Little Ghost
I don’t remember what happiness is. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy. I think the only times I come close to being happy are when I embrace my sadness.
I think of my body four years ago. I’d knock back half a bottle of pain pills and lie on the ground in the dark, carving up my body and touching my blood and floating away. I always felt like their were two of me, a body and a ghost. A specter of myself would sit on the side of the bed and watch my body lie and shake on the floor. My best friend, my witness.
I’m happy now. I’m medicated. I was medicated then too. But now I don’t overdo anything. Now I make clean calculations of my emotions. I keep my blood inside my veins, though sometimes I still ache to see it.
Someone once asked me why hurt myself, and I told them that it didn’t hurt, that opening myself up felt like happiness. What kind of happiness, he said. I said, Happiness. Like throwing yourself out of plane as it’s crossing the ocean.
I’m better now. If better is measured in the number of open wounds in my flesh, I’m better now. Though I miss my audience, my the witness. I miss my apparition.
I didn’t feel scared then, because I didn’t feel alone.With her I never felt alone.
The night I realized all my cuts were healed, I felt more lonely than I ever had in my life. I ran my fingers across my scarred arms, and saw my specter for the last time, standing in the doorway, whispering, are you willing to sacrifice what you are for what you will become?
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
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]
Love: A Dissection
You can lose love, carry love, see love, hear love, paint love, know love, have love, give love, need love, and peel the love off the walls and keep it in a jar or make a snowball out of love and throw it into outer space.
It’s a common misconception that you can fall in love, but really love can fall into you….and then fuck your shit up.
Love squeezes through you until you really do fall. But usually it’s just out or apart, and by then you’ve forgotten your own name and way and how how how do you remake it all?
An example sentence: “It wasn’t so much that we fell in love, as my life just seemed to fall down.”
‘Love’ disguises itself in other words.
For example: “How are you?” might mean “I’ve loved you forever. I love so you much my bones rattle when I say your name.” or it could mean “How are you?”
Another example, “I love you”often translates to “You’re an asshole, but I’m getting used to you.”
And then there is the quiet knowledge of ‘love’. The kind that doesn’t peel in the sun. The kind that means what it means when it says it and doesn’t ever really need to say it in the first place. This is a kind of love that bridges are built from that allows them to bend in the wind.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
And Then
In my mind there is this place where everyone I know is dead.
And I’m alone.
And nobody is asking me questions. Nobody wants anything from me.
But I’m also sad. I’m more than sad. I’m desperate. I’m crazy. I’m so unbelievably heartsick I feel like vomiting.
Because I can’t stand to be without him. Because the thought of his death rips my soul apart.
I imagine what it would be like, what I would be like in his absence. I picture myself laying down in the grass and never getting up. Never feeling anything again except for sunlight and rain and wind, cut loose from all the things that make me human.
I picture myself sliced up, bloodied lines up and down my body, like I used to be, except this time I don’t feel any guilt. I just hurt, and I don’t want to stop and there’s no one left in the world to stop me.
I picture myself sick. So sick I’m writhing on the ground, like my soul is trying to escape my body, because she can’t bear to be in a place where he doesn’t exist. Because she has to find him and if she doesn’t she’ll die, trapped inside my body.
But there’s also this little flicker of peace, like a lightning bug. It just floats there in the dark, occasionally reminding me its there by the soft, small light it carries. And I realize, if he were dead I’d have nothing else to live for.
And then I’d be free.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Promise
Dimly I might remember your face, in the flickering light of someone else’s fireplace. I will remember how I wanted to be wearing a blue coat when I met you, but instead I was wearing green and that is not how it was supposed to happen. I might feel something important when I hear your name, something that could travel through my bloodsteam until I die, but most likely I will feel nothing.
I wouldn’t flinch at an explosion now. I wouldn’t be able to know fear. I wouldn’t know how to hope. Maybe on my lips I’ll keep some of the quiet wishes we had for each other and someday send them into the desert.
You were once a hole that I was constantly falling into, and now it has been filled many times over by distaste. It has been more than filled; it is the tallest mountain on my heart’s horizon.
Please, I promise not to keep you awake, if you promise not to kick me out. I promise not to talk too much, if you promise to keep picking me up at 3 am. I promise to build your ego up, if you promise to keep my secrets.
Like love picked out of a trash can, an obsession with someone else’s garbage.
I was so scared of what might float out of the mouseholes in my emotions then.
Well, I’m promising now that I’ll think of you never.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
The Story in Five Parts (From End to Beginning)
(Zero
She has let forgetting define her. She has let scars achromatize. She has let her lungs empty, and her hair grow, and her eyes shrink. She is longing for a home.)
One
It is colder now, so in the nighttime when she exhales her breath is a ghost in the air. There is snow everywhere. Some moments when there is nobody to watch she lays down in it and feels like a she is painting colors on the pale canvas of the world, and some moments she lays down and feels like she is a frozen, inanimate body, asphyxiated in the bleached abstract.
She sits up in the snow bank thinking that you are a phone booth she just stumbled into.
