park blvd.
May 30, 2010
this part of oakland is heavy with memory. to drive down a street my legs have walked a thousand times, ten years imprinted in sidewalk concrete, strange. an outsider in a former home, does it ever matter when we return? the laundromat where one lover and i washed our clothes, the diner by the lake with its famous fried chicken and two kitchens–one for those who can afford to sit down and tip a waitress, the other for those who can’t. dilapidated roadways, their potholes wide enough to swim in, the cafe where i spent hours perfecting my students’ papers with them after long days of classroom teaching. the exhaustion, exhilaration. the years that march by as days gather to form a single energy.
the freeway exit where my sister took her own life last year, park boulevard. i passed it feeling that maybe it didn’t happen. is my body, my soul, capable of such massive forgetting? she returns to me when i cross solano avenue in albany, a place we never walked together. a haze of rage and disbelief shields me from that indescribable death. the truth descends with the gravity of saturn and earth combined, a leaden, muddy burden. before i can realize that i have abandoned my body for a moment while i grieve, i am eating baba ganoush, the meal we shared most often. too much tahini, so much i can hardly taste the eggplant. lemonade speckled with pulverized mint leaves, their aroma purging the pain of remembering.
there is something inescapable about writing, unpredictable as to what words will write themselves next. like memory, a string unbroken by its very brokenness, the pieces of a shattered window, unified in their defiance of unity. the heart is bruised and bent in a rhythm of an ordered disorder, crumbs of past and future bleeding the present of its seeming certainty and wholeness. the body responds to signs cemented into the landscape: a brick wall, patch of grass, the coroner’s office, a stop sign emblazoned with letters of a secret alphabet. what remains is the movement between static elements, wind forcing apart the branches of a tree, buildings in ruin, fresh flowers thrust into a vase in the center of chaos.
© 2010 tahminah zaman
