Winter

I was born after a snow storm, and lived in my early years in the cold, the kind where the wind feels brand new in each moment.  Sensations followed me wherever I went: a deep need for hibernating curled up as if I fit in a seashell, my nose constantly running, and sleeping so fitfully that my teeth clenched and grinded on tectonic plates, molars sharpening wildly on their own at night.  There was also the ability to feel for ghosts in school bathrooms and old buildings, to see the past in a person’s eyes, to smell kitchens in other places far away, like my grandma’s.  And still, I elbowed my way forward, even as I felt I was being moved around by the Earth. 

I just wanted one thing.  One thing that was part of me, that would never, ever change.  

But energy collapsed in a big black pile, and the rest of the world seemed to move with heat & shadow.  I held it heavy.  There was nothing else to do.

My timelines were always freezing, thawing, moving ahead, backwards, as I tried to return to places that felt like home: writing on the black board of my dad’s old office, the planetarium I visited as a child, playing in a 19th century labyrinth in my pink coat.  An unusual amount of déjà vu, my parents would say, when I told them, “I think I’m here again.”  

Once when I was alone, I stood on a hill in a big backyard and looked up at the dark sky, between the tall skinny trees.  I was trying to escape from the noise, like letting a shook-up snow globe settle.  Planets and black wind swirled around me and then stopped, and it was so still I thought maybe I’d died.  For a moment I was left alone, & I felt light again.

My mother had said, “It’s like you just walked into this big world, Margaret.” I knew the world would have to be my one thing.

Spring

I have always loved driving fast.  When I was 5, I rolled down the window of my dad’s tan Ford and sat on the ledge.  We were on the highway going 55 and he didn’t notice me for a while.  I just wanted to feel free, to feel the quick, windy air.  I was already too many years into my young age to be able to live in the world the way I was supposed to.  I was just being me and not even able to hide it, though I would have, had I known how.  But I was used to absorbing the world like big watercolor paper, the hard parts deep in my bones.  I was at the same time both shy and unconcerned about how I appeared.  It was an intensity that can only be described as a strain on my heart, both the love and the fear: the golden-tinged auras I could see, the loudness of color, the saliva-inducing sweet taste of sugar that exploded in pink in front of my eyes. The colors, burning, almost.  The intensity of the smell of rain.  The holding-in of sizzling heat.  The sound of hot pink azaleas.  The clatter of deep darkness.  Temperatures too intense to recover from quickly; heat, humidity, suddenly-stopped cold.  Everything always magnified by color and sound and light.  But then the shell of me came. I felt like the ones I would find on the beach: weathered, cement-looking, craggled, white-gray, & hard, but somewhere, still porous. I would pick them up from the thick, sinking sand and hold them up to the red setting sun in front of me.  I held them in my hand tightly, feeling them break the skin, because I was water-weary and cellophane-d.  The waves would push into my legs, and the wind would blow.  I could have been just dust & bone, with a heart like clay and no blood left in it that broke apart in a sandy sort of way.  But I was not afraid of death, not afraid of pain, just very, very wary of the wind.  

That day in the car, my mom held her hand out to me gently and asked me to come back, and I did.

Fall

Once my dad made me a ghost costume for Halloween by cutting two eye holes in a sheet and I didn’t have the voice in my heart to tell him I couldn’t see or breathe very well.  After getting used to not breathing with ease or seeing too well or speaking loudly, I felt at home with the idea of ghosts who might appear to me, just like Esther Hicks could talk to Abraham, by the time I was 8 years old.  I already disliked Christmas, because my brother had nearly electrocuted himself with an electric candle one year, & I ran in my room & cried, because I knew I couldn’t protect him from ghosts or asthma or electricity.  And Easter was when my grandfather had died.  After my grandfather’s suicide, his ghost followed me for days.  Our neighbor, too, who had passed & whose funeral we went to, & on & on, ghosts who floated by or stayed still or gnashed their terrible teeth & tried to scare me away.  But I had no other place to go.  Years passed, & when he was an older child, I tried to read my brother story The Velveteen Rabbit, because I loved it so much, how the rabbit goes to be with rabbits who are just like he is.  “I am NOT a baby!”  Because I hadn’t thought of him as a baby, so much as my partner in ghost-watching, but he was tired of being awakened by me in the night & of Halloween exuberance in June, & I let it all go.    

I have a scar that runs down and around my chest almost like I had open heart surgery.  A big chunk was taken from my left breast, and there was so much gone that the doctor had to sew the remaining fascia to my sternum.  Then to even both sides, she took some out from the right.  The scar swims long and crooked like a broken anchor.  The smarting of torn flesh follows me wherever I go, sometimes worse than other times.  Attacks of pain are like a heart attack, moving over my shoulder and into my jaw.  The doctor said it is brought about by original trauma of surgery.  I was convinced the pain meant I would die before I turned 21.   When I realized I would still be living, I had to do something.  I knew if I didn’t do something, my cravings for whatever would take me away would last forever, or maybe I would last forever, and it would all be too much.  

Ever since I put on that costume, I have wanted to become myself.

Summer

I always swam underwater on my back, just below the surface, wondering why I couldn’t just live there, see the world above as wavy and out of focus and unimportant and instead stay touching the nearby soft sand and blow air out hard through my nose, the power of loving my own breath.  

The water was all the way down blue, a blue as deep as a jewel.  My limbs looked that color, instead of white like a ghost, giving life to what I thought was stale blood.  The water hitting my skin felt salt-heavy, the waves made of mortars & pestles, grinding into my body.  My heart no longer needed to puff up and shiver.  Or maybe there was no room left for it to shake left and right, with all my strong breath.  The pain was gone.

When I came to the surface, I breathed in, and for a moment, I felt the air even more.  Then the wind would come and I could feel the water withering away and I wanted the water again, especially around the time of the sunset.  Under the sky, far-away constellations reached me and went bleeding out like starfish, and air moving like some kind of tide.

When I started to hear the world speak to me again, it felt like fast tattoos anchor in my chest, buzzing with pain, their broken hearts with wings. Ever since words have been carved on my skin, I have been becoming myself. 

You might do like I did and go see a shaman outside Marfa who will offer you some mysterious drink “for the pain.”  I insisted I didn’t have pain, till I left her yurt office and carried my baby with me back to the car, limping again from my bad hip, then remembering the hurt and wishing I had taken her advice.  I looked over my shoulder, feeling that I was somehow, again, becoming more myself.

After sunset, the moon was there, too, and I could tell it was pulling the tide & changing the shore, wetting the sand, & salting the earth.  The tattoos, the pain, the world, the ghosts, are a part of me forever, yes. Just like me, & just like the Earth, so is salt.