The Body Obsessed with Nostalgia
i.
Fractions have never been explained to children. They cannot fathom how quickly the future blurs past. Stuck in the present, every moment seems slow, for every year matters more. These moments that rip my sensibilities to shred flee from their crimes. Grass stains absorbed into the safety of recess. I refuse to step outside anymore. My knees crack in the cold; green summers frozen over by purple bruises and scars. I don’t bend. I don’t slide into the field to score a goal. Instead, I break. I collapse to the floor, skeleton shattered. I remembered thinking I would continue to darken under the afternoon sun, but the world shoved me indoors. I sit on sofas, knees curled up in a book, pale and frightened.
Pain presents itself as birthmarks. It eases you into the familiarity of seeing yourself crumpled. It scatters away certainty, never giving you proof that you existed before hurt. Pain has been ruinous to me. I have lost all sense of reality. I don’t remember this scar. I don’t remember the accident. I don’t remember a life of security. Each time someone asks, I reinvent. Skiing. Car. Fight. Dog. Game. I refuse to let my amnesia vandalize my life; I ignore all the lines that traverse my body — the language of my journey waiting to be translated. I stay away from glass. Unseen, unknown, unreal. I will imagine myself into the womb, even if through a casket. Perhaps, then, pain will be harmonious to me.
The cobblestone of a neglected birthplace. The one-acre by one-acre perfectly three-inch grass covered green lawns of small town suburbia. The rampant pace of cigarette stained sidewalks that trample through each intersection of bright lights, big city. These toes touched the riverbeds of every ocean, yet still seek to make a dust print on the moon. Once in awhile, I forget that it’s there, and so I crane my head through my legs and check the sole of my foot. Once in awhile, I am just looking for something consistent amongst the hazy lines of those who stay and those who leave. And so I check. Again, craning my head, checking the sole. I am constantly on the search for assurance that I am alive. I have spread the prints of my body on the flagpoles of the world, yet validation pulls me still. But if the Universe cannot fulfill me, I will keep craning my head to my foot, checking on my soul.
ii.
The heart yearns for love in the most foolish of senses. Its valves will pull away from blood if love betrays. It scoffs at users who draw syringes into their surfaces, yet it craves the rush of dopamine in the most unreliable and dangerous of ways. The heart will always be either unsatisfied or broken. Why do we deny the safety of other emotions? Why we repel from the idea of settling for companionship? Our addictions have driven us insane; we become beggars on the street screaming, the heart wants what the heart wants. That is the problem with sadness — it comforts us, it soothes us in its despair. It loves us. Like a guardian angel, but even the Devil once had wings.
Bones strung us together, our knuckles and knees knocked against each other, bodies unaware where one's limbs ended and the other's began. We believed in the eternity between dusk and dawn. Our voices crept out of our throats and into the night, speaking secrets only exhaustion could coax out. Infinity ended too soon. But I am not writing this for him, I am writing this for you. Why is it so easy to touch a stranger from the streets, yet so hard to look you in the eyes? Screams tied to bedposts and sheets, but none of it felt like it mattered. I am stuck in the brushstrokes of us that we left in arms that could not close the distance. There’s nothing to worry about with someone you do not love. Yet freedom is a luxury I cannot afford. Even without a cage, you trap me over and over.
I told you I had a disease that was trapped in my lungs. That my body built a fortress around it and kept guard through all the years. I told you I was dying. I remember every detail of you — but my memories have forgotten your response to my deterioration. Then again, I have never trusted you to say the right words. There’s heaviness on my ribs that never went away since you stole my breath. I guess it makes sense; my lungs have never been healthy. I should have never expected to be able to inhale around you and not fall in love. I should have never expected to be able to exhale around you and not give my heart away.
iii.
Latex gloves pull out tradition from its roots, douse the body in dip-dye chemicals, promise longevity in artificiality. I know nothing of holy solemnity. I swallow the red as if it could bring back memories. Once again, I run through the birches, and let the cuts ring me deep. But I am not a child anymore, and so black waits patiently for the Darkest Days. It taints me utterly: the abyss without anchors. But I am not gone anymore, and so I learn something of hopeful salvagery. I am slipping into my skin, and the night ends. People slice ink into their bones, but my tattoos are in the strands that shelter me. Then again, hair has a tendency to fall, and sometimes I am afraid to lose it all.
Age poisons youth, my mother consoles, as she wraps her fingers through my scalp. The years have rushed toward me, bringing white pencils to etch their intent. My fingers shook as they grasped silver chains, my body shivered as it moved to the mirror, my mind unraveled out of lucidity — I ached to be young. Dyes hide my decay, but their illusions are only ever temporary, and the grey washes back to the shore. My grandmother watches me wistfully, her own black long gone. It’s almost as if every generation grows up earlier, she wonders out loud. She was twenty-one when it began, my mother eighteen, me twelve. I’ve begun to feel older than must, and I can’t figure out if my hair reflects my soul, or if I am running through the years in an attempt to match my appearance. I yearn for innocence, but I have been guilty for so long. The DNA in my veins has prophesized my fall from purity. Oracles have attempted to save me from the demons, but none can deny that I have been marked by Hades.
Every seven years, I carve a tally in the wall, each time I grow into the world anew. Spending hours in the shower to scrub away death did nothing but rip away my skin. I lacked the patience that survival requires; I am always being taught by time to wait. I could scratch away all traces of myself, but my memories will be stuck in the nerves of my mind, and brain cells take seven years to die. I am two and a half lives older, but still so far from when I can prove with a pen in my hand and a slit in the crevices of plaster, when I can finally say that I have a body you have not touched. I will no longer have reason to remember, I will convince this novel chemistry to forget. But I have a prolific interest in shortcuts — I will rush toward that moment. And so, the locks fall to the ground.