It is lodged in her back somewhere between one vertebra and another, a small thing, sharp. It doesn't hurt at all unless it does, a slight movement forward and she feels it. The reaction is, as most are, involuntary: a gasp, wetness in the eyes; the need to do anything at all to not feel it again. She drinks to quench the fire it burns through her, the flames that lick at her heart, she drinks a river and there is nothing more to drink and still it hurts. This sharp… who put this in her? Why is it here? She cranes her neck around but it is just out of her sight, it is just beyond where her fingers can reach, that one spot, like kissing your elbow, unreachable. A man comes to tell her to stop screaming and she eats him whole and still it hurts, it is an endless pain except when she doesn't feel it at all. Days go by and she can forget it entirely, it's nothing, it never was. She even imagines that she was just feeling someone else's pain, which is a logical risk of being a sorceress, except then she reaches out in a particular way to take a specific thing that belongs to her and there it is again, the knife in her spine that twists with grief, and she is crying again until the whole village shakes with her sobs. Another man comes to tell her to try to hold it together and she swallows him before he can finish his sentence. Men. Meanwhile she is trying to do her job though it's clear that her pain has driven the less devoted customers away. This one needs a love potion; this one wants to stay up all night talking without saying a word about the actual problem. This one wants nothing except to be wanted, a mobius band of longing that she treats with alcohol and a song about shoes that can leave and don't. And still her back is sharp with anguish, the mirror won't show her what it is, and now when her fingers come close the pain is such that she can't even describe it without weeping. This is getting ridiculous. Another man comes, another, they are asking questions but it is only for themselves, what they want, she is interesting to them only in terms of what she can give them and she eats them, a pile of bones she spits at her feet the only remains. One day some day someone will come and ask her the right question, one day some day someone. Put arms around her, hold her gently, brush the tears from her cheeks, pull the thorn from her back. A thorn! Yes, that is all it is, like all horrible things it only feels big, but it is smaller than a splinter. They will pull the thorn out, lick the blood from the tip, put it in a jar with other things that used to scare her. They will laugh together. That will come later, and she will be so grateful she will give back the river. She will give back the men and call them warriors rather than bores. It's in the story, it's bound to happen. But not yet; today she mutters spells and wails, wraps her arms around herself and tries to keep her hands on grace, hopes.
Category: THINKING
so far
Nostos algos. A visit to a godfather, to beautiful poets, old friends, childhood idols, the girls I looked up to in the schoolyard, my prom dates, the first people I danced with, the first writers I both admired and considered peers. Remember when? When we met in town squares on the hour. When we were single. When we thought we were immortal. When we drove all night. When we were raging with hormones. When we cared about everything so much more. I remember.
The ache of homecoming. I have thought that I could remember everything because the memories I had were always so vivid, textures I could still feel on my fingers, I remember your hands shaking like birds when you told a story, I remember holding you from behind, resting my head in the hollow of your shoulder blades, I remember the taste of your skin. I remember the first time you fell in love and called to tell me about it; I remember your breath on the phone in the spaces when we didn't speak. This summer has been the realization that my memories are telephone poles, with long gaps of mere wire in between, where I trust that information is traveling until we come to the next telephone pole, solid wood I can wrap my arms around, splinters in my fingers. Why those memories and not others? Together we make a map of who we were, untangle the wires to avoid getting shocked, string our memories together. Ten years since we first met, twenty years, thirty. I was only fifteen then. I was never so young.
Pain from an old wound. It's lovely that we have grown up, richer now in most ways. If my seventeen could meet my forty-seven she'd be … happy. Surprised, I think, to still be alive, and to be so happy with life. The sadness that consumed me then is present, but a shadow only, and I keep my eye on it but it doesn't cloud my vision. And you, my friend. The same smile only with more lines around it, the same beautiful eyes but so much wiser. Our hands have touched so many more things, we have been burned, we have scars, and yet we are the same. We are strong; we have survived.
