MY LOVE

By Dana G. Peleg - ALL rights Reserved

For O.

 

            My love is a bibliotherapist. In the afternoon hours, as the sun sinks in the wadi, children gather around her and she tells them stories. They listen and look at the shining sun inside her reddish hair, at the sun shining in her hair and setting behind her back. Where my love lives, the sun sets in the sea, behind her. The children gather around her. Of course they know that the sun sets in the sea and not in my love’s hair and that it is all stories. But they do not mind. They listen to the stories that she tells in her deep, quiet voice. After they go, they are healed. They are not really children. They are children inside the bodies of adults who did not let the child in them grow up. She takes them and treats them and loves them and they are healed until they forget they were ever sick, that she was ever there, my love with her big smile and her reddish hair and her deep, quiet, soft, sweet voice, and the sun that shines beyond the wadi. But she does not mind. She smiles because every day, a little before the sun sets in the west, children come to her to hear her stories. They come so she will love them. I know.

            Once, on a Saturday, she took me on a kind of trip. We found a sunbeam that reached the Bedouin rug in her room and we rode it. And while we rode it, we saw the whole landscape without any people at all and without any of the bad and ugly things they do. And the landscape was beautiful, as if people do not ruin and destroy it all the time. We rode this sunbeam, my bibliotherapist love and I, and we reached the place where the sun is, and she, the great sun, kept herself from sliding and falling and sinking, and no one minded except for us, because we started from her, from her beam. And we knew that if we did not get off her, we would sink along with her into the sea.

            That’s all right, my love told me, we will come back and rise in the morning.

            And that is what happened. We fell asleep and rose with her in the morning, and we returned to the house on the rim of the wadi, and in the afternoon the children came and I had to go back to my life, to work and to school, and everything I had to do. In any case, it was all a dream, and I am no longer a child. Fifteen years of menstrual blood comes back to remind me over and over and over again how much I am one no longer.

            So now I return home after work and school. I run up the stairs, four stories, groping for the key by the third floor, open the white door with the sign on it with my name and my roommates’ and the cat’s names, lock the door, rush into the bathroom, take out the tampon, pee, insert a new tampon. What a flood. And then I kick the cat out of my room, close the door and shut the shutters really tight so the sun will not filter through. I stick earplugs in my ears so I will not hear the answering machine even at its low volume, or the cat or my roommates or the world. I take off my shirt, bra and shoes, toss away my pants and socks and am left in my underwear. I cover myself with the piqué blanket and go to sleep.

 

            I am asleep. I have been sleeping for days. My roommates knock on the door, but I am sealed off from sounds and nothing can get to me. I am not going to work and at the end of the month I will not have money coming in. My parents come and take me to their house, wrapped in the flowered blanket, and still I do not wake up. Months pass. I will not finish my Masters degree this year. I am asleep. If I were dead it would be easier on everyone. They could bury me and be done with it. And if I were just in a coma they could send me to the hospital and take care of me and feel like saints. I do not even need the sheets changed. I already expelled everything I had in my body and now it is empty of waste. I do not even need to be turned over because I do it by myself. As I do, I become smaller. My period disappeared a long time ago and never came back. The tampon dissolved somewhere inside, with the faithful assistance of my vaginal bacteria. I continue sleeping, a year passes, two years pass, ten years. One hundred years. My parents and my sister have all died long ago. I continue sleeping.

            As small as a pea, in an enormous flowered blanket, they bring me to my bibliotherapist love. Now she tells me a story. But from inside the dark I can see the little wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, I feel the white strands in her beautiful reddish hair, and I know that the sun does not shine there any more. In the evening, at the end of the story, she takes me, minuscule as an unfertilized ovum, and returns me to her uterus.

            At night she lays with a man, and it begins all over again.