A Collection of Impossibilities

I was born without a voice. Without a voice and without a history. No-one can tell me anything about the circumstances of my birth. There are names on my birth certificate, but they sound too convenient, too common. The people who abandoned me could be anyone. The doctor who presided over my birth is the same. So I can’t tell you that I came out of my mother’s womb silent, not for certain, though I like to imagine it that way: a pale infant, sucking in air and pushing it back out, without sound. What I can tell you is that my medical records, everything I have to my name, state I was born without vocal cords. There is nothing to create sound inside me. No instrument to strike, no fold to rake over and tear out cries of terror or sadness or surprise or happiness, nothing to power my laughter or my tears. I am only air. Only silence.

Blindfold

Click to enlarge. In the middle of the quarter, I took some photos which played with the idea of erasure, especially in terms of the erasure of one's voice. If I were to turn my observations into a physical chapbook to be abandoned in various locations, this is what one of the included images would look like.

Original photos taken by R.N. Jones. Photoshopping done by me.

Observation #20, 12/6: Somewhere nearby there is a faultline

(Theme: Paranoia)

The hill is slowly slipping down over the sidewalk, headed for the street. The curved trunks of trees, hooked like canes, fighting the pull of gravity, reaching skyward, attest to the slow certain advancement of the whole Arboretum, the forest threatening to crash downward, a train wreck in slow motion. Thin sick rivulets clotted with mud leak out under the strain of all that water, all that rain, storm system after storm system saturating everything, calling out the road workers and their yellow-lighted trucks - won't you prop up this hill for us? In some places they've laid out heavy netting meant to hold back the slow sudden advance of nature but it looks like thin mesh against the hulking mass of all that earth, all that stone looking down on the access road running parallel to campus. And walking along that road, the sidewalk is clear but its pores are filled with silt, the remains of the slide those workers scrambled to clear before working hours and my boots have poor traction, and I slide. It's a short leap to imagine it all coming down and how would I react, what would I do, where could I possibly go? First I see myself sprinting for the environmental science building but I know enough about velocity about speed + direction about force and weight to know I wouldn't make it. Second I see myself curling up into a ball but what good would that do except to kill me quickly, or would I be buried and slowly crushed, drowned? Third I see myself making for the slope, hoping to climb on top of something, to ride a tree down the slide like riding a wave, I've body boarded enough, but then there's that problem of speed + direction and tumultuous motion and force and I already know what happens when a wave decides fuck you, today's not your day. The hill puts itself back together. I walk home. There are no more scenarios to invent because they are exhausted. If it happens today, I am dead. No matter what I do.

Observation #19, 12/4

(Theme: Paranoia)

Things of Which I am Regularly Afraid:

Bridges. Falling in cars. Unmarked lanes. Broken lights. Broken glass. Needles. Pins. Tacks. Staples. Nails. Air pressure. Water pressure. Depth. Unseen things. The dark side of the street. Walking alone in the morning. Walking alone to school. Walking alone on trails with the trees pressing in. Walking alone near roads and cat calls. Walking alone in the evening. Walking alone at night with the 2AM drunks and their stale breath and their bloodshot eyes. Walking alone with the silence and stilldark of early morning. Walking alone unarmed. Walking alone looking like a woman. Walking alone.

Observation #18, 11/29: Almost, in Two Parts

(Theme: almost)

I used to go to church with my head hung low and arms crossed over my heart
you were a light for eleven months before you cast off playing a part
I convinced myself to belong to a boy until a week parted our ways
Almost only really counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

#

The notes of a familiar song drifting through panes of glass
half intelligible, words muddled somewhere between
melting point and the classification "static liquid"
the music broken, fading in and out
weaving into my consciousness until
the chorus rings louder and truer than the solidity of brick walls
and I am no longer here
I am there
with the applause and the raised voices
my body left behind.