The way you tap your finger against your mouth when you're thinking. Rub your ear. Hold my eyes with yours. I was a little in love with you then. More than a little. And still. I am glad we are both alive in the world.
it didn’t hurt
Getting up off the mat upon which I learned to fall, back when it was closer, when the ground kissed me and it felt like hello, now so much more difficult, every fall a reminder of bones, joints, a reminder of pain. I know it looks more natural when I really fall, when I do it myself, no camera cutting away to my brave face while some other stronger younger person takes the fall for me, I know it's part of the visceral truth that needs to be told when I myself personally tumble down the cliff's side, body tossed like a rag doll, like salad, flesh torn by the pack of rabid-looking dogs at the foot of the ravine, okay some of that is just special effects but the tears are mine, no glycerin needed. Visceral truth, verisimilitude, whatever. I know that it has to be me, or nobody's impressed. When I was young I said I couldn't understand something unless I tried it myself, and I opened my mouth wide to the wind as we drove through, to the flavors, the drugs, the kisses, to every thing, I opened my whole body for it, tried it, tasted it, experienced it, and I knew that it was the only way I could know anything. But now I think: do I NEED to know? Why? Why do I have to do all my own stunts? Is there not some poor unemployed actor out there, someone who could look like me with just a wig and some padding, someone more eager and enthusiastic who could do this for me, and I would sit in my trailer looking wise and sipping tea and I would be so nice to the reporters, the magazine journalists, I'd talk about The Method and The Process. Look, it doesn't have to be REAL-real, some of it could be ketchup, I don't want anybody else to suffer, I'm just tired of how real this feels, tired of bleeding the truth and shaking it off. I'm tired of bravely walking away from the flames as they lick the clothes from my back, of taking the punches, of one more time with feeling. I'm tired even of the exotic locations, but I'll stay in the picture if you want me to do the work, I just don't want to get hurt anymore. I want it in my contract.
oil can what
You're standing in a garden, abandoned since that rainstorm, fixed in place. The world grows around you. Nobody remembers that you were there, nobody knows what you were working on, nobody cares, or has cared for years, other than you. You still care, though, so you spend the days watching the flowers grow and wishing for the thing that would free you up to return to what you were doing, to what you were made to do. Not so much a calling as a design.
One day some people come to your garden, gaze at you in wonder and surprise. The hollow sounds you make as they bang against you. You marvel at their soft bones, soft tissue, you can't even imagine what it would be like to be so vulnerable. They give you the first thing you ask for, the only thing you actually need, and you're free again. At least for a little while you are ready to go back to what you were doing before your unfortunate circumstances. But now they are telling you that something is still wrong with you. You're empty inside, they say, you don't have anything inside to give. This is not true, and anybody who was really paying attention would know this but they take you at surface value and they can't see what they think you should have, these people with their soft skin and their pumping hearts. You know it is an important thing to have, and they say you don't have it, and you believe them.
There are advantages to you. You don't burn the way they do; anger frightens you but it can't hurt you, similarly shame and jealousy. You cry easily and this hurts you in myriad ways, but tears are how the body says what the mouth cannot. Other than the ability to fiercely defend your friends you don't experience much passion and the only damage you sustain are a few dents that could be knocked out if you cared. You can remember when you were young and shiny but it doesn't seem to bother you that you aren't any more. There's just the one thing you need and the other thing you want because you've been told you don't have it.
Hold out your hand and they will fill it with velvet and sawdust only. You will be no different; you already had what they told you that you lack. It's more important to remember to ask for what you need, ask again, ask until someone understands. Otherwise you will find yourself back in that garden, rusting in place, useless to everyone.
desolate
You stumble into the room on legs that do not belong to you, though the pain is certainly yours. Collapse fetal on the floor and a scream rips from your throat, arches up and falls back on a cascade of sobs so raw they embarrass you. Weeping into your knees, so humiliating and so unstoppable, and the carpet soaks in a widening circle of blood, which for the moment you can use as your excuse, though of course the real wound is much deeper; the bleeding much harder to stop, the cries even harder to muffle.
