Anatomy Cont. 3

Hair

It fell graceful and smooth down my back like a sheer curtain against a windowpane, just long enough to shroud my bare chest, ends resting barely below my small breasts. It was a part of me more than my fingers or toes, my limbs, a thick mass of stories and smells, touches and strokes. It made strangers linger, fingers dancing at their sides. Some hesitated to reach out and grab a handful of it, and some didn’t hesitate at all. I didn’t mind. I was interested in attention paid to a part of me that was actually dead. Because that is all hair is isn’t it?

*

The fragment of hair was braided into a small, woven line, fastened with a pastel ribbon, the color now undistinguishable from aged fading and the peripheries of it fraying. My eyes barely reach the open drawer that held old, small cardboard boxes once used for gifts or jewelry, maybe from my grandfather for my grandmother on her birthday or for anniversaries, compiled like the odds and ends that are stored in them. Little boxes, medium sized ones, and one so large that it barely fit in the drawer. The medium sized boxes held old letters with the larger box held newspaper clippings that I rubbed between my small fingers until they left a grainy dust. But the smallest boxes were my favorite. I could barely reach inside to play with the tarnished odds and ends that rested on top of tissue paper that my grandmother would replace every few months. She kept the lids on the bottom, the insides exposed. And that’s where the braided hair would lie.

The Internal

You think the pink pen is giving you bad luck. Pen color has become a mode of blame for another failure. You could construct a list of failures, things you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself. Not even the pink pen you are writing with, or rather writing nonsense with. Now it seems all that dribbles out of your pen is silly, contrite and full of blankness, ugly and smeared with ink stains from tears. You can almost smell the cliché and stagnancy that wafts unpleasantly like old laundry on the page yet you return to the same coffee shop every day, stare at scratched out words, sentences. You scratches out a part of yourself. The words of other authors frustrate you now because you know you can create work like theirs, one with your own loopy signature, writing that you would get both praise and criticism for, because you believed praise was nothing without rejection. It feels like sun on the back on your neck, this possibility for new words.

“I should have used the purple one,” you say to yourself, thumbing through your old notebook as pages of purple scratches of writing that you could be momentarily proud of, until you find some way to make it better, using words like “lithe” instead of “flexible”. Words that kept people reading for at least one more sentences.

Flush rises when you feels the professor in the chair across from you lift your head to stare. You know the professor is staring at you because you can feel it and because you have a sense for being a negative focal point. You realize you said that out loud, about the pen, and that other people are staring too. You live alone and have noticed that you have been talking to yourself much more. Or maybe someone you wish was there. Especially at night. You sing yourself to sleep.

You do not sleep in your bed anymore but on the floor atop a mound of pillows and a down blanket, sometimes a sheet or two, and always Teddy and Baby Blue. You will lie there at night, on the floor, next to your bed and curl into a ball. Sometimes you wonder what it was like in your mothers womb curled that way. Your hands almost cradle your breasts, rest crossed, your fingers tucked into your armpits, “to keep warm,” you think. Because no one will be keeping cold away tonight. You say this aloud often, into the creases of the blankets where the words become trapped, cold and blank. And try to imagine of someone’s pulse against your back in hopes that maybe the blood circulating through his veins would breathe life into your flesh, work through your spine and seep into your brain, maybe that warmth would short circuit whatever faulty connection was flowing through it now, so that you could just start over. You wish it were that simple, that all of the answers were locked away somewhere inside someone’s embrace. You have been so cold lately, so cold that it’s painful, sharp and gouging in your joints, blades on your skin.

You think of the nursing home where you must spent brackets of time with shells that were once people. Guilt nauseates you like the smell of the place, a smell and a sensation that makes you aware of her gag reflex in the back of your throat, so pungent you can taste it; your stomach wants to react violently. It is the guilt of a girl who consumes guilt for fuel. Guilt riddles you when you waves to Susie and smile, when you nearly vomit as you pass the cafeteria, banana cake that day for desert, and macaroni and cheese. The guilt stays when Tiny, with her violent tremors races up to you to kiss your cheek with a sloppy mouth; guilty because if you had a choice you would never spent one second of your life in a place that houses impending death. Guilty because you are frightened when you notice Susie’s roommate is absent, the opposite side of the room like a blank piece of paper, stripped bed, white walls, empty closet, cold. Susie tells you she died last night in the bathroom. You feel guilty when the old women take your hands, fingers white and stiff at the ends, dead cold. You don’t want to think about your skin someday being that warm and malleable, almost oily like dough. You don’t want to think about regressing back into child’s mind and body. And you don’t want to think about moving forwarded only to eventually, inevitably move backward again, because that seems to be a recurring theme in your life, and you hate those.