(2019)
One time, I had been living deep in the Earth’s core for millennia. Not at the center exactly, but deep enough that it would’ve burned your thoughts away. It would have pulled your past into your future and you would have had to learn how to fall sleep again. Then I got shot out of a volcano into outer space. You’d probably think that once you’re many pieces, strewn across distance, you’ve got some reason to be nostalgic for the moment before your explosion, before you dissolved, but actually you can’t really remember. You just hear this echo of the form you’re about to take. It sounds like ancient blue whale song or seismic activity that’s coming from inside of you. But I want you to imagine hearing without sense. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, After several hundred thousand years in space I came to earth as a puddly sludge in Chicago. I took the Amtrak to Baltimore and life lit up there. I hopped between kindergartners for a little while, preferring the structure of their day to any other. French toast, playing with bugs, nap time. That’s where violence starts to bloom, playground torture mimicking the noise and friction of the city. In kindergarten you aren’t allowed to play on the monkey bars if you have stitches. You might come apart. I did it anyway, feeling I should float above the rumble of psychology I was starting to be mired in.
Fear is part of my vocabulary but not my system. Sometimes my skin pricks up when I do something wrong and I think, oh, this is a rudimentary version of the darkness I’ve heard of. Is it that you’re living inside an error, and there’s no way out, just doors leading into new mistakes? Sometimes you look up and you see the ornate ceiling mural there, and you think, none of these doors will make me Michaelangelo, so I’ll just grind this trough into the floor and piss in it? The best I can do is float paper boats down my little river and wait to win the lottery. And when the plastic spoon I’ve been digging up the floor with breaks, I’ll cry.
On odd weeks I’ll grow a shell over my arms and legs, this mesmerizing pearlescent emerald green, and I’ll turn to mush inside for a few days. All the lines I’ve drawn between the times that I thought I was stepping into traffic disappear. The twisted rag of my self-image unfurls. As an eternal being walking planet earth, I have the power to take scissors to the window shade that separates me from fullness, cut some light into it. I’ll pop popcorn for myself and assign a separate joy to each kernel. I’ll arrange a wedding for me and me and I’ll marry my past to my future to live blissfully in the present moment unto death. Death never comes. In the luteal phase of my menstrual cycle, I rest and extract the cord of expectation from my asshole. But you can’t do that and it must be terrible. You’re strung up by the butt about performing life exactly right. You should listen to my podcast, hear how it could be to wander the universe without a destination because you’re already everywhere. I interview house cats and little-known rock formations, we talk about how time feels when you know you are part of the sun.
I was seduced by coming apart when I was an astronaut too. The spaceship became my skin, the thing holding me together. The more I played in anti-gravity, the more I wanted to open the hatch and be sucked into oblivion. In my first mission to mars with NASA, I had an intellectual romance with headquarters in Houston. I would tease them, tell them I was going out without my helmet. I knew I’d be fine, just blown apart again to find some wormhole back into existence. But to mission control, an exploded astronaut represented failure. Eventually I did it, I consummated, killing all my flight mates in the process.
For twenty years after that I was a bald eagle. I soared above the treetops looking for prey, sizing up the landscape for morsels to sustain myself. I relished the ripping up of meat in my talons, integrated the knowledge that powerful symbols of freedom have appetites for flesh. When I bored of flying, I went into a tree and stayed there til we merged. For a brief period, I was both that ancient redwood and a hatha yoga teacher in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. On a certain day, after class, one of my students asked if I could do that delicious adjustment in down dog again. I placed my hands where their body bent in half and, lifting up, relieved them of their need for elegance. I relieved their need to wear their unique experiences and identifiers like a gilded crown. It was as if before my soothing touch, the student had been thinking of themselves like a Guess Who character. Woman, white, brown hair, glasses, turtleneck, freelancer, went to RISD, not close with her Mom, size 8, single, interested in both men and women, drinks socially, would like a dog but can’t keep one in New York, 2 siblings, plenty of savings, enjoys yoga and dancing, Scorpio Cancer rising, neat freak, interested in deeper orgasms, looking, searching, present in odd moments but usually distracted. They said that I, the yoga teacher slash thousand year old tree, had made them feel that the boxes they’d been ticking all these years were dripping off the page and that they could finally see the beautiful blankness of themselves. Not bland, they said, but featureless so as to have no reference point as they zoomed through time in the fleeting spaces between inhale and exhale.
