Later, as I got to that age where you desperately want to fit in, I hid my mother. And our poverty. Our cold rooms. I hid my parents' struggle with their trauma and mental illnesses brought upon them by the Second World War. My fire was banked and my creative expression which I inherited from her and also from my father --- but that's another story – lived quietly in me like coals. Dark and hot and unseen. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I read. Quietly. Voraciously. Silent on the rubber soles of my tennis shoes I made my way across the cool linoleum of the local library. Studied the shelves, the titles, choosing almost by intuition what books I would read next. Three, four a week. I had no guidance. Except my mother did encourage me to read Jane Eyre. And I found the hardcover on the shelves of the Children's section and it pulled me, its thick pages, its blunted corners, its heft. I didn't understand everything. The sentences were often a mystery. I was ten. I persevered.
I felt powerless as a child to the difficult circumstances of my family life. So, I stoked what mattered to me in words. I shoved the spoken word deep inside me, though I loved to sing. I sang in Chorus. But often didn't anywhere else, though I could hear the melodies, the layers, the harmonies in my head. They'd travel through my finger tips as I lifted my hands sculpting the music silently in the air when I was by myself at home. Eventually I learned to dance. No. I already knew how to dance. Just like it seemed I already knew how to read by the time I got to school. And I knew how to sing. These mysteries unfolded quickly. And I thought for me, maybe this side of life could be easier. These gifts had raised me in the eyes of those who were watching. But you come in with deficits to balance what may be extraordinary in you. I longed to be well-rounded. Later, and at a cost, I found that was just another term for mediocrity and a tamping down of vitality. The road to a kind of purgatory often labeled depression.
Well-rounded meant you could speak a smattering on many subjects and be comfortable in all kinds of company and not stick out. Which kept you safe. Well-rounded meant you had white straight teeth and an easy expression. Comfortable in your skin. Well-rounded meant a balanced kind of limited power. But that is not the kind of power I have. The scales weigh heavy on one side and if you ever think they do not, then I have fooled you.
I wonder if within my black coals of heat and fire, if there is a diamond yielded yet from that weight, that pressure. For a long time I did not know this is what could happen with the progression of time and evolution. We live at the speed of 67,000 miles per hour around the sun. It is this dance with the sun and this struggle with gravity that keeps us alive. I am the balance of trauma and healing, gifts and deficits, shame and love. The balance of a human being who lives with immense gravity and tremendous speed. My power is in the tension of the bow that pulls and pulls and pulls so far back into the shadows – stockpiling velocity, aiming for the light.
© 2022 Lisa Marguerite Mora
