nesting behavior

I nest.  Whatever home I enter I stay there.  If I leave it must be morning as the morning comes with simpler threats than the afternoon and the evening is always, always, always an aggressive wolf with a human heart intelligently populating the black air with motion sickness.  How unfortunate because I love the night but I’ve never lived in kind places where the night didn’t constantly scrape.  Somewhere else in the world I know the damp silent air combs everything it touches and you could sleep in that air if you wanted to and it wouldn’t request your blood, it wouldn’t even provide a headache.  I don’t live in those places.  I live in the city.

When I nest I do it purposefully with a standing posture with closed eyes or with a flat back on the floor with open eyes locked on the ceiling.  When I sit I’m dull.  I mostly sit.  I’m mostly dull.  But safe if I find the proper corner to hide where no harassing or small-talking stranger can pull me out of my world with their wide, loud, intruding mouth.  Whatever bitterness I may harbor doesn’t compare to the sourness of a culture whose people haven’t learned to leave each other alone.  Either a fist is pounding or a body is wanting or an eye is prying and no one knows the language for politely denying a company.  Leave me alone, don’t intrude, don’t even look at me.  If you want a binding just listen for the breath pouring out of my lungs, mix it with the sugars of your sweat, bake a cake, and eat it.  But don’t tell me.  I don’t want to know.

This isn’t my secret wish for everyone.  There are little bits of life that I welcome with broken forearms, swollen nostrils, and silhouettes of pack animals painted on my forehead.  I can make myself vulnerable enough for care and familiar enough for bonding but a human woman has limited space in her womb, no single palm can carry the volume of an ocean, and no one takes in the world without discrimination.

It’s not all a story of feeling strong in the path one chooses.  I do let a lot of dust settle on my body.  There is a lot of stagnant sloping of my spine, stomach squirming in hunger, and it’s often one o’clock in the afternoon and I haven’t eaten because I’m letting a parade of possible futures dissect the intimacy of my present moment.  Still, I nest behind four walls.  Sometimes I raise my arms in the air while standing on a chair when I know, or at least hope, no one is looking and I triumphantly scream and the galloping echo of myself is returned.

madwoman’s meditation

I talk to myself.  A lot.  Everyday.  Dozens of times a day if not more.  I mumble.  I whisper.  I speak and scream and silently mouth words when I think no one can see or hear me.  I wake up in the middle of the night and I say aloud “I love you, ______” to men I never loved.  I say “Thank you” or “I’m so lucky” conjuring up gratitude so my negative thoughts aren’t the only things stirring.  At 5am or 3pm or 10am I have full, intimate, hearty, healthy, satisfying conversations while the warm, soothing tone of my voice gets tangled in the naked air around me withholding its response.

I love it.  I love it so much.  I do it in front of a mirror and get upset when I’m lifted out of my world too soon to pee, to eat, to address a live body who’s addressing me.  I do it while walking.  My head down.  My lips fighting the desire to make intense stretches of the mouth to get the words out properly instead of keeping them tight to avoid being judged by anyone who might see me carrying on like a madwoman.

I say “I’m an idiot”, “I miss you”, “It’s ok”, “I knew it”, “Today is a new day”, “All things come to an end”, “God, I miss him”, “Patience, let me find my comfort and rhythm”.  I say “What was I thinking to have believed anything else”.

I never know how loud I am.  Sometimes I’m heard.  Even though my words are quiet enough not to be understood I’m still terribly embarrassed.  But I can’t stop.  I wont stop.  It’s beyond a habit.  It’s a meditation almost.  The kind of meditation that quiets and calms the mind with a stream of loose delicate chatter.  I know.  It’s not supposed to work that way but it does.

They say “Who are you talking to?”.

“I’m talking to no one” “I’m talking to you” “I didn’t say anything”.

sleep is a dream

I dream in color, sound, abstraction, pleasure, and terror.  Like anyone else fortunate enough to make the mind empty enough, stripped bare enough, for images with narratives to sprout deep within the brain, and grow up and out into all sides of the skull.  Little baobab tree, stretching.

I know I’m dreaming when I’m in a laboratory, or a sterile school cafeteria, or I simply don’t remember and several gorillas are chasing me down a hall.  I slip into a room, curl up in a ball, and beg myself to wake up.  I don’t know I’m dreaming anymore.  How is this possible?  A bright light, like the one people think will take them to heaven, levitates me out an open window, in silence and slow motion, while gorilla hands futilely reach for my feet and I rise up and out of my sleep.

I’m falling in space.  I see the planets of the solar system.  Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars.  I love space.  I know these places.  They’re so familiar.  They are surrounding me, so close, and entirely out of scale but I don’t care because I’m in the heavens, completely supported by the nothingness of things, not a single knot in my stomach from the free fall.  Closest to me is a planet I’ve never seen.  What is it?  I’ve never seen it because it’s a speck of dust in the air and my microscopic body has gently fallen back to Earth.

