Free Your Mind

The sun’s radiant shine warms a gorgeous afternoon with fun and laughter as children and elders alike enjoy the generous spring day. Bear stares out his living room window from his floor cushion. He’s seen too many days as such come and go without feeling its heat, even rain drops on his head would be nice for a change.

“I know you heard me.” Joan says to Bear in her famous tea kettle stance, hand over hips.

He heard her — he’s just not listening. She’ll give Bear an ear full any time he starts looking out that damn window; forever reminding him of her blessed gift of clairvoyance.

“I was born the daughter of a sharecropper and the saints chose to speak to me!” She emphasizes, me!

Bear heard this many times and lip syncs with his back turned to her.

“…I had King Charles crowned, rescued France from England’s tyranny; and, I was declared a saint by Pope Benedict the XV and savor of the kingdom. She adds new content to her resume. Savor, geez.

“And I have a holiday! Do you have a holiday, huh?”

He knows it’s a loaded question and keeps his lips together.

“No…no you don’t!”

He doesn’t see any reason to get all cartwheels and somersaults about it — it’s a French Holiday — we’re in America, crazy brioche!

“Your sarcastic expression only proves you’re not ready for the world, Bear. The voices told me that it’s best for us to stay here where it’s safe with ever comfort imaginable.” She points their PlayStation.

Joan and her damn visions are driving him crazy and their marriage a hundred miles per hour into a brick wall.

“There’s nothing out there for you but trouble and more trouble. Besides, what would you do without me?” After crushing him, out of habit, she’d use jacked up reasoning to patch him up. It’s her way of consoling him for the pain she’ll cause. Joan is far from done. She have to burn out her passion first, being the extreme person Joan is – it’s going to be a long afternoon. She picks at his shoe strings.

“…they’re not even tied. See you can’t live without me.”

It’s an easy prophecy, Joan, even a blind person can see a slip and fall situation.

“You need divine guidance — ‘all of us do’”. Including herself still sounded condescending to him.

“What Bear!”

Her bossing him around is coming to an end, today! Bear tears his forehead away from the window, leaving a print. He’s heard enough and is ready for a dual. It’s been awhile since they had a fight. This time he won’t be the one leaving the room with his head slumped between his shoulders, retreating to the bathroom and freaky toilet. No, today she’s going to get a taste of her own shit! Oddly, Joan is afraid of turds, after all the shit that went down in her days.

Bear blames himself for Joan thinking she knows what’s best for him: allowing her to think that she control him by her blasphemous visions. Really, she’s too damn persuasive — Joan can sell acorns to a squirrel. If her strong personality wasn’t such a turn on to him, he’d been had called the mental health crisis hotline on her. Hell, Joan doesn’t even know what’s best for herself; pointing out, she’s the one that can’t stop people from getting inside her head and tell her what to do.

“Their divine revelations by Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret and —”

“Yeah, all dead people.” Bear cuts her off.

“Blasphemy! How dare you!” she rebukes.

“My bad, HOLY dead people.”

“All they’ve done for us, saving our souls from eternal damnation and this is your attitude, huh, Bear?”

All this drama because he just wanted a lil fun in the sun. It ain’t like she couldn’t use a tan.

“Is that supposed to be funny? I guess prison is hilarious too!”

Bear’s face snarls up like somebody poured salt in his kool aid.

“It’s what’s in your future, if you don’t listen to me. Not so funny now. 24 hour lock down! Shoe detail!..”

Shoe detail? She’s quoting Denzel Washington, “Training Day”.

“Those streets are full of traps and you’re ready to run out there and get tangled up”. She smug in satisfaction over Bear’s silence. She glides in to the kitchen, “care for a sandwich, honey, your favorite, P&J?”

“Hell no!” Bear roars back.

It’s typical of Joan to down play things she can’t control; deflecting what she really don’t want to talk about. She always put what matters in the saints hands, never taking responsibility herself.

“That’s not true.” she says, though, guilt is easily read on her countenance. “I answer to a higher calling, yes, but I love you! I do it for us.”

“I don’t doubt it, Joan. I know you do, it’s just…I know you. You hold back your own feelings to serve your divine voices. What are you feeling Joan, right now, huh, what? You don’t even know. A ball of confusion, that’s you, Joan. How long has it been since you got in touch with your own feelings; think for yourself?”

Her frozen expression is telling.

“…probably not since when we first got together. Remember our strolls through the park, and you were such a hopeless selenophile under the night sky. Excitement exuded out of your pores when you spoke about your dreams to become a social media influencer. I could see you giving your followers a great show with celebrity guests. What happened to her, that Joan?”

