Kintsugi Yogini

The mere sight of her filled me with a sharp, searing heat that churned in my chest and clawed its way up my throat. “I did not like her” is far too weak a phrase to convey the odium she inspired in me. “She’s a little girl, just like you,” said a bodiless voice. Like me? Like ME?! Like hell! My chest tightened, breath hitching with the force of it, as if something sharp had lodged itself between my ribs. She had long, flowing blond hair that framed her oval face. Her eyes were twin shards of blue ice, piercing and untouchable, glinting with an uncanny sharpness. Her pouting mouth resembled a little rose bud. It was obvious that she was at ease in her skin, a quiet certainty that seemed to radiate from her every movement, pressing against me like the weight of an unseen hand. The ease she embodied only deepened my awareness of the tight, restless discomfort that coiled within my own body. Even her clean, white dress screamed “Look at me! I’m pretty! Aren’t I the prettiest?” She wore it well: the dress, barely above her knees, allowed her nice calves to show—calves that seemed sculpted from alabaster, smooth and firm in a way that made me hyper-aware of the ungainly knots that were my legs. Why did I notice that? Why couldn’t I stop? Her feet were encased in shiny, black shoes—immaculate, mirror-like surfaces that reflected the world around them, as if capturing every gaze that fell upon her. They were too perfect, too untouchable, like pedestals elevating her above the ground where I trudged with scuffed, muddy soles. One could feel that her pale, pink flawless skin was smooth and cool to the touch. Indubitably, all eyes were on her whenever she was in the room. Which eyes would not feast on the sight of her? Which hands would not want to touch her? Which heart could resist the aching pull to adore her completely? In contrast, there was this ugly monkey. But, “she’s a little girl, just like you!” Look at me! Look at me! I had raven hair so short that I was mistaken for a little boy with a perpetual frown. Always in grass-stained pants that hid my short crooked, ugly legs, and a t-shirt that boasted smells of nature, muddy shoes carrying more than their share of dead critters, disheveled and dirt all over my fat, round face, how could anyone say we were alike?

Already at a very young age, I was a very curious little blood sausage, asking my teachers unanswerable questions—like why the moon only comes out at night, or whether worms had hearts—demanding an answer nonetheless. Fearless to a fault, obstinate dare-devil if you will, you could always find me where nobody dared to go: in the dark and dank cellar of the apartment building, where the air smelled of wet stone and sand, or in the forest, where the sharp tang of leaves mingled with the distant calls of unseen birds, all by myself. My curiosity did not stop at the natural world that surrounded me. It extended to bodies. I always wondered what a body looked like in the inside. No. Even as a child, I’d marvel at the anatomy diagrams in library books, tracing the paths of veins and arteries with my fingers. So naturally, I was fascinated by the human body’s internal organs. If Pamela, we shall call her Pamela, was so much like me, then she must be made like me…. must she not?

One day, I was playing with Pamela in my bedroom, my curiosity won over my reason. My blood-pumping organ was thumping hard, not because I was afraid. But in anticipation of what may come. I undressed her (she let me do that sometimes) and made her lie down on the floor, forcing her to close her eyes like it was a game of make-believe. My heart thudded with a strange, giddy urgency, a sense of command that I didn’t fully understand but felt compelled to follow. I was kneeling by her side. Grabbing the knife with both of my hands, I hesitated for a moment, the cold weight of the steel pressing into my palms. A single thought flickered like a spark—what if it wasn’t like the books?—but the thumping of my heart drowned it out. I raised the knife above my head, and with a breathless surge of certainty, I swiftly plunged it into the middle of her stomach. “AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!” I heard this awfully high-pitched scream. “Oh la la la la! What are you doing?! I am going to tell mom! I’m going to tell mom!” my five-year old sister, the tattle-teller screeched behind me before running out of my room. Quickly, I slit Pamela’s stomach open, and a faint, plasticky scent wafted up, mixing with the sharp tang of metal. My fingers, slick with something greasy, pushed against the hollow shell as I spread her sides apart. The quiet creak of plastic joints echoed louder than it should have, but I pressed on, my breath shallow and fast, desperate to see inside before my sister came running back with my mom. I could still hear her screams reverberating in my ears.

