Dear Mother,
Jesus is not some abstract idea or person who died 2,000 years ago. He is alive. He said, “I will never leave you.” He knows you cannot do it alone. We are too weak, every last one of us. Who do you know that really “has it together”? No one- not you, not me – there is no security here. No perfection here – yet- until he returns. There is no plateau that we reach on earth where everything is happy and harmonious because of our physical appearance, our home, our job our income – that is grasping at empty air and only in our spiritual life will we reach it — only with Jesus accepting His Love — in believing in Him can we experience that security & happiness that everyone seeks.
–Kathy
1977
Trinidad, Ca
What do you do when you’ve lived your life and survived? Do you get a shotgun and kill yourself? Do you shoot yourself in the head? If so, how do you do it? Point at your temple? Or do you shove the gun down your throat, pointed up to get a good shot, to do the deed, seal the deal? Your arms are not long enough to hold a shotgun. Also, you don’t have a shotgun.
You have: bleach, a box of razor blades you bought twenty years ago, at Flax Art Supply, and a very sharp chef’s knife. But the knife was a birthday present so it seems disrespectful to use it to slit your wrists. Plus, wrist slitting seems like an acute challenge and you’ve never been good with details.
There are many variables in something you’ve seen perfectly executed thousands of times, in films. In movies, most of the time, when people get killed they get killed with a bullet. Pills are for the wealthy. In movies, wealthy people are poor.
Meanwhile, at night, when you lie in bed, concentrate on the areas that bother you (your sinuses) let your mind sort of float through your sinuses. Then feel that the spirit of the lord is flowing there, soothing & healing – drying up your sinuses (you can even try it at work when you are troubled). You can ask Him to remove the pain. Just say, “Please, Jesus, take away my suffering.” Just try it.
–Kathy, 1976
Trinidad, ca
What you want to do is you want to put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Die. Die in the bathtub, or maybe a field of gravel. Surrounded by blood: trickling, splattering, dripping. Sticky hair, messy. But not too messy, the point is to die with as little mess as possible, hence the bathtub. And a field doesn’t require a heartache of cleanup. Death is nature. It’s a method of problem solving. It’s a process of a set of rules. It’s Wikipedia. They trick you. They teach you your times tables, and that X=0 but they never call it a language or reveal that zero actually means nothing other than it’s a number reflecting more money than you have in your pocket.
It’s like when I would wait to take calls, like from the guy in Santa Clara who got raped when he was thirteen. While riding home from school, he got pulled off his bike. That man paid me $1.99 a minute to listen to the story and I was never given an algorithm for that. He raped himself every day, having unprotected sex with strangers, and then paid me to hear the stories. I could not fix him.
It took a lot of years to understand algorithms and I still don’t. I was never very good with math. That’s where they trick you. It’s not about math or numbers or logic. It’s not, but they trick you. Logic. They throw around so many terms, all the terms, and they leave you. You wonder what the words mean: are they word problems? Calculus? Blind luck?
While your brain still functions, kinda, you think about the parts of your life that were good. Or, you just make up some good parts. Isn’t that what you do? What you’ve been paid to do? You make up pretty stories, write them down, and sell them. Romance novels. A bunch of pretty stories.
Still in my dream, I wake up. Today I’m in a Bed & Breakfast. In Ireland. Under moss. Fresh eggs. Wet grass. An Irish female voice, humming through damp air. Salty air. The always comforting scent of my husband. He reassures me. And that feeling makes me uncomfortable. I think about breakfast. I smell the scent of fresh bread. There will be cups of butter, and maybe some bacon. And muffins.
The bathrooms here are tiny, but it’ll be fine. I’ll leave the breakfast table before him, bounce up the soft, spiral, blue staircase, enter our bedroom, enter the tiny bathroom, and puke.
In Dallas. I look past peeling formica counter and the plastic bottle of soap. I think about scones. That was my mind gifting me a memory, through dreams.
Date: July 4, 1963
Place: Madrid, Spain
Weather: Very Hot,.
We crossed the border into Spain early this morning. Once across the Pyrenees, the weather & scenery became dry & flat. We ate lunch in Bruges the birth place of El Cid. In the evening we arrived in Madrid. Tomorrow we visit the Prado Museum.
Love, Kathy
July 22, 1994
Day 2 in Killarney. Our lodge is actually about 10 miles outside Killarney. It is an old farm house & the ladies that run it are very nice. We have a large, comfy bed, our own bathroom, & huge bay windows looking towards the mountains. Aside from the plastic pillows that our pillow cases keep sliding off, the bed is nice, & the room stays dark.
Last night I was coughing all night, but I was asleep. Finally Jay told me I was keeping him & everyone else in the place awake. Oh well. We were going to try & catch the tour of the Gap of Dunloe , but it wasn’t meant to be. After B-Fast, we hurried into town to try & catch the jaunting car.
Well, we drove around but never saw the place, so Jay said fuck it & drove back to our B&B. It turned out to be fine, because we decided to drive to the Burren instead. It was beautiful. We found a waterfall that we had to hike to across some mushy land in a serene valley. First, we walked along a river for always. We were walking along when we saw a little family of swimming mongooses (or something). They were cute, swimming in the river & out on land all in one smooth stride. /
We crossed the valley through the mushy earth, dodging the hidden streams & sheep shit. By the time we got to the waterfall, the few people that were there were leaving. We climbed around on the rocks underneath the fall. We could have had a quickie but that’s another story.
Michelle, -1991