Best Last Days

Jun. 8th, 2025 08:15 pm
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[personal profile] michaelboy
I remember looking at my dad and thinking how strong he was. In the summers, he smelled like sweat, work, sawdust and paint.



So many years later in a geriatric chair and in his loneliness, I remembered him the same.

Near the end of his life, after several debilitating strokes, I had brought him home from the VA hospital for an afternoon. It was raining that day and the front yard was mushy. After our visit, I pushed him in his wheelchair across the yard and out to the car when one of the front wheels of the chair dove into the soggy ground. Down he went and I fell over and into the mud with him. For a moment, I thought he might have been injured and was worried. We paused there for a few seconds and said nothing.

We then we started to laugh in our wet muddy mess. I was so happy that he was able to enjoy something and I couldn't have loved him more at that moment. This was our best last day together.



This was the last painting he ever created. Even with all those unfinished strokes and odd colors that had changed him and his expressions substantially, he was still mountain strong to me.

femininity

Jun. 2nd, 2025 10:27 pm
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[personal profile] essexcats
for long i'd seen it as cage, as curse. i hid away and covered myself. i expressed it as blood, i expressed it as rage, sadness, bile, tragedy. the fear of knowing i'm less, i'm fragile, i'm not me but woman. i feared that for so long. sometimes i still do.

but something has shifted along the way. i'd always found beauty in tragedy, ruins, in shadows. why would it be any different, then? like a web of shared wordly experiences, through each woman that came in contact with me through their elaborate art of mere existance, an imprint was made into my soul, my identity, what i've always felt i was or was not; it reconnected me. it healed me.

pj harvey. patti smith. ana mendieta. jun togawa. trish keenan. dadá and maria bonita. rita lee. cecelia condit. kim gordon. keri smith. clarice lispector. coralie fargaet. miki berenyi. nise.

beautiful, or disturbing, or both. making their own worlds through art, bravery, intelligence. being seen and heard in their full femininity, about feminine experiences, about feminine subjects, feminine horrors. making of it as they can, just like me.

i take my mother's arm walking with her on the street and realise how much more i've grown to appreciate her. her talent for homekeeping, for being so elegant, for dealing with others, for decorating. feminine things i paid no mind to because i thought the intelligent one was my father with his serious programming job, with his maths. i did not see her.

i hold her arm and think of my grandmother and the two times she put her alcoholic husbands out of the house, the violence she endured from the first one, the single migrant mother she became, her work as a maid in a foreign state. her resolve, grumpiness and bravery despite it all, her armor, her grandchildren who survived her. i did not see her. but now i do. she is a femininity i internalize as tragic, incredible, moving, beautiful, painful, everything, everything - femininity is as bittersweet as life. it's why it's so beautiful.

i've ceased fearing my dresses, my small hands, my tightly sillouetted tops, my tiny figure - what once has made me feel exposed and fragile now brings me the confidence i could once only achieve when i wore an armor of masculinity. no longer. i can feel as confident in skirts as i do in long shorts. as confident in makeup as without it. my gender does not define my worth.

publicly i've struggled with my femininity. i brought so many others in my journey of discovering how to navigate something so darkly complicated, so weird and painful at times. i've grown into it, around it, under its spell, and i've emerged within it as a reclaimed asset of my life i've denied for so long because i thought it meant a label that signaled to others that violence against me was okay. i never thought of it as strength. but now i think that enduring said violence is precisely what turns it into strength.

i love femininity, and i make it be my own. no one will ever get to declare what it means but me.
it's mine, and mine alone. and it not define me - it will mirror me.
michaelboy: (Default)
[personal profile] michaelboy
Water in a plastic cup - sensible and obedient knowing such acquiescence in rigid form or in the color of earth - yielding and forgiving - remembering its supplication to the potter's hand.

All those pieces that scatter to the floor
you scramble to pick them up while knowing
that many are simply unrecognizable shards
(pottery from some long-forgotten civilization)
It is difficult to know to which plate or cup they belong and even if you did figure it out would you know how to reassemble them?

* * *


My dad made this pot when I was young and it is one of my favorites. He made it for my teacher who made us fried tortilla chips and salsa...long before they were ever sold in bags and jars. I loved them so much she made me my own special batch. She passed away several years ago and her daughter gave the pot to me.




* * *

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