You might think me a monster, might assume the worst from what I’ve told you. You might even think I hate blondes. I always wished I were one—imagined myself with hair like molten gold, glinting in the sun, soft as silk on my shoulders. Maybe then, people would see me differently, see me at all. I am not a misogynist either. I just wanted a well-equipped fire truck. Father Christmas, this big, white, fat liar, promised me one. I’d dreamed of it for weeks—a fire truck with a flashing siren, a ladder that extended to impossible heights, wheels that spun smoothly across any surface. Each night, I’d whisper my wish like a secret incantation, believing in the magic of being heard. But Christmas morning came, and instead of red metal and chrome, there was soft plastic and pink frills. It was a doll. A doll. A DOLL! Instead, I got this doll. A doll. A DOLL! And it did not even satisfy my curiosity: it was empty, empty I tell you. Empty inside. Filled with nothing but air. “She’s a little girl, just like you, Élodie.” Yes, just like me. Filled with nothing but air.

But I was not filled with air. My inner life is one of the most vivid, vigorous, and extensive realms, where languages and images cross and inter-cross—sometimes in wonderful dances, other times in well-synchronized battles. Eventually, they project themselves through the false borders created by the body into the outward world. Some may say that the exterior life, is the authentic one, woven fabric into fulfilling tapestries… However, the words and images have such strength and their own complicated existence that my head does not know how to keep them in captivity. Or, it is that I do not want to hold them back in the darkness of my being, when they so yearn to see the light. Perhaps, the two lives cannot exist one without the other, forming thus a symbiotic cycle of growth and decay, each feeding the other until they exude their own quintessence as they intermingle to create my life.

The scent of ink on paper has always felt more familiar than the vibration of words on my tongue—a heady mixture of sharp metal and faint earthiness. The way ink seeps into paper, unfurling in soft tendrils, has always felt truer than the blunt, fleeting echo of spoken words. I write better than I speak. Rather, my imagination exceeds my speech abilities. It is a timeless truth: I was but three or four years old, though lived then a life in which the few words in my possession, with the multitude of images, formed mental tales never able to cross the borders of my lips. Of course, I did not know how to write with letters. Were they only images of the words that truly existed as words in my head? The two are sometimes melded… Frequently, those words and images spoke louder and clearer than the voices of the other people around me, only because I felt more “I” in my inner life. In it, with my eyes opened or closed, my friends surrounded me. Nevertheless, inwardly, I could create an abundance of stories that gave life in me—in turn, happiness, fear, sadness, sorrow—all the emotions that I could not ever express to others because, as very young as I was, I had many responsibilities (so I thought). It was thus more important that I assumed the charge of my mother’s emotions; mine couldn’t see daylight. I remember one afternoon when she sat silently at the kitchen table, her gaze fixed on nothing, her hands limp on the table’s edge. The weight of her silence filled the room like a fog, and I, barely tall enough to reach the counter, thought it my duty to dispel it. I gathered my crayons and scribbled a bright sun on the back of a piece of paper, holding it up to her as if I could force light into the room. Her eyes shifted to me, and for a moment, I believed I had succeeded. Her gaze lingered longer than usual, her lips twitching with something I couldn’t name—surprise, perhaps, or the ghost of a smile that never quite emerged. She blinked slowly, as if waking from a dream, and her fingers curled inward ever so slightly, grazing the edge of the table like she was anchoring herself back to reality. 

My stories were my only friends. There was Élodie, a stubbornly free girl who lived in the hollow of an old oak tree and refused to leave even as the seasons changed around her. She whispered secrets about the world outside, ones I wasn’t ready to hear, but I listened anyway. Then there was Georges, a beautiful owl that could speak all languages, who built bridges over imagined rivers and invited me to cross them into new worlds. We walked together, side by side, speaking in the silence of shared wonder. Each of them existed only in the corners of my mind, but their presence was as steady as the hum of my own heartbeat. Populated by images, neither good nor bad, to which some mindful stories were set. With them, I could be my authentic self—without any falsifications. I felt safe thus: no one could incorporate my words, therefore no one could cannibalize me, nor own me. I could be sad in my head without anyone knowing it, nor mocking me. Expressing thus my fears in the forms of images in order to conjure them may have been a little excessive, but the words needed to explain them to others did not manifest. Maybe I cared not to grow or change, hence allowing me to nurture that power. Or curse. Indeed, I could not abandon it, will it as I were. However, today I have a powerful weapon: my trusted fountain pen.