One life I had came in the mail. It was delivered on a Sunday, which I found odd, and it was a box within a box. It was wrapped in the Japanese style of furoshiki, in a handkerchief that had batiqued serpents coiling around it. I carefully untied the elaborate knot that held it all together, letting loose a bundle of sticks which tumbled onto the table and floor in a satisfying clatter. There was a note, it said get ready to watch the most beautiful film ever made. I waited. I looked to see if a thumb drive or dvd had been delivered too. I checked to see if anyone was setting up an inflatable projector screen in my back yard, but no one was. I sat quietly until dinner time. I ate peanut butter toast with banana and cinnamon. No one came. I checked my email every 20 minutes. No links were sent. I had more peanut butter toast, no banana this time. I draped the handkerchief over a lamp.
There was a spooky presence in the room with me as I scooted back on the leather couch. When I adjusted my legs, crossed one foot over the other, I felt the camera pushing in on my puzzled face. Somewhere I heard soft instrumental music supporting my understated screen presence. I disappeared from myself for a beat, and when I reappeared again I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, looking at my face in a way I never had before. I peered at my own eyes, deep set and haunting, as if I was saying something with them, silently communicating a flat truth about myself, like “once an addict, always an addict” or “i’m pretty enough, why can’t I find someone to love me?” or “so this is the face of a murderer.” Every other time I’d seen a mirror I’d giggle at how poorly it held my concept, my features bouncing wildly as I tried to check for boogers, green things, pen marks. But now I was in this movie, the most beautiful film ever made, and I was suddenly a moving statue. I couldn’t help but wonder who the director was. The curve of my nose had meaning. The way I brushed my teeth was deeply indicative of past trauma, long held insecurities. Later on in the movie I came down with the condition of pregnancy. The only way to cure it was surgery. Now my face was saying things like “this is a safe and legal procedure” and “how dare me” and “the breathtaking power of my pussy has been criminalized.” The man who played the doctor sort of overdid his “reluctant servant of justice” bit. But I was such a terrific actor. The camera held on me very close as my mouth went into a U shape and no sound came out. My character didn’t want the women waiting in the other room to hear. The director thought that was good, very good, make it a silent wail. There was a shot of water dripping from a faucet and the whole movie went cold after that. It took until the third act to fall in love with me again, I’d supposedly lost so much of myself.
Down on the coffee table, I tried to pile the sticks I’d received as a new life into something tidier, but the sound guy from the camera crew kept bumping it and knocking it over. They touched up my hair and makeup til my face went numb and my scalp chafed. They must have asked me a hundred times when I would be available for the PR circuit. I walked outside to see if maybe when my bare feet touched the grass I would reconnect with the natural world. Then they’d have to switch to a wide-angle lens because I’d expanded beyond the frame, but no such luck. They took out chalk pencils and drew my silhouette in the air, sucking their teeth if I moved and messed up their outline. They wanted me to hold still enough that they could imagine me with a pedestrian drug habit that took my glow away, made my posture bad, put distance between me and any man I tried to love. That would have made a funny still for the movie poster. But I had these distant memories of floating through outer space as a billion disparate particles. I remembered being the branches of a tree, its roots and the ground it grew in. I remembered the spaceflight prep-camp where I’d lived just before launch, where I ate hot oatmeal in a dining hall and made flirtatious eyes with other astronauts-in-training. I remembered opening my cervix and removing a few cells. I lifted my arms above my head and accidentally pegged the Assistant Director square in the jaw. They all loved how cold and unloving that made me seem.
The director took me aside and told me they were switching gears, but I was such a deft technician of my craft that I could handle it. Could I play it like there was nothing else? Like I’d never flown above a pine forest with a wing-span reaching 6 to 7 feet? Like I was no insect, no quiet five-year-old collecting acorns for her imaginary squirrels, no world-famous rock climber breaking records year after year? Could I just play it sad? Could I just stare up at the clouds and not imagine myself as one of them? Could I just wrap my arms around my belly and pretend that’s all I was, that I wasn’t made up of infinite electric filaments reaching through to other dreamworlds?
I guess I agreed, having no proof otherwise. In the 11th hour of our shooting day they shone the light in my face, told me to make love to the camera, and cut my last lines for time.