Sati's Little Notebook

[Sati Beshara]

Her handwriting looks as though someone dipped the heads of matches in ink in order to scratch out the letters. The way she writes the letter 'I' is ever so distinctive, with the little rows on the top and bottom, especially the bottom, having a gap from the column that connects them. When she writes with a pencil, her hand smears the rather greasy lead, leaving smokey smudges on the page.

Sati does not write as often as she wants to, and certainly not as often as she thinks that she should. When she feels she has something worth writing, she doesn't seem to have the time/energy. When she has the time/energy, she doesn't have anything that she feels is worth writing down.

But once in awhile, just as the celestial objects in the Solar System can align in ever so nice ways, so too does Sati have her little Solstices and Equinoxes within the microcosm of her being that allow her to...jot a little something down.

[Sati Beshara]

I was thinking that I should tear them out, but I'm torn.

Torn...over tearing.

I should make a joke. Or some elaborate metaphor. But that really is it. Those pages, they happened. Ripping them out seems like telling a lie. One of those lies by omission. Look, out of sight, out of mind, those years don't exist!

But they do. And I'll know it. And I'm the only one who sees this, so I'm the only one to whom I can lie...and I know the truth so...again, I feel as if I'm on the verge of saying something profound or at least interesting, but it floats away from me.

I'm leaving the pages in.

[Sati Beshara]

I am still arguing in my head with people that I have not seen or heard from since I was seventeen.

I still feel horrible for not saying things I should have five years ago.

I still want to gut myself for something accidentally cruel I said to a boy when I was in fifth grade.

Fifth grade, I think that is the age when most of us already know what we can’t do. We know who is best at drawing, at singing, at sports. And by extension, who is not. Who is normal. Who may as well not bother to enter a talent show or send in a submission to a poetry contest.

Fifth grade, I guess, is also when most of us started to bleed. Us girls, that is.

The Aztecs believed that the Sun ate blood. Or at least I think they did. It was something like that, which was why they ripped out the hearts of people for sacrifice. But the Moon, I think it is She who eats our blood. She causes it. The lunar cycle, the menstrual cycle, everyone knows they’re one and the same. She looks like an egg at her peak, a round turtle egg laid in the night, when they come ashore from the sea. The same sea that the Moon controls. I am bleeding now, bleeding from Her, bleeding for Her, my own sea flowing from my nether parts.

I have heard it said creativity flows. It is funny, to think of something like creativity being able to physically move like the word ‘flow’ implies. It makes me almost able to picture what it is, some kind of miraculous fluid, coming at you like a flood of rapids in a canyon that was dry a moment ago. I should wish that I could flow that way, wish I could dance, wish I could write, wish I could sculpt, yet I am complacent with my self-made sea. I stick with what I do and who I am; the turtle egg that will not hatch and swim, but lie buried in the sand, soaking up any moonbeams that can somehow reach it.