Happy 15th birthday, From the Choirgirl Hotel (May 5th, 1998)!
“I was very ready to be a mom. It was a shock, and I was devastated. While I was pregnant, I felt more love than I had ever really felt. And the love didn’t go away. Feeling love like that, it changed me, even though the spirit didn’t manifest physically. I didn’t become a mother at this time, but I became a different woman. I think when i’m going through a difficult time, the songs tear across the universe to find me, because we have a pact.”
Raining Blood (Strange Little Girls, 2001)
Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.
