Sorry about the delay

I realize it's been a while since I've blogged, and that's mostly because I've been fighting off death. Literally. With four health center visits, two emergency room visits, three antibiotics, and five prescriptions medicines (including some narcotics), you'd think that I'd have kicked mono's ass.
Oh no.
It was surely kicking mine.

But now I'm feeling better (knock on wood) and I have been thinking and feeling much inside myself lately.
The urge to write and get it out of my skin is....tingling inside.

So...I want to write down some things tonight that I was thinking about and that inspired thought/words/poetry before I forget them. Forgive them if they don't make sense right now...they will be elaborated upon later.

I went to rainy Kansas and I learned the truth.

The trinity of the past, the present, and the future. Doors. Locked doors, locked away, the past.

Speaking the language of the otherworld. Translation.

And now...to what Lauren and I have been talking about over the past half-hour or so...and what triggered my nose bleed.
Yeah, a nose bleed.

We started talking about insane asylums and how cruelly they treated the patients. For whatever reason we started talking about the Holocaust and concentration camps.
I said that I've never been more overwhelmed by a sense of darkness and evil and despair than I have when I was at Mauthausen. You see some things that you just can't forget.

And I let it rest at that for a while. Then I started dwelling on it, and I knew unless I said something, I'd sink into the pit of darkness in my head and have bizarre nightmares about the intense and indescribable suffering that these innocent people underwent.

So I started speaking about the things I saw and felt at Mauthausen, things that I haven't been able to tell anyone or even get out of my mouth without just losing it.

I told them about the barracks. How the museum people had a few of the standard bunks set up for us in an otherwise empty barrack and explained that three people would sleep in each bed frame, with no mattress, of course. Three people in each bed, three beds high. Nine people in a space that we wouldn't expect two people to reside within.

And next to the bunks on the worn grey hardwood floor was a dark splotch. The floor had been waxed years past, but of course the varnish was missing in spots and it was mostly dull bare wood, aged and matte. And then, a dark stained splotch on the floor. We all wondered but no one opened their mouths to ask because we already knew, really.
Using human blood as a wood stain...I can't even walk on the floor the same. I avoided that spot when they shuffled us through the room, out of respect for those who were fell in that place, for the dead who were killed without respect, without dignity, without their family near. For those who were forgotten as just another number, and moved, and disposed of because that's just how life was on the inside of those granite walls. For the people who died in that spot, inside the walls of a prison that they built with their own backs, their own sweat, their own blood, from the quarry down below. Can you imagine??? Being put to work to build your own cage?
When the work didn't kill them, the SS did.
Officers given strict commands to work the prisoners until they were dead. Literally.

I was so angry, I wanted to kneel and cry and scream and tear at my eyes and my hair and my ridiculously proud clothes and the haughty life that I lead without considering any of it. I wanted to go back in time and bash the heads of the villagers together, villagers who lived with a dark secret in their backyard. Don't tell me they didn't know...they KNEW goddamnit, and they did NOTHING.
Oh, but they had to survive somehow, and loose lips sink ships.
Really?
Because I know 6 million ships that sank without a sound in a dark harbor, without a single SOS response, without a single nod in their direction, slipping into the inky abyss without a flag raised in respect.

I hate getting irate about this, because I rant like a Republican preacher. There's nothing less convincing. I know that my anger is justified. That my disgust with the past, the lives of the guilty and the guilty by choice of silence. I feel the disgust with my own privileged life. With the ease with which I live.

I remember walking down the stairs into the areas where they did they worst business of all. Hanging from above the steps was a wire, with a loop on the end. I was confused...this wire didn't overkill for simply hanging decorations or signs. And then, they told us, "That wire was used to hang people on the steps, where you are standing. They would attach the rope here - to this loop - and then push them off from behind."
Even in the sunlight I was afraid to touch it.

Then in the corner, at the bottom of the stairs, to the left. A corner. Very dark, because no sunlight reached it. I wondered what was in that corner, and peered closely at the wall. I didn't step into the darkness because I felt a sort of respect for it, a fear or understanding of its depth. The plaque read - Headshot Corner. The officers would make prisoners kneel here, interrogating them before shooting them in the head at close range.
The darkness had less to do with direct sunlight and more to do with the fact that the cement walls and floor were saturated with the blood of innocent men and women. Stained.

There's more I can remember, images burned into my mind. But that's all I could handle tonight before I started to cry and my nose started to bleed.

And it's all I can handle right now.

My heart goes out to you.

Amanda