Conflagration

This fight started years ago. It started in another country, in another language, between different people. Only God knows what it was about. They carried it here to America-in their hearts tiny embers-they nursed them quietly, blowing on them imperceptibly to keep them alight.

It must have been hard for them. I have broken pieces of the stories in my mind, stories told to me by my grandmothers, cherished and turned over in their minds till the rough edges were worn away. Drunken gambling husbands mothers who's jobs kept them away from home for days on end. Cold water flats next to the railroad tracks. There were crates for tables and chairs, in those days you scraped the frost off the inside of the windows in the morning, there wasn't enough heat to sustain the fire in their hearts.

death was much closer then, always just over your shoulder, breathing down your neck, a sibling, a parent. There was no welfare, there was only the bitter cold and the gnawing hunger in your stomach. No time for school, just work, everybody work. She had to leave school in second grade, she spoke two languages but when she wrote you could tell by the way she spelled things that she'd left school as a young child. Not that she was stupid mind you, when she had her own daughter though she resolved to educate her.Her daughter spoke three languages and could write them all as well. She could paint and she went to nursing school. Such sacrifice for this child such pain in bringing her here raising her correctly. Navigating between the ways of the old country and the new.

Two worlds collided in this child, it was hard to apply old world sensibility to a new world child, and the embers in their hearts which they had inherited sparkled and glowed. The result of the friction of one feeling pressed upon to be something she didn't want to be and the growing resentment of the other who felt sure of the correctness of the path she had laid out for her daughter. The fire raged out of control fueled by the alcohol the daughter drank to drown the dreams she had dreamt. The conflagration decimated the the landscape of the family an entire generation of which grew up engulfed by it. It was onto this scorched earth that I was born.

The smoking ground hot and prickly with the vestiges of living things. Raw and bereft of resources with nowhere to hide. After having been through such a time no one has any kindness in there hearts for a child, it's all about putting things back together it's all about surviving. Houses were built and children born, but something had happened once this fire was let loose it could not be contained. It rages to this day, some of the children who grew up surrounded by it don't know another way to live, some see another way but just can't escape. All suffer the intractable sadness that comes from not being able to fight anymore, but not being able to give up either.

I have inherited the fire in my heart, the bitter vitriol, the unabashed hatred, the raging anger, the deep sadness. It is inscribed in my very DNA, and I have a daughter now and I am scared. I am nursing wounds given to me by my mother who's wounds were given to her by hers this goes on ad infinitum. Yet though I see it is so much bigger then anyone of us, and I see the futility of continuing (stupidity is doing the same things over and over expecting different results) I cannot let go of the hatred, I cannot give up this fight which was handed to me by my dead grandmothers. Of what benefit can it be to hold so tightly to this feeling which I hate? How do I let it all go when it is so deeply a part of me? It is something I continue to struggle with, and I don't feel I'm overstating that if I do find a way to let this go then I can surely broker world peace. because this eternal struggle is bigger then all of that.