Category: Life

Empty mind

New year, new me. New year, new opportunity to stalk my soul down the corridor, across the river, over the mountain, and around my bedroom.

Sliding my pointer finger across my broken phone screen, I feel my skin catch and drag around the point of fracture, like a strip of fabric snagging on a thorn. I pull away from my phone before the jagged edge can draw blood and bring my fingertip in close for inspection. A dirty, gold-tinged half-moon straddling pink flesh, the fingerprint like crop circles or waves in a shallow pool, lazily approaching the shore. The skin remains unbroken, so I return to my scrolling.

I come across job listings littered with words that I recognize and use frequently, and that I still don’t understand, particularly not in this crushingly contemporary context. These are not words in sentences, but hieroglyphs strung alongside each other in a garland. “Best practices” of “brands” that need “cultivation” or “learnings” that pinpoint “space” to “pivot.” I am particularly intrigued by “brand,” because I can’t read the word without its second meaning bubbling up into the froth of my thoughts. To mark, with painful implications.

Living out my small life in a spiraling megacity, I often feel like an 8-bit creature composed mainly of a mouth roaming a spontaneously generated set of white-walled malls, hungrily swallowing products: ordinary products, but also lifestyle-as-product, ethics-as-product, individuality-as-product. Sometimes the marketing is devilishly creative, and the consumption at times satisfying—the equivalent of haute cuisine. But I am pursued by a hangover that seems to locate me no matter where I am, and an incredible, relentless urge to purge my body of the aftereffects of my things, as well as my job, my ambition, my aspirations, my expectations, and to keep only my little and lonely life.

Tow Away Lane

Flying over the nighttime geometry of Tokyo, en route to rejoin my boyfriend across the ocean, I turn my face to the view below, feeling the 20,000-foot chill as intensely as an ice cube in my mouth. My bodily senses are five stallions chomping at the bit, caught in an eternal race across an immense desert under an orange sky, the sand whipping at their legs and eyes—but now, my limbs arranged against the hard cushioned seat, my eyes trained on the moving landscape, I feel them slow from a sprint to a crawl as I redirect my mind toward the splendor of the vista, shrouded in cloud or anointed in light, and the theater of my breath, a three-act show that plays wetly over the cold acrylic airplane windows.

Every thought coursing through my flesh, every belief in my pantheon has been stunned into silence by the sensation of being run off the ground and buoyed into the air, momentarily ceasing their hydraulic crush of me. The end of this pressure is an invitation to abandon, at least for the next eight hours, the threats of the future, and I feel the frisson of a thrill as perfect as a first kiss.

Tokyo Bay is a prism of light. The Atlantic Ocean is a black hole. The snow over Minnesota is a blank page crisscrossed by lines that are indecipherable to my eye though I also harbor the suspicion that they are perfectly legible to those with the right gifts. What meaning is made in the flourishes of a foreign language, the eddies of water, and the flurries of snow, symbols gusting far below me, caught up in the currents that will travel far beyond me?

In Miami, the sky is preternaturally huge and fierce. It exerts a kind of force that communicates intransigence, total command, and the possibility of wildness, like the stare of a monarch framed in the doorway, or a tiger appearing between trees, tail thumping against the bark as it vanishes into the darkness. In the late evening, I sit on the old dock, legs swinging, with the sky looming behind me, its bath of purple tones, scattered clouds, and rays of light dancing over the river. You are not alone here, it seems to be saying, transmitting both comfort and danger. The sky recalls the ancient primacy of the natural gods, the divine personalities of the clouds, the sun, the stars, the firmament, and their roles in birthing, shaping, and consuming the world. “Buildings block the sky in Tokyo,” Strawberry reminds me, when I say that I can’t believe how big the sky is here, and I laugh because he is right, and because his pragmatism presents such advantages versus the blurry fantasy of my sky-as-tiger or sky-as-king. Later, I wonder what else blocks my vision there, at home in Tokyo.

