A river rock sits heavy in my sweatpants pocket. The approximate size of my palm, on the flat side, and almost a perfect circle. Slate-grey, soap-smooth but cratered as if with acne scars, as if my hormonally shifting face. Lunar. Toss it up into the sky, no guesses of heads or tails because it will stick there, watching me; I write this on the final day of March, so it would be a Worm Moon, a Crust Moon, a Sap, a Sugar, a Crow Moon. Squirmy, hard-shelled, sweet, and seam-bursting with revenge and gossip—glossy and dark, sharp-beaked and innovative. All these things I wish to be. A March moon placed carefully against the clouds like a licked stamp. Slip the sky into the mailbox; ship her across state lines. My friends and I will all share this moment beneath the river-washed moon, clean slate, imperfect O, she who knows how to make tools that fit her ends.
As John Marzluff notes in Gifts of the Crow, “The call of a crow in a film triggers an expectation in us that something ominous is about to happen.” On the DVD commentary for very-early The Simpsons episode, “Simpson and Delilah,” in which Homer miraculously grows a full head of hair—if this were March (or perhaps Smarch), it would be a Worm Head of Hair, a minor Medusa—a speaker points out the crow that caws in the nuclear power plant’s establishing external shot, saying that this prophetic creaky cry becomes a motif throughout the series.
We could say that the crow heralds capitalism, that its call—with its evocation of the Wicked Witch of the West’s gothic fortress or the haunted ruins through which the teenage characters of Marvel’s Runaways walk when deposited into an alternate nightmare dimension—tells us: Abandon all hope, ye who wear hard harts in these halls, who punch in at the time clock (viscerally becoming data), who guzzle coffee and down pink donuts in the cafeteria and send orange-bottled memos via pneumatic tubes; surrender to melancholy, surveillance, and routine. But notably, the cawing crow perches outside these halls of (nuclear) power. What it embodies is a juxtaposition. Inside, we have the laborers’ dreary working day and Mr. Burns’ ceaseless efforts to accumulate further riches and poison Springfield’s stateless environment in the process. Outside, we have: screaming, flight, teaming (crows favor group projects), and a constant chaotic and skillful evolution toward the further breakdown of boundary between bird and us, sky and ground.
My former therapist gifted me this rock, on my final day of work with her, our relationship ending because I was moving out of state. Slipping myself into the mailbox, becoming-sky. Spreading, suffusing. A pile of rocks sat on the table between us, and she told me to pick one, and the choice was easy. Because months before, I’d been holding this miniature moon in my fist to ground myself when my muscles locked up, and no matter how hard I willed my hand open, I could not uncurl my fingers. Our session came to an end and I was still stuck, grasping the cool solidity of a knowing nighttime eye, so she told me to take it, to bring it back when I could. My malfunctioning body knew what I needed.
Around the time I chose my gift, my future-roommate sent me a text across state lines, a photo of a massive crow perched on a Brooklyn trashcan. He captioned it not the way closed captions subtitle crows, with [cawing], but instead, “A crow portends your arrival.” Silently, through her shape rather than through her voice. Her glossy dark body heralded me. She, the good omen in my sky. The feathery rock in my pocket. No implication of nuclear power, the monstrously mutating force forged through drudgery; the only power to come my way would be a wholesome, holy kind of power, of memory and friendship and flight and mutation for the better.
I name my rock Patience. I skim her with my now-functioning fingers to remember the weight and reality of time. When I think, I need patience, I reach into my pocket. Touchstone. Touchmoon. Imagine if Goodnight Moon were akin to the tactile Pat the Bunny, the moon on the page raised, smooth, cratered. Shrinking the space between us and space. Nurturing, from our spines, wings, great black corvine things capable of defying gravity. Hollowing out our bones, sending termites in to chew up encumbering marrow. Every full moon, every month, is a Patient Moon, waiting/wading through the ritual wax and wane. O, imperfectly—I wish to be the same.