10:01 am

10:01 am

I woke up in a pool of ache and tears. Last night, my dream.

I was in Bordeaux. I shuffled around cobblestone in flowing dresses with orange aura and swole. “I’m pregnant” I tell everyone. Look at me! A cellular orchard. A fortress. A promise. A tradition!

The women, les sage femmes, were a constellation of mothers and doulas with blushed cheeks and untame hair and pale linen and wore twisted seaweed sandals. You know, I can remember their smell? Like salt and dust and dew and rosemary.

“Tu es prêt, tu es fort, regarde!” and they sang folk songs and stacked wild herbs on my belly and rubbed oil on my feet and layered bises across my forehead and poured wine on my crotch. An invokation?

They did ceremonies petitioning serpents and venus.

I asked one of them: “Je sais que c'est une fille parce que je sens qu'une partie de mon âme devient elle. Il se brise. Quand elle quittera mon corps, vais-je me sentir moins ou plus soul?”

“Plus! Plus! Plus! Plus” and they laughed, “Sinon comment?”

And then I drank two bottles of wine, fell asleep. Woke up with blood on my knees and thighs and feet.

“Where’s my baby?” And the women, unrelenting my presence, didn’t answer me.

I felt like my soul was less and less and less. Deficient. As if its Knowing, its vision, and its potence was fractured; missing a retina. Anorexic.

“Le bébé est né. Quoi de plus? Vous n'avez pas vu cette montagne à l'ouest. Vous devez le voir d'abord. Avant de voir le bébé. Et puis la mer. Il faut d'abord voir la mer. Et puis vous devez voler en Algérie. Et puis vous devez récolter cotten. Faire du parfum. Enrôler dans l'armée. Couper un membre. Mangez un lapin. Vous n'avez aucune compréhension des mécanismes du monde. Une mère doit tout voir. Tu vois ce qui te bouge. Vous êtes l'émotion. Vous devez avoir une vision viscérale. Pas subconscient. Une mère doit apprendre à manger de la saleté pour chaque repas," is what they told me.

They drug me through swamps and temples and graveyards and bars and forests and Syria and alleys and the whole time I felt internally rotted and incinerated and undone.

“L-O-L-A” I kept saying.

her name is “L-O-L-Aaahhh”

And I cried and cried and cried this morning. I can’t find Lola and the world is a lucid samsara.