How Flesh Eating Bacteria Made My Birthday Great

I’m sitting next to my mother in her newly acquired double wide.  We are in Bradenton, Florida  at the Trailer Estates, where she now resides during New Hampshire’s winter months.  She doesn’t realize I’ve cornered myself into a good working space, an ambitious attempt at writing.  She reads me a recipe for chicken and rice baby food.  Can’t she see I’m waxing philosophical over here?  At any moment gold could be pouring out of my fingertips onto this keyboard, clicking words across the screen in perfect, revelatory order?  I get annoyed.  She can tell, so she leaves.  Suddenly I don’t want her to go. I become desperately interested in how long baby rice should cook before blending. 

As soon as I find the courage to write, my dad enters. 

Dad (in a powerful voice): Have you seen my glasses?

Mom:  Joe, you know there is a drawer of glasses right here.

Dad (whining):  Yes, but I want the ones I lost this morning.

Mom (under her breath):  Oye - stubborn man.

(Dad exits)

Dad (yelling from the other room):  Huuuuuney, what was I looking for?

Mom:  Glasses!

Dad:  Yeah, where are they?

Mom:  In the drawer!

Dad (entering, still yelling sort of):  Not those!  The ones I lost!  

(Eyes roll and they both shoot secret looks at me so as to communicate the madness of the other.)

***

There is panic before stillness.  Mom and Dad have gone shopping.  Now I have to write.  The sun shines on my body, false summer soothing this cough, hushing the building tantrum that comes with proximity to my parents.  In a  moment I will realize, nobody is here. 

When I do, I breathe a little more slowly.  My shoulders relax.  I think, If I knew I would die tomorrow, I would like nobody around.

Is it strange to want a lonely death?  Is it the animal of my body or this personality that craves it?

I resist being seen as what I am.  Yet I desire that sincerity from you.  I want to be there for your birth.  I want to be there for your death, your illness, your pain, your fear.  I want to soak in the unbearably honest moment.  The one that pokes holes in the mask so that light shines through, brilliant and embarrassing.  I imagine being brave enough for that - letting a luminescent fart, standing naked in front of a classroom, publicly forgetting the lines to nothing that matters.  Begging, in all ugliness, for the world to love me.

***

For my birthday this year I got a flesh-eating bacteria on my face and a mild case of bronchitis.  This did not bode well for my happy vacation.  It started out small…then spread fast and suddenly there was threat of necrotic tissue, loss of an eye, blood poisoning.  When I told the doctor I had been celebrating in a divey bar, proposing it as the site of bacterial contraction, he laughed and said, “This wouldn’t have happened unless you were rubbing your face on the floor.”  I remembered the weird dancing, the handstands and the repeated face touching in expressions of gratitude.

Me:  I think it has gotten worse.

Mom (pale-faced, wide-eyed, struggling to keep her voice calm):  Hmmm.  Yes I think we should go to the hospital now.

Dad (without having seen it):  Wait a second, let’s make sure. (looks at my face, assumes similar tone of voice to Mom, delicate and afraid)  Ok, you’re probably right.  Trina, get in the car.

I left the emergency room pumped full of antibiotics and antihistamines.  I felt sorry for myself on the ride home.  Felt like a little girl and ashamed to feel like a little girl at 32.  It took two days for me to realize this has been the best worst birthday ever.  

Revelations:

*  Feeling beautiful doesn’t require both cheeks.

*  Doing things for people makes me feel beautiful.

*  Not complaining is hard and contagious.

*  Contrary to popular belief, they do provide recycling services here at Trailer Estates.

*  I don’t want to die alone.  I want to be seen.

Autumn arrived today.

I watched it pour in through the mountains.  I felt it in my body.  It came angry, wind blowing, purple gray sky.  The hawks flew overhead without regard for the proximity of people below.  Swooping through the sky like demons, riding savage gusts.  