Observation #17, 11/27: So it is in the Marathon

(Theme: Almost)

Your muscles strain against frigid November, winter come early, this is the last hill, the last climb your calves are burning hot against your skin you feel the rope of your hamstrings taut in their sheath of muscles your quads quiver and shake, a threat of failure, you feel your bodyheat fly out the crown of your exposed head and there, at the apex, your greatest desire – the finish line – freedom – and the distance grows greater between you and it, here and there, but you push, you push, you push to reach it, even though you know you will only trip on the other side.

Observation #16, 11/20: The Brave Young Seed Who Waited

(Theme: family)

Once upon a time, there was a seed. It fell in witch country and was carried on a wind of blood and superstition deep into the Old South. There it landed in a desperate time, when the regiment was failing so miserably it turned to sixteen year old boys. It found itself on a farm, but the seed did not put down root. The war carried it into dark days and when they were done, it rode in the pocket of a soldier into the West. It watched the soldier’s family of ten children grow out of the Texas dust, but the seed did not put down root. One of the soldier’s sons, then grown, stormed away north with the seed in his luggage. He set down his load to live like a hermit in the Arizona desert, but still the seed did not put down root. A young girl came on troubled times in her home and went South to sand, cacti, tarantulas and tortoises. She stayed for a year and when it was up, the seed found its way into her shoe where it bothered her all the way home. She finally knocked it out on her front stoop. It was a grey, rainy day, but not too cold. The seed found a small patch of earth and finally put down root. First it was one, soon it was two. With all its strength the seed drew its long lost brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces from all over the country and soon they stood side by side, a regiment in the Northwest, all connected with their roots woven together.

Observation #15, 11/15

(Theme: finding the danger in the ordinary)

                                                                                      

Sleeping:

Sleep looks at you from across the apartment. You can feel him sitting on the edge of your bed, his eyes burning through layers of plaster and drywall, matchsticks waiting to be blown down. He looks and looks at you and you feel the tingle at the skin of your neck, your temple.

No. You work. The screen of your laptop vomits technicolor noise onto the plane of your face and the sting of it keeps you awake. Still that tingling. A crawling. Something desperate to find a way into your eyes, into your brain.

He says your name.

Your forehead droops dangerously close to your keyboard, you jolt upright. Bidden, you go to your bedroom door, your feet dragging molasses-slow across cheap, coarse carpet. The knuckles of your toes are rubbed raw by the time you arrive.

Yes, he is sitting there. Tonight he looks like Hypnos, the way the Greeks saw him, nearly naked but comfortably so, sun-kissed and strong from some gymnasium or other exercise in the Elysian Fields. His hair is dark, curly, and entangled with the feathers of the white wings rising from behind his ears like a strange crown.

“Come,” he says, his eyes so dark there is no difference between pupil and iris, so dark you can see most of the room and all of yourself in them. Lost. “You must rest.”

Your stomach clenches, you clutch at the door frame for support, the bed is calling you to it, with him still sitting there, persuasive. No, no, you can’t and you won’t.

“You haven’t slept for four days, an eternity,” he shakes his head and his curls sway but his eyes do not move, do not blink. Dead eyes. “Mortals are not meant to wake so long.”

You know it can be done, it has been done. To never sleep again. To blot out all the dreams. All the dreams and every time you’ve woken up screaming. Screaming and bruised from remembered violence. Paul Kern did it in the Great War, you can do it now, with or without the bullet that left him forever wakeful.

He knows what you are thinking, can see it in the defiant definition of the muscles of your arms. “No. He nearly died for that exception and even then sometimes he slept with his eyes open and mind awake. One way or another, you will sleep the years away with me.”

In those dark reflections you see the door frame splinter under your hands as exhaustion comes on like riptide, a great current pulling you toward your sheets, toward his eyes, toward oblivion and into your suffocating, brutal, ripping, bleeding dreams and

He blinks.

Waking:

You are awake. You are fully aware, every synapse singing, every nerve ending searing into your muscles, but aching with the weight. The weight of the hours lost, the weight of the comforter, the weight of the day. You want to suck in a breath, to feel your ribcage expand, but the weight is too much. It is crushing. It takes all of your strength to even open your eyes.

