Gravity Works

The Machine That Changed the World

Here’s the thing about God.

I don’t believe in Him or It or Her or ‘all at once’ or ‘ever-present’. I don’t believe in unwavering faith and good-intentioned prayer. I don’t believe that doubt will hurt you, and I know that our false idols help us save ourselves.

But it’s possible that because every scarecrow has its purpose so do I.

Dear God, I want to make you a lot of pretty things and shyly offer them to you one at a time. And please God, let me be a machine that changed the world.

(And at the same time screaming “You don’t exist!” and “Choose anyone but me!”)

What can a writer be, but born again every single day? She is the text that creeps through the cracks between the red bricks. She is the thoughts that thoughtless breaths exhale. She is Es muss sein! and the words that describe the sound colliding bodies make. She is only as good as being born again each day with the single wish to be the machine that changed the world. She is the treasure-hunter.

I have been digging for gold most of my life; and I have found one nugget.

It is nearing the end of 2007 and I feel as though I have swallowed an umbrella and someone has just opened it up. My mother is sick and Es muss sein! feels foolish now. When once my deepest wish had been to write down my soul for the rest of my life until I was at peace, I can now only wish that it were my body deteriorating, not her’s.

She had been the perfect body, even where her emotions had failed; never sick, never coarse, never a wrinkle that wasn’t beautiful. She loved to walk and had planned a hiking trip in Ireland that year, her motherland, her spirit’s house; now her legs drag, a numbness that doesn’t let her feel anything but pain. When my cat climbs up her body she doesn’t feel the scratches and the blood trickles down the back of her knees unnoticed.

I want to find the person who has stolen her limbs and replaced them with these weak machines. Every part of me is anxious and grieved watching her try to move. 

I sometimes sit in class and feel as though I am looking at a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of her forever in my mind. A body in trouble, an essay of decay.

What gives us the strength to avoid our bodies? I use my words, what I write in my notebooks to avoid owning up to myself and the world. I have a love affair with searching, constantly looking away from myself. The only thing I know how to own is words. And I feel panicked because my mother does not know how to not own her world. She was born fierce, and has not lost the fight. She did not stop to love one thing and own it for her heart; my mother loves broadly and owns everything. She is compassionate for more than carefully placed words.            

I pray, for the second time in my life to something I don’t believe in, but she does.

                                Dear God, help my mother from monsters.

I’ve been digging for gold all of my life. And here’s the nugget: just like every scarecrow has its purpose, so do I.

The amount of faith I must have in myself scares me. To be born new everyday and still own my soul completely means passion must be in every step. I am not passionate in the way my mother is. I do not understand my body like she did her own, yet mine is still in working order expecting to be kept and used.

Becoming the writer I hope to become is like a public surgery with everyone’s hands in my gut. I will have to love the world, be intimate with the world in a way that never speaks. Writing will be the mountain of my life. I will give up the expectancy that comes with being born and being loved. Like my mother once trusted her body, I will trust my heart to this.

[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]