nccotus

That is a character from the Leonard Bernstein, New York City work up of Romeo and Juliet: West Side Story. She is a tomboy who hangs out with the white gang members. I always identified with her as I akways played with my older brother and his friends. Looking back, I see a hint of Mary Magdalen and the disciples?

The other gang is all Puerto Rican. The two gangs fight for turf. One of the White boys falls in love with one of the Puerto Rican girls. I watched the movie of the musical 3 times in a row shortly after I got out of my first state hospital stay (after the clamped catheter ICU overdose incident). I remember the pain I felt in the dayroom there listening to the music on the t.v. : “A Time for Us” So eerie and sad. So desperately sad.

Weird shit happened after thst. I called it “the ghoul epiphany.” I have a drawing:

it’s not a very good drawing but it represents the loss of a sweet pretty little woman. I am beleaguered now with the subject of how you note the absence of something you never knew to exist. This topic is troubling me across a number of axes that are critical to my survival, for instance, I have gone through so many changes over time, especially with the mmoe-wart removal, and people day it’s not me or, “it’s like that.” Even the people closest to me. Even the ones who have done this to me! I have been declared dead! I suspect that death certificates have been illegally obtained in the past.

So, it goes back to painful issues in my past that I am now ready to address. The things that made it impossible for me to succeed as a Harvard student but also necessary. I was able to think outside the box of my family life and Kent School that way. I ran away from home and wrote my college personal essay about it.

Here it is, should my reader wish to struggle with the small print and old-fashioned language.

Obviously my father was furiously upset about all this. This essay went to 3 IV League Colleges and 5 other top Schools. I had no idea what that was going to do to him or even to me. He did. I took a punishment for that that flattened me; and, I did not understand it at the time. It was one of the main things that needed to finally be addressed 30 YEARS AGO at Johns Hopkins Hospital psych ward and pathetically wasn’t.

So, 45 years I after I can look back on this with hilarity. After all this time.

The main thing for me to remember is about my childhood and that my brother and I and sometimes his friends played in the city dump. This misdeed reflects my mother’s misalliance in the small city of New Providence, she was living in England in her mind and we were not being trained in any way to grow up into Americans. She did not have a plan for us. Neither did my father. He just assumed. That we would grow like weeds. The City closed the tall metal fence and put a padlock on it. We also played in the nearby Passaic River and raped it of frogs and minnows and salamanders that then died in the inflatable pool at home, it was so sad and awful.

It’s all coming back to me now. About my childhood. How awful it was. How I was blamed for saying that and deemed a spoiled brat by my father and others. Supposedly I had everything and didn’t aporeciate it. Which is true. I literally could not appreciate anything and THEY KNEW PERFECTLY WELL WHY. I was a little girl with a broken pud and they knew it. Maybe they really didn’t understand about the wart-mole.

They knew that something was wrong.

I had no way to know. I was born that way, I never knew a normal human existence until today; these last few weeks as the last few moments of the “OCD sciatica” goes out of me in the wake of the mole-wart surgery 2 1/2 years ago, almost 3.

i do understand that I had a certain immunity in my suffering. My farher was wealthy and my mother was a beautiful woman. i had unbelievable comforts and consolations. But I was hated and didn’t know why. It made me an ASSHOLE. I realized this last night when I remembered some of the people who got hurt by me and how that felt to them.

i am starting to be able to take responsipbility for this past tense person in a way that nobody else can. She was a contraption, an appatatus for a beautiful person inside waiting to live, please, please forgive her for the sake of her soul. She needs to live for a while to do good on Earth and live better.