Article by Ella Roxy Boyd Brocker Art by Eliza Blanning
I have the strangest thoughts just before I fall asleep, the richest mixing of deep cold wordless current and turbulent warm epipelagic consciousness.
One night not too long ago, the dark air already carried a sweet shiver through the windows: beneath the weighted blanket which acts as a pacifier to my vagrant anxiety, my body curled in remembrance of the womb. Just before I dropped off beyond reckoning into the deep, a feeling almost the color of the blanket — an abhorrent army gray — crawled up like disturbed dust. Although, that’s not quite right. It was closer to smoke; it just didn’t have the fire behind it. Mist, without the generosity that water carries. It felt ancient and unchanged and terrible, somehow so hopelessly immortal as to be banal. Yet in its banality, my terror lies. I understood in a fractured heartbeat a despair I had never fully let in. It had no shape and no end.
And in a different fractured realm of that same heartbeat, with all the genius of a mind surrendered to strangeness and the rich realm between the shallows and the deeps, an image arose. That unnameable and ancient and omnipresent despair was, without interval of change, an egg. It did not become an egg. It was one terrible thing, and it was another thing. Something I could swallow. We say, they swallowed their fear. I have swallowed my mother’s fear, my father’s, my sister’s. I have swallowed my friends’ fears. My beloveds’. My own. I have tried to digest them time and again, to surrender it into my stomach. Most often, the surrender does not come, and I am gripped by the pain of fear untransformed, undigested. But on rare occasions, I have released my grip, and as with any food accepted totally by the body, the fear returned to a state of pure energy unburdened by the residue and judgments of mortality.
I swallow the egg of despair, its golden center sconced in gleaming white. I let it slide whole down my throat and feel the weirdest morbid joy, a wild laughter softened by sleep. I surrender the egg to the stomach, where all things change and the source of great power slumbers. The egg unbinds itself, its energy loosening from perfect ratio into perfect ratio, its baffling smoothness broken into stories, questions, bursts of passion, longing, fear, love, fear, love, fear, love, fear —
There’s no meaning here, and the sky is dark with smoke, and escape is relief, and they won’t miss me anyway. Or if they do, I’m more welcome as a loss than as a presence, an unreachable pain that only rose — only ever could rise—from the messy yolk of love before it had settled into shape, I only hurt because it comes from there. The central golden soup of no difference, no distance, just loving/being loved/beloved/beholding. How beautiful is this? Says someone softly. It is my voice, and within my voice are the voices of everyone who loves me, loves wholly and messily and in praise of the unreasonable, the clumsy, and the broken. They say, stay. Escape nothing, feel everything. Come back. We want you. Not a hole where your life once lived.
I swallow the egg. I let it lose itself to its own energy dancing, the movement digested. The egg belonging in change, always. Delicious becomings.
When I walked into the tea house with my friend, I walked somewhere between a chaos of feeling and sensation and memory and a carefully constructed reality made of rules to be followed. Brutal honesty is sometimes its own performer. What can we ever know about what is real, and when we tell the truth? Are we simply circumscribing what could be possible? When we say, this is how it is, how do we leave room for this is not all that it is, this could be true also…
We sat down only after having repressed our need to smell every jar in the place, and settled on an Oolong and a Pu-erh.
What to do when you’ve forgotten how to care
Or maybe it’s just I’ve lost conviction, or inspiration, or the crackling heat of bravery
Without which I might die
Not knowing I had been surrounded all my life with the answers to my prayers.
There’s a white rocking swing somewhere in the Midwest, and a girl is swinging there, maybe, and maybe I am that girl, or maybe I’m somewhere else. She sits and kicks her legs, and I remember the feeling of her bathing suit, which renders her as quintessential as the swing itself in its faded topskin, which has begun to wrinkle and separate from the underneath like other old skins. The peeling paint, for instance, on the slatted bench of the swing — the swing has laugh lines from all the times it’s rained — speaks of its years holding people and the things inside them they are afraid to look at. The things they’ve shoved to the bottom and allowed to gather dust.
Or maybe what I remember is the restlessness of summer that softens so in memories and blurs itself into an irretrievable childhood that maybe wasn’t there — without which, however, I would not know where to land in the story I have become. She, girl in old skin, popped unopened flowers like an assurance of small deaths — like she wanted a certificate that said,
It’s all uncertain; that said
Don’t try too hard to bloom
don’t be too magnificent, it’s better
To stay with petals tight around your vital center, like lowered eyelids after only half a smile
At that stranger, you might have loved
Without which, you are safer
for now.
My uncertainty travelled with me just under my feet. This friend and I were a strange tangle, unchosen. Sometimes reluctant. New to each other and eyeing the silences warily.
The server arrived, taking us through the nature of the leaves, the water, heat and steeping, and health benefits that seemed to cover most bases. We sipped.
I’d tasted emotions that weren’t my own before. But that tea carried an entire story, a creature I’d never encountered hiding whole in well-steeped leafwater.
The house looks back at us warily as we look in, half in the tea shop, half caught in the sharp dust of the Pu-erh like a potion into wistful bitterness. Images not my own opening like stricken flowers, that gray coming in again, but this time house-shaped, softly painful but enticing. The floors are made of concrete. The walls are washed gray from ambiguous light. Stepping through, we leave footprints. The floor is made of dust, and there is a single rocking chair near a fireplace filled with ash.
The house looks back at us without trust. No one ever earned it by staying. The house, like my despair, asks for something improbable: a transformation slower and stranger than the one I witnessed, or orchestrated, while half asleep. Formless and terrible feelings became white-gold potentiality; the tired and abandoned ghost of home asks to return to earth, to not hold emptiness any more, to no longer be a tomb for the wild wind. We take another unwilling and fascinated swallow of liquid story. Autumn turns towards us outside the window, her face full of the last pollen — we wade through the field between her long fingers and our longing feet. Dust and pollen dance, caught and ravished and equally golden in sunlight.