From the parking lot I looked out to the field.  A woman was yelling.  She threw down her shovel and pulled her hat off.  The sun tore through the sky for a moment, ripping heat.  I assessed the tantrum with distant curiosity.  I recognized the energy.  I could taste the madness.  Like the sting of szechuan buttons - fireworks on the tongue.  With the rational removed, all that remains is a delightful or unbearable sensation.  She was still so angry and now hiccuping with tears.  I almost got in my car.  I almost whistled past the flames and returned to all the other important things I had planned for my day.  

It wasn’t just her fury that moved me, but the eventual embarrassment I knew would follow.  I walked slowly toward her.  I respected her anger - or rather the expression of it.  I wasn’t thinking, I respect the expression of her anger, as I walked across the pavement.  I didn’t know I respected it until later, when I returned home and I felt the same rise up in me only to be shoved back in.  

I picked up a shovel.  Inside I was thinking, I’m here to help.  But it wasn’t a benevolent thought.  I didn’t want to be there.  I didn’t want to spend my Friday afternoon digging up thistle.  Other times I may have wished for a larger audience, more people to see the compassionate gesture.  I considered, maybe without so many words, Isn’t this interesting that I’m not thinking about being a good person?  

Usually that - telling myself I’m good - serves as motivation for this kind of volunteering.  I realized later that my impetus was selfish in a different way.  Later, I would think, I did it because I was attracted to her outburst.  Attracted to her unstoppable honesty. 

When autumn slaps my face and the screeching sun moves in and out of clouds, tormenting my body with warmth and its denial, I also rage against the storm of Colorado’s dying summer.  Most of the time, however, it comes out sideways.  It is labyrinth in here, and does not allow for direct expression.  Instead, I calmly watch the hawk, quietly notice the intermittent chills, and let my hair be blown in all directions.  Eventually, I crawl into dark habits, make false prayers and invent manners of self sabotage.

When we finished with the hard work she turned to me, “I’m sorry I couldn’t control myself earlier.  Hopefully someday I’ll be more evolved.”  

I responded with a friendly hug, “Oh stop, it makes you more relatable.”  She seemed comforted by the comment, less embarrassed.  

Later, like right now, I wonder, would it have been more honest to tell her I thought the tantrum intriguing?  And that the sweet humility in her eyes when she apologized, when the weather paused to watch her with me, was like looking at treasure?

Scorpions are Beautiful in this Middle Twilight

Now, as night rises to love and lick the day, as the summer is gently swallowed, a darkness, mirroring that of our planetary position, bubbles up from within us.  The swell of silent oceans filled with summer-frozen water scorpions, chimeras, sharks, and sea monsters, can seem very ugly.  The quiet death of sunshine stirs these creatures. 

Before trying to capture and contain them, fix or adorn them with makeup and perfume, let's admire them.  Scorpions are beautiful in this middle twilight.  Before turning away, examine them.  Let them be intriguing.  Bow to and dance with the jealousy, the dishonesty, the subtle thievery, the smells and decay, the secrets, the sadness, the shame.

These are the misunderstood guardians that protect something deep and innocent.  Can you love them?  These devoted gargoyles?  If you can love yours and I can love mine, then maybe the coming of winter won’t be so cold.

Prune Flinging and Noodle Arms

I'm sitting on a soft patio chair listening to traffic and the mumbles of morning conversation.  I can tell it’s fall by the way the air smells.  The sun is strong and the afternoon will bear down with dry, autumn heat.  

I just finished eating warm cereal with powdered greens - it looked like swamp sludge.  There were prunes in there too.  I placed one in my spoon,  covered in green, and catapulted it into the garden.  Maybe I did it to two, or all of the prunes in my cereal.  Watching them fly trumped their flavor.

A future investigator is exploring the dig site of what was once my home. What could this be? she wonders while examining the fossilized drupe.  Upon further inspection and after intense collaboration with experts in various fields, she determines it is part of a deeply profound ceremonial event, one that celebrates a rite of passage into the phase of life where a person, usually of advanced age, must incorporate more prunes into the diet.  The softened fruit is easy on the teeth and helps ease the constipation that often accompanies old age.  She determines that, rather than it being a shameful experience, for our Coloradian tribe, the process of aging was held with reverence and respect.  

