Issue 2: embodied

Note paper. Found pinned under a rock, under a cracked gravestone, under the snow. The name on the grave has been taken by the seasons.

I am a slow moving, low breathing, subject of ice and wind. Pinprick of the land. I am a wanderer of the barren and abandoned—peaks of pines and tilted trains on steady tracks follow out and out. An abandon of sky lights in streaks of green waves, a chase of hypothermia, empty stomachs, the refusal of tinder, and the knowledge I was wrong. My movement is dotted with crude language and worse poetry. I, homesteader of dust and lost parlors. First place evader of moose, bear, and loneliness, three months running. Her littlest flower in the wool sweaters of dead men, the mariners peacoats of those lost at sea. She who clothes herself in corpses. She who lives but by the mercy of soil, of edible roots and wild mushroom tea. She without, she a body, she without body, she, nonetheless.

***

Rolled up and wrapped around a bouquet of dried flower stems. The bow that ties them together is a crocheted string of baby soft lilac. Someone or something has since crushed the petals.

She loved dried flowers, and it made me upsettingly crazy for her. Oh, sure… you and everyone's mother has it for dried flowers. But do you go out picking your own bouquets? Do you hang them in rows from your four-post bed so that every time your partner goes to sleep, they can look up at a constellation of daisies, daffodils, magnolias, hyacinths—God, I don’t even know if this variety grows around here. And when we finished fucking, to lay down with her in a field of petals. Did you make displays? Did you buy little glass bulbs and trays, put your dried flowers with little skulls and moss and other small greenery? Did you take those painstaking works of art and put them into the walls of every building you designed, silently telling the new owners, “Here too lies life?”

Well, did you?

***

Crisp cardstock. Handwritten. Spotted in an old cabin flecked with mold and other rotten life.

It is summer, and I have never known a body like this. We walk through a garden, perfect abundance of emerald, violet, sunshine, beetle, and moth.  Life swells from feet to fingertip. She smiles to me and points out a blue butterfly. I was always the blue one. I hold my hand to the glass sky as a hopeful perch. She’s staring, humid breath on my neck. I close my eyes and my blue wings trail down through the canopy; I close my eyes and she pulls me to a little bench taken by the vines.  The botanical gardens are quiet, empty, yet as a butterfly I am distracted, uncertain of my mark. She kisses my neck, wastes no time with her fingers as I sharpen my sights and tumble through the sky, sated by the weight of a confident hand and soft lips. Our bodies align, perfect and new.

***

The sapling of a plant splits the envelope in two. She used red ink.

Grow out of the bottom of a pail. Grow out of the soil within you. In bulb, leaf, stem, and flower, the little days will linger in the time it takes our moon to orbit your greenery. Be a slow sway in long grass. The umbrella of small beetles hiding from the rain. Be a soft love. The sun that drips over you in April, a breath of pollen and spring. Let me—permit me the grace of trimming your petals. Sever off the dead and dying from your arc, heal all that corrodes your body. Be still the twist and life that tangle your roots around my fingertips. Croon your neck up toward my body of light. 

The caretaker cries, digging up handfuls of weeds. She trims off long roots, arranging them with love so that their petals may dry even and unwithered. She’s cried for so long convincing herself that these too are flowers. Rot of earth be damned. Entropy of soil and sun, sprouts choked of being—these too are flowers. Fragrant, beautiful, worthy of life.

***

Folded neatly on a neater bedspread. The home is empty. The power, disconnected.

At a point, you wake up. You look around and someone is in the other room showering, and you see the sunlight filtering through dust scattered with air, and the bookshelves with little filigree, chipped away of white and time. The colour on the wall is bold and deep, complex and you know you painted it with her but you can’t for the life of you remember when. Bedspread a forest, pillows in excess, comfort extraordinary. What were you reading last night before you slept? What thrift store did you buy your lamps from? Who wore the clothes in your closet? You think and you think, weeping as long as her shower runs, that you have never seen this room before in your life. That you have never lived here, you have never breathed this air, read this book, slept in this bed. But at a point, you wake up. And everything is as it should be, still and unwanted.

***

Spread across a pile of bandages, dried and slick with frozen blood. The torn looseleaf paper is stuck to them, bundled in the loose wet material. The pile smells and has spots of tears that carry over to the letter. A small monument to pain.

At a point, pain is always something forgotten. As I write this, I am slowly submerging my foot in warm water, deep indigo toes radiating agony through my body. The cabin around me is still, aside from the occasional shake of travelling wind. I place a small piece of firewood between my teeth and wrap my foot carefully in a torn shirt. I bite down and growl and moan and shout out in a way that makes me wonder if I was ever human.

I know that the first most obvious way to remove pain is to remove yourself from its source. Bandaging your hand will do you little good if you haven't taken it off the stove.

When things got worse between us, I scrambled desperately for bandages. Quick fixes, flowers, little gifts, reminders of our beginnings. As much support as I could bear, help around, cook dinner for her, tiptoe, cry alone and only alone. I carried my exhaustion, emotional, physical, mental, in private.