Joan’s normal upright posture is loose, like a nail working its way up from the wood floor.

“I miss your deep and thoughtful prison letters. Every time I received one, I could breathe again. You wrote with fire and passion. I couldn’t wait to come home and feel your heat. And when I did…your love was exactly how I fantasized — hot lava on brimstone! I miss our foreplay, like, the love letters we’d put in conspicuous places around our little apartment for each other to find when I first came home.”

Joan sighs of reminiscence with her arms wrapped around her petite frame.

“Then —”

“Here we go,” she says, anticipating the conversation shift.

“Yeah, un huh, here I go! All those midnight candles I thought you’d burnt for me, you really lit for your ‘VOICE-FRIEND.'” Bear says, “…your-ghost-writer.” He does the quotation sign with his fingers.

Joan lashes back, quoting scriptures. It irritates Bear. Where does she get this shit from forreal? She can’t read or write a lick! Bear drops the conversation, knowing she’ll only say, “It’s divine intervention,” of course it is, what else, right? He doesn’t let off too easily though, feeling it’s now or never to make a stand against his beloved wordsmith, Joan.

“You have a beacon for man in desperate situations, like, King Charles; no crown, no treasury! and barely a country to rule. Yet, he’d listen to a 17 year old peasant girl, claiming to have gotten favored by God. What freakin drugs were you taking?” Bear stops to consider what Joan had said about medieval times and how conditions had gotten so bad that people would even take advice from the village drunk. Why not listen to Joan? Bear reckons, hell, he listened to her. He know all too well the adverse conditions for Black men, especially with a criminal record or living in the burbs with a сrazy white woman — he isn’t trying to go back to prison or walk outside to an upside-down cross burning party on their front lawn.

“Ok. The King had similar reasons. But you have it all figured out, huh, Joan. Scare Bear to keep me in the cave.”

Joan goes into one of her tirades and starts throwing things off the mantel and speaking in tongues, maybe French(?). Her theatrics aren’t working on him. He’s not falling for it, not now.

“Joan, that’s why they burned you on the stake, you’re crazy as a Betsy bug.” He says from a distance, for good reason, Joan has a deadly aim.

“I commanded an army of men, led them to many victories and had the King’s ear”.

“So what are you trying to say, Joan, that you had better men than me?”

“No. I’m just saying —”

“That I should feel so lucky to be married to you, and have someone like you run my life, right?”

“No, no, no.” she sings.

“Quit with the Destiny’s Child stuff, admit it. Yes, yes, yes! Say it Joan, it’s true. Just like the voices in your head have great influence over you. Don’t believe it! Joan, you don’t know them from the man on the moon; where they come from or goes. Your head is filled with rhetoric and commentary. Whose? I’m glad you recognize not yours. But others, huh, Joan? What others? Take a minute, sit still for a change. See that every thought isn’t a call to action. I’m aware that calm to you mean alone; that you rather mimic everyone in the dream room then awaken your own true nature in solitude.

Joan darts to the living room window.

“There isn’t a moat out there to jump in, Joan, besides, we’re on the ground floor.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, just letting some fresh air in.” She says and open the window.

“Suicide won’t get you into Heaven”.

“You’re being mean, Bear.”

“Yes I am Joan. It’s always about you. What about me, Joan — what about us? Maybe I don’t want to go to heaven if you’re not there.”

Joan quivers and drop her face into her hands.

“Joan, don’t you think staying inside the house all day has grown old? Don’t you ever want to do something different, like skiing?” She shakes her head and says,

“No.”

“Me either. But you get the point. There’s a lot of fun and excitement out there waiting for us. All we got to do is be brave and release ourselves to the experience.” Bear catch the rain drop rolling off her chin, and smiles.

“That’s a first.” she says, freeing her joy.

“Faith,” he goes on to say, “is a wonderful thing. Its our guiding light through the dark, leading the unsure foot on the path. And since Faith is always ahead of us, we won’t lose our way in the darkness; so long as we don’t redirect to the past by dwelling, we’ll miss the moment then. Every moment we let slip through our fingers is a joy lost. Nothing is certain, not even your visions, love.” He affectionately swipes the ball of her nose. “destiny is for suckers, like tomorrow and yesterday: all we have is now.”

Joan’s eyes are wide open like an owl’s, keen and receptive. For the first time in a very long time Joan doesn’t hear any voices in her head. Together Bear and Joan open the door, and walk outside hand in hand into a welcoming sun.