An animal gets very good at carrying hot water. An animal can take a full mug of tea, scalding hot, and run it back and forth with no trouble at all, not spilling a single drop. Stairs are no problem; they’re traversed with speed and fluidity. An animal imagines taking flight while carrying hot water. She will hold a mug in each hand and, arms outstretched like a bird, will take off running down the sidewalk, running until her feet lift off the ground and no one will ever see her again. She doesn’t know how she’ll get off the ground, but she assumes perfection will do the trick. An animal is perfect at carrying hot water.
An animal is perfect at carrying hot water, except for around corners. The corners are tricky motherfuckers— they can’t help it, it’s their nature to twist people around. An animal approaches a corner, hot water in hand, with immense trepidation. Still she spills the water. It’s not a lot, but it splashes onto her skin, flecking little pink burns across her knuckles. An animal does not yelp or put down the mug to shake off her hand. An animal continues to carry the hot water without flinching. When another corner approaches— and it’s an old house, an architectural marvel that seems to consist solely of corners, somehow— it happens again. Still she does not cry out. The stairs come easy but another corner knocks more water loose from the mug. The mug has approximately two thirds of a centimeter less hot water in it than it did before she began carrying it.
An animal imagines that she could fly if it weren’t for all the corners in the world.
“My job— or at least what I’m trying to do here— is not to be invasive or mess with your system, because that’s not my place. I’m just telling the angels to direct the energy into you, and from there, your body will decide what to do with it and how it’ll best be used, right?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Like, I’m not going to push anything into anywhere, because that might not be where the problem is. Ideally, we get your pain down, and maybe something will happen that can help you deal with the feeling of electricity, but that’s just an intention. It’d be nice, but that’s not something I’m going to try and enforce, because, again, that’s not my place.”
“Sure,” I say again.
The medium exhales and smiles, signalling an end to her spiel. “Perfect. Alright, do I have your permission to work with your energy?”
“You do.” I’m lying on my back on the couch in the living room, thinking of vultures swirling over a swimming pool. Flight patterns like echoes. Dead bugs trapped in filters. Chlorine blue. This, I’m beginning to realize, is how my body experiences emotion— not feelings, but scenes. I think this one is either vulnerability or over-exposed.
The medium puts her hands over my body, over the place she feels she should start. This is an exercise in the difference between knowing something and believing in it.
“You’ve got a very strong solar plexus,” she says. I’m still sizing her up. She has thick-lensed glasses and heavy foundation on top of her face. Faux-vintage Pink Floyd t-shirt, new merch made for an old tour. No lipstick. She sits in herself like she’s extending, with a silent, shineless bright, and smells of something reminiscent of wood. “There’s lots of energy swirling around in the seat of your power. Maybe a little less grounded than it should be, but it’s very powerful. You’ve got incredible willpower and intentions. Do you like being outside?”
“I prefer it to being inside. There aren’t many good places to do that in the city, really,” I say. She takes out a quartz pendulum and holds it over my stomach. We watch it fling itself in circles on the end of its silver chain. It looks like a little stone dog. I am thinking about dry bones.
“Mm, yeah, that might explain the lack of grounding— can you hold out your hands?” I do. “Can you let me into your hands’ energy?”
“You can come into my hands’ energy.”
It doesn’t sound like I mean it, but it’s good enough for her. She holds the pendulum over my palms. The little dog calms into almost nothing. “Your hands are very powerful energetic shields. This is a— you’ve got a lot of protective measures on you. It seems like you’re pretty conscious about what you allow into you, especially because of how, like, little your energy extends away from you.”
“Yeah, I keep myself to myself.” Nothing she has said is surprising to me. I am thinking about the Greek word ataraxia, which the internet defines as tranquility, but the book where I first came across it defined as lack of disturbance. I try to focus on bringing a scene to mind. Instead, I think of a weak shade of purple.
“Right,” she says. “I can really see that.”
We move on. In this way, we slowly crawl through my body, moving down limbs and revisiting places if the energy moves backwards. She tells me she has to ask my permission every time she moves onto a new spot because I automatically lock her out. This is not something most people do, apparently.
“I’m calling on the angels,” she says. “Not literally— I’m not calling on the forces of a Christian God— just the idea of a collective higher power who will help me and direct me to where I need to go. That’s what I mean when I say angels. I call that higher vibrational force angels because that’s the only word I can think of.” I say that I understand and she smiles. “I can feel you’re telling the truth, I think, because it makes you ring like a little bell,” she says. She’s only a few years younger than my mother, but the difference feels much bigger than that. Decades. Oceans.
The odd one out, my mother sits quietly in a chair in the corner, haloed by the dirty windows. This is a scene that she doesn’t have access to; her entry would break it. It’s nice to see her aware of that.
We reach my ankles. “You’ve got a lot of fear, here.” The medium has her eyes closed. I can see the irregularities in her eyeliner, fading on the skin and sticking to the roots of her eyelashes in tacky black clots of non-blood. “Were you ever dragged by your ankles as a child?”
“I shared a room with my sibling, growing up. There was a lot of roughhousing.” I look to my mother. She is looking at me like there’s something that I shouldn’t say, but I can’t think of what it might be, because she was never there for it. This is not her scene. “I can’t think of any specific instances, but I’m sure I’ve been dragged around plenty of times.”
It’s not a lie. My mother purses her lips against the narrative regardless.