A classmate at Salamanca once remarked that my handwriting revealed how much I rely on writing to give shape to the swirling mass of words filling the dark cavern of my mind. Although they may be boisterously loud and demand that I give them life—a life without parole—their delivery is especially difficult and time-consuming. For each word is unique, special, and carries, like a banner, its own story it yearns to weave out loud. Maybe you can imagine that they are facing one another, as in a long struggle of life and death, in which only one of the protagonists will survive and, after passing through the light, would fall in a mist of violet ink upon the white papers by morning. Imagine that I am a huntress, like the Roman goddess Diana, prowling through the night in search of the perfect word. Each capture is a kill, a necessary sacrifice to grant it a new life—freed from the confines of Plato’s cave, no longer a shadow but a form finally seen in the light. Yet, I hope you do not see me as a despot who lines up her words at dawn like soldiers before a firing squad, sacrificing them to the unyielding god of expression for the love of creation… 

Some people may say that writing so much through so many words is a symptom of a person who is attempting to occupy a physical space in order to find her place in the real world. In any case, writing to find my embodied voice finally may possibly be an uninterrupted war torturing me, in which I must die in one form to be reborn in another. For I do not know who I am. Yet. Perhaps this is why I need to use such a hemorrhagic amount of words to express a simple idea when only one or two would suffice. Nonetheless, with and through the words is a quest to find the real person I am, or could be, while conjuring the demons of the erstwhile “I” damaged by the words of others. That subjective linguistic diaspora from oppression evidences my eagerness to find my voice and the place where I would belong. Belong. Two syllables rolling off the lips, like a stream cascading over a rock that, time after time, softens the rough edges—just as the search for belonging erodes the sharp corners of the self, revealing something smoother, something more whole. What does it mean, to belong to a place? To be home—to be at home, outside of my own body? Is it the warmth of sunlight filtering through lace curtains, the faint aroma of star anis and coriander drifting from the kitchen, or the sound of footsteps that move toward you, never away? Perhaps home is not a structure but a sensation, the way the earth feels solid beneath bare feet after wandering too long on shifting sand. But how would I know them when I see them, if I do not know who I am? I do not believe that this dilemma compares to a snake eating its own tail to form a circle of which one cannot see the beginning of the end. For the start is clearly marked: an empty cave, or rather a bottomless pit that must continually be filled.

From whence do these words and images come? I remember the first written word I devoured consciously. I read it in my school book when I was 5 or 6 years old: essence de térébenthine—”turpentine.” In reading this account of a boy helping his father, the whole story was developing in my mind, becoming alive as if it were a projection of a colorful film with sounds, in a movie theater. But, when suddenly I encountered these words so strange, “essence of turpentine,” the puzzlement borrowed my steps for days and nights. It became a mantra whose vocalization gave me a new living energy—a hum that thrummed through my chest like the distant rumble of thunder, steady and unrelenting, filling my limbs with a restless urgency to move, to create, to bring something unseen into being. Essence, I understood it in my own way. But térébenthine… what was this so unusual creature whose name was so precious? Phonetically, térébenthine in French brought back the memory of the soil and a bench. I then imagined a tiny dirt bench which produced a liquid (gas, what “essence” is in French), when squeezed perhaps, with which the boy was cleaning brushes. (Did these images also come to life for you now?) How was this possible? There must be a hidden trick. Reading the dictionary definition was like staring at a puzzle with missing pieces—each word clear on its own, but together they refused to fit, leaving me with a gnawing frustration that buzzed in my temples and settled like a stone in my gut. Thus, the words, with their blended images, have remained in my head to this day. Finally, they are coming to the light after a few decades, but transformed, thereby closing the circle. Their story proper is finally known by others. So words are born in my head through all the reading I did: children’s books, forbidden novels, labels on boxes and packages, warnings, graffiti, posters plastered on walls next to a painted Défense d’afficher (“No posting allowed”) …

