Patsy

by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

“Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and have never been before.”

And while people would pardon convicts, drunks, and men who fuck goats, cows, dogs, and children, they are suspicious, almost terrified, of a woman without a family and no religion. Jesus is the only viable excuse a young woman can use to deny the penis.

But what angers Patsy is the things her friend doesn’t recall. The sacrifices Patsy made so that Cicely could be where she is now—all because she thought she had no dreams of her own, a future as empty as her insides, scraped clean of yearnings.

It's interesting to think of this notion of helping others as a distraction from our own lives and futures. Is it because we don't believe in ourselves or because it feels like the other person deserves it more?

A lifetime of love and friendship lost tonight in Cicely’s effort to defend the prison she has built for herself.

It’s the nothing that gets her—the fact that she was content with the nothing. Knowing that she is fully capable of feeling such visceral disgust for herself fills her with purpose, a drive to get on with it, gather the scattered pieces inside herself, and get her life back.

For to feel absolutely nothing at all is terrifying. At least with a little touching, there is the pleasant anticipation of arriving someplace, rather than merely existing.

There’s that word again that Patsy hates—illegal. She’s no longer a person, but an illegal. An alien. She can’t understand why she’s deemed a criminal for wanting more, for being in a place where she can live out her dreams—even if it might take a while to achieve them.

We have neither di right nor permission to enjoy human things like Americans—vacation, rest, strolling in di park, di sunset. Who are we to do dat when we taking up space, taxes, an’ air, according to dem? Dey have all di power to punish us fah stealing from dem—fah daring to t’ink we can dream, much less love.”

If you immigrate to this country for freedom why must you be subjected to being treated like a second class citizen? There is the literal difference (papers) but the social boundary that is drawn is just so cruel.

Quietly she mourns, realizing that she must mutilate the very thing that sprang inside her, unearthing itself, reaching and reaching toward sunlight.

Now the promise of life comes with accepting the fact that she will never have a choice.

Is there maybe some power in this realization and acceptance of this?

Everything and everyone the same as they were the day she left to chase dreams that have since dissolved.

The immigrant experience brings with it a sort of grief that comes from the loss of your roots, despite choosing to let it go. The mind can't forget and yet has no way of guessing the truth/reality.

This, Patsy believes, is worship—to enter a woman the way one enters a sacred temple, and to be entered.

returns. She wipes away the watery veil from her eyes, knowing that the heaviness that weighs on her has nothing to do with the dark, nor will the morning deliver her.

Her heart batters itself against the wall of her chest, as if in a desperate attempt to escape, understanding that there’s a part of her that is willing to surrender with perverse gratification to the murderous mammoth thing capable of ripping her apart again and again.

She searches her memory, desperate now to see the remorse in her mother’s eyes. How she stood there on the outskirts of Patsy’s girlhood and watch things happen to her, how her back was always turned as if she had given permission to the night to swallow Patsy, to touch her with coarse hands. The memories come back in a scale of colors. Before they were merely just black-and-white. They now coalesce into a prism of clarity—a light that reflects the shadows that have always been there.