You knew he would be there. He’s always there. Every time you wake.

A tall figure – he must be – insect thin and dressed in black, hunched tightly and face overshadowed by the darkness of the corner made by two of your bedroom walls and the ceiling. For his thinness you call him the Straw Man, and he is watching you. You can’t see any of his features, save for the glint of eyes from the occasional passing car outside. He never moves or speaks, just holds himself there on the ceiling and watches.

He doesn’t need to make a sound. The room is full of whispers. Though you can see him there the lingering sense of terror that accompanies him is all around the room, especially everywhere that your periphery cannot reach. Sometimes you think you hear the grate of metal or the sick slick sound of serpent skin on carpet, magnified hugely, coiling somewhere nearby.

These noises, the terror, slowly pass and fade. But no matter where you are, outside of this room, outside of this town, he is always in some corner. Sometimes you think the heaviness is a thing he carries with him, presses down on you so hard that you are drowning in the soupy air, but you know it is just the weight of your life, trailing after you, growing ever shorter, ever more frail; you know it somewhere in the back of your mind.

So today, like every day, you force your leaden limbs out from under the covers, strain against your own weight to sit upright. It takes an hour to stand. You turn toward the door, you can see into your bathroom. 

As soon as you focus on the sink the carpet extends out between you and the faucet, stretching impossibly, it’s miles away, you’ll never reach it, but you heave yourself forward, thirsty, reaching.

And the Straw Man watches you go.

Observation #14, 11/13 (for reals this time)

(Theme: finding the drama in....pancakes?)

We've wanted them for days, keep talking about breakfast for dinner or breakfast for breakfast, but we've always got an excuse: we slept in too late, we don't have syrup, we ran out of mix, making the batter by hand is too much work.

Until one roommate finds us a new recipe: peanut butter pancakes.

"I'll make the batter if you cook them."

Sure. Why not?

But by the time the batter is done the oven is not set to warm, so we wait. And by the time the oven is heated the batter is thicker because it's been sitting in its bowl on the counter uncovered.

I could blame all three of us for not thinking of putting it in the fridge. I could blame the peanut butter for thickening the mix. I could blame our shitty pans, our apartment stovetop, my mood that night, the brand of no-stick spray.

In the end, there is no one to blame for the batter-y centers and scorched exteriors of our experiment  No one but our cravings, because there is no such thing as the perfect pancake.

Observation #14, 11/8

Theme: I don't have class today, therefore a quick haiku:

I attended school
to better my craft and skill
oh god NaNo why

Observation #13, 11/6: Home

(Theme: Loss & Gain)

It’s the little things, maybe even the littlest things. The songs that make me think of the movies that make me think of you. The smell of a certain something cooking. A casual mention of one of your favorite books in an overheard conversation. Cutting open a pomegranate and remembering that time when the juice turned my fingers black under the fluorescents and we stood there in Rite-Aid, puzzling over what could have turned my cuticles so dark, laughing aloud with the joy of recognition when I realized. Hearing the words I most needed to hear and getting weepy, even though we were in the car.

I might have lost everything at the time, but I gained you back.

Observation #12.2, 11/2: I use my adrenaline to clean up my own mess, fix computers, and write poetry

I was woken from a dream

of pilot whales so large

they could be seen from the highway

great humps the shape of the hills

around them, clusters of barnacles

the size of cities, and on one

a huge, gleaming eye –

luminous, glass-smooth

globe amidst the turbulence of water,

the landscape roiling with the plunge and gyrate

of hulking bodies –

by an unprovoked Heraclean nosebleed

that spattered the bathroom sink

brighter than stills in horror films as I scrabbled for tissue

which I would promptly bleed through:

on its end, a cherry of clotted blood

round and bright, gleaming

like the whale’s eye looking

at me from across the orchards and farm lands

he had wrecked.

