transterrestrial

allow me to set the scene: there is something sour between your teeth. a bit of gristle, blood hot on the tongue, the throb and ache of a place beyond this where the graveyard of memories is still and silent. you've been here before. this place is familiar to you, or, it used to be. the brambles have grown thick and snarled and their thorns bite into your skin as you push through them. there is something bitter about the way the past cedes slowly to the present, and somewhere deep in your chest, you are afraid that you too will be left behind.

lately i have found myself writing as if to capture my feelings like photographed places. i want this to be perfect, the way i describe it to you. i want to slip between your ribs and make room for these words right alongside your heart, where they may fatten for the slaughter. but, there is distinctly an inside and an outside, and try as i might, i cannot drag the way this feels from one to another. there are places where the silvercold ice in my stomach lodges itself firmly in the earth, though. these moments of connection serve as a sort of map across which i am always wandering. here is the tucked-away space in the bushes behind the factory where i used to sit for hours. here is the field i laid in at night and thought myself closer to something i might call holy. here the railroad tracks i would walk along playing chicken with the train, here a boat-launch where i would stand ankle-deep in the river and wonder at drowning. i am always wondering what it would be like to go to places incomprehensible to the living body, not so curious about the dying as the inside-outside consuming each other.

let's return to the part about teeth. what of consumption stands as a proxy for being truly and completely known? sometimes i think the only way i might be understood is if my blood finds its home on another tongue and becomes something alien to me. my life has been a long series of disappearing acts, sloughing my skin to become something new. do you think the inside knows this? it is as alien to me as it is to you. i am kept firmly outside myself, and the swirling current of memory that nestles inside me is too deep to reach, unless i am flayed to the bone like a deer strung up to be drained. it bears repeating, i think, that this is not an essay about death. in fact, entirely the opposite: i am trying to explain to you how it feels to live.

i have come to the point in life where the places that were once familiar and alive in my memory have grown small and wilted, overgrown with ivy and thorns and each moment becoming something unknown to me. in a way, this is a comfort. i am not the person these places knew, either. there is a mutual agreement about these things, the way we are both ghosts of our former selves. it's so strange to find peace like this, in the moving-ons, after spending so long fearing that time would forget to touch us both, these places and i.

it's beginning to become lovely, the changing. a metamorphosis of the self, maybe, the steady march forward inevitable. i will plant new seeds of memory and in time, they too will become foreign. the gristle squeaks between your teeth and you chew, swallow, try again. this time it is simpler. the ivy reaches up the wall and the brambles knit together across old game-paths whose game have long since returned to the dirt. in time, all this may be forgotten, but the earth knows. remembers. the brambles have grown, but so have i.

published june 19, 2022

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