plain light
secret hearts, old dogs, and the terms and conditions.
One ear listens to the talking around me, the other is listening to everything else. An entire world exists in perpetuity through the window behind me. In front of me is my family and the meal— evidence of my birthday, because we rarely get takeout, much less for lunch.
These are the people who have known me for my entire life. They sit like pruned roses and discuss the mental state of a freshly-divorced neighbor. I listen, with one ear, to my mother and my sibling as they describe her with words that they would never dare call any other woman. Evil, scheming, what a bitch. Yes she wrung her ex-husband out to dry and called him abusive in court and everyone, even her own children, think she was lying to further her own gains. No I don’t agree with her actions but there are plenty of lovely unstable people, too. Let’s not be hasty and equate her health to her morality, yes? They don’t listen to me. Zero ears. She can’t help but be horrible, she had no choice, she’s rotten to the core. It’s funny because, by their definition, I’m rotten too and I’m sitting right across from them and they don’t even know.
My family looks at me. They look away. When they’re looking, they’re looking right through me. It is a miracle that I’ve lived in the same house as these people for over two decades and managed to keep my heart a secret. I kept my life to myself and, instead of noticing the blank spots their information doesn’t cover, they continue to assume nothing is there. And I’m looking at them and I know they have secret hearts, too, hidden in their ripe bodies— there are plenty of things I’ll never know about or see— but I am not extended the same courtesy.
It’s my birthday. The world outside the window is beautiful and the window is beautiful and whatever comes before the window is beautiful, too. O.K. so you won’t. So you can’t. Nothing to come down with. Gleefully: my heart is a secret. Lonesomely: my heart is a secret. Honestly: my heart is a secret, and I won’t be telling it. Certainly not here. Certainly not now.
I go out in the yard in the mornings. Won’t talk to anyone before I do it. Sometimes I bring a notebook, sometimes I don’t— a lot of the time, it’s an exercise in memory. How much light? How did the lichen bloom? Did you count the tiny, ground-up chunks of quartz that were mixed into the cement? How many were there? And yes, it’s the same yard every time, but it shifts. It keeps shifting on me. I can’t even get mad about it because I know damn well that everything is perpetual movement. One day the moss leans yellow, the next it’s emerald, and the day after that, it’s got a strange redness when you look at it from the right angle. Well, okay. Fine. When I rub my eyes, the phosphenes somehow manage to be mossy, too, even though they’re bright pink. So take that.
Above the moss, flitting in and out of the branches over me: hummingbirds, dark-eyed juncos, black-capped chickadees, pine siskins. I like the unadorned ones more than I like the ones with colorful plumage— red bleeding out of their throats, black hoods, yellow on their wings. They have plain bodies and sweet eyes. I’d like to think there’s a sort of luck in being plain. Maybe that’s why I won’t wear jewelry or bright colors. And luck isn’t the right word here— I’m talking more about nearness to some secret of the world than I am about fortune— but it’s what I have, and what I have is plain, and maybe plain can mean universal proximity. Almost everything is plain, after all. The dirt. The air. The shingles on the rooftops, the black dresses I keep putting on, the repetitive metal of the cars. So on and so forth. It’s all so lovely that I don’t really know what to do with myself.
There’s a face in the lichen today— maybe an elderly person, jowly and a bit pinched around the mouth. It’s got my great-grandmother’s eyebrows. They crook down on me expectantly and I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what the question is. My hair is in my face and the sun is in my eyes and I want a cigarette. No I don’t. Yes I do. Fuck me.
The short of it is that I’m beginning to lose certain aspects of self, hopefully for the better. I hate my phone to the point of averaging under twenty minutes of screen time a day. I don’t want to be inside at all anymore, hence sitting on the porch steps in the morning. There’s an itch developing under my skin. I want to run across a big field, but there are still days where even sitting up has me seeing black spots, much less standing and walking. I want to put my head through the fucking wall. Everything is beautiful and I’m not allowed to be a part of it. The sky. The spines of branches. The pine trees and the distant mountains and the flowers that are blooming because winter never really came. Sometimes I resent life for keeping me in a human body, separate from the greater machine of the ecosystem. Sometimes I resent myself for not managing to find a way around it.
