Last night, I
woke up inside my dream while I was sleeping, I woke up in a life I lived
before, in the past or in the future I do not know, in dreams there is no time. Still this was no ordinary dream and I knew it was what people call a past
life.
I was a small girl looking out the doorway of my family’s mud hut as the
sun was setting. At the edge of the village in the dust of the dust, the women
collect their gathering baskets. Their skin is as dark as the dark blue corn
they grind on stones speckled grey and
white. The girl is I, she is young and learning, her hands still get numb, sore
and bruised. Still, she is proud to be doing the women’s work, the washing, the
hanging of the white linens. It will not be long before the newness turns to
resentment, not long before the honor becomes a chore.
It will not be long before the days of her life, the honor of duty becomes a fence that traps her beauty and the color of her dreams begins to bleed into the drab dusty earth of every day living. She searches the distant horizon for the man on the horse, for the messenger from somewhere far away, for the one who might come and take her away. To where she does not know, but it is somewhere far from the names that shackle her. Daughter Sister. Mother. She longs to go where she has no names.
I have no names when I disappear for fleeting moments in a lover's arms,
I disappear in blinding pleasure to blot out the pain.
More pleasure, more pain.
I die to live again.
