Hair in My Throat

This is the first of a series of short observations. Not clearly connected, I split them up into several parts. Like my recent travels this year since Katrina, the pieces are rather scattered and ungrounded. Maybe later, when I am more settled, I will be able to look back and create a longer, more cohesive piece. But for now, the writing will have to be accepted for what it is (like my own mental state), whimsical and fragmented yet still going places and hopefully engaging enough to be considered interesting.

Sometimes, I have dreams that there is an endless strand of hair stuck in my throat.

The dream always entails a scenario like this: I am about to sing jazz with this very tight group of musicians, players that look like they are from another time and place, circa. early 20th-century in New Orleans. However, the song will not come out of my mouth; there is something blocking it. That is when I feel a tickle in the back of my throat. I am choking, the music stops, and everyone stares silently at me as I pull the single strand of black hair from the back of my throat. I can't pull the hair out fast enough. All I can do is maintain the uncomfortable feeling that is permitting my voice from being heard, stopping me from being part of this wonderful NOW within the music and scene. Instead of engaging with the musicians and audience around me, I am involved with only that which stands in my way. I am communicating with that self-effacing demon which permits my own expression with the outside world. And as he takes me into a rapture of self-doubt, I allow myself to be embraced by him. I turn to an imploding darkness as the rest of the world falls away. All around me is laughing, drinking, and conversation as I am drawn closer and closer into the softness and comfort of my demon's grasp. He is hovering, choking me, and cornering me. I become solid and stale like a piece of amalgamated rock, a fake fossil that contains synthetic materials such as tar and broken glass. One day, I notice a tooth in the mix. One tooth, the rest of it is covered in black hair. But the hair is too curly, and the tooth is too large to come from me. So whose defining features am I carrying with me (the items that forensics use to identify someone through dental records and DNA). Why have these things become a part of me? Thus, is the hair in my throat my own or does it also belong to someone else?

A long time ago, I decided to meet with my demon. What I didn't know is that we would become lovers. The meeting turned into a conversation, an embrace rather than a battle, and then a long affair. He transplanted things that I thought were foreign to my body within my veins, eventually reaching my heart. Before I gave in to him, I used to stand there, transfixed, my feet stuck in cement tar on the street, as he was sliding around freely in the stuff, like Jesus when he walked on water. He was beyond the physical limitations that I constantly found myself constrained within.

But now that he is my lover, the tar that was solid within me, flows freely within our veins. When he speaks, pebbles of the stuff hit me in the face, making me blind to what is around me. It seems that everyday I am within these black gravel storms, clouds of the stuff invading my nostrils and mouth. I empty out my bowels in the evening only to be filled up again by this fog.