Cloudbursts in Strawberry’s hometown are like something out of a fairy tale. The tension in the air breaks open and the rain pours down, hotly, wetly, heavily, like blood. The weather wields its powers with the clumsiness of a child, but with the grace of an artist. Gemstones sparkle in the air and glance off the water. Under the gray shadow of clouds, Strawberry’s family car hums nervously on the highway. I try to assist by navigating with my phone, zooming into the knot of roads on the map and getting lost, for a moment, in exploration as my finger undoes the strands and follows it into the fields of New England. I graze there, on distant heather in a land unseen, like a lamb, before I am called back by Strawberry asking me about the next exit. He looks younger than ever behind the wheel, like a boy magician handling levers and buttons behind a velvet curtain that opens onto a vast world. The captain of the ark, he leads us down a path littered in raindrops and flower petals.

Anxieties are sticky. They hold fast to my skin, drying down not just to a stain, but to a tattoo. I am praised for my kindness by the people who know me best but I never feel kind. I have never felt kind once in my life. In fact, I feel my own cruelty all the time. It has its own beating heart, embedded right next to mine. I feel it propelling me forward. I feel it holding me back. What’s more likely—that they have misread me, or that I have misread myself? Which would be more painful?

Bathing in the Styx

Lying on the grass, my hands folded over my chest, I look upwards, the whole of my vision turning green, gold, and baby blue as I look through the irregular sheaf of leaves, branches, and sparkling air overhead. I hold my body still while my eyes dart around, from twisted branch to falling leaf, following the long-lived dance held between the trees and the wind. Every few seconds, a quick-moving bird or insect joins into the choreography, their shadows skittering over the grass.

I try to watch purposefully, with the meticulous, deeply considered attention of an astronomer charting clouds of stars. I try to think of nothing but the wind, the trees, the grass. I reduce them, as though simmering away the water in their bodies, to a slurry of light, matter, and sensation. The wind is a blue-toned and fragrant memory of the seashore and the grass is a kiss on my ankles and wrists. The world is here, in this field. It is contained in the eggshell of the sky, pricked by needles of metallic yellow and olive-green light. I try to keep my mind on a leash, yanking it back when it threatens to dash out of the fenced-in perimeter and onto the road below. This is a task that requires every ounce of my concentration.

Across the field, a young woman, her face obscured by a thick scarf, is bent over her phone. Our gazes never meet. I don’t notice when she leaves but when I next look around, she is already gone. Now, in her place, an older woman is leading a toddler across the patchy grass. She pauses every so often to let him test the sensation of walking on his own; he sinks to his knees, at a loss. His eyes, blinking against the light, move in my direction, but I am too far away for him to truly see: a silhouette bathed in the green blur of the trees. His hands grab at the tufts of grass. When he leans down to inspect the clump in his hand, I notice the roughly circular bald spot on his crown, as obvious as a speckled, pink-and-white carnation pinned to a dark lapel.

Something about very young children has always made me uneasy; with their jerky movements, farsightedness, half-formed limbs, and toothless smiles, they seem especially close to death. Never mind that, in terms of proximity and according to the moral order of things, we should never be farther away from death than we are as children. But even as a young girl myself, I felt that the veil between my life and death was strikingly thin, almost insubstantial. A barrier more like a cobweb than a curtain. I never possessed the sure-footed belief in my own immortality that seemed to characterize the childhoods of others. I was always conscious of fragility, particularly my own. Everything around me and about me seemed weak, insufficient, prone to breakage and failure.

In the photos where I most strongly recognize myself—my real presence, spared from artifice and revealed authentically, in the tepid waters of a drugstore darkroom, before being printed on laminated plastic and handed to my mother in a paper envelope—I am unsmiling, and my eyes are faraway, beholding a fuzzy, nearly invisible figure in the distance. A tiny psychopomp in a black felt hat, cradling a doll with a red satin ribbon woven through the synthetic strands of its hair.

In the moments after the woman-and-baby duo exit the park, a gray-haired gardener, shears in hand, a rubber apron over her midsection, walks assiduously through the field. She vanishes under the cover of the distant trees. I wonder what the world may be trying to tell me with this parade of women entering and exiting the field, while I lay under the cool shade of the largest maple. Will I ever grow old enough to appreciate the passage of days, to enjoy them, to indulge in their small, varied pleasures like the gem-like stars, the star-shaped leaves, the trees like angels, the wind like God? Will I ever lose the perverse urge to siphon away the value of my own time via the vice, the maw, of melancholia, its grip tightening around me like a cuff strapped around my torso, numbing me before the blood draw that reduces me to nothing but matter and sensation, nothing but cells oriented toward despondency, nothing but the shells of thoughts configured for fragility, toward failure?

