#tuesdayafternoons

The young women I work with on Tuesday afternoons are stunning.

Today, we sit in a circle after they have just done an Image Theater scene. The scene entailed 4 of them in stilled expressions--someone's head is bowed with a piece of paper in her hand. Someone is reaching their arm out from the other side of the room to the person holding the paper and two others are standing a few feet away. One is holding back the other who's arm is raised in the air. The other women sitting in their chairs must guess what is going on in this scene.

I have them playing out a domestic violence incident in the home where one parent is crossing the line of discipline and entering into physical abuse of their child over making poor grades. A grandparent is reaching out their arm in the background to comfort the child.

The image of the parent lifting their hand high in the air ready to strike caused four stories from their own lives to pour out.

"Can we talk about this?"

"I'm here. Go for it." I say.

"I hate my living situation. I hate my home life. That fist in the air you see, that's my house all the time."

"My aunt and uncle, I hate them. You don't understand, I dream of killing them and then I wake up in the morning and look them in the eye and I'm thinking like, 'do you know I just killed you in my dream'?"

They tell me of faces slammed repeatedly against radiators and young, pregnant mothers kicked out of the house.

I tell them, "I hear you. I understand. I used to hate my mother. When I talk about these memories I feel like I'm going to turn into Incredible Hulk!"

"Don't even talk to me about Incredible Hulk," one of them says to me. "My little brother scares me. I think he hatched out of something off of a branch. I'm like scared to see him angry."

I listen and re-live 11903 Ivahar Street where all the blood and ambulances and police and fist-busted walls let me know I was home.

They speak their memories as we go around this circle and I feel waves of heat and tenderness all over my body as their images make me think of my own. I am teaching them how to do this--find an image, tell a memory moment, and finally influence the memory by having an intentional relationship with it, so that it is not controlling you.

But we haven't gotten to the finally part yet. In this moment, I am wondering how we will. Right now I am scared of my own brother who can punch his fist through a wall, dares to race drivers who piss him off and has to be escorted out of night clubs for not backing down to men who claim they have guns in the trunks of their cars. I am scared though he is four states away and none of these moments have happened in a few years. But when I re-imagine them no one can tell me that they are not happening right now. Me and three of the young women are rubbing our knees and straining the veins in our necks as we tell our stories. We are entangled, and yet I know this is the very kind of entanglement that will lead to us being set free.