Chapter excerpt: the country gyal journal

Copyright ©®™ Crystal Evans

I knew what I wanted for myself even before listening to the Kelly Clarkson's song that mirrored the poignance I often felt staring out the window of my grandmothers house during a late afternoon shower that left the air with an earthy perfume. 

I wanted to break away but before that I was happily content with my life. Mama would bring back patty from the factory and we would fry them over in the frying pan and eat it with Gratto Bread. I remembered my sisters and I eating out the peanut butter in the fridge or licking out the milo tin that mama hid in the cupboard. We would pull the chairs and take down Horlicks from off the fridge top and eat it like there was no tommorrow. Our favorite delicacy for lunch was bread and sugar or condensed milk washed down with water. 

When Christmas time came we had roast breadfruit and fried saltfish, I particularly enjoyed using my finger to lick the grease from my plate and if my granny was absent, I would readily obliged the usage of my tongue in the same manner. 

We had jokes and Dolly house was nice. We married each other with Bulla Cake and Water, sometimes we had money to buy dollar cooler and suck suck to quench our thirst as we played in the sweltering son. 

Sometimes when the rain came down like a torrential downpour we remained inside and played jacks and ball or watch Tv. We didn't have Dolls but managed to find some old weaves and plastic bottles to improvised. We had plastic Dolls and our nieghbour Kiesha mother sent down Dolly with clothes set from foriegn come give her. We were not jealous but vaguely aware for the first time that albeit we were never hungry, we still lacked and want. 

Our favorite past time would be carrying water from the standpipe across the cow pasture, early in the morning when the only sign of the sun was a chalky, powdery pinkish haze on the skirt tail of the horizons, when dew water wash your foot like rain and the mist of the morning smelled by leaves. When you use dew water to drop inna your yeye from it's dollop accumulation on the dasheen leaves because your granny  said it would get the gunk out of your eye after waking two mornings with it glued shut with matta.

  We would race across the grassy surface at the same time the common fowls marched across the cow pasture in lines like a soldier and we avoided sliding, falling face down in a pile a cow shit. In the days when we were not staring in awe at the length of Brother Roach Donkey penis, we would be hunting bees, using paper and bottle to trap them, then setting them free. We were oftentimes stung but never deterred, because chasing bees and butterflies were the happiest moments of our lives. 

We had games like Chinese skip when my sisters, I, Doodo Pet, Quennae and Puuchie Loo would play chinese skip until the sun went down or our parents called us home for food. We enjoyed roast goat seed, hog seed and the only thing we hated about Pigs was cleaning out the Hog Crawl. 

Boys were rude but never as violent as they are today. Boys had work to do like tying out the animals in the mornings and my cousin once lost a herd of goats in the hills, he could not sleep in the house as my grand uncle ordered him to find the goats before daylight or don't come back there. He slept in the hills that night even when my Granny cried shame on Uncle Roy for being such a heartless brute. 

I hated playing with boys because they hurtle the ball with too much speed therefore the impact was often more excruitiating that when girls played alone. We got more jokes, winced and pleaded with the boys not to crack a bone when they caught the ball in our usual bat-and-run-a-bound- games. 

These boys were not interested in playing crickets and flying kites on the open field in the searing sun like boys did when I was a child. These boys wanted console games and smartphones like the American teenagers on cable tv. They wanted to drive chromes vans and date women with chrome skin. Everything they valued had to look like silver or gold, shiny and attention  pulling like the lifestyles of those in movies. 

I remembered how my first pickney boyfriend kicked a ball and pushed the bucket of water off my head. It was unponderable the intensity of the hatred he reserved for me up until adulthood. I think he is still reeling over the comment I left him with, one I overhead my grandmother telling a man one day. " even if you gave me you hood, I wouldn't know what to do with it". I didn't understand what my grandmother meant by that but between eating the Mangoes and Guinep he brought from bush for me in a crocus bad, I told my twelve year old admirer that I was not remotely interested in him and his Dolly House business. 

Now I leave this community, glancing up at the regal spread of the mountains posed above the trees, kissing the horizon against the serene blue sky, meditating over the very purpose of my existence. 

Woman Scorned: Excerpt from Book

Love is an elusive emotion. You can't help it. It just happens, unexpected, unbidden. It is like a disease, a drug additive, constant and obsessive. Our reaction to someone we like is fascinating, intricate and confusing. Our angst about love and relationship is tied to our fantasies and ideation of what being in love is and suppose to be like. 

