Read Online A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths - Free Book Online

Surely the flight of mind and the shapeshifting of the soul was the real juice of it, flight’s true reality was never in its being made material. What is real need not be material at all. In fact, they are often opposites. Why do I need feet when I have wings to fly? I asked, after my leg was amputated. ‘For me,’ I said, ‘wings are more than enough. Let them cut my leg off and I’ll fly.’ I try to fly by suicide but my wings are broken. I will have to wait for Old Baldy to visit.
    I am at the break-point of the soul. For the upward swing of my life, the sheerness of flight, its upward curve into the sky, is about to crash. Flight began in beauty, the flight of the shaman, flying for the moon, the flight of Icarus, the flight of the lunatic who fell in love, who flew in love with the moon, the flight of art and angels.
    All that is best in flight is over.
    And now, truly, the fall.
    I paint myself, I explained, because I am so often alone. How can one woman weep so much and grieve so much? It’s easy if you’re the moon. And they called me Frida, meaning Peace and Joy, when I knew so little of either, which is a bitter, if unintended, taunt. Someone commissioned me to paint my face inside a sunflower. If there was such a thing as a moonflower, it might have worked, but I painted it anyway, then took a knife and carved at it, scratching, annihilating my own work, my own self.
    My hands have become so weak and shaky that when I put on my make-up I splatter it all over my face, and then I see in the mirror what I’ve done, and my grotesque reflection haunts me. La Huesera , the bone woman, is always with me these days, so I paint my own bones and here, in words too, I am painting my broken bones, my broken life, my broken narrative, the bones of my history, written for my indigenous ancestors as their stories lie in shattered bones. And my unfleshed love lasts and lasts like bones. It is over, how can it be? He is gone, but the bones are still with me. I don’t know if La Huesera can breathe life into them.
    They cut my leg off and gave me a wooden leg. I danced the jarabe tapatío . I was half-skeleton already and always Mexicanista ; this was better than skeletons of candy dressed up like me.
    I long for him still, and for the vitality I once knew. I ask them to move my bed nearer the garden, nearer the light, nearer the birds whose flight I envy. I am surrounded now by all my paintings, all my creations, at the opening of my first solo exhibition but I am falling and I know it. I have fallen ill, and I think this time it will be fatal. My night of sweetest triumph comes towards the end of my life, my solo show, sung to the cosmos, and the cosmos came to me, applauding, crowding round my bed, the stars loved me, the sun wept with pride. I am so stricken that I had to send my bed ahead of me, and I came by ambulance later, and was carried to my bed, where I lie, dressed in my exotic perfection, drinking and singing all evening long. I am broken, the crescent moon cracked, shattered, clouded with painkilling drugs but I drink and sing along with everyone, from my four-poster bed, calling on a friend to sing La Llorona , the Weeping Woman. Whatever you do, do it gallantly. It’s a strange place from which to see the world, a strange perspective, as far as the moon, and as lonely, but in my fallenness I can tell you that, everywhere I look, I see those who fall.
    The fallen. The young widow, despairing and penniless in her high-rise flat, gives a party on the last night of her life, she thanks her friends, finishes the vodka and jumps to her death. I painted her flight, to give her soul wings.
    The fallen. The psychiatric case. In bed seventeen hours a day, his mind too dulled by tranquillisers to fly a kite or crack a joke. Tamped to nothing with tranx, sleeping the dulled sleep of the torpid: eating jelly and pills. Is this, too, a self-portrait? Under my flowers and jewels, am I