WWMRD?
What was it like for you? I think about it a lot; I think about it daily. What was it like to take off the costume of a colder more distant possible you, take off the cruel shoes polished with such care? Surely part of you knew that one joy of your life was taking that expectation off, but then part of the burden was not being able to hide behind it. What was it like to pull on the warmth of your mother's hands, slide into shoes that didn't pinch, wear your heart on the sleeve of your homemade cardigan? Singing so earnestly and effortlessly. Watching the fish as if there was nothing else to do, occupying every moment fully. Putting your hands and your voice into hidden spaces and telling your truths through the metaphors of an arrogant king, a curious owl, a cranky museum curator. But mostly, mainly, keeping your eyes wide, looking at things, filling your whole body with grace and keeping yourself constantly open to every feeling. Because you believed it was okay to feel everything. Feeling was practically your middle name; you let every feeling smash through your heart, and then you looked at it with those wide eyes and thought about it and decided when to stop. At least that's what you said. But what was it like for you? I wonder today, I wondered yesterday, the day before that and a year and more. Did you sometimes wonder if you were doing the right sort of good or any good at all? Did you rest your forehead against the cool piano keys and weep because it doesn't make any difference anyway, a twig in a flood of wrongness? And if you didn't, how did you not? I know that for me it is a constant struggle and I think it must have been a struggle for you sometimes. I remember how to deal with the mad that I feel and the fear because I can see you in my head pounding clay, or how your chin shook when you asked for money, what it meant to put your hand out to power and come back with their tears, how proud you must have been then but how scared before. But did you despair? What was it like for you, really? Because sometimes I feel close to where you wanted me to be, close to being strong enough to have all the feelings, and sometimes I just want to kill the fish, smash the train, lace the shiny shoes too tight and march out the door, go back to not caring at all. I did yesterday; I don't today. Did you also learn to wait until it passes, or did you never feel hopeless? What was it like for you to be you?
lighter matters
This was the first time we drove down to Southern California, to see the places where he'd grown up, the childhood bedroom, the university housing where his best friend from high school was living with four other uberbrains. They had a white board that covered a whole wall, and a section of the board was devoted to a project they were working on, tracking correlations between the weather and the number of sweat droplets that the cartoon character Cathy had floating around her head that day. There was no correlation. I admit I thought it was a big deal to meet the parents and the friends but probably my car just got better mileage. I had not hung out before with people so entirely devoted to being intellectual, sitting in rooms without furniture and talking about string theory and Derrida. My life had been almost exclusively pop entertainment and human behavior, and I was thinking that this was simply different, like how I liked Eurythmics and other people liked Madonna, but it was soon clear that actually what I had was less, at least to him. But I thought: I will make them like me, and then it will be okay. And I did, I did. I had my insecurities but I also had my shell games for hiding them. I conducted subtle interviews and found the thin threads where their brains collided with mine, the symmetries; I hung stories on these threads, I regaled, I raconteured, one of them laughing until he rolled onto his back like a beetle, legs kicking in the air, and I thought I had won, but then so much of my life is coloring in the lines and then showing my pictures to the blind. "You're talking too much," he said, stopping me in the hallway. "And nobody thinks it's funny when you pronounce 'subtle' wrong; they don't think you're joking, they think you're stupid." Gravity pulled into the equation, the tales I had been weaving collapsed around me, and I stumbled back into the room and tried to play the quiet game until it was time to go to bed. I've moved on since then, I've stayed up late talking in so many places, slept and woke up and tried again, and usually I don't care but sometimes I stop, mid-anecdote, and wait for someone to tell me the truth, the ugly truth, and I feel the knot pull around my heart that was first tied years ago, before this memory even, and for a second I can't breathe.
eitheror
I can't tell whether you're a bad actor or a good actor pretending to be a liar. I can't tell whether you're lying with your words or your actions. I can't tell whether you're acting or performing. I can't tell if you're a performer or an artist. I can't tell whether you're a good artist or just good looking. I can't tell if you're looking at my eyes or looking at my nose. I can't tell what anybody knows. I can't tell the difference between what I know and what I feel. I can't tell what I'm eating from how it feels even though if I were an octopus I could, and that would be nice.