Observation 12.1, 11/1: Saruman of Many Colors

(Theme: Gain, Plagiarism edition)

But oh! The things we could accomplish together! For are we not of a high and ancient order, most excellent in the Earth? Are we not young in our wisdom and strong in our seniority? Are we not the conquerors and scholars, having eyes that see both far and deep? Are we not young Gods in old bodies, sent to shepherd the sheep and conduct the song the world sings? Are we not invincible, perfect, immortal?

The guest who has escaped from the roof thinks twice before he comes back in by the door.

Observation #12, 11/1

(Theme: Gain)

The things I vow to take from this day:

1. The warmth of the sun on my face as it passes through glass, how it arcs over my forehead and cheekbones, igniting my hair, plunging my philtrum into shadow.

2. Every shifting shade of blue that crosses the sky between varying grades of cloud.

3. The green of the pine branches behind the red blush of deciduous behind the white froth of fall flowers behind the course grey rust-streaked face of dry stone.

4. The stark, clean white of birch bark.

5. The shiver of the canopy.

6. Meandering trails no one is meant to walk between fallen trunks and peaty wetlands, the light on the surface of the lake.

7. The lift of leaves in small circles, stirring, settling – the wind is dancing.

8. The promise of words and quiet and the steam rising in curls: herbal smoke from sacred spells and mugs of tea.

9. The warmth of a hand in mine.

Observation #11, 11/1

(Theme: Loss)

We are always writing about loss.

I am withering, I am vanishing, I lost my voice when I was twenty, I lost my hearing when I was five, I lost my sight when I was seventeen, I lost my leg in the war, I lost my arm in the accident, I lost my dog, my parents, my brother, my lover, the family inheritance.

We have lost everything.

I lose things.

I lose things in the way that you do, sudden, without warning and I am pursued by that abruptness, that paralytic shock that somehow, something is missing. I am haunted by how smooth and silent loss creeps in. I fear it.

I fear that one day it will find my parents and they will be a hole in my heart I fear that my lover will die far, far from me too far for me to see or hear or hold her hand and I fear that it will come and render me useless, finally immobile, unable to give anything to a dying world from a perpetually dying hand

too soon, too soon

Observation #10, 10/30: All Hallows Up North

It’s a gusting, blustering day in the Pacific Northwest with plenty of threat of rain: here we worry about hooligans and druggies, kidnappers and thieves, punk rock kids in punk rock bands smashing pumpkins in homage. But somewhere up North, with a far-off cousin on a far-off frontier, the only worry is the wandering suburban moose, who stops for a squash-like snack at every door.

Trick or Treat.

Observation #9, 10/25: Refract

(Theme: Fairy Tales)

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived and breathed for fantasy. Everything un-real was a delight and everything impossible brought with it a sense of joy inherent in that the thing or person or place was just that: impossible. She whiled away hours and days reading, inventing, dreaming, sculpting herself until she could look into the mirror and see something impossible. And that brought joy to her. She so loved being impossible that she buried all of the possible parts of her far, far within herself, so far that they were lost.

But one day this girl began to change. Her hips swelled and stretch marks splintered her sides like trails left by snails in the dust.

She ran to her mother, “Mommy, mommy, I’m puffing up like a balloon! What is happening to me?”

But her mother did not look up from her book, and said only “It’s nothing, dear.”

And the girl went back to her impossibilities.

But then small hairs began to appear under her arms, on her legs, and in the most embarrassing of places.

She ran to her mother, “Mommy, mommy, I’m sprouting fur! What is happening to me?”

But her mother did not look up from her cooking, and said only “It’s nothing, dear.”

And the girl went back to her un-reality.

But then her chest began to inflate and jiggle when she moved.

She ran to her mother, more hysterical than ever, “Mommy, mommy my skin is sagging and falling off! What is happening to me?”

Her mother looked up from her painting and looked through her calmly. “My dear,” she took her by the shoulders, “You are growing up. Soon you will need new clothes and a new room and new kinds of books to read. You will want different things and spend time with different kinds of people. You will change and grow and learn so much.” Her mother embraced her.

