are you all right, my dragonfly?

Didn't you know women are made of pain?

anguish and pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process.
diego. estoy sola.

soon, i couldn't tell the difference between things i'd heard before and things i hadn't. things i'd seen in dreams were tangled up in memories. i lost track of what was real. i know the veil of fog surrounding all the naked bodies has a sound. the high walls, separating the men's bath from the women's. a hollow clack cuts through the air. all the naked women in the steaming water turn to look at me. all their nipples look at me in unison. the steam churns, and i massage the soles of my own feet. the skin of my feet is always cracking, but no amount of peeling makes them pretty. my mum's feet were always flaky. and white, except for her brown toenails.with lathered fingers, komi washes the spaces between my toes. you gotta yank a little on the lever, or the stove won't light. there's a knack to it.
click, click, click.
the gas roars into flame.

i am dreaming of all my possibilities.

i am dreaming of all my possibilities.

i am dreaming of all my possibilities.

Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet, Stefano's grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale's father. And yet Don Achille's money had been made before. And the Solaras money as well. She had tested this out on her mother and father.They didn't know anything, they wouldn't say anything. Not fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don achille and were afraid of the solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money at both Don Achille's son's and at the solaras and sent us, too. And they voted for the fascists, for the monarchists, as the solaras wanted them to. And they thought what had happened before was past and in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it. They were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.

he said, we have a duty to memory,
and she asked, whose?

I knew I wouldn't have time for Lila, anymore, on the other , I hoped to detach myself from the sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved , whom we carried- she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us- in our blood.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our woman's heartbeat. Actually the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through veins and arteries. we vibrate to the primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in our ovaries while she is a four month old foetus in the womb of her mother.
This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. we vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way through the grandmother to the first mother. we all share the blood of the first mother- we are truly children of one blood.

//i realised i was my work. I was the essence of my work- i always say that after i'm dead, my work isn't going to be half as good.//
tracey emin