Tale of a Sad Woman

Call me sad. What is a face anyway but you don't see my face anyway. I am calling you to call me sad because it's ended all wrong when it began all right. I know. It was my father who use to cry out my name when I was younger and when I ran to him he wanted me to fix him coffee or get my little dog from his favorite chair. This dog was a mutt and would scratch its belly on the carpet floor and yelp and run wild on the lawn until it disappeared one day. Was that my fathers voice? How can my father speak whose been so dead for so long and yet I hear him, one of the hallucinating properties of sadness I imagine.

Did I say call me sad? I will do it before you- that is one advantage I have. I have known happiness several times. Embraced it or thought it in my mind but I forget the substantial, the content of those occurrences. Only a paradigm remains like the proverbial cloud and its colored whitish-grey.

Stay. You want to know the occurrences so that you can measure them among your own occurrences and so decide whether to live or die I suppose or at least know if you should be sad in relation to your occurrences or any such thing- lord only knows.

I will make up a story. Call myself a Queen rather than sad and wear white dresses on the avenue and take each bow as it comes- no, my intelligence is too proletarian really, for royalty.

I have been freed from all that. Let me see if I remember there was oh, a ten by ten cage full of dirty volumes and whispers from an old blue parrot sleeping on the perch and after spending at least a week in trying to get the parrot to speak, at least, a man comes along and said I was free, wake up, so I pushed the cage door open and stepped out.

I was startled by the speed of the man as he walked away from the cage down a hallway with startling speed. If I had known the mans name I would have asked him if he was running but not knowing the mans name or the word running

I was caught up in the mystery of his speed and the curious way he moved his legs like slow pistons in an engine. I know about running, pistons, engines, and cages now. For when I was on my own I made it a point to know everything I could. This was an imperative of the heart and eye.

Does it seem curious that a woman of this age would desire to know everything I mean if the opportunity presented itself? It is a quandary, especially someone untutored as myself, to know where to begin much less to know everything so I took myself out of the dark room lived in and took a glance around at the motion of the world I happened to inhabit which I have since found out has lights which don't control traffic too well and stores and bars and housing where everyone lives and various services to help a poor body get along.

But most especially it has automobiles! I have analyzed this. This particular attraction to automobiles, especially by my own sex and men who are possessed by my sex. I can not tell it really so I will describe a scene one of the first which I remember. A simple scene and convenient since the street was empty and a thin man, a bit older than myself, walked across my point of vision.

And as he trudged along I tried to get his attention by yelling to him since this man was attractive and I had thought at some time I would get married - if had a sound to it which pout a menacing growl in my heart----and this fellow looked as fine a partner as any. I could imagine all kinds of attitudes developed between us, exchanged and then melted away by our passion.

I did not want to mention that word because I had heard it in the cage being whispered to me but I couldn't quite tell if it was passion or prison or passenger- no- perhaps it was a mocking whimper by the parrot after all. Despite this I had dreams and saw myself for so long among green-red cottages and the sea in various postures of love which were utterly spontaneous I swear though I have learned to name these images by reading manuals and old letters my father use to write to my mother. I think they loved each other. I saw them kiss once after they had come home from work. But these letters are full of filth if I can use this word without feeling laughter we've come such a long way only to turn our fine brains into a little palm of filth but no more judgements since I 've been tutored by the world I won't begrudge it one item of its advanced decisions.

I've tried to escape my sex but I find the generalization of the female mind which inherited mock the fine points of life which is better deciphered under the increments of the male brain such as it exists.

The man I desired kept walking and suddenly a big fine automobile rolled and positioned itself with authority between myself and the man of my dreams on the other side of the street. I was annoyed at this but then a creeping realization dawned on me followed by a fulsome sound and great speed and this poor fool kept doddering down the street dreaming no doubt of the time when he is elected President. Why be President when you can drive to the ocean or mountains? I didn't ask that at the time it's only a passing thought now but it makes sense.

They did not tell me when you made sex with a man that all the while he was stealing your dreams and was going to use these dreams against you. I got so complicated. But that was no ones fault but my own since the outer world had the prod at my back all the while making me to sex with as many men as possible for whatever reason the outer world has and however it reaches its conclusions. Call it freedom.

That's what one the boys called it. Wicked, wicked boy but fun too. My dispassionate self that pulls away from everyone and judges the way it does out of my control but with my voice kept telling me this boy was no good, that he was a brown leaf or some such thing as that but I kept going back to him and once he stood me up and he too stood up and with his hand he drew a line between us and said that I was I and he was he and that whatever transpired between us was between us and we were complete as we were and he upbraided me for a false conscience and then vaguely waved his arm toward the window saying that no one was looking and that there were a thousand protections and safeguards against many wrong things. Wrong things I cried out. Wrong things! What wrong things and he began to tell me his life which was an invented life but he made it sound adventuresome. He had come from Florida seeking an education and would become a famous lawyer but I didn't believe one world of it because he had become the fifth man I had sexed with since my release and they had all told me similar stories and each had progressed a bit since I sexed with him and could observe this progress and saw it was no good. An automobile or any fine machine doesn't lie like the men I sexed with, they do break down, the men simply move on.

I may sound disillusioned because I am writing after the fact now that they are all gone and I am alone sitting by the kitchen sink being wistful in this chair I made with the tools I bought. No, there were happier times. When I felt fully in love I would nearly run everywhere I went or it felt like running my heart and skin out in front of me as it were.

Yes- there was the times at the ocean when we took a basket of things and sat in front of the waves and made a fire and he was trying to do things I discouraged him from doing I thought he was such a dreamer. Dream on, dream on I thought to myself as he tried to do the things he tried to do.

And when the sun set I told him to watch for the green flash at the moment the sun intersected the horizon and yet that day it occurred which I had read about in science books- that the sun turns green and goes a moment in a flash all green before sinking away so quickly as it does. And we drank wine to the great green flash and he said he was beginning to like California.

I like to remember the happier times because now that I am experienced I can lift them in my mind and let them settle there for longer periods of time than they actually occurred.

Too, there was the time I drove alone to the top of Grizzly Peak at night and parked along the turnout and looked at all the lights moving like a golden chain through the darkness and imagining every bit of life indoors and out and how it all added up to something. I knew something of history at the time and the knowledge dismantled the lights and made it pure again with rabbits, Indians, trees and trees all the way to the green bay and the immigration which came in several waves when gold was discovered and the ships came and men and women until the area was self-sufficient from the ground up built up on the soil and red bones. It was pleasurable for the sense of destiny it gave to my small identity. Not being religious it gave something to wrap myself in. I'm always stretched beyond myself by power which is an admission one makes when they are sad. How can I talk about these things without the least bit of dramatization? If only I had energy left I would dance across your table and play out the windings of my spirit. I am free of priests and psychologists. So I confess, eh? I have known worse women than myself who will never confess so I accept my gibberings as a sacrifice. And women too- worse than myself- who gloat in their petty sins as if they're getting by with something won't they find out too late?

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