Michaela Coel by Durga Chew-Bose for Garage
i love listening to MUSIC!!!!!! and imagining things happening
i am holding my loneliness and she is a teenage girl with puffy eyes, and i love her more than i have ever loved anyone
catadromous
[Image description: a series of realistic digital illustrations of animals, overlaid with a poem written in white text. The illustrations are drawn resembling photographs taken with the flash on.
Image 1: The tail and part of the flank of a cheetah runs out of shot. The background is of a green grassy field with a dark blue and black, cloudy sky. The poem reads:
“The eel at the fish store opens its mouth:
Sargasso Sea clear,
I remember larval suspension, planktonic
presence.
Sargasso Sea dark,
My body was small and clear,
and like how all young things
are, revealed the truth.
I tell you a story and it goes like this:
Eel as a delicacy/eel as a cuisine/eel as the
indescribable.
Soft bellied things, the way their delicate skin drags on,
the gravel in the backyard.
The rotifers in the textbook look like angels to me, and
the eel at the fish store is labeled as a freshwater fish.
I tell you that the eels in the store will die soon
because of the
complex life cycle of the animal.
You nod and look at the tank.”
Image 2: A white swan floating in the shallows of a body of water, looking down at its own reflection. There is a muddy bank and dark, black water. The poem reads:
“I tell you that no human has seen
eels breed.
The word “catadromous” means
“downward-running”
I have a tendency to
cartographize/catastrophize.
What does it mean to be
unmappable?”
Image 3: A large brown owl flies low to the snowy ground. It is looking at the viewer and its eyes glow red. There is scraggly vegetation breaking through the snow. The poem reads:
“Aristotle picks up the
knife.
To him the eel was to
be
discovered/explored/conquered.
No human has ever
seen eels breed.
He insists that human
nature is the desire to
discover.
Aristotle guts the fish.
Freud grabs the handle
of the axe now,
Do you think it will
bleed? He asks after
slicing into it.
Spent a month
dissecting hundreds of
them to find the
unseekable.
Eels live up to 85
years.”
Image 4: a deer stands knee deep in a body of clear water, and lowers it head to drink from it. Behind it is a bank of tall, green reeds. The scene is reflected in the water. The poem reads:
“What makes a man sail around the Atlantic Ocean for 18 years
just to know where eels are born?
No human has ever seen eels breed.”
Image 5: A tiger stands side on and looks at the viewer. Its eyes glow white and it is partially obscured in shadow. The poem reads:
“Cretaceous sky, star-studded eyes;
The eel in the tank’s head bobs up and down:
Sargasso Sea blue,
With enlarged eyes I go downstream/return to
I wake up from the dream where my teeth are all bent and crooked and
broken;
partake in looking, abstain from food,
Allow my eyes to become ten times the size so I may learn to
see what it feels like to grow.”
/end ID]
i'm used to it, and how bad it is, and how often it's so bad that it rings like a bell inside of me, drowning out everything around me. and the truth is that i get frustrated with myself about it - again? we're like this still? again? it's not that i feel weak, precisely. it's just this sense almost like - i've already been pushing against this thing for years now, shouldn't i have gained more ground?
i get frustrated because i'm sick of picking up the loose ends every six months. i get frustrated because it's always this same shit, same problem - i lose myself in a matter of months; spiral out of control, lose touch with friends and loved ones. i stop taking care of myself and therapy gets hard and i let everything around me wilt and shrivel and fall off; start somehow both sleeping too much and not-enough. i panic-attack and cry in my car in a target parking lot, pulling my hair out and hurting my ribs from sobbing so hard - and later, when i'm better, i'm embarrassed because how could i let it get that far?
it feels like - i already have done this so many times. isn't there a way out of it? isn't there a point where i've just... won? that it never happens again, that i just get to be done? maybe this is weakness, i guess - that i still (so often!) succumb.
i am used to it, so i forget exactly how hard it gets. do you even know how many times i've laid in bed, exhausted, blank and numb and listless and said - i can't anymore. i just can't. i'm not even really upset. it's okay. i've been here long enough. so much of my life was beautiful.... i'm just... done.
do you know how many times i woke up and i said - i can't and put my feet on the floor and said i can't, i don't want to and took a shower and walked the dog and bought myself fresh bread and put a nice playlist on and said i really can't, there's no end to this and i went to work and i called a friend and i made myself cookies even if food tasted like ashes and decided that i really should wait for the new album from that artist i love and i thought i can't, it's not worth it and then i washed my hands and cut my hair and drank more water and wrote a poem and signed up for an art class at the local community college and said i can't, i can't, i won't do this again, and i paid my rent and let the dishes rot in the sink but still made myself eat anything fresh even if it meant overdrawing my account on a stupid bag of plums just because they looked delicious and do you know how often i closed my eyes and thought this is it i really fucking can't, something has to give and i have nothing left that it can take and then i went to bed and i got up and i fucking survived anyway
yesterday the local ice cream place opened up for the first time this season and they were giving out tiny samples of their new dairy-free options and i tried a mango sorbet. three months ago i was positive that februrary was going to be my last month on the planet. i am teaching my dog a new trick and i just discovered a new band i love. i got a plant from the clearance aisle and repotted her and she's been perking up. i made salmon for alison and we ate it in her new house with her new beautiful baby girl. my manager told me he keeps recommending my work to others just because i always include a stupid number of puns. tomorrow i'm trying a new dance class. tomorrow i'm maybe going to buy more plums.
i forget, you know? it's not some bone-deep strength or some magical power. it's that some part of me knows - i need to stay. in all of this; out of all of this - i just want to choose love.
over time the thing i have had more access to - through healing, maybe, or because i got out of that house, or because i was lucky, or because of those who taught me, or all of it - was this sense of a type of love that was all-encompassing and easy. nonromantic; it wasn't anything rose-colored but rather a world seen through honey.
it is this sense that i am in love with birds, and puddles, and how the nose of my dog moves. i am in love with my best friend's hands, and i am in love with your eyes, and i am in love with the little blades of wildflowers turning their heads towards the sun. today my mother told me one of my favorite flowers - lily of the valley - is endangered. i almost wept. i love them, i said.
when i was younger, and i said i am staying for the love, i thought love could only fit into a single birdwing. like a nesting doll; you could only find love somewhere balled up; hidden. you had to pry first, unlock. it would not absolve; only give you a moment's rest. somehow i thought - that was all.
oh but. this love, now. a love of how trains move, and how clouds scud the blue, and how when i asked does anyone have a bandaid i received offers from each person in the room. it is the love of a grey sunday and of mixing paint and of jazz music and seeing my neighbor sigh while he leashes his dog. this sense that it is all lovely and magical, that it is all romantic. the sense that i am in love with breakfast foods and i am in love with book nooks and i am in love with poetry and plants and how you braid your hair and how we shift our weight at the bus stop; and how each of these flood me, effortless and sleepy, like a memory of something i learned as a baby.
i think tomorrow for practice i will teach myself how to love the grey carpet of my ratty apartment; and how the fibers all hold hands with each other and snuggle into bed together, their forms all spooning. i think tonight i will love how my yoga mat leaves little imprints on my knees; a marathon of sticky kisses where the grooves all begged stay with me please. i think i will love the melon rind and i will love the ugly dark bruise.
while we're at it - although we are apart and have never met, i think right now, dear reader. i love you.