Oh, well. All the tumult in the world doesn’t change what and where I am. And I don’t want you to mistake my attitude for misery or something like that. It’s love. It’s all love. When I was younger, I thought other people were stupid for thinking love could keep us safe from death, but they were right— not our own deaths, not really, but the death of the world and the people around us. Things stay alive through remembering and being remembered. If I forget something, some chunk of dirt or a rotting leaf, then it dies because no one will ever see it again the way I did, and I die because I’ve forgotten part of my life. Do you understand? I love it and I want us all to live. And it’s no pressure at all; it’s just the terms and conditions I agreed to when I kept my body.
A dark-eyed junco lands by my side, plain and beautiful. I suppose I’ve been still enough to earn the tentative trust of the birds. When I ask her to forgive me, she looks at me with her bottomless eyes and continues to peck at the weeds in the cracks. Incredible. It is my honor and my duty to keep her safe. I take her on like I’ll take anything else.
In this house, the stairs to the upper floor are carpeted and contained within a small, cream-colored corridor that leads to a landing with white walls, two doors, and no windows. The door to the right— the west— used to be my parents’ bedroom. My mother put a desk in it and now it’s where she works. Dead ahead, to the south, is my bedroom. If there is light to be had, it lives there. I mean that in a literal sense. It’s the only room in the house that gets sunlight for the whole day. The hallway is so dark that it makes my bedroom look like a fictional treasure chest— the cracked lid, the glow, the sense of mystery. Stepping inside sometimes makes me feel like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor Oz. It feels like somewhere else, somewhere far away where the world is gold and everything is warm and gleaming.
When I’m feeling hopeful, that becomes a metaphor. I’ve spent hours sitting in the desolation of the hallway and watching the light shift. Christina’s World on the stairs. It’s a poetic indulgence. Imagine me shaking a Magic 8 ball— am I moving out of the darkness? Will I make it to that bright place? Will I be okay?
Well it’s complicated, says my therapist, because it’s like you’re trying to recover from a drug addiction. There are physical repercussions when you deviate. You get sick. You’re going to have to go through withdrawal symptoms if you want to be able to move forward. And she’s right, and I know she’s right, and that doesn’t help make me want to do it. I can see that light, though. I didn’t used to be able to. I can’t get around this river in front of me, but I can see the yellow brick road and it’s beautiful. It really is.
I play Old Dog in the evenings, meaning that when my mother is in the kitchen making herself dinner, I lay on the rug in the dark living room— hair over my face, skirt askew, limbs akimbo— and watch her move in the light. We’ve had this carpet for years; there is undoubtedly piss and vomit from foster dogs still trapped in the fibers. That doesn’t stop me from pressing myself into it. I’m trying to fall through the floor. I go down like Alice in her rabbit-hole. Eat Me. Drink Me. I imagine becoming small enough to hide in the carpet. Then I’m human-sized again, looking at my fist. It looks like a dead baby or a bloodless organ. I spread my fingers out— now they’re fish bones— and clench my hand back into a fist. My knuckles make hieroglyphs under my skin. My fist could also be a vertebra for a large animal. Not just any Old Dog, but a Big Old Dog. The Old Dog I am now, I’ve decided, has an issue with urinary incontinence and a tumor in its head that its owners don’t know about yet. Last night, I had broken both my hips. This is my idea of fun.
My mother is split over the sink, slashed in half by one of the strands of hair across my face. I close one eye. I open it, then close the other eye. If I do it quickly enough, she ripples back and forth like water. There’s a slight delay between the two halves of her body, so for less than a heartbeat in between eyes, there’s a hole in her stomach. I go back and forth again and watch it wink at me. The knife in her hands is made out of gold. Her sweatpants are the shade of hard black that you see in dreams. She glitches side-to-side in rapid cuts, dead-grass hair moving from one crookedness to the next. I’m thinking of Brakhage’s Star Garden, the sepia and the newspapers and the jam-jars. Being an Old Dog is very peaceful. Maybe it’s the brain tumor.
