calm confusion

With every day that passes I remember something I loved about my dad. It wasn’t that he was the greatest man on earth, or the smartest, or the tallest, or the richest. It was that he was my dad and as my father he was without fault. I remember the day he left, as clear as I remember the day he died. I was sitting on the dining room table pretending to study for my O Level Geography Exam. He knew I had just spent about 14 hours on the phone with my nutcase boyfriend at the time, so he took the phone and hid it in the bookcase downstairs, making kissing noises and sucking faces at me, while waving his little white whip that I still waiting to get lix with. The events that followed in the hours after, has always been a blur to me. But what is as clear as the shallowest of ponds is the moment he drove his orange and white patrol out the garage gate packed with his stuff. I vowed never to forgive him. It did not matter that he left, what mattered was that he left me. This is a memory I lock...

“You Rim Cyat! You!!!! Move yuh ass get in class! You want to see my gallbladder? Well moooooooove.” Going to school in south Trinidad was like trying to ride a donkey through a cricket ground full of cracks. You cud make it through certain patches of grass, but once you hit ah crack…well crick crack monkey break yuh back with ah piece ah pomarac… go and check yuh cote ce cota la. I had the privilege of attending Iere High School in Siparia.. and no it wasn’t ah Rasta school, but we did have rasta living behind the school we bought weed from on occasion. The school was down in a valley surrounded by two football fields, acres of trees and was accessed through a long winding driveway. About five huge old buildings made up the entire compound: the auditorium, the main school building, the arts building, the science building and the Reverend house for Trinidad Girls in Training and Christian Association meetings. Meh mudda went dere, meh uncs went there, meh grand uncs went there... all i...

Roti for me means Dogtanian the lonely musketeer. Everytime my sister and I smell roti, we look at each other and say, “ aye aye what u thinking, dogtanian ent!” Don’t laugh at de south people, we from south. It was all my grandmother’s fault. From 3 pm every afternoon, the race would begin. Who would get home from school first, who would open the syrotex box of food she sent, who would get to sit directly in front the television and who roti had de biggest curry wing and neck with sauce leaking out. My sis and I had a world of our own. It began with a life of incessant torment and has become one of increasing torture. For my sister that is. My first memory of her was the day she was born. My dad and I packed up and went to Victoria Nursing Home to meet the child. I saw my mom lying on a bed, I looked around for Jello.. Found it eat it and waited to be pampered. I was by far the cutest kid on the planet and without a doubt the reason my parents lived. “ You know you are a big sister no...

I walked to the edge of the walkway and looked out onto the ocean. At 6 pm, the sun was setting on the horizon and a chilly breeze fuelled the air around me. The smell of seaweed and slowly drying sand lazily mixed with the wind and settled around the bay. If this was not heaven, then I will never find it. It was an extraordinary evening; I could feel it in my bones. Standing on the steps of my mom’s home in St Maarten, I felt completely serene like the softest of breezes would blow me over, or pick me up to float over the house and out onto the streets. Light as a feather, calm as a pond, this was happiness to me. As the afternoon grew darker, I stood there motionless, with thoughts of everything running through my head. I played back the last few days, months years of my life, tweaking plots every now and then to see if the outcome would have been better. I spun my life in my head into a web of fiction. Extreme unreality surpasses sanity. I was 28, married with kids, living in south ...

me and my ash, looking way to young.. seems like years ago!

Growing up is a funny thing. You never feel like you're fully grown and when people call you an adult, you look around for your parents or laugh like you didnt quite get the joke. I love that memories are remembered without being tainted by age or logic. You never look back on the time you peed your bed and think, " if only i had listened to my aunt and not drank fourteen coconuts" you always think..." i loooooove coconuts!" i love even more knowing that no matter how old i get and how much i experience in life, i can still look in the mirror and see a 5 year old me if i wanted to. maturity is a sad sad excuse for losing your imagination.

as if a bolt of lightening shot out of my ass, i was jolted awake. I lay flat on my grand parents bed, staring up at 10 faces with bunched up eyebrows, worried thinned lips and eyes full of concern. "what the hell!" "don't what de hell me u hear!" apparently my mom was peeved. slowly i backtracked in my mind the events that preceded my immovable state. i saw myself playing with my cousin michelle in the garage next to my grand dad's service station and in front of my grand mom's roti shop. We were five and six. Mimi was in one of her moods, flames shooting out her ears, her face turning red enough to be mistaken for an m&m. i was trying to convince her to swing from the iron beams that held up the garage. no go. in a final attempt to convince her, i climbed up the pumping thing my uncle used to change tires.. those old fashion ones that move like a jumping jack.. what the hell is it called!!!! still not high enough to reach the beams, i step gingerly...