I dream with a lot of love, a lot of lust, pressing of the flesh, floating in the air, falling, desiring, suffocating, weeping, screaming, fighting, surviving, dying, a lot of sour sweat, breath, and saliva, with more than enough honey.

effortless human

I try.  I make attempts.  I do my best or I don’t.  I fail.  I silently or with a full sobbing mouth loaf in the burden.  I try again.  And again and again.  Not as an optimist.  I don’t rise up with a sword and shield and my armored loving essence trying to make a home for myself in the world.  I feel myself through sewage with my head hanging low and my heart and lungs swimming in the squid ink and mercury of civilization because in my most sensory-deprived hours I know that if all were healthy and abundant, if all civilization asked of its humans was an inhale, an exhale, some planting and harvesting, some warming and rinsing, some helping and playing, then I would be the most extreme human.  The most efficient human.  The most effortless human with one end of an invisible umbilical cord embedded between my kidneys and the other end tangled in the roots of a banyan tree because I only know how to live my living not earn my living.

pollen mouth

The year is 1276.  My infant consciousness wills itself into an endless existence.  Even as a baby lacking the mastery of my mind and body I know to invoke the variety of immortality that suffers no susceptibility to death.  The vampire dies beneath the rising light.  The werewolf withers from bullets of silver.  But my being, purposely impenetrable, knows no potential for corruption.  Not because of any rapid wound healing or instinctual defensive aggressions.  If fist, weapon, or contagion approached while paired with hostile intentions, my tongue would flutter, then bellow out from my mouth a ball of light, and reduce all within its radius to pollen.

Like newborn muscle, like the canal at the end of a baby’s bowel, my protective power, that could turn a bolt of lighting into a cloud of powder, surrenders to a similar involuntary control.  Deaths are inevitable.  First a beetle, then a spider, then I disappear forever both my mother and my father, together with the neighbors, who are numerous and too curious to be apathetic towards a residence where people never exit only enter.  From the center of my navel to two hundred meters in the distance, stopping at the town’s circumference, is a wasteland whose past inhabitants now take the shape of powdery pyramids beside an innocent, smiling infant.

My growth is slow.  Half a century passed before bone replaced fontanel.  The year is 2176.  Nine hundred years has placed me in the midst of adolescence.  A feral child with poor jurisdiction over bodily functions is now a veteran who turns to dust the unjust with skill and precision.  I am the infamous invincible, a heroine, host to unrivaled virtues, celebrated by all the world’s people, a killer of the worst criminals.  Elected by the populace to dismiss those who resist peace and cooperative progress.  In the aftermath of a murder, or any harm derived from one and done to another, my tongue would elongate, weaponize worldwide rays of sunlight to seize and disintegrate society’s most insufferable subjects.

Like lip-gnawing hunger, like the air-lust of a lung submerged in water, my desire to expire the foulest amongst the living surrenders to an appetite that now includes all varieties of human being.  Deaths are impartial.  The young, old, healthy, and sick are all susceptible.  The sinful and religious exist equally defenseless when I empty, simultaneously, the cities, countries, and continents.  Condense the action of extinction down to a single moment.  I extend the devastation to include everything designed by the mind or hand of a human.  As if swallowed up by time they are denied an Earthly presence along with any evidence of a previous existence.

The year is 3076.  Alone on a planet of perfect conditions I witness the synthesis of a new branch of human evolution.  An equally verminous cultivation.  Babies birthed from impossible sources of gestation.  Head first out of the earth.  Feet first out of the ocean.  Face first out of the glaciers.  Spine first out of the mountains.  Billions sprout in rows and columns.  The upright pelvis, hairless epidermis, pair of opposable digits, unmistakably human.  With unprecedented persistence the resilient Homo sapiens’ spirit resurfaces.  A solitude is removed from permanence by piles upon piles of blossoming infants.  A previously unknown peace is released like food exiting a stomach.

Like euthanizing a rabid animal, like exiling the sick to avert an epidemic, killing the seedlings of a species repopulating is both necessary and immoral.  But it was only natural, from my conception to maturation, to undo what had been done by nature, to alter accepted collective culture, instinctively in search of fewer numbers.  It is when pressed upon the chests of too many others, when companionship is the irritant that breeds conflict, the suffocated soul erupts violently, sacrifices the intimacy of the colony and casts off on a canoe of silence towards the isle of self-sovereignty.  While perched on the moon I part my lips only slightly.  Sunlight pools on my tongue.  I exhale.  Earth bursts into a cloud of pollen.