The house is old, too, and it rattles and shakes when big cars pass by. With my face pressed into the carpet, every single vehicle is another heartbeat in my body. A truck descends upon me like a swarm of locusts and then leaves. The drone of it is perfect. In the glow of the kitchen, my mother is standing in front of the stove, her face entirely hidden from me. One eye, then the next. She dances and she doesn’t even know it. My head is starting to hurt. I think I might love her. I think I could probably move objects with my mind if I really wanted to— small things, like cups and hair clips and matchbooks. I could stay superglued to the floor and push wires around without moving a muscle. Another car passes. I lose my train of thought and start thinking about the sound an organ has when it’s being played at a funeral. Maybe tomorrow’s Old Dog will have been hit by a car.
My mother turns towards me, moving back to the sink, and I still can’t see her face. It’s my fault this time. My hair is in the way. She is surrounded by warmth, which really makes me feel like a dog— a real dog, something clueless and loving and dying. My first word was dog, you know. I hadn’t really gotten articulation down yet, though, so it sounded more like dug, as in “I have dug myself into a hole I can’t get out of”. I didn’t care about people and I didn’t laugh or cry much. Just pointed at dogs with chubby toddler hands and said dug dug dug.
I can’t get up. I can’t get off the fucking floor. God help me.
Migraines came when they upped my medication, and with the migraines came fevers, and with the fevers came bad ideas. It’s almost 2 a.m. The temperature is just below freezing. I’m laying across the porch steps in a cotton nightgown, trying to stop myself from burning alive. I’m being dramatic, yes, but moments like these are good for drama. Sometimes you just need a little glitter to get through it.
I’m on my back, staring at the encroaching houses and streetlights and telephone poles. I want open sky. When I was little, I was nervous that I would die in a city and my soul would get caught on all the wires. Then I got a bit older and realized you don’t have to die for your soul to leave you, to slip free of your body, and now I’m even more nervous. I don’t want my soul to catch on anything. Not that my soul matters that much. The spirit is tentative, the flesh is unwilling, and some ancient blacked-out thing between the two— murky like bad water, sticky like tar— is ruling from its stagnant throne. That’s the one I have to be concerned about. I think it’s my heart. I think that ugly in-between is my secret, precious heart.
A plane drones overhead. Who decided to take the red eye tonight? Night owls, businessmen, lovers aiming for a dramatic reunion? A hundred bodies, give or take a few dozen. A hundred bodies with their own secret hearts and spirits and flesh and fevers. It’s easy to feel unique when you’re sick and in pain. Yeah, maybe the frequency of my being ill is unusual, but I’d bet that there isn’t a single adult body on that plane that hasn’t experienced something close to what I’m feeling now. Bodies catch things, bodies give them away, bodies hold cards close to their chests and show them and use them to play games. Bodies try to get to parties because they know who they want to spend the rest of their life with and they want the rest of their life to start as soon as possible. We’re born and we get sick and we love and we die. It’s part of the contract that comes with a torturable body. Terms and conditions, baby.
So I’m overheated and exhausted and alone. Lonely? No, just alone. Secrets are inherently alone and I am a secret. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone. The sweat on my skin is beginning to cool at an alarming rate. The concrete of the steps is becoming more hungry than soothing. I’m thinking about the first dead body I ever saw— I was six and brave enough to touch its waxy, swollen gray hand. It was the first time I believed that a beating heart creates an electrical field. I think I might be hungry. I think the burning in my head is making me cycle through thoughts at an alarming rate, and that maybe I should try to sleep again.
Oh, my poor heart. I don’t regret accepting the terms and conditions. I just wish it was easier.