A True Stream of Consciousness By Mel Benedichuk
This is a true stream of consciousness. We’re on the verge of greatness or total human disaster. This is a true stream of consciousness. More like a message recorded using a pink Nokia flip phone to those who will come after me. They won’t care about the contents of this message or the one who left it behind -- me. A universe and a speck of dust, everything and nothing, creation and destruction, life and death. I live and I die. You live and you die. Do you fancy dying together? Hand in hand, or just on the same (preselected) day? Never mind. Come as you please. The outcomes are unpredictable. This is a true stream of consciousness. Despairing/pedantic/disorderly/ reckless it is not, it’s none of these things. This is a stream of consciousness, a stream by definition, it flows and so I no longer think. But consciousness! It’s there. Like a curse or a scar, the stains of an ugly snail, the nail polish I spilt and never washed off, brain almost splattered all over the bathroom floor, hoping it would cease to do the very thing it was created to do -- THINK! When I was born, I used to know how to cry. All babies cry when they are born because somewhere deep inside they know that they would’ve been better off chilling together on the thick branches of their heavenly lemon tree, in their celestial crystal castle, or in their shithole of a pub in paradise. No boundaries, no divisions, all unashamed, naked, genderless, and ultimately -- happy. What was ‘happy’ supposed to mean back then? When I was born, I used to know how to cry. I must’ve inherited tears from my mother, for she’d cry every time she feared I wouldn’t be born and then every time she wished I wasn’t her daughter. I had one fear - the fear of love misplaced and love withdrawn. What is love? I’d ask page ten of a magazine for girls (next to where it says ‘How to Find Your Perfect Boyfriend’) or maybe the reverse of a bubble gum wrapper reading ‘Love is…’ Apparently, love is two people kissing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mom and Dad kiss. My mom has a tangerine for a heart. The glossy orange skin helped keep its precious contents locked away from the world, safely secured. Daughters must inherit sadness from their mothers. My mom’s tangerine heart was perfectly sealed off, all before the surrounding world let its tender insides be touched by dirty fingers, tearing apart whatever it holds, scattering the orange flesh much like a lion would tear up the remaining meat of a freshly slaughtered antelope. Once just a baby girl, she was taught that happiness is sacrificing yourself for the sake of others’ happiness. A true woman’s joy, they’d say. That was the first breach in the tangerine skin, juice slowly trickling away from the wounds carved out with so much tenderness by the hands and tongues of those who seemed to always know better. “You’ll understand when your first child starts kicking inside your womb,” they’d say. You’ll also understand when you can no longer sleep at night because of baby screams on top of anxious insomnia, and when your husband tells you that this exhaustion is what you’ve always wanted. Mom rarely lamented what they did to her poor little heart -- she only did sometimes, when we’d sit alone in the kitchen finishing up our last couple glasses of wine, remembering that we still needed to (hand) wash all of the dishes. I have a tangerine heart just like her. Glossy skin to keep the insides away from the world.
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