Heart Berries: A Memoir(4)

I knew I was not well. I thought of the first healer, who was just a boy. My friend Denise told me the story. She called him Heart Berry Boy, or O’dimin. His name means “strawberry” in the language. Denise and I struggled and came up together—she named her son after the boy. The people in his village were sick and dying because the Indian world was shifting. The boy lost his mother. O’dimin became a sorrowful kid who found solace in the dream world. He fell asleep and spun a restlessness that comes when people are waiting to die. Sometimes grief is a nothing feeling.

The spirits finally came to him in a dream and told him to leave the village. He asked the elders what he should do, and they told him their own dreams, and that he should introduce himself by name and lineage to a bear and follow her until she gave him a gift.

He walked alone in the valley, and, when Bear presented herself, she stood tall. They looked at each other. He followed her. She sunk her paws into wet dirt, and then he told her his name. She started to feel sick. Her heaving seemed bloody and reminded him of his mother. Bear told him she was not his mother. She told him to let her rest, but he didn’t.

She said, “You can’t expect me to unearth medicine and give you power unless you give your life to this.” She was willing to die to keep her secrets from weak people.

He sat with her. She put her claws into a strawberry patch and produced ripe berries. She ate and slept. He collected some berries and brought them to the people. Eventually, he started to plant and show others what he learned. This was how the first medicine man came to be.

I learned that any power asks you to dedicate your life to its expansion. Things feel continuous when I think of my gifts and heritage. With you, things don’t feel right sometimes. I believe you obstruct my healing.

What I notice with you is that I look outside whenever I’m close to a window, and I wonder how many women feel that way. I feel things I would rather feel alone.

Things have become more real with you. Every time I start to cry, you tell me that you can’t keep me from leaving. I feel abject without your passion. I feel uncontrollable with you.

In bed, daylight breaks through our tented sheets. I see you, Casey. You will always love me in a shadow. It’s not torturous to be with you when I consider being without. Instead of feeling the gasping pain of my powerlessness, I straddle it and put your hands on my breasts. I tell you that I’d burn my life down for you.

We try to remember each other this way, and I’m not sure how many times I can do this to you before I forget myself. I want you to will my pain away. I try to think that the things I do to you, I won’t ever do harder to someone else.

I guess heartbreak is simple. Problems seem to unfurl themselves like crumpled bills on a nightstand.

The first night that I locked myself away, you didn’t even notice I was gone. Every door is the same when I kneel in a corner—with a hand over my mouth. Every bathroom floor is different, but no mourning I do feels familiar. It feels brand new.





3


indian sick



Casey,

I want to be polite and present myself as decent. I know the math of regret and nostalgia. The potency of your touch times the distance between that touch and today determines the intensity of my desperation. I regret leaving you, and I’m disappointed you let me go.

I don’t remember what I did. I know that I cried next to you, and I was wearing lingerie. You were angry with me for wanting to die—more than that, you were upset that I was weak minded. I was dramatic and unhinged. I couldn’t placate. I know that’s what I should have done.

I remember that I was wearing black lace and new stockings. I wasn’t stable, but men don’t usually care about that. I didn’t perform. I found myself uncovered and vulnerable, in fabric so thin—I thought of everything I’ve belted against my flesh and unclasped again and again.

You used me. I know you think animals are sentient. You treat your dog well. I needed to talk to you. The way we operate asks a lot from me before I can ask something of you.

This letter can spiral out of control like me, and maybe you won’t read it, because I might fail to send it, or you might decide your life without me is worth maintaining. You have white sensibilities, and who can fault you for being practical? I’d like this letter to be ashamed and wild like me, and I’d like to know you read it and wanted me more.

I told the staff this is my journal.

I’m going to die an Indian death. I want to lay my neck on the cool steel alloy of the train tracks back home. I want the death of a rez dog. Mutts can’t keep away from the tracks.

I’m writing you from a behavioral health service building. I agreed to commit myself under the condition they would let me write. You should have thought before you made a crazy Indian woman your lover. Feel culpable in my insanity because you are partly to blame.

I am not good, but you knew that. Why think less of me in here? You’re so economic with your language and your time. I understand your frustration with me. You want to spare yourself any tax or energy, and I am acutely aware of my impulsivity. It might be all the same to you. Do you still love me? I still want you. Don’t think less of me for being crazy. Don’t think that I am the only one culpable in my craziness.

I was walking through the house in the dark. I had covered the windows and mirrors. I was just unseeing things, dragging my feet along the wood panels until I found myself in the kitchen. I could not forget the familiarity of the kitchen or its drawers and instruments.