The pain of thawing frostbite does not get any better the longer I keep it in the water. The wood has stayed in my mouth. Clamped down, I worry my gums have split from the pressure. The only respite is knowing this pain serves a purpose. That this is how the body begins to forget.

By our third anniversary I understood that all the pain I forgot, I wanted to forget, by sleeping it off or acting like everything was fine, by wondering what would happen if I just walked into the snow. All the forgetting didn't remove our history of pain.

I often feel for the frog who died in a pot of boiling water by way of slowly raising the temperature until boiling. It started in warmth, glowing comfort until the heat overgrew itself, winding and spiking. The frog no doubt clung to the previous warmth, knowing that even in its boiling water there remained a trace of previous care.

I wonder if that's why we both stayed. We hurt each other endlessly: arguments and neglect, quiet in fear, loudmouthed in hurt, a confusion that asked both of us if we really were nothing. But we stupidly reminded ourselves of little intimacies. The same inside jokes, the same politics, familiarity, she still knew how to make coffee for me just how I liked it.

I hate that our last moments of togetherness were more of a relief than anything.

I pull my foot out of the water and wrap it gently in bandages. The ache lessens slightly. Staring at it, I don't know if it will heal fully. I don't even know if I tended to the wound properly. It worries me. The body is quick to turn forgetting into history when it does not have its needs met. But my needs require more movement, more cold, a day after day. I will try what I can, but I think this pain is the kind that lives with you.

***

A scrawling. Asleep on a bed of dried lavender.

I wonder often of the moss that will grow from my body when it is lived long enough to forget itself. What small creatures will skitter slowly down the halls of my bones. Stag beetle, pill bug, an unnamed caterpillar with horns and a fuzzy coat. As they take root, wrap around my emptied memory—what is it to know you are now a home? That you lived a life worth inhabiting. How calming is it to know that you were returning to something whole and perfect, as something whole and perfect?

***

Clean typed paper. Folded and placed gently into the mouth of a small animal ornament. The ornament resembles a cat, but it’s hard to tell exactly. The snow and ice have blown away much of a face or fur. What remains is a pale silhouette.

Two hand whittled giraffes, one craning their neck into the other; a handful of beach stones (first date); one unpaid parking ticket from our trip to Prague; a collection of lesbian erotica/revolutionary magazines from the late 90’s underground zine publishers; four scented candles (moonberry, fresh cleaned linen, sandalwood and stone, bonfire and ash); twenty six antique brass objects, each in wonderful different states of oxidation; three family photos; an excessive amount of books (see catalog B); a small taxidermy rat in a tuxedo that has been the point of many disagreements—yes, its as tacky as you think it is, and no, she wouldn’t let me part with it; a pack of cigarettes tucked behind an old book, smoked only when absolutely necessary; ten small lithographs, hand-made over the course of a four-month art class, each I find just as breathtaking as the first time she showed me; a stuffy of a small fawn for the baby that would never be; a holy bible with each line meticulously struck through (what rebels we were!); a bag of baby teeth; bad habits; drains clogged with hair, never cleaned; an old record player that played slow dances; the slow dances in question; disputes of where to place all this junk and the silent nights with our backs turned to one another—they say never go to bed angry. A love found and lost over and over again.

***

Stand out in the snow on a quiet day when the wind comes and goes in steady gusts. Note the wind’s path, its journey without words, destination, or origin. Close your eyes. Hold your hand to the sky, like such, and catch the paper as it floats on.  

If you want to know how it felt, here is what you should do. Find something unseen. A mossed rock, a ricochet, a fishhook, whatever is at hand. Cradle it, wash it in softness. Know that the world was not made for its darkness, that your guidance is important. Feel proud, puff up your chest because it doesn’t matter how well you wrapped the bandages or stopped the bleeding, it matters that you tried. Make sure nobody can tell you that you didn’t try. Coax it in offerings of comfort and small gifts. Do this even though you know the best use of an unseen stone is bludgeoning, the best use of a fishhook is an open eye. Pace yourself. It will feel wrong, but quietly offer what you can when you can, and hide yourself when you can’t. Find your own blindness, the areas untouched and alone. Take baths that are too long, hide in the back yard, meander on your trips into town. Justify your actions. This too is care. This too is being the very best you can be. Try washing it—a held tongue, the long dark, snowed silence, whatever is at hand—try washing it in softness again. Panic, because the water won’t run clear like it used to. It's still dirty, it’s still darkness. Try again. Hide again. This too is care, your very best, but your very best is so little, smaller and more grotesque, a body broken down and rotting in an effort that you can no longer stand to give, an effort that crawls across gravel, knees splitting, desperate to stop at the altar, just to hold a part of your life to the heavens. Just for a chance at blind salvation.

If you want to know how it felt, grovel at your worst. Tire of trying and trying again to fix what’s broken, to break yourself in the process. And finally, watch as they open their eyes and see what you’ve become.