I don’t want to be “productive”. I don’t want to be “pessimistic”. I don’t want the self-help manual, the uplifting conversation, the sun-bleached afternoon, the tender poem, the TV show produced by a crowd of web-savvy millennials, the gimmick, the joke, the cry in the dark. I want to never cause harm. I want to take back all the pain. I want to forgive. I want to choose right. I sit up, leaves in my hair, suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling I can’t name and will later be unable to describe, to give life beyond where it lives, sick to its stomach, within me. I want to never fear death. I want to meet its eyes across the field.

“SOMETHING TRUE”

I am sitting at the desk, patiently enduring the chill coming from the single-pane window, blinking away the fog of tiredness that saps my strength like a deer tick squatting on my brain, like a sea sponge, expunged from its natural environment and sold by Amazon as a dyed pink loofah, soaking up water from the shower drain. One foot is tucked underneath me—ankle strangled by thigh, bereft of blood—and is rapidly losing sensation. I am sitting in silence with the sole goal of writing something true, but I think it may, unfortunately, not be as easy as I initially hoped.

I must admit that I think of the “something true” as something that lives perennially inside me, well-nourished and lucid as genius, luminous as moonstone, appraising conditions outside my body for the right opportunity to emerge, resplendent in the last dregs of milky afternoon light. But “something true” is not a “something” that I am knowingly carrying. I do not feel it inside me as I do the digestion of a meal, or a thorn in my shoe, or a wound in my memory. If I carry anything true, it resides in me as noise indistinguishable from the plaintive chorus of cells, tissues, thoughts, organs, feelings, joys, tragedies. I cannot pluck its face from the crowd. I probe my stomach, my limbs, my heart, every part of me more meat than spirit, looking for the “something true” in the blue night, but no reply is forthcoming.

I know “something true” was here, once—I knew it as a child, as many children do, playing by myself in a corner of the sandlot, living out a tiny life rich with alien roots sprouting from dark earth. I knew I could create, even if what I made was never good enough. But the certainty of that seems to have faded as I have grown and and become accustomed to trading authenticity for commercial viability and passion for (limited-to-nonexistent) career advancement. When I write now in pursuit of “something true,” I find myself lost, more often that not, in a labyrinth wallpapered in endlessly scrolling feeds. Blinking open wetly from the ceiling, the gaze of my father, and his father, and his father’s father, falls on me like a cascade of cinder blocks. I become possessed by the fear that I should be doing something else, anything else. I forget to feed the white rabbit. Its red eyes flutter closed. Could I have already killed the possibility of my “something true” through neglect? But in its absence I finally understand how tenderly the act of creation once held me, how my day was structured around it like paradise around the apple, like flesh around the parasite, like sound around meaning, and how my life continues to take the shape of an asymptote reaching for it, for something that is missing.

Namesake

True to its namesake, this Sunday was bursting at the seams with light. I looked up at the sky and the clarity of its color—clarity as a pure and as vivid as the pinprick of a needle—took my breath away.

Not true to my namesake (Emma, from ermen, meaning “whole”), today my attention is being pulled in a hundred different directions. Work, play, friends, partner. Family. Sad, bad, happy. Regretful.

The way my attention divides is like cells multiplying: each instance of division represents continuation, forward momentum, the progression of linear time, but, also, by those same gilded tokens, decay, inertia, and eventual collapse of being. You cannot be in many places at once without the quality of your presence diminishing. My eyes scatter out, profligate propagation, through the textured skin of tough calls, ruinous moods, and pits of anxiety. Each time my mind moves out to seek another task, another problem, another email, another text, the quality of my focus suffers as a result. It splinters, then fractures. It flushes, then reddens, then bleeds. I lose my train of thought. I become unable to name the right word, to follow the flow of a conversation, to keep myself from wandering off into the thorns of the next thing To-Do. I listen less intently, and respond less intentionally, and behave less thoughtfully. This, I know, puts me directly on the path of becoming a woman I am not and don’t want to be.