“But mommy,” said the girl, “I have already changed myself in the mirror.”

“No, sweetheart,” said the mother. “You have to leave that behind.”

And the little girl ran back to her mirror and all she could see were those possible parts she had buried rising up again. She tried and tried to shape herself back the way she used to be. She tried once, and the stretch marks burned brighter. She tried again and the hairs grew darker. She tried a third time and her chest grew heavier than ever! She tried a final time and she burst wide open, and was standing there the way she was supposed to be: impossible. And that brought her joy.

Observation #8, 10/23

(Theme: Vacancy)

Today the dust
motes
rattle between
my ears as
they drift lazily
in
nothing
in
white
noise

-

There are times when I should be doing so many things, but all I have the strength to think is
I want to sleep for a year.

-

There used to be Old Gods. We used to revere the motions of the Sun and Moon and the Shadows they cast. We used to fear the forces of nature. We used to bribe the fair folk nightly. We used to build great pyres and mounds for mighty kings. The wonder is gone out of the world.

Observation #7, 10/18: Illuminate

(Theme: Vacancy)

The light went out of her eyes a long time ago. There wasn’t much we could do – that we could ever do – except hope that the ‘no’ would someday go out of her ‘vacancy’ sign. After a year passed we wondered every night if she would have wanted this, vegetating, little more than the reason for several machines to exist. After two years dad started drinking. He would go into rages, maybe because this was his fault in the first place and he knew it. He would scream about pulling the plug. It was around then that mom left us. I went to live with a friend. He never did pull the plug after I told him he didn’t know anything about what she wanted (she never was one to talk about sad things, even if I knew now it was all a façade) and that furthermore, if anyone was going to do it, it would be me. He stopped coming to the hospital after that. On the night of the third year I brought her her usual bouquet, lavender and jasmine from the park, and held her hand, and she sat up and looked at me. She said my name, and

“How long was I asleep?”

Observation #6, 10/16: Flight 7336, Auckland to London

(Theme: Patience)

There’s a young man waiting at the airport. I can’t help but watch him, he’s so beautiful. He has pleasant light brown skin and his hair pulled back away from his face in well-kept dredlocks. Some of them are yellow, some are clementine orange, some are burnt red. Not a single root shows. Not many people show that kind of dedication with their hair. His hands are pressed palm to palm, flat, and trapped between his knees like Harding in Cuckoo’s Nest. He keeps glancing at the clock with the brightest hazel eyes I’ve ever seen.

The clock strikes the hour and his back straightens. Whatever he’s waiting for – departure, arrival – must be on its way. Five minutes pass. He fidgets with his hands and fixes the sleeves of his well-worn military jacket.

Ten minutes pass and he resists bouncing his leg. I can tell because one ankle and boot-toe twitch erratically without ever moving fully.

Fifteen minutes pass. By then he’s chewing on the backs of his snakebite piercings. It pulls them into his lip, creating small dimples in his skin.

Twenty minutes pass and he stands, running his hands down his thighs as though to smooth his jeans. A lady in uniform appears behind the stewardess' podium and he moves toward her. He asks in a quiet south-end accent:

“Excuse me, ma’am, is this the gate for flight 7336?”

“Yes,” she says gently. It seems as though she’s spoken to him before. “I’m sorry, sir, it’s been delayed again.”

His mouth breaks into a fragile smile and he looks down for a moment to compose or control himself as she continues,

“The storm off the coast of New Zealand has not yet let up.” She pauses, lips pressed together as though holding something in. The sympathy in her eyes builds for a moment and comes loose, “I’m so sorry, Diggs. I thought someone would have told you. I'm sure he's fine.”

He looks back up, the fracture of that smile gone again. “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow, Anne.”

“See you tomorrow.”

He buries his hands in his pockets and moves away down the strip, shoulders shrugged high near his ears as he goes out into the cold of a London night.

I wonder who he’s waiting for.