Like a drug addict experiencing withdrawal, my eyes madly grazed the already-consumed books from our school’s minuscule library, my fingers caressing each spine, rough with worn paper and frayed edges, as if touching the words could get me the next hit so anxiously craved. The faint musty smell of old ink and yellowed pages clung to the air, a scent that felt as necessary as breath. My mind and soul yearned for new words to fill the ineffable void that threatened to swallow me. Unable to feed its hunger, my mind’s restlessness translated into corporeal states of lethargy. The inner child in me was craving for new friends… “There’s always the dictionary,” a bodiless voice whispered—a familiar echo, distant yet intimate, like a thread pulled from the tangled skein of my own thoughts. It carried the texture of quiet doubt and restless curiosity, a presence that tugged at me in moments of uncertainty, coaxing me to seek clarity even in the murkiest of places. It sounded like the quiet persistence of doubt and hope interwoven, a voice that had lived in my head so long it no longer needed a name. DICTIONARY, mausoleum of words—the book that gets opened only to discover the virgin words, without their own history, but one from which tales may develop and multiply.

Similarly, I found many words in the dictionary at that time, but it was the word Palimpseste that burrowed itself deeply inside my heart. To this day. He lives within me, as do all the words that others hurled carelessly at me. The words I encountered in my reading took on new life, adorned with fresh narratives and visions, dressed by beautiful words visible solely to me… Palimpsests of words are formed, superimposed with stories and images, sometimes visible to the outside world, painted on the streets, the buildings, even on the people when they walk through my eyes, like the objectives of a projector displaying a silent movie that I narrated within my mind. Palimpsests of palimpsests of palimpsests … The words of my life.

Oh how I fear sharing my stories! It is a fear that paralyzes me so much that, in spite of my years of writing, only my childish musings have been read. Perhaps I write in Spanish or in English because they are not my mother tongue, therefore creating a layer of protection – it is not well written, you see, because I do not speak Spanish or English “very well.” My artichoke heart is naked and raw for all when my words, as they coat the papers, are shared with other eyes. What if people who read me do not understand what I have shared? Would I be judged? Would they judge the words that I cherish? Also, once they are written, their history is immutable, their ending etched in stone, Séyès-lined papers become their tombstones. But within my mind, they evolve still, change, and defy a banal death. Unless, naturally, they are mere relics of the past – trivial anecdotes, devoid of lasting significance. Drawings, compositions, poems, my French writing, echoes of an ever wondering and wandering child that I was growing up. “She’s a little girl, just like you, Élodie.” Yes, just like me. Filled with nothing but air.

But, I was not filled with nothing but air. I was a child filled with others’ words: disappointment, condemnation, contempt, and rejection. “Oh, it’s a girl…” “Why is it so ugly?” “Nobody loves you.” “You don’t belong here. You’re not of this family.” A tiny child, I looked up at her defiantly, with my “ugly bug eyes” ensconced in my dark skin and left. A dog senses love and hate. As does a child. I walked. It didn’t matter where. I didn’t know where. I just walked. It was at that moment, I realize it now, that my heart was forever wounded. From its wound grew the first cicatrizing layer. I am only three! I had wanted to scream to her. Yet, no word came out. Nor did the tears. “Crying is for the babies.” For what seemed like days, but ‘twas just an hour or two, I was sitting in a street of Saï-Gon. A little blood sausage with her head on her folded arms upon her knees. “You don’t belong here.” The words echoed, relentless and cruel. “You don’t belong here.” “You don’t belong here.” I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry. As the words fell harshly on that tiny body, so did the blows of that Algerian woman. “You’re just a dog.” “An ugly, useless dog.” Merciless beatings falling on my backside. The physical pain faded. But the words, sharp and cutting, lingered still. 

Dontcrydontcrydontcrydontcry… The body bleeds, ecchymosed skin eventually fades, and wounds heal.  Don’t cry. Don’t feel bad for that little girl. Did you not see the little angel beside her, hugging her, waiting with her in Saï-Gon? Did you not see her spreading her wings over her back, taking most of the blows meant for that child in that babybeater’s apartment? Don’t cry. “Don’t cry, Mẹ…” the four-year-old whispered, blood staining her words. She silenced the hurtful words, killing them, letting them bleed onto the floor. Don’t cry, Mẹ… she whispered quietly in her head.