But life demands a fractured being. Staying in touch requires ten different apps bearing pastel-colored logos with soft, curved edges, elegantly curated feeds with custom typefaces, and consequences to my psyche that feel like being emotionally pulverized with a hammer. Keeping up with work trends means five subscriptions to magazines and trade papers, all eager to costume the truth in whatever disguise best suits the cause of sensationalism. A healthy body deserves rest, food, and exercise, but I cannot consistently provide all three, or even two. I have now been trained to seek distraction, to fear introspection, to submit to the transformation of hours of my life into ad revenue, to split my presence into forms that are “real” and “digital,” that are “personal” and “public-facing,” that are “work” and “life”.

My mind, flattened until it disintegrates, floats through the digital meadows of Asphodel. The day shifts shape. My mind returns to my body, filling out its contours like water crowding a bay. I come home and drop my bag onto the hardwood floors. I roll my tired shoulders, turn on the light, and fall onto the couch. Momentarily whole, momentarily true, momentarily at peace.

Hypervigilant

In the ruins poking over the horizon—sandy yellow, blurred at the edges, pink marble monuments glazed by the greenish sun—lies everything I have ever wanted. I stand on a distant dune, kitted out in a broad-brimmed hat, khaki overalls, and combat boots. I’m waiting for my opportunity to approach. The air is alive with heat, light, and whorls of dust.

Sand turns to worn cobblestone under my feet. The monoliths are tall and rectangular, providing some shelter from the elements in the form of long, cascading shadows. But they are afraid of my encroaching presence and recede from me as I walk by, no matter how slow and careful my steps. I observe one at its base, noting the irregular pattern of its pink-gray stone. But out of respect for its discomfort, I restrain myself from laying a hand on its cool surface. In response, I feel it release an icy breath of relief onto my retreating back.

I don’t begrudge the monoliths their distrust. They have ample reason to fear my visits. At first there are only a few broken monoliths scattered among them, but, as I press forward, I see they have grown in number. They lie in perfect halves, snapped apart cleanly, like toothpicks. Stepping over them feels profoundly wrong—like committing a crime in paradise. Sweat runs down my spine in thin, snaking lines.

There isn’t a whole monolith to be seen anywhere by the time I make it to the swimming pool at the center of the ruins. The broken monoliths here are nothing but piles of rubble, the dusty rose of the stone reduced to the color of spilled brain matter. The pool, lobular and ordinary, its sides bounded in unfinished concrete, is clear and glassy in the light. Palm fronds litter its surface. I shed my clothes and submerge myself, hissing in pain as my bare skin, scraped raw by sand and wind, makes contact with the water. At first, I swim cautiously, crossing sign posts in my mind as each stroke gets me closer to the deep end of the pool.

I almost have my hand on the concrete edge, terror and exhilaration catching in my throat, when I feel her launch herself from the bottom. A sleeve of bubbles, a torrent of force, churning underneath my shadow. I feel her anger before the grip of her hand, grabbing my wrist with her thumb and forefinger. Her nails dig in, drawing blood. I manage to heave in half a breath before she drags me down.

“Does it help,” she hisses in my ear, “to write out hundreds of words of stilted preamble? Does it delay the inevitable?”

(more…)

The shores of memory

We half-walk, half-shuffle through brown sand littered with shell fragments, on a clean but otherwise unremarkable beach bracketed on one side by the churning gray waters of the ocean and on the other by a geometric mass of steel, concrete, and weather-worn plastic that, in the pink-purple clarity of the sunset, looks less like a charming coastal town and more like a recently unearthed, life-size time capsule from the 80’s. Gold and aquamarine Ozymandias. I finger the rust on the fence as I wait to cross the road.

The convenience store, the perfect site for data collection on types of local demand, sells rice crackers, cooler-sized blocks of ice, baggies of pineapple chunks bobbing in their juice, and five kinds of flavored vodka. I wander the aisles in flip-flops and a khaki dress, my salt-encrusted hair escaping from its clam-shell clasp to swim down my back in a wave vaguely redolent of seaweed, potato chips, and canned beer. Outside, trucks roll past, down the seaside road that connects us to Tokyo, and Tokyo to the distant, isolated, snow-covered north.

