Hey, everyone! My name is Kalla. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. I haven’t posted here before, but I think having a cool space where we can write about what the fuck ever is a pretty neat idea, so I want to put my two cents in where “Guernica” Part 3 is concerned.
It’s also a bit too soon for the other alters to write about this shit, as many of them consider Part 3 to be the most gut-wrenching and soul-searing part of the poem. So I have stepped in to get them through this fucked up block they’re having and maybe process some of the grief on their behalf. If you are just now coming across this series in the wild, you can find Parts One and Two here and here. And as previously stated in the posts Eight and Ellie wrote, you can find the full poem in our poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.
I think this post will follow roughly the same structure of the others – Eight’s performance first, then the text, then my thoughts on it. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 3!
Eight’s Performance
The Text of “Guernica” Part 3
guernica iii.
airplanes up in the sky..
i know airplanes.
of course i do.
sometimes you’re the bomber,
sometimes you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
i like to think god laughs at tragedy
so that at least someone finds it funny.
but a brain is the bomb
and there’s a cruel irony in it eating itself
when it was the best brain i’ve ever known.
the roads were clogged with rubble and there was
no way out
there never was
not when the brain is the bomb
and you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
not when the brain belonged to your favorite person
and the bomb is also a death sentence in an MRI scan
and the execution date is to be determined.
so many bombs
making a hole in a heart
so deep that i’m still trying to find the bottom of it
(there’s no bottom)
but i will not die here when i’ve died 10 million times
already and i’m choking on this metaphor as i write
no harm in 10 million and 1
Allēna, summer 2019.
My Thoughts
“Guernica” Part 3 is about our father, Xavier, dying when we were 18. He had brain cancer for eleven years. It was a shadow over our entire fucking childhood.
We knew Xavier was going to die from the time we were seven years old. This wasn’t due to any kind of intuitive knowing. He collapsed at the gym a few days prior and fell into a tonic-clonic seizure. He found out what had caused the seizure a short while later, a brain tumor.
We weren’t shielded from any of that. Our parents sat us down at the round kitchen table in the rumpus room and told us everything, sparing no details. This was a terrible burden for a child to bear, especially a highly intelligent child who had already seen too much pain by the age of seven. We had already attended more funerals than weddings, and would go on to lose even more people we deeply loved before even losing him.
A Death Sentence In An MRI Scan, And The Execution Date Is To Be Determined
In 2013, when Allēna was already battling the beginnings of a severe depressive spell that would make her crave death for the better part of the next decade, Xavier got even more terrible news. He went in for a routine MRI scan to see if his tumor – named Cuato by then – had grown any larger. The oncologists came back with good news and bad news. The first tumor hadn’t grown any, but they had found a second one. It turned out to be completely separate from Cuato, called a second primary tumor. This tumor was far more aggressive, and he was given months to live. Though he shattered expectations and went on to live for another three years, this was a death sentence. Allēna had to watch her brilliant father, one of the only people who had ever made her feel understood,
Allēna practically gave up on everything. Xavier was everything to her by that point. She describes the last few years of Xavier’s life as being trapped beneath a sword that is held by a fraying rope. At any moment, that rope could snap, and the sword would fall and impale her.
Suffering Alone And In Pain
Hera became colder the worse Xavier got and the worse Allēna fell into her depression. Without Xavier as a buffer anymore, Hera emotionally, mentally, medically, and occasionally physically abused Allēna. Hera began to massively overmedicate her with psychiatric medication so that she wouldn’t fight back anymore. She used Xavier’s worsening condition as a justification to do the bare minimum and emotionally abandon her when she needed support most.
So for three years, Allēna watched her father wither away, unable to tell anyone about what she was suffering at home. Hera explicitly forbade it and would hurt her worse if she tried. She dealt with a terrible bout of mononucleosis in early 2014, as well.
During that ordeal, she had to diagnose and treat herself for it. It turned out that she had actually gone to the doctor too early. The tests she’d gotten came back with a false negative. It was only when she presented with acute pancreatitis a few months later that they actually found the antibodies in her system that indicated she had had mono at all. By that time, Hera had written her now chronic exhaustion and pain as hypochondria, mental illness, and a ploy for attention.
We still haven’t recovered and are still chasing diagnoses a decade later. We suspect that the bout of mono may have given us lupus, an immensely painful and debilitating chronic illness that is notoriously difficult to diagnose. However, both Hera and later Fang wrote Allēna off as a lazy hypochondriac who just didn’t want to do her work, abandoning her to suffer alone, terrified, and in unimaginable physical and psychological pain.
Like The Sun Itself Went Out
Hera’s abuse and Xavier’s impending death psychologically shattered an already fragile Allēna. When he passed away on February 5, 2016, she felt nothing for five days. It hit her at breakfast back at college on the fifth day.
She describes losing Xavier like it was as though the sun itself went out. Her world became dark, cold, and completely and totally lonely. It took every ounce of strength she had just to drag herself to class and back. She told her professors what was going on, and most of them took mercy on her. She could communicate with her Ancient Greek professor that she was having a very hard time that day with just her eyes. This professor, who we’ll call Ms. Melitta, was a very kind and perceptive angel of a woman, and she outright pleaded with Allēna to go easy on herself. She told Allēna she was proud of her just for showing up even when in her words it looked like she “wanted to be blotted off the face of the Earth”.
Allēna, whose family and life up to that point had always pushed her past her capacity to handle it against her will, had never received that kind of grace before. She broke down ugly crying. It was a balm to her weary, brokenhearted soul. She credits Ms. Melitta and others that year for saving her life. She was seriously contemplating suicide at that point, was sick all the time, barely eating, and was an all around disaster. It’s a miracle in her mind that she still has friends from that college, she was such a disaster.
I Will Not Die Here
At the end of the year, when her professors all gathered to give her her closing remarks, they almost all agreed that they admired that she almost always showed up to class, even if she couldn’t manage to stay the whole time or say or do much at all. Even during one of the most painful times in her life, Allēna kept showing up and putting in an effort through tremendous difficulty, and many of them held her in high regard for that. She had never received that sort of kindness and praise before, and it helped her keep going and not give up.
Showing up became a pattern for all of us. We joke that we “appear under mysterious circumstances”. If we say we’ll be someplace at some time, we will be there and early, come hell or high water. Xavier taught us that nothing less will do. Eight did this when he got his job in Philly – he said he would be there in Philly on Monday the Friday before that in Texas, and there the fuck he was on Philly on Monday, early. Nobody in the office thought he’d even show up, considering he’d have to travel over a thousand miles and move in less than a week to take this job. But that’s the way we were raised, and that’s what we do, obstacles be fucking damned.
We will not die here, we keep saying. We have shit to do. And die we don’t, even though there are often close calls.
Stay tuned for more magic and for Part 4! I’m gonna go to sleep soon, I cried my eyes out writing this.
Love, Kalla
One more thing…
Wait! Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (haha, gottem) and we’ve joined the Fediverse. We’re opensorceryy@opensorceryy.co everywhere that’s federated. Give us a follow?
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