“Okay, yeah. Your body— the way it interprets fear, the way it feels it— fear, for you, feels like being dragged by your ankles, like someone grabbing your ankles and forcing you…” The medium trails off. Is dragged away. Some thought in her head pulls her, very briefly, out of the room and into a place where no one can reach her. “Like a forceful, painful relocation. That’s your fear. The way it feels. Or the way I feel you feel it, if that makes sense.”
“Sure,” I say. Ataraxia. The medium looks at my face like she’s in the process of knowing something but hasn’t quite reached the conclusion.
“Right,” she says. My mother says nothing at all. It’s nothing the same way that empty rooms have a dull hum to them. This is because an empty room is never empty. This is because it’s not her scene. “Sure.”
Now imagine an animal carrying hot water while a net made of fire burns over her. Now imagine an animal carrying hot water while her bones turn to glass holding static that is holding an edge. Now imagine something porous and hungry, white like a bad ritual. The desire to fly isn’t entirely fantastical; there’s a desperate element to it, the same way that the desire to escape pain makes children out of everyone. The natural reaction to pain is to try and get away from the pain. You should know this about people by now.
My therapist— a phrase that, in my head, immediately invalidates whatever comes next and/or makes it seem deeply pathetic— wants me to write a book. Or an essay. Or just to write anything, which is funny, because she’s only brushed the surface of exactly how often I journal and she certainly doesn’t know that I have, at my last count, almost 170,000 words in self-published essays. I’ll tell her eventually. Probably.
“I think it could be an interesting project for you to write something about what it’s like being sick in the way you are, addressing a group of healthcare workers or something like that,” she says. “Not just a timeline and description of symptoms— a humanist perspective, sort of. The experience of it.”
Well, okay. You want to know what it’s like? I need to reinvent the dictionary to describe what it’s like, to describe my world. Christina’s World. Crawling-uphill-back-home world. Goodness stops being about moral value and starts being about obedience and subservience. Ecstatic is not a feeling wild happiness, but the swelling of the violins. Crying is a state of being, not the act. Violence also becomes a state of being.
Let’s try a few sentences. My days are ecstatic. My life is a crying violence. I am not very good. Here is what I mean by this: there is an impossible, brutal, fragile sort of beauty to the way I see the world, because the world is constantly inflicting pain on me, but I still like being here. And this: I constantly feel like my heart is about to explode from sheer capacity issues, but I am not sad. And this, too: sometimes I forget to take my pills or to do the things that are supposed to make me feel better, because none of it makes me feel better, and what does make me feel better are things that I’m not supposed to do. How does that feel for you? Have you laid down on the side of the hill with me yet? If you twist yourself around, is there a house behind you?
Let me be very plain. If you took a camera and recorded what I do all day, it would be three years of the same footage over and over— bed, kitchen, bathroom, desk. I walk between them with strange steps. I sit in one place for hours on end and seemingly do nothing. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I watch movies. Sometimes I fuck around on the internet. My head is a detonation zone. There is no such thing as originality. All things are repetitions. Every drawing or painting or sketch I do is an echo. There are crayons all over the desk like someone thinks I’m going to stab myself. Everything in its right place. Anything can happen to me, but it won’t, because God is dedicated to figuring out if doing something over and over really can drive someone to insanity. I’m aware of this, of course, so He won’t be catching me slipping into any sort of madness, much to His disappointment. He’s not even that disappointed, though, because He’s omniscient and knows I won’t give in. But He keeps doing it. Over and over, the repetition. Concentricities. Constant ripples inward. He keeps doing it, which means that eventually, I am going to go crazy, and that’s just fine, because anything can happen to me at that point. Anything at all.
I’m smiling when I say this, by the way. I’m smiling real big. And I don’t tell anyone about God’s little experiment, not because I’m thinking about God any less than I used to, but because I hate sharing God more than I used to.
God, I can’t imagine what that must be like, people say. No. No, you can’t. He can, probably, but you can’t. And because I’ve got a modicum of tact, I resist the urge to tell them to fuck off and fucking die, you fucking fuck, fucking die in a miserable fucking hole.
I’m smiling when I don’t say that, by the way. I’m smiling real big. Say cheese.
An animal is carrying hot water with her weak bones under a burning net. She’s not even the animal, just an animal, any animal, any animal at all— this is happening to hundreds of thousands of animals all over the world, human and non-human alike. The only difference between humans and the rest, psychoemotionally speaking, is that some humans are more hesitant to chew off their limbs when stuck in a trap than most. An animal carrying hot water leans towards more likely on the chew-your-leg-off spectrum. An animal has learned to be okay with this, to know that there’s a time and place for practical action, to know when to get her teeth ready. You should know this about people by now.
An animal is not special. An animal can’t escape her bones or the burning net so she goes inside of it and hunkers down in her head, intent on waiting out the pain. It’s only natural for animals who can’t escape to pretend it isn’t happening. You should know this about people by now.
An animal who won’t look out of her own skull is carrying hot water. She hates the corners. She wishes she could fly. It’s not going to happen.
Your writing (especially your imagery) always makes me feel as if I’m watching someone reinvent the English language to make it their own. I’ll never fully understand it the way that you do but at my core I know it’s something that I’ve always been familiar with and you’re just making me more aware of it. Beautiful work as always!!! Mwah <3
"...not because I’m thinking about God any less than I used to, but because I hate sharing God more than I used to." exactly. Much love as always lee