The Painting of the Prunes emerged as a blessing ritual, wherein dried fruits of various varieties (prunes especially prized for their mild laxative effect and high fiber content) are colored with polychromatic food powders then tossed with joyful reverie around the person for whom the celebration is being conducted.  

Yesterday evening I watched two kids walk down the handicapped ramp from a Shell gas station.  The boy was moving as if on an invisible pony (or unicorn or any other rideable creature), galloping freely, noodle arms, mouth open, head nodding in rhythm with his step.  His older sister slithered sideways, her pelvis jutting forward, stirring the air with her fingertips.  

I wonder if it's possible to have action without logic.  Behavior like this is easy to accept, coming from a child's body.  Housed in the skin of a grown-up, these random acts of play are often distorted into something socially meaningful, explained and interpreted as art, or labeled as insane.  

A beautiful alien hears the thoughts of an ambitious young woman who is attempting to figure it out.  The extra terrestrial, suspended in time-space, turns circles, dances with bubbles and listens to the angst and curiosity that impel an invention of logic for what is humanly ineffable.  The young investigator proposes a kind of dried fruit ritual as the alien watches children move unreasonably and the narrator fling green prunes into the garden on a sunny autumn morning. 

But I am Naked Now

I’m naked.  Outside with the finicky sunshine, crickets, a plane rumbling somewhere near.  I like the free air and the heat on all of me.  The bees move as if they are being breathed - in and out, sliding along some invisible fabric.  

I am self conscious writing to you.  When you look at me, it goes deep.  An exquisite panic arises.  I build castle walls to keep you out and dig secret tunnels to sneak you in.  

You see me, not just the parts I show, not just the parts I consciously hide, but a whole of me that I cannot perceive.

A squirrel sits preening in a crook of the tupelo that leans over the pond.  Another scampers through mulch collecting acorns, its movements punctuated with any sound that might be cause for alarm.  I smell the work of a chainsaw - warm, astringent.  I try to relax into the familiarity of this world, but the pressure of you coursing through me, thickening my blood, is a new sensation.  I don’t know myself as I used to.

I feel compelled to ask if its reciprocal.  It’s a defense, an attempt to soothe myself with the idea that there is camaraderie in the internal quake.

The sun is sweet.  When it comes out, it lays on me.  I can see I am not the only thing feeling its heat.  But the squirrels and hummingbirds take shade, so it is just me and the rocks and the wood, fixed in radiance.  It feels good it because it comes from outside.

I want to travel with you like dragonflies, bent, twisted into each other, making knotted islands of our delicate bodies atop the murky water we know so well.

I want to write succinctly, matter-of-factly, less poetry, more substance.  I want clean and elegant simplicity.  But I am naked now and I can’t disguise these heavy prose - the exposure of a throbbing beauty, roots grasping stones, clinging to the Earth, screaming in anguish and delight at having been discovered.

Fishing and Flowers

She is sitting on a humid swing.  The air is full of cicadas and a smell of white flowers.  Her body rocks in the gentle seat.  Back and forth.  He is on his way home.  She hopes he is in a happy mood, but it's a shallow attempt at conjuring joy.  The truth is, it only affirms her expectation of his state of arrival.  Years it has been and always she finds herself trapped in the waiting.  Driving down 465 without air conditioning, imagining a lake and the fishing boat and the bass bigger than his arm, he pushes aside the tone of voice he knows is waiting for him.  Meek (when did it become so falsely demure?), concerned-sounding (when did she think this expressed love?), imploring (at what point did he stop talking to her?)

The weight of summer quiets everything.  All living beings within a ten mile radius, cease to emote, drop their patterns for this one moment each day.  It is a dense twilight, so big it cannot be measured in units of time.  Mostly it passes unnoticed, in fact the very nature of its existence is ephemeral, impossible - a snowflake in August.

