Months turn to years and my love for Ale deepens. The unconscious patterns that pulled us together are also magnified. My passivity and desire to please pair well with his passion and confidence. I become less in touch with my needs (what little I had in the first place) and more concerned with validating Ale’s world. This doesn’t diminish the exceptional bond we share and the care we have for one another. It’s simply young. Unwillingness to surface my own buried anger becomes fuel for his.
I don’t blame him for his temper — I’m jealous of it. I crave his brazen backbone and conviction. I am quietly frustrated by his rage but I need it near so he can drown out my own.
Near the end of my senior year at Colorado College, we end our relationship. He graduated a year earlier and lives in Crested Butte, skiing backcountry and working as a sushi chef at a small inn. I’m weary of making the four-hour drive, one-way, almost every weekend to visit him. It’s not the first time we had tried to end things, but I’m tired of digesting his reality. I want to taste my own.
The summer after graduation, mom and I visit her aging mom in Florida, flying into Miami and then driving at dusk along Alligator Alley— a hot, 80-mile, stretch yawning through the Everglades. Lit only by lamp posts and headlights, the looming darkness inspires my own; I begin recounting stories from my three-year relationship with Ale, events I was too ashamed to tell anyone. Now, I share them with mom as if I’m reading someone else’s memoir.
Neighbors in a small college town hear shouting and breaking glass. Two young lovers are questioned by police; the woman hides trembling hands, the man hides bloodied hands. The same young woman sits alone in the hot, Baja desert for a day without money, food or water. When the man returns, her hunger to be powerful is betrayed by her hunger to not be alone. There’s a knife. Cornered in a high valley of the Rocky Mountains, the young man points it at his gut as the woman takes the wrong side in an argument. The same woman sleeps in a snow-covered dog house because she’d rather be rescued than rescue herself.
Mom interrupts and asks if I’d like to roll down the window.
“Sure.” I say, wondering if she’s even listening. “Why?”
“I think you need to scream.” She replies, reaching her warm hand into mine.
Inhaling, I pull mom’s amber perfume into my lungs, then deeper, where it beckons the cold, lifeless shape in my gut to rise.
At first, thin and timid in my throat. Then warm. Then hot. Then round. Then free.
My smoldering body torches the sky from orange to purple to black. I don’t just scream for the young woman of the last three years. Decades wail out of hiding. I don’t recognize her voice. Who is screaming?
She sounds pissed. She sounds worthy. She sounds alive.
Did you miss earlier chapters?
Go(o)d Bless that mother! I wonder whether she knew you needed to scream because she too had stifled her voice. And your ancestral line of women before her. Looking forward to meeting her mother now...
The “lioness” in me wanted to strangle Ale for the injustices he perpetuated on you! But I knew as your mom that you, more importantly, needed to find the strength of your own voice. And you did! And continue to enrich our world with its wisdom and compassion and power and truth and...and...