Two
I like smokers because they understand self-harm better than most. They are a colossal group of people who are puff and suck and breath out fire, saying “We’re probably won’t live as long as you. Is that a problem?” Sometimes I think people smoke to keep from dissolving all together. The way a person keeps from crying by laughing too much and too loudly and holds her eyes still in their sockets even though there might be a million different things she would like to see. Sometimes the only way to alleviate the pain in a heart is to destroy the body.
Three
Then there is sludge. Every night there are nightmares in which she is rolling down a long hill covered in dark grass towards a sea of sludge containing all the sinking things in the world. And in the sky where the moon should be there is a dilated eyeball that is staring at her and asking her to forget and to let the forgetting define each day. And she rolls and rolls and rolls and waits for the moon to blink and is frantically waving her arms over her head to anybody at the top who might be looking out for sinking things. Then she wakes up sharply, freezing and strangled and thinks about all the windows in a graveyard and all the walls in a church and wishes she were dead for a split second. But the minute she thinks of killing herself the images of broken necks and stomach pumps and bare veins push into her mind so she says to herself, “I will take up smoking first, and work my way there.”
Four
Briefly, there might be a moment of peace in which you humor my need to keep you close.
But in the end it only makes it more obvious that something has died and has been placed in a tomb that is slowly filling with sand.
Five
Here is how it starts: he is thin as bones when she first meets him; she is puffing on cigarette and some kind of light is coming from her head. He is very easily swayed by the all noise flowing out of her. She wonders out loud if her soul is like a birdbath or like the Mississippi River.
And then there is a drink. And then there is a song. And words, a fountain, love.
At moments every tiny movement of his mouth makes her own mouth twitch anxiously. At moments she loses her head in the obscurity of this ideal, full of words and lips and bodies that color all the hours in the day.
There was talk of winning the lottery and running away. There is a talk of a tree house. There is talk of an adventure. There is talk of escaping into an abstract, where there is significance in two people who are meant to be together.
Then there is nothing
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
*
Measure a thousand times and cut once. The mantra of a person who is certain of their task.
*
I don’t remember where I was the first time I did it, not the color of the room or the décor. I don’t remember the time of day or whether there was music or silence.
What I do remember is the feeling – the awkward placement of my thumb and forefinger backwards over the handle of the scissors and how quickly the coldness of the blade crossing over my skin changed to hot blood. And then that strange sense of relief, as if there was light entering into me through a passage I created.
I have twenty-nine visible scars and countless numbers faded away, most of them evenly spaced and leaning at the same angles – the mathematics of my mistakes. Each one had a purpose and a exactness, each one created to release some suffocation from my body.
There have been a few haphazard slopes, a break from my usual surgical precision. They splay and curve across with no method, the combat wounds of someone with no time to waste.
I remember thinking that this was how a blood transfusion must feel: slowly, slowly drained and then full of something new, something uninfected, like sunlight through an open window.
*
She remembers reading somewhere, “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
The only way. The only way. She says it in her head over and over like a song, played out to the drum of her pulse. There is not one drop of blood left inside her veins that does not throb to this chant. The only way. The only way.
*
A shark can detect a single drop of blood in 25 million drops of water and can sense the electricity emitted from living creatures.
I think about being a shark, and how I might have been one once.
Every person I have ever loved and who has loved me is inside me somewhere, pulsing through my veins, living in my body. I can feel their electricity beating in my heart, keeping the rhythm steady.
Sometimes I wish they’d let me rest.
*
This is the geography of a life. Simple rhythms and hidden avenues of air in the veins where there should be blood.
This is the secret structure of the world. Everyone treading and pacing over their pain, keeping the heart beat steady in the people we love so we won’t have to be alone while our bodies decay in slow motion, like rotting cargoes abandoned in the ocean.
Our hearts don’t beat on their own; we keep each other’s rhythms.
*
We all have thunderstorms, some that brood for heavy hours. And I let mine pour out of me, to feel the quiet fill me up.
What choices can I make without knowing what it is to rest, always awake to the never-ending thumping of the heart and the rushing of the blood around my body carrying all the people who have loved me and whom I have loved.
Each year that we grow older, our skin becomes more translucent, like a bare bulb, displaying the infinity of thunderstorms and all the love that courses through our veins.
Pour them out. Pour them out. It’s the only way.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
Good Luck
I was making the wrong decision last week, watching myself actively trotting down the last leg of a path that I should have never taken.
There’s a margin of error for the perfect places I am transported to on my own breathing. But I have rotten luck. The way I let things escalate, it’s the habit that keep my phobias growing all around me, like a garden, like a menagerie.
And as I was walking towards my certain doom, towards this new mistake in a long string of mistakes, my shoes started digging into my heels and a cutting pain went up my leg and I knew I had to turn around and run away from all of this.
That’s when the birch tree growing in the plot next to the path said to me, “Good luck.”
I’m sure she meant it kindly, and I’m sure she’d be happy to know that I’m still running.
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