On this particular day, high above them, a swooping gull split the snowflake with an eager angle of flight.  The gesture sent one half through the window of his car and the other piece down past the willow tree from which the swing hangs.  A tiny ice crystal landed on her nose, slid down the nape of his neck.  On this particular day, the invisible moment was mutually recognized.

The meat of their thoughts did not disappear, but all the residue - weeks, decades, generations of ways of thinking, washed through them.  He continued to drive, she, to swing.  Fishing was there, the heady scent of a garden, but nothing more.  Nothing else pressing against the moment, twisting it.

She gets up from the swing.  He pulls into the driveway.  They look like children.  She grabs a lemonade popsicle and runs to meet him.  He gets out of the car grinning.  She is tiny next to him.  He lifts her up under her armpits and licks the frozen treat in her hand.  “Fishing?” he asks her.  She wraps her legs around his waist like it’s a tree, kisses him on the forehead.  “Yes.”

Story Monster

There is a Story Monster inside me.  But I have not seen her for a while.

Oh why did I go for it?  Did I say yes to everything?  Why did I do these things that make it so difficult to find the monster.  The shy monster who loves time and loneliness and empty space.  Plans scare her away.  She buries herself, makes a nest in my throat and stays there indefinitely while I busy around and do stuff and check things off of my list.  

Who wants to be busy like this? 

I suppose I do.   Because I’m scared of her.  I’m scared of the monster.  She grabs me and I lose myself.  She moves me for her cause which, in surrendering to it, dissolves a part of me. 

Where are you Story monster?  You scary, scared being?  You brilliant wave, who takes me for your vessel.  I miss you.  I know I have not been a great house keeper.  The room smells like caffeine and importance.  I could clean up… Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Love more.  Thank people more.  Play more.  Rest.

Or I could stay here casting words around a unknown space, making desperate attempts at finding you, at seeing the invisible by scattering the glitter of language to reveal a negative image.  The Words point to you, suggest your whereabouts.  

Words are the lingerie for a truth that forever changes shape.  I could lose myself as a fetishist - obsessed with the form, mistakenly stroking leather and lace, forgetting about your body underneath.  

Beautiful Story Monster.  I’m sorry.  

Death Makes Me Beautiful

Death makes me beautiful.  The the bad decisions, hateful love handles, giant worries and failures - these become pieces of lint, with mortality near.

We think we’re grown-up.   We think now that we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we know life.  Then Death walks up - gets all close.  Suddenly the everything that seemed to be important dissolves.  All that stuff was so easy compared to this.  This, this, this… immense nothing.  This too-big-to-make-sense-of disappearance.  You were here a moment ago - gorgeous vessel for my love, stunning light that shone in my sky.  You were here and together we made a constellation - even when you were billions of miles away.  But now you’re gone.

I burn more brightly trying to figure it out.  Trying to find you.  Listening for your voice. The others don’t matter - I want you.  One more laugh.  One more bear hug and wandering conversation. 

Somehow - the magic in you has turned to tears and grief. 

I don’t know why, but there is also gratitude.  And shame for that.  All I want to do is cry and celebrate my body.  I’m sorry I am grateful for your passing.  It’s confusing.  I want you here, but death makes me beautiful.  The flaws and imperfections are alive and radiant. 

I thought I was all grown-up.  But I’m not.  There is still so much I don’t know.  Information is everywhere.  Understanding is endangered.  But it begins to grow in the wake of you. 

Unless we open up, we never get to see or share the parts that come to life with the stimulus of grief.  Just as birth catalyzes that which cannot be known before parenthood, death awakens something.  It puts in motion the maturation of imaginal cells, those that sprout wings as we let ourselves go and expand into something new.

I undress:  every sensation is divine.  Every “could-be-better” is perfect. 

To the living:  Sit in the sun with me.  Let me smell you.  Let me hold your face and touch your skin lightly, like a whisper.  Let me know the parts of you I didn’t get to see in them. 

Death makes us all so beautiful.