Be Thankful For Healing Words In Spite Of Your Trauma.
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To my heart and my stomach and my guts,
To my diaphragm and my lungs and the peritoneal fluid that surrounds my intestines,
To my liver and my kidneys and my spleen,
To the unborn children nestled in my ovaries,
and to my sternum and the skin that stretches across my belly,
To my vertebrae and the nervous highway of my body,
To the scars on my face and the steel-enforced bones in my hands:
I feel your fear.
I feel the fear grip around your muscles and in the very DNA of your cellular structure.
I feel the fear that encloses around you when you drive past the scene of an accident and witness the once living — now dead — body of a person you never knew who was killed by someone they never knew.
And I see you ask yourself what that person felt when the impact of a fast-moving vehicle hurled their body across the road.
And I hear your fear wondering whether that person experienced agonizing pain in their last moment as they bled out on the black tar while the car sped away.
And I feel you hoping that they were blessed with your own experience of blissful mindlessness overridden by your body’s chemistry, where adrenaline and epinephrine combine to sustain you in situations that could pose imminent danger to your well-being, and wash you in a cloud of peace and calm understanding despite the mile-and-a-half-a-minute race your mind constructs, and the stunned failing to understand how the fuck this actually happened to you.
You never expected this.
This wasn’t part of the plans for today,
or tomorrow that will never come for the guy lying in the highway under a black plastic body-bag with the police rerouting the Friday night party traffic.
And I smell your fear like dried blood caked in your hair and on your skin and the meat of your flesh that has been ripped open by god-knows-what.
And I taste the fear inside your mouth like metal and dehydration and resignation.
The trauma embraces you like the clouds on table mountain and your silent screams howl blooming bleeding orchids from your navel.
And your pain remembers the words of the taxi driver that stabbed into your sensitive soul when he vomited his violence —
or is it his own fear and pain and trauma? —
onto you and said ‘dan lyk sy nog soos ‘n poes ook‘.
Because despite the general assumption that you are a hardcore chick,
because of the scribbles in your skin and the glint of gold in your nostril, you are rather sensitive everything in the world around you,
and you are often overwhelmed by the immensity of the empathy that you feel even for the taxi driver.
The empathy flows in your core and drip-drip-drips you memories of your own trauma and fear and pain until you can barely breathe, because the object of your empathy has become indistinguishable from yourself.
And you remember learning as a young one that words can kill and indeed make more powerful weapons than swords or motor cars.
And you think of the bone-crunching, skin-splitting impact of the words of the taxi driver as his sentence sent you flying across the road while he sped off into the distance.
And you think of how many times you were stabbed by words of others.
And you think of how many times you stabbed others with your words.
And you think of how many times you stabbed yourself by your own words.
And you realize that you would never be your own friend if you spoke to yourself the way you sometimes do when you drive over your soul with a truck full of horrible words.
And you realize that you would never tolerate your lover and companion killing you with their words the way you kill yourself every other day.
And you think of the person lying in the road dying from the impact of the vehicle that sped away in its own fear and pain,
and you weep even though you know that the simple act or ‘un-act’ of being born is already a privilege.
And just like the soft flesh of the body, the strong but fragile bones of your soul is even more likely to get killed by reckless and mindless constructs of word and steel with sharp edges and blunt misdirection.
I see your pain and your fear and it is all the same.
And you are thankful that there are healing words too, like these:
To my heart and my stomach and my guts,
To my diaphragm and my lungs and the peritoneal fluid that surrounds my intestines,
To my liver and my kidneys and my spleen,
To the unborn children nestled in my ovaries,
And my sternum and the skin that stretches across my belly,
To my vertebrae and the nervous highway of my body,
To the scars on my face and the steel-enforced bones in my hands:
You are so beautiful,
You are so talented,
You carry within you the potential to give birth to dancing stars
Because of the chaos that you carry, not despite…
You are so kind and compassionate,
You are so strong,
You are so beautiful.
*****
Estè Kira is a multi-discipline artist without enough discipline. She is a performer, anarchist, drag queen, hedonist at times, introvert, muse to some, freak… mostly… film-industry slave and lover, writer, screecher, howler, hook addict, collector of all things obscure, exquisite and macabre… tattooed, scarred, and on a journey through the wilderness. She earns her bread and butter decorating movie sets, while she feeds her soul on extravagant self-expression, limitless freedom from judgment and fear-denying self-awareness. She is an artist of life and seeks to inspire others to shake the shackles of social conventions and embrace the truth of themselves. She is scared of tea-bags in the sink and is currently obsessed with the music of The Knife.
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