sometimes i wonder about my friends. i wonder where i found them and what makes them so important to me. if i close my eyes, i can see a huge circular room with glass containers all the way around. in each container i put a different friend. once in a while containers merge for a short time, but eventually they all go back to their own spot, sectioned off and protected from the rest of my life. I can remember my very first real friend. He was imaginary and i could make him anyone i wanted him to be. One day i tried to turn him into She-Ra, but this was too much of an identity crisis for him so he left. Since then i have had better luck. If anyone still has a friend from primary school, congratulations! those are the hardest ones to keep. mostly because during that age period you are trapped amongst bullies or are a bully yourself, and each relationship whether based on feminine dynamics or the monkey dynamics of men, is full of pure shit,crayons and plastercene,and not much else. i me...

Now carnival just done, but while it was happening, Trinidad became the land of the "oh god! I cyah take it! I cyaahh take it! i love meh land! oh lord oh loorddddd!" , people. I myself try to stay away from the callaloo of mad people charging through Port of Spain, knocking over garbage, fall into garbage, eating garbage and thefin garbage. But the enticement to be a part of it runs deep in your soul. Sitting at home, spread out on de couch, waiting for de red beans and rice and stew chicken to done cook, gives you one of two feelings: The choking feeling of being hit in your stomach because you are not a apart of something that everyone else is or the feeling of safety that you are home waiting for rice and red beans and stew chicken, while everyone else jumping up in de hot sun, with greasy doubles and early morning shark and bake, not sure exactly where to pee or if to pee. Ah yes.. Trinidad, the land of two peoples: de carnival people and de not so carnival people. Ca...

Part III if ever there was a synaptic misfire (duh ask meh wuh dat mean eh), it happened when i sat in the wheelchair and was wheeled through customs and straight out to my mom's car. From then on i saw things happening around me in slow motion, accompanied by a steady humming sound in my head. I saw my mom's lips moving, her eyesbrows bunching and could only imagine what she was saying. I did not care. I did not care to know, to feel, to live. and so the cookie mash up. one day i was a vibrant bubbly very lovable chick with a good sense of style (yea baby!), next thing i am a walking bag of bones, with no ass, frizzy hair, dark circles under my eyes and a compulsive need to spit at everyone and bark in foriegn languages. Love really does suck. anyone who ever thought they were in love, slap yuhself. I remember the feeling of dred everytime an event like christmas, birthdays or valentine's came around. You had to go all out or else was pressa! not like buying stuff for your...

Part II I could feel the sunburning into my shoulders, deep, searing sunshine, making an impression on my skin as it moves across the cloudless skies. You feel so much more with your eyes closed. It's almost as if when opened, eyes mean nothing. Every kiss, every tear, every moment of passion is completed with closed eyes. at that moment, i could feel the scene unfolding around me. Sitting on a mile long beach of white smooth untouched sand, listening to the ocean rise and fall steadily without breaking waves onto the shore, imagining the fisherman pulling his boat up to the jetty, trying to block out the tourist behind me arguing with the bartender for an umbrella in her pina collada. Surrounded by the stillness and unmatched tranquility of paradise, i tried to calm the rage inside me. I opened my eyes and winced at the sharpness of the sunshine. Alone, burning in the sun, i felt lost and hollow, like a dead tree trapped in a deep forest, someplace unknown. This is what I had be...

Part I i wonder if i believe in destiny. i wonder out loud and in the dark and in the shower. If this life of mine was meant to be. i sat up on the bed after a night of tears and wretching heartache. i looked over to see my aunt looking at me with a worried brow and sad eyes. I hate pity. Pity comes along at your lowest point and ensures you remember what got you there. pity was never meant for me. but at 5 am on a thursday morning, pity was all i got. dressed in my pj's and blue UNB sweatshirt my step dad took me to the airport. Acutely aware of the fact that i looked insane, i began to feel insane. my eyes darted about my head in rapid motions and i kept tugging at my sweatshirt... my god..im a loony toony. i waved goodbye to my stepdad and made my way upstairs to await my flight. staring straight ahead, with my mouth slightly open, i replayed the events of the last few days in my head. the anguish, the constant stabbing pain in my stomach, the involuntary tears. here i was, a wo...