I return to the shore empty-handed. I pretend to nap, my head in Strawberry’s lap and my eyes facing the froth of the tide, as he makes conversation with our friends and acquaintances. We will spend six hours idle here, traveling from the tent on the beach to the tidy Seven-Eleven fifty meters away only to relieve ourselves, or to replenish our stock of ice and chips. The day moves forward, not dully, but with no feeling behind its ticking seconds, like a bloated episode of television. The crash of the waves is methodical, meditative, and evokes nothing but itself. Perfect to drown out any persistent thought, or to soften the burn of any blistering memory. The temperature of the air is neither warm nor cool, but still not entirely comfortable. I keep awkwardly shifting my position, fracturing any possibility of real rest. My mouth tastes like the artificial vanilla of cheap soft-serve. My thighs are wet, cold, and clammy to the touch, like refrigerated meat in its Styrofoam package, sitting in a shallow bath of blood.

The older I get, the more closely I parody the paranoia of my father, the melancholia of my mother. I say “parody” because it feels intentional and ironic, and sometimes gratifying and clever. But, to be honest, it can also feel uncontrolled, inevitable, and painful. Less like performance and more like fate. Regardless, it is one thing above all else to slowly transform into one’s parents, and that is “annoyingly self-inflicted,” the way continuing a nicotine addiction is both a choice and not a choice. I cannot help but to grow into my mother’s hands and my father’s legs, which sit on me oddly, like parts cobbled together in the style of Frankenstein. I cannot help but manifest their bad habits, absorbed during the porous days of childhood and released now like ancient volcanic vapors. The marks of genetic destiny are obvious even in baby photos in which I lie, swaddled in white linen, already in possession of the family frown. Sometimes I think I own nothing of my own. Even lying on the beach, sand between my toes, Strawberry’s hand on my head, his thumb weeding pebbles from my hair, feels like a borrowed dream, an echo from a past that I didn’t live.

I feel the shadows of my family most acutely at the beach, where I spent so many summers with them in my pampered infancy, and frenetic childhood, and grumpy, scary adolescence, and frightened adulthood. It means I am always dying to visit the ocean and then, once there, totally unable to understand its appeal. Nostalgia exerts a special kind of pressure, strong enough to compel the strangest behavior—I’ve seen it induce people to even bear children, as though shaping and clay-firing a vessel of innocence could restore to life the memory of their own.

But I feel no comfort from nostalgia; its most immediate side-effect, once satiated, is only sadness, felt as the prickly chill of lost time, escaping from the mind as inexorably as air-conditioned inhalation from a cracked-open car window rushing down the highway. (I remember my pimply arms piled parallel to the sticky rubber gap between window and seat, like a spectator to my own life.) This—nostalgia’s brew of sadness—means I am a moody beach-goer. I get up, pad a few steps away from the tent, away from the water, to stare at the concrete blocks that divide the sand from the road. I can see a row of flowers, buried up to their necks in the strip of soil around the Seven-Eleven. The heat is vanishing, from terror to shimmer to nothing. I hold my hand over my eyes like a visor as I scan the clouds for a reason to leave, or a reason to stay.

Wait and see

As children, we beg for attention, fight to be the favorite, scream at every injustice, and generally lead a daily existence that doubles as a constant plea for love. As adults, we feel the same needs, but shame precludes us from petitioning freely. Instead, we brush down our hair, choke down emotions, and play mind games. We read between the lines, scanning faces and phrases as though interpreting runes, and silently, bitterly pick at every hurt feeling with all the teenage pathos of a sad guitar coaxed into tears.

I have always been a little wary of keenly intelligent, emotionally mature people, a prejudicial tendency I have continued to dutifully preserve even if it embarrasses me deeply. First, I envy them. Second, I fear their probable skill at masking and shaping feelings, which I assume must be some part of success in adulthood. I don’t like to be honest with an avatar of sharply-dressed, polite, smart ambition, as I cannot hide adequately in front of one. They are infinitely better than me at the purposeful dance of adult conversation, and I know that, when I miss a step, they will see through the veil, into the big, sad eyes of a girl who didn’t quite grow up, who never got past the need to plea for love.

