The other day I opened a bag of rice I had been eating from over the last 6 months to find black specks moving amongst the white grains. It reminded me of the bathroom sink a man hasn’t cleaned after shaving his face over it. There were bugs in my grains, and I’d probably eaten a few over the last couple of months. I cried in one of those silent, eerie ways as I threw the sack down my trash chute because my body felt infested and because the rice belonged to a woman who had died. I suppose I don’t know what I would have done after I’d eventually finished eating it all, but I didn’t bother thinking about it because she used to smooth my eyebrows down and well up when I left and massage my hands and wash my bald head and tell me she loved me and I had just thrown it all away with household garbage, letting it comingle with every other unworthy disgusting thing, instead of letting it linger with me, letting it be savored and eventually released out of my nose in the form of carbon dioxide.
When these things happen, when they collide and twist, I nearly feel my brain begin to swell. When my brain is swollen, I cannot eat, which is fine and manageable. My clothing is all mostly massive in relation to my average size and meant to fit my body in three distinct phases of weight fluctuation. What is less manageable are the mundane dreams that follow my brain swelling, potentially a defensive mechanism deployed by my neurons to neutralize. I dream about me and you sitting on my bed, me telling you about what I’m reading, me asking you when you’re leaving New York. I don’t show up to class with no clothes on; I am sipping a martini and trying to decide which of your eyes to look at.
I had these dreams frequently in 2019 when my cranium was being squeezed by thick rubber bands. I would wake up in the middle of the night to text my then-boyfriend as a continuation of the events in my sleep, thinking it was all real. I’d unstick my eyes a few hours later and become confused after rereading the messages while still half-unconscious, then delete them from my phone thinking it would unsend them somehow. In the mornings I would panic because it was difficult for me to discern what had happened. Everything was inconsequential at the end of the day and my boyfriend thought it was funny. I placed a hefty weight on these instances because I cannot tolerate being muddled and demented over anything else, including sickening grief and dumb heartbreak.
When these things happen, I attempt to return to what I know is true, and it all must be true, they cannot be false memories or else there is nothing to see here. What I know is true is that she used to smooth my eyebrows down and well up when I left and massage my hands and wash my bald head and tell me she loved me.
I write these things down now and send postcards to tell people I had a nightmare about applying to law school and I think about them all the time. I tell them a little too much. I tell them, against their wills, what I thought about them the first time we met. The more precise I am the more real it is for both of us and then I can tether myself back to the start. And I will kiss them on the cheek and squeeze their hand and look into their eyes so they know that these are plain and simple truths.
loved this one bald ❤️