My language clumsies inside my thumbs, clots. She dribbles out simple and staccato across the spread-winged insect of my iPhone keyboard. Markings like watchful eyes to adorn the flutter of its delicate exoskeleton. A minor beauty, easy to squash or pick and flick off the skin as a minor zit or chord. All these easy ways to speak swamp my verbosity. Trapped in an armor of outlets; suffocating in ajar doors. When I type and know that what I want to articulate is incomplete, it feels like the tip of my tongue’s been burned, my overeagerness to drink from my cup shepherding me to an uneasy numbness that I press, testing, how I do with every bruise. Tapping tonguetip against teeth or traitorous whorled thumbpads, I reiterate to myself the way my senses have been muffled. All because I couldn’t wait for what I consume to cool. Had to have that fire and stimulation inside me now now now. It’s embarrassing, even when I know that I alone control which words are presented to an audience. Can choose to lock the wrong-shaped sentences away in the attic like Bart’s once-conjoined twin Hugo in the Treehouse of Horror short where he slips loose.
We are each our own little snowglobe universe shaken to life, I remind myself, trudging through the unevenly shoveled sidewalks to and from the laundromat. Each enbubbled, and maybe playing a song when you twist the dial beneath us, like how Tinder allows you to set a single song as your profile’s anthem, to sell yourself with a jingle, though this thought that I am working on is different than that cynical take. This is soundtracking, cinematizing. And also epithetizing tunefully. Encompassing and offering yourself up as a sensorally pleasing gift. Each of us: filmically suspended in the viscous, glittering water of our idiosyncrasies. This analogy smacks me over the head sparklingly, a champagne bottle wielded in the ritziest of bar brawls. Makes hard contact with the cap of my skull, and pop! The cork goes flying. Sweet fizz everywhere, mingling with the blood soon to matt my hair. This is it! I want to scream through the shock of (cham)pain. We are all simply snowglobes! Our bodies and minds and histories and mundanities—contained, intricate, delightful, whole, and perpetually deep in winter’s cold clutch.
Hugo has sewn together a pigeon and a rat. This Frankensteinian experience under his belt, Hugo plans to re-attach, with oversized needle and thread, his side to Bart’s. They’ll be of one waist; knock ribs to ribs, but continue to be each cocooned within their respective, individual cages of bone. No matter how close, each boy will still be his own snowglobe. Each will live in the depths of his own private, confetti-strewn winter, and sing his own music box anthem.
My overeagerness manifests not just in drinking my hot beverage too soon or typing away with too much restless fervor. Too, I am overeager to sew my side to another’s, to knock together our ribs, have our hearts murmuring to one another in Morse code, tapping dots and dashes on one another’s bodies. In a, you know, metaphorical way. I have practiced no seamstressing of rodent and bird; just barely can I manage to sufficiently reattach a button; with thick black embroidery thread, I repair the torn tongue of my combat boot, only for the leather to rip in half again not much later. But emotionally, I rush to stitch us up, to make two into one, ignoring the important fact of our snowglobiness. Refusing to acknowledge myself as my own whole, contained creature and universe, singing and shakable. Without an object of affection to zero in on like this, I find myself languishing in desperate feelings of loneliness. Sinking into it like quicksand, but a bank of cold quicksand in which I fear I’ll freeze to death, my heart’s tongue torn in half with no one to tap tap talk to. My language clumsied by the distance it must traverse to reach another rather than zooming telepathically into a twinned skull.
Hugo fails in his mad scientist mission of codependency because Dr. Hibbert punches him unconscious. How? Holds up an empty frame and beckons him to look at himself in the mirror, then forces his fist through the frame’s maw. No reflection visible; it is simply lights out now. Thumbs and tongues silenced, able neither to talk nor to stitch: two ways to connect, both nullified.
My language is meant to be the mirror into which I gaze, getting narcissistically lost, but sometimes, instead, it punches me in the face. Shakes me up. Burns or rips my tongue. And I hold in my pocket a hope that it might do the same kind violence to someone else, and in this way, we’ll be as close as we can get to sewn together, our snowglobe enclosures brushing, our snow falling at the same rate. Our songs harmonizing and winters kissing. Because I am trying so hard to cling to this realization, this champagne bottle to the head, that I am my own snowglobe, and Hugo failed. And neither of these is a tragedy.