Stingers
That one secret. You know the one. The one you can't tell because everything will fall apart. It sits on your chest at night, a squatting horrible homunculus. Presses the air from your lungs. Crouches in the back of your throat and tastes like tears. You learn to lie around it, to speak lightly, to make sunshine against this darkness that is the only thing that matters because it's the only thing that scares you. Not the thing itself, not the secret; you already know what it is. You're not afraid of what you know, you're afraid that someone else will know it. It's not even that; it's worse than that. You're afraid that knowing it will change them, the way that knowing has changed you. The only good thing about this secret is that it is yours, and it has cut you from the inside like glass; why would you give this to someone else, the pain of knowing this.
And yet you want so badly to be known. You want so much for someone to want to know you. You want to be loved despite, maybe even because of this secret. And they can't know you if they don't know this, can they? You know that not telling is a form of lying. Or is not telling a means of being known and loved for who you are besides this, the lightness of you without the darkness. Or are you the darkness, and the lightness is the lie. You don't even know any more.
One day you open your mouth. You tell her, finally, the truth. You roll the stone from your throat, tell her the secret. And realize in the telling that there is so much more, the small shards that are part of the larger break. Her eyes on yours: But you've been lying to me, you've lied all this time. How can I trust anything you say now? The homunculus leans forward, touches a greasy hand to your lips, smiles at you. You knew better than to tell. Or should have known.
quite contrary
Oh you and your well-tended garden. The flowers that bloom and fade and bloom again, perennials and annuals though you can never remember which is which, the giant tulip bulbs you unearth in the winter and push back under the willing dirt in the spring, don't you know that it's rude to keep your tulips waiting when they're in the mood. Ahem. The bushes laden with sweet berries that you kneel beside, plunging your hands in over and over until your arms are stained with blood from the thorns and berry juice from your over-eager fingers. The sweet soft grass you can lie back on, nap in a sunbeam. Mysteries of ivy and your trellised longing, roses with unusual names and the richest scent, you cut them down in bunches and fill the house with their inverted death. And in the winter, even in the darkest month, the hum underground while the snow covers every surface into anonymity. Gardens are like this, they burst forth and fade in sequence and you love this flow, the pull.
In the corner there is a deep hole, the one place where you plant nothing and nothing grows. At some point you had plans even for this space, a tree that would provide blossoms in the spring, fruit and shade in the summer, a place for a child to climb, the stark beauty of snow on bare branches, the one thing in the garden that would never disappear. You dug the ground carefully, dirt caked in your broken nails, worms rolling away from your fingers. The first tree you planted too deep and narrow, and the roots never spread, you dug it up and planted it again but it was too late already. The next tree, too, though the reasons were unclear, you did everything right and it wasn't enough and when you had to pull it out the root system ripped through the rest of the garden to such an extent you thought it might never recover. And another tree, and another. You rolled a rock into the space and gave up on the idea of trees, and the rock was a good place to sit and read a book, rest your back against it in the summer and feel the heat radiate from it. Over winters, though, the rock cracked and eventually even that had to be removed as a hazard.
And so now you have the hole again, waiting for you to step in and twist your ankle, you hear the emptiness of it calling to you across the garden. What to do. The soil has been so salted with your tears that nothing can grow there, you know this, and even thinking about trying to find another rock makes you almost sleepy. You pile some smaller broken rocks around it, pottery shards, high enough to protect you from falling in, a little wall of warning, and turn your back on it to look at the parts of the garden you love. It's unfortunate but then every garden has a fallow area, so.
tuckova 