Shade Her

Chord

I was born a day late following an 18 hour labor, a poignant premonition of a hesitant attitude prone to agonizing and procrastinating yet to develop in my psyche. By the time I came along my parents had been married for five years, my young mother’s tubes were blocked and she had had to undergo various procedures before she could conceive. It eventually happened only a few months after the death of my great grandmother on my Italian side, Nona. This poetic piece of information which spoke of death and re-birth acquired a precious place in my heart. I believed that it gave me a special connection to that which came before me, a supernatural umbilical chord uniting me directly with her and, with my ancestry. 

As I grew, this magical chord quietly coiled its way around and within me, weaving worry and weariness into my developing wisdoms of the world. With a snide snaking strength it squeezed my small organs as if intent on abstracting any lingering of purity or free will. A serpent-like keeper of all things past (and therefore to come) it swallowed me into moments and lifetimes cut with sadness and self loathing. Building a dark inner landscape in which the slightest sense of self lay violently obscured by innate repressed anger. 

Today as an adult I find myself naturally at the forefront of the ancestral lines, enquiring. I look back with untamed black eyes, like those of a heretic compelled to dismantle the archaic and accepted workings of an internal cellular landscape transmitted to me chronically on compulsory and instinctive levels.