This was probably one of the easiest and yet one of the most difficult pieces for me to write at the same time. Easy because the words flowed. Difficult because of the emotions involved. Namely the pain.

Lirone, you are not that far off with your first comment.

Here’s the deal: I referred to what his father did back in lines 12 – 14, i.e. telling him that what he had witnessed was just a dream. I don’t care what reasons there are for a parent doing this – I strongly believe that lying to a child like that will severly fuck up his/her perceptions and sense of reality (i.e. the idea “you really didn’t just see what you think you saw”). That has the potential to cause the child to question his/her own senses and judgment to the point of severe doubt on one hand, or on the other break the child’s trust if he/she knows in his/her heart if the parent is lying. Also, there’s the dismissal of feelings and concern…the underlying message that what the child feels is trivial, and not important enough to the point where it can be safely dismissed with a few offhand words or a lie.

This is what resonated with me: a) elders fucking with your sense of reality before your own mind has finished growing, and b) the dismissal of one’s feelings and concerns. I have had this happen to me and it is NOT FUN. I have spent the last 14 years trying to recover from my aunt and one of my cousins doing the same things during my teenage years. Hence the pain. Hence why I could relate to that incident in his life and why I could write this piece.

I think that with the suggestion to him that this incident, traumatic obviously for a child of that age to witness, was a dream…well if you had a “dream” of witnessing a group of injured, dead, and bleeding people around a massive multi-car accident, I imagine you’d probably call it a “nightmare”. So there you have it.

Thank you, all, for stopping by. I am, as always, honored by your praise and compliments.

-Nicole

By the way, I know very little about Morrison, but you rendered his story (or somebody’s) very intimate for me here.

and on a side note in a Byzantine orthodox service that is still quite traditional the altar doors stay closed until the most important moment of the service –the Communion- where the say “ the doors, now the doors open”. It always made me think at this almost universal image of the “the doors to the other side” and I was surprised to find it in Morrison’s poetry as well. )