literature

The Eyes and Ears and Fingers and Nose and Tongue

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Literature Text

I am in too many places and too many time zones. I hold my hand up to the light and I am partially transparent, red tinted by the veins in my flesh. My body is breaking apart and I don’t understand. My body is breaking like a mirror breaks: a hundred glass shards with the same image and the same confused face, a hundred iterations of my body looking out and asking: “who-who am-who-who am I?”
I don’t understand the body. The wisest people before me have called it a prison, a distraction, a lie. When I was 12 I sat in a bathroom and wondered what it would be like to carve a wound into my wrist, find out what bled under my skin. It’s not that I felt too much. I felt not enough. I felt not quite like everyone else. I was convinced that something had gone wrong at my birth, my nervous system criss-crossed, left foot wired to right pelvis. I sat there crying at the bathroom wall, and even though I never actually did anything, I still get scared when I hold a knife.
I don’t understand the body, or the intimacies that come with it. When I was 16 I read my first trashy porn novel, and I was mystified. The characters were cookie cutter predictable, but they felt so much. Like pleasure and pain and want and hope were the branches of a tree with its roots coiled in the body. I usually avoided the body. I hated the crush of bodies, the noise of bodies, I didn’t really go to late-night parties. When I was 18 I broke up with my first boyfriend, and I felt nothing but relief and a faint aftertaste of guilt. We’d never done anything more than hold hands and touch lips to lips.
I’m not ashamed. I’m happy with my body—it’s healthy, it carries me to the places I want to go, and it only hurts sometimes. All my decisions I make myself, on my own time and my own dime, and I like it that way. But every now and then I listen to my sisters cry, and I cling to their shoulders like my touch can push their sorrows away, like my body is enough to keep them warm, keep them safe. I wish it were enough. I wish my body could speak so I wouldn’t have to fight so hard for the right words.
I break pieces off of myself, and it’s painless. I hardly notice. I put my ears in a conch shell, my knees beneath a redwood tree, my eyes on my palms and held out for the crows to eat. I don’t take pictures. I don’t take souvenirs. I’m a hitchhiker headed for the end of the world, blink and you’ll miss me, I travel light. I only take names: the Sea; the Cliff; the City; the Forest Path. I hide your names between my teeth like diamond contraband. All of the rest; the salt, the clay, the concrete, the mighty wood, I have no power over you. I experiment in surrender. You call the shots. You hold me close and break a piece off of me tenderly like pinching crumbs from a pastry, and I let you keep me. I have walked a hundred places in the world, and in these places there are a hundred crumbs of me, a hundred ghosts and shadows of me.
I try to make sense of this cobbled-together body. My left eye tells me maybe you’re saying something. But my left ear is listening to thunder in Beijing, and my heels are dancing in St. Mark’s Square, and I say, “Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Can you repeat that?” It’s a lost cause, I know. Every day my right eye flies higher and my right ear sinks deeper and the space between my fingers grows wider. Sometimes it feels like the only piece of me still on stage is the one mouthing the same words over and over: “Can you repeat that? Can you repeat that?” I’m still waiting to give my tongue to someone; maybe I’ll taste chili dogs in hot weather, maybe coconut ice cream, maybe bitter almonds, maybe ash. And then we will none of us need to speak.
Someday, you’ll ask me: “Who are you?” I will reply: “I don’t know. I feel like I could be--I feel like I--I feel--” And you will say: “That’s right. You feel.”
When I have died, maybe you will unzip my body and read my secrets like the ancients used to read the future in bird bones and intestines. Maybe you will preserve my modesty with a white sheet, sprinkle dirt on my forehead and silver over my eyes. Maybe you will burn me. But before that you and I will learn so many things. I want that. Before the decay, I want the ripening. Teach me passion. Teach me sorrow. Teach me to say hello and goodbye, I’m sorry and thank you. Teach me what it means to be happy. I want that.
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