Lately I’ve been swinging through upticks of somatic hallucination, especially the phantom sensation that the skin of my skull and neck constricts and relaxes in a writhing-grub rhythm. On my back in the bed of almost-strangers for whom I am catsitting, I become the grub myself, finicky yet violent twitches of shoulder and spine attempting exorcism. This is not as bad as feeling my teeth yanked from my mouth and smelling blood. Still, I email in sick to work, and once I can bring myself to leave my bedded twitching, take a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood, wrapping myself in a cartoon tornado of music, seeking stillness at the eye of a loud throb of feeling.
Caught twisting like a flyaway Kansas farmhouse in the overwhelming urge to rend some kind of textile, as if from between split seams will sprout a new life. Or the old life, maybe—the old self to whom I still involuntarily struggle to return, a compulsion. Like plucking my eyebrow hairs between thumb and forefinger as a tween, but something more desperate, blurrier than that. Groping hand-over-hand along a rope tied from structure to structure on a blizzard-blanked prairie. There is always the question of whether this old self in whom I seek shelter ever existed, was more than myth.
Or: not textile, in the depths of my heart, but my skin; opening its tough-soft wide; that's the destruction for which my fingernails and teeth yearn, for which the tendons in my forearms practice-flex. To make a new hole in the surface of my body, and to see my own encasement stretch and give and open wide like latex, something fetishistic and protective, shiny where it wears thin before the light breaks through? I could reach right inside of me. Locate the mechanics in need of dusting and oiling. Leave behind a gift; plant a seed; flood the space with water and sun and shit and sew everything back up, and wait for tendrils to burst through my fetish-material outsides.
I learned to sew as a child so that I could affix Girl Scout merit badges to my brown vest. The blueprint of basting would be followed by the tightest, tiniest arcs of stitching. Little teeth crammed at all angles into a little mouth in order to show off that I had roller skated or learned first aid or gone out for water ice. Later, at sixteen, I loved to stay up all night hand-sewing hair bows from the gift-wrapping fabric in our hall closet, stitches still the tiniest teeth, painstaking, painful if they bit: all those separate points of puncture, entry.
Then came the choice to bury my girlhood—my merit, my topped-with-a-bow—in the backyard, tamping down the soil over her like a draped blanket for a guest who's fallen asleep on the couch. An act of hospitality, that death. And now I find myself longing to tear the blanket—shroud, skin—in two, to reveal the girl beneath and scavenge treasures from her stillness. Pluck out her eyes with my crow's beak, slip rings off her fingerbones and onto my own. How inhospitable I long to be! How disrespectful of the concept of resting in peace! Knock knock and rise and shine, I call as I slick holographic highlighter down the well-engineered bridge of my nose and phase slowly back out of “he,” that cackle of a linguistic being.
I never intend to be buried in a cemetery. I will become ashes, maybe mingling with tattoo ink, slipping subdermally, dark and bold and carried-with. Still, cemeteries are my favorite spaces besides bodies of water. The first time I saw a bathtub Mary—one of those Virgin Mary figurines dollhoused inside a white or blue arc like a half-bathtub or clamshell or something yonic—was in the cemetery by my South Hadley, Massachusetts apartment at nineteen and twenty. Her bathtub’s edges were scalloped, doily-esque, and I loved to pass her when running or walking through the graves, presiding at the very top of the cemetery, its skeleton’s skull. A photo of her from the side, in the snow, is the first reference from which I sketched when attempting to design myself a bathtub Mary tattoo.
Ultimately, I choose to commit to my skin a sketch from a different figure. Surrounded by scalloping, but facing forward in her boldly dark cocoon. A friend calls this new shape that my boyfriend stabs into my calf muscle “trés vaginal.” In response, I call it my new hole.
Rending garments: an act of grief. I think often of the pilot of Six Feet Under, the scene of elderly Sicilian mourners wailing and falling over an embodied loss. I used to think of this more often, in a past skin, when I would be thrust backward into even-further-past skins by an outcropping of bad memory, tripping me up. Reading a short story that hit the wrong way at eighteen and stumbling around my dorm room, unable to breathe in normal syncopation, forgetting where I was, a high and hungry wailing emerging from my breast as if I was giving birth to something that had lodged parasitically between the fat pillows of my lungs for years. Bones should have cracked and flesh should have sloshed. It did not seem to come from my mouth, this noise that woke my roommate before I fled into the bathroom and hid in the tub for hours, shaking.
The whole time, the only distinct thought to which I could cling was of those women all in black, throwing themselves atop a casket, as Nate Fisher watched from—a boat? Was he on a boat? Was it so distinct, that he in his voyeurism was on the mercuriality of water, and they, on their grief, were on solid ground? I have not watched this episode in a very long time.
There’s no place like home, you’re supposed to say when you’re caught in a flyaway Kansas farmhouse. But where am I picturing if I cling to this mantra? What solid ground but the constant of feeling that this body is on the verge of metamorphosis, or even in the middle of the act? A little girl on roller skates dreaming of taking knives to her calves. Eighteen: knifing open a plantar wart to pour vinegar inside and yank out fleshy roots with tweezers. Each Friday: a puncture with a needle. Always: this search for a new hole. A way to let the squirming escape. What of me is certifiably real but penetrability? A long walk at the eye of a cartoon storm. I can say this much. I say this much. There’s no place like the terrifying onset of each new journey.