When you carry a fully developed cerebral cortex, but not an entirely matured heart, the most serious consequence is you make bad choices at bad times. As reliably as the chosen victim of a storybook prophecy, I choose all the wrong times to be unsympathetic, unkind, unforgiving. Other times, when I should be cutting, biting, on the attack rather than the defensive, I lapse instead into unwitting obedience. I never realize the mistake immediately. Weeks, months, or years later, something will trigger, realization will strike, an alarm will go off in my mind, and the noise will radiate backward into the past, bouncing off the walls of the house of Mnemosyne. In an inner chamber, a younger Emma will wake up in a cold sweat, sheets pooled around her like ripples from a stone chucked into water by a hand from the faraway future. A lesson in the form of a sermon and a prayer, sung in our twinned voices and forgotten immediately.

It’s dangerous to attribute the actions of others to malice, and those of your own to righteousness. It’s dangerous to spend too long intellectualizing your choices. A fallen angel at the center of my own vision of the cosmos, but unavoidably, an unfriendly demon, a non-playable character, a gaping maw, or a puddle of fetid blood, from another’s point of view. Come on now, Emma. I’m throwing a pebble at you. Listen to yourself—an angel, a demon. How could it be that black and white? How could it be that theatrical, that biblical? The truth is much less complex, and so much more boring. You will never be the best, nor the worst. Never totally pure nor totally filthy.

Bury the instinct to think of the world as a stage, and you as its protagonist. To want both love and power. To constantly succumb to self-pity for having neither in the condition that you desire. To punish yourself so harshly for the wrongdoings you forgive readily in others. To want to love and to hate yourself, both at once. To be unable to do either. Open your eyes. In the house of Mnemosyne, a little girl runs through the hall, a heart-shaped barrette nestled in her curls, and disappears around the corner.

Next of kin

I try, I do try, to forget her, because too much time has elapsed to force a reunion, because the distance is too vast to casually cross, because I am certain her feelings for me oscillate within a narrow range bounded by disdain and hate, because no pretense at rekindling feelings would be sufficient to deceive her, because she has grown into a person so different from the one I knew, because I question if I ever knew her at all. Most uncomfortable is the realization that I likely didn’t ever understand her on the level she deserved. We met during my blue period, when I was insecure, superficial, selfish, and motivated only by insecurity, superficiality, and selfishness. In my current phase of life, at least, I am aware of my deficiencies, even if I can’t fully cure them, and I can curtail them when they threaten to knock out the power to my better impulses. If we met today, I promise I would be a better friend to you. If we met today, I promise I would empathize more honestly, share more fully, and forgive more completely.

“Just forget it,” I think, as thoughts of her approach like a stalker at the window, silhouetted in lamplight, lifting a kitchen knife into my line of eyesight. She stares at me through darkness, through dirty, milky glass. I turn contemptuously from the girl-as-specter, as though the force of my disdain—sometimes so cool, so imperious, so lofty—alone could disarm her. “Just forget it,” when the pain refuses to pass, when it lodges like a gallstone in sticky tissue, when it accumulates like microplastic in fetal blood, when it won’t be evicted by any means.

In the map of our lost relationship, a forest of deepest green circumscribes a lake of clearest blue, and beyond the trees, there’s a grassy hill, bare of any flowers. I leave the lake, the edge of my skirt bunched up in my hand, trailing water onto the rocky shore. The old-growth trees offer imperfect, gentle shelter from the light of the setting sun, which falls through the branches and onto moss and leaves in dark-toned splashes of violet, magenta, yellow, silver, blood. I part from the protection of the forest and find myself at the bottom of the hill, holding my breath. The breeze moves through and heightens every splintered sensation. I don’t know what may come from cresting that hill. I don’t know what I will see from the height offered by that vantage point. It’s so hard to avoid the fear, here. But I do try. So I turn around: back through the trees, back across the shore, back into the cool depths of the lake. A hundred steps back until I feel the water cover me in consolation and return me to my familiar fiefdom of night-blooming flowers, icy sidewalks, incomplete declarations, and yellowed sketches taped to the refrigerator, which feel as painful, as crucial, as close to my heart as the profoundest regret.