We might not admit it but we all have a checklist in our head of what we are looking for in a partner. We want that other half that we believe completes us. It is this mode of thinking that opens a trap door for obsession and addiction to love or the idea of being in love. Love is a powerful

Drug. A lovelorn woman's lover is a drug addict looking for a next fix. The slightest comment, look or embrace triggers a state of euphoria sending doses of dopamine into the blood stream. 

This explains why it is very difficult almost unlikely for a woman crazily in love with a man to be able to resist the temptation to call him, to seek out that "cocaine like high" we all experience in a new relationship.

And like the literally drug addiction, a high is often followed by an abysmal low. The perverse magic and materiality of love is a timeless obsession since the beginning of our existence. It is this unmerited, offhand feeling that makes a simple quirk of the lips or upward tilt of the eyebrows unmistakably sensual. 

Love lends an inimitable pleasure to the deep baritone of a man's voice, a seductiveness to the power of his leg strides and a breathtaking aura to his presence. Love transforms the growls, snarls and grrrrrrr of a man's voice into the sexiest attribute. You either have it or you don't!!! 

Love transcends the simplest of gestures into something extraordinary. Eyes that once behold the world become Windows's to ones soul, limpid pools of pleasure, glances of indiscretions and light feathery touches sending tingles from skin to bone. Your entire body awakens, fluids rushing into places and sensational sounds emits from ones lips involuntarily. 

When you fall in love. You unknowingly place your happiness at the mercy of another's companionship. Those who say otherwise, have only skipped cross the raggedy terrains of love in a parachute and from the other side -beckon you to come across its steep landscape barefeet. 

Humility ; Finding the err in my Humanity

Self righteousness is the enemy of compassion and judging another persons life by your own existence with little regards for his private struggles is to bring down the same egocentric critique on your own humanity. 

You cannot understand the human nature without first examining yourself. Consider what motivates you to anger and violence. Imagine how many times people have done evil to us and how we subtlety, in the weak, secret hours of our lives wished them dead. We want their lives end because we believe life is the most precious thing and to take it away is to destroy what an individual values most. We are afraid of others when we should be wary of ourselves. We are as much a danger to others as we are to ourselves. The only danger that exist is man is himself and he is quite unaware of it. When we strive to destroy each other often times, unknown, unbidden we become the catalyst for our own self destruction. 

Regardless of the differences and divisions that we encourage among ourselves we must come to realize that it is the fragile strands of our humanity that bonds each and every one of us to a similar beginning and an inexorably yet identical end. 

Life is centrally a misery because society force these lofty ideals upon us to achieve and pursue material abundance and try to pervert our own nullification. We hate our meaningless existence and hence we try to give our lives purpose, to safeguard ourself from atomization into the free bouncing energy of nothingness that we all are. 

Many of us openly denounce those who pervade wickedness and yet we gloat over the failures of others. We would put our head and hearts together to see another to down because we think it makes us innocent. As long as I don't have any blood on my hands, then I haven't done anything wrong. When you speak your desires atmosphere asking God or Nature to conspire with you and foment the annihilation of others. Those who wish death upon others for malice, retribution or recreation are as guilty as the man behind the trigger. 

Evil is a serious energy. It is far more robust than Good because Good albeit subliminal is gradual but insured. Evil rushes to conclude that which it started. It consumes it's supporters and purveyors because evil leaves very few narrators. Wickedness thrives on pouring gasoline over a fire than hurling a bucket of water upon a fiery temper. Very soon the conflagration incinerated the doser because whatsoever we put out in is what we get back. I wish even the damning the best of health because I believe it is never my place to cast judgement. Me, a flawed human being with my numerous quasi obsessive compulsive behaviors and never ending personal struggles would never marinate another human being in condemnation, laws caters how deserving.

It is sad because there was a time when I imagined mercy as reciprocity. Show mercy onto those who are merciful towards you. I could never ask the higher forces to fight against those who fight against me since in doing so I prove myself no better or different than them. 

Sometimes I am afraid to write about  how I really feel and some of the things my mind's eye see. I believe opening some doors can change your life. I have a hunch of foreboding that this society does not want to hear anything I have to say because I don't look a certain way or come from a particular area. My brothers get judged for wearing kerchiefs on their faces like Mexicans, I get judge for choosing to remain among them. Well how can you expect to look like a criminal, act like a criminal and associate with criminals and not be regarded as one. Judge not less he be the brunt of a fool's judgement. 

I see wisdom hunkering down on the darkness, afraid to traipsing the menacing streets of gratification and material allures. I've asked God whoever he is because I am sometimes agnostic to show me the error in my ways, guide me away from the evil paths. I am only human ad my scope of knowledge is not static, it is ever expanding. The more I learn the less I realize I know. I am still a fool and the foolish are prone to make mistakes. So I am asking for guidance from the supreme intelligence.