short shock of peppermint sweets, curdled sweats, the swollen crest of Kosovo in flight. I loved him them, suddenly, certainly and drew the lines of my life around his fierce, if wounded, frame. In him I solidified my passion, kicked up the dirt of his road with frozen toes, shook with tiny teacups in my palms, the spitting fire of boiled coffee and grand, if ghoulish, graffitied walls.
And then to Bosnia. Expecting, entertaining a future fled to in crumbled Sarajevo that crumbled crookedly and at cost.
Today, wandering still in this limitless loss, I am also building on love...if now legacy. I am engaging, making my way back to the world my father lighted, my father loved. In a way, I believe he is there, dsplaced, floating, fishing on his freckled back. Maybe he will find me in that south, because here he cannot be harkened. I hear only his hearty echo and his remorse at over-cooked meat. I see his pride, melting from his pores, a salted ham or sturdy sea bass laughing at his toes.
If I was in Oz or akin to magic queens; if I found a genie or was more of a superhero than adorned in Superman roos, I would grow no bigger or smaller; I would not ask for another heart.
I would wish him back.
And so for him I will go, meld my imagination and mystic in one; be mighty, if I must, but always un-whole. I will speak in his jagged drawl, just enough so that when I un-close my eyes I accept some part of this, however small, as mine. That I re-recognise hurt as healing, that I am again both helpless and hearty in loving. That I find my way back, if crookedly, if severely imperfect, to the same hard-footed child, to the flight of fairytales, to my father.
