Hush Baby, And Burn Like Firewood [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]

82

The girl in the silk stockings, chewing on Nicorette gum, hair up in braids, built a network of traces on a map of the city above her bed. She’s tracing four people across the city - each represented by a colored pin.

Each of the people know her, but they do not know each other.

She talks to each of them every day on Facebook, tracking the whereabouts with a combination of journalling and foursquare. She updates the map, tracing the pins together with thread.

She is searching for the currently unknowable - how strangers influence each other’s lives without ever knowing it. Gene the writer and Ellen the architect went to the same cafe on Tuesday evening and Thursday night, separated by two hours. Gene intersected with Hannah on the 7th on highway I-35, Hannah was thirty minutes later to work. Gene has two DUIs. She wonders if Gene is a bad driver, though he’d never admit to it. She wonders if he is responsible for her being late to work, even though there are too many variables to figure that one out.

“Yeah, I know, mom,” the girl said, “I really should get a job. I just don’t want to.”

She sleeps in the early mornings and through the afternoons, sleeps like a cat curled up in the corner of her bed, with her spine and feet touching the wall, the toes lightly curled. She springs awake at any noise, the sound of her mother pacing the hall, the construction work outside the window.

When she dreams she dreams of highways made of pulses of light, spreading out from the fingertips of every person who ever existed. And when the pulses of light meet each other, they collide into sparks, and run off into new directions, into new colors, creating highways on top of layered highways, multilayered heading off into all parts of the universe, in colors that haven’t even been dreamed of.

She writes above her head when she wakes, “Sillage.”

She writes underneath that, “Sonder.”

When she’s not sleeping or updating her map, the girl collects bottles of perfume. Except she hates how the perfume never smells like the shape or color of the bottle its packaged in, so she pours them out into colorless, nondescript bottles. Then she relabeled them, so that Chanel Mademoiselle becomes “Deerborn in Perfunctory Spring,” and Gucci Guilty becomes “Madwoman.”

The girl stares at herself in the mirror and does not recognize herself, does not recognize the jaw that chews the nicorette gum or the stockings she found at a thrift store. She douses herself in Madwoman. The smell dissipates through the room. She presses her fingers to the wall. For years, she’s been trying to move her fingers through the wall, just a centimeter, enough to feel the pressure give away.

She can walk through walls in her dreams. She can walk straight through the superhighways of the soul, see the map she’s created from her small sample size turn into a ricocheting nerve.

If she could have been anyone, she would be sitting at a computer in a laboratory, collecting the data of millions, hundreds of millions people, their lives and intersecting lives and consequences.

But she sleeps in her ex-boyfriend’s oversized shirt worn through with her holes, and works on a four year old laptop, in pins and unknowable geography.

She looks up at the words she’s written on the wall.

“Sillage.”

“Sonder.”

Her mother knocks on her door. “Are you sleeping at this hour? Get up and look for a job.”

She is awake, staring at herself in the mirror, twisting her body into unfamiliar geometry, but she doesn’t speak. She waits for her mother to shuffle back down the hall and slam the door to her bedroom. She turns away from the mirror.

She writes underneath that, in the space where her head rests while she sleeps, in tiny print, “We leave traces of ourselves everywhere, indeterminate and indistinguishable from the fabric of scenery. No matter how much we try to escape, we will always be a part of the multilayered highway machinery of others lives. No matter how we live our lives, we are born of stories.”

83

Sat Oct 25, 2008

It is 11:15 and I am setting the woods on fire. I am listening to 16 Horsepower and wanting to destroy the earth

Hush, my baby, you will be firewood

Hush, my baby, you will be my regret and my pulsepound and my thick tongue. You will drive me underwater until my lungs burst, but fear not.

You will burn.

Hush, baby.

I do not know who you are, not yet, but you are just there underneath my skin, like Morpheus who took me underneath his coat, who said "we cannot see each other anymore," and left me to wander the nightmarescape alone. I am wriggling underneath my skin, itching, looking for the way in. Hush baby.

You will burn.

It is 11:18 and the words haven't stopped. There is so much I want to write but I cannot find the way in. You've riddled me with holes, don't you know? I'm filling them in with machine gun fire.

Tell me, sweetie, how did you just positively know that I was a lesbo? What gave it away? Was it the way I bit my lip or my non-tongue piercing or my glasses? Was it the way I crossed the street or closed my eyes or lifted my arms or tried to look away? Was it written on my back? Did you take it away from me as I slept and dreamed of children that became elves, and how while I was on my back she walked in as my 18th century wife dressed in period clothing and ash and woman features came to take this loneliness away?

Isn't it funny how friends disappear when it gets too dark?

I have tried to climb into the machine, but it hurts me. It bites.

Hush baby, I am not who you thought I was.

Hush baby, if you just take out your eyes you don't have to see me.

I have always been the same. It is you who has changed.

I am learning how to crawl, one hand in front of the other, my knees pressing against the ground, and it hurts, god, it hurts, but it's a lovely pain, a cleansing pain, and I'll just stick my fingers right through your ribcage, press and prod and poke until you are something I can discern. Come down here with me.

Hush baby. I will learn to love your stranger.

Hush baby.

Burn.

---

Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.

You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.