Her fingernails claw quietly inside the bulb of sleepy air, kissing at the wind, attempting to make love to the clouds.
But they never can settle around her hair for too long without weeping themselves out of existence.
Or shuffling their toes over to another pair of hands-- Weight can’t survive inside the belly of something so rootless.
Wind, on the other hand, sculpts her eyelashes, braids her hair. Around enough to keep her from emptiness. But gone enough for her to remember loneliness.
A two-footed beast dug into her once searching for her heart (she thought) trying to shade in blank ovals and give her what the wind and the clouds never could.
She thought he might caress her heart into beating once more and feel around for the different textures of her soul.
Instead, he chiseled away at her skin and tugged greedily at her breasts, stealing pieces until he’d bullet-holed right through her never even stopping to listen to her sing.
Rape, she thought, that’s what this must be. Her only defense was to collapse the holes he kept boring but even that didn’t stop him.
He left one day leaving only footprints pieces of his clothes and holes, too many to count too many to fill too many to remember.
She still wears them, beads of a stranger’s necklace Slowly she is making them hers untaming them, eating at pieces as she was consumed, reclaiming her agency becoming more than a survivor or a victim remembering her timelessness remembering her voice.
I. The Transformation
She has a hole in her heart, dug out by men from days of freedom and depression. They traversed her aortas, cleansing them and skinning pieces of her copper walls, scurrying to call home for reinforcements. She thought herself safe from unwanted touch, living so far away from the land of the excavators. Yet, they came to her anyway, choosing to peel away pieces of her ash-colored skin (or was it nut brown and pure black back then?) and root around like surgeons, removing ribs and releasing trickles of blood that still lie at her feet in little gray mounds.
At first she thought it pleasant that they looked at her as more than just a pretty face. She thought they wanted to know her because she was worth knowing, maybe worth loving. She hadn’t been loved by anyone other than the wind, rain, and clouds in a long time, and their love was the vagabond kind, meant for everyone and therefore meant for no one. Even the snow only stayed through the winter to keep loneliness at bay until the sun came back to wrap its fingers around his waist. She didn’t blame him for wanting a resting place during those seven months of desolation. She only wondered why no one seemed to find genuine love these days, without using or being used. Where was the puzzle-piece companionship that she had once seen in her mother and father? Or the burning kind of love that had formed her youth, bubbles of molten desire that drove her to climb high above the valley.
Greatness can be lonely, she thought. These days she would do most anything to shave off loneliness, even weather her own hair away to join sand in plurality.
But then again, she prefers loneliness to the noise of someone entering her in a frenzy, destroying precious parts of herself that had taken ages for her to perfect, and then rushing away as quickly as they came, only to leave her hollow and self-conscious, leaving her to question parts of her identity and existence that she thought she had solidified before she rose above the valley.
It still marvels her how quickly they came and went. She knows that their sense of time stretches across space in a different way, more like a short, taut rubber band ready to snap at the slightest brush with sharpness, nothing resembling the ocean tide ebb and flow that she had lived and breathed for as long as she could remember. Still, she had only to close and open her eyelids once, and they had already come and went. It’s funny how such tiny pieces of time have the power to gut and skin a life and turn it inside out.
Somehow those mighty, miserable men tore her into their time bubble, forcing her to walk their rubber band tight rope of beginning and end. Now, she can feel her hair growing, can count the minutes it takes for her belly of fireweed to burst its purple pedals. Maybe she’s like Samson, although they didn’t touch her hair. But something about the way they touched her, hallowed her, left her dirty, turned her mortal. And now she can feel loneliness. She wouldn’t wish an eternity of loneliness on anyone, not even those who burdened her with it.
Now she spends most of her days thinking of Magma. She hated this terrible time-splitting device—days, but now that she’s conscious of the way men chop time like trees and stack it neatly to be burned away until all their fuel for the fire of life has been wasted into smoke, she can’t not participate in this soul-sucking act. Except, she knows the truth of endlessness so the counting and organizing of moments; past, present, and future, feels almost unbearable. Again, she finds herself wishing for the anonymity of sand. And Magma too, the man of yesterday’s dreams.
He lived and breathed every inch of her, explored even the ugliest, most buried caves of internal turmoil. He sculpted her with liquid hot hands, taking care to blend her sharp wit with the smooth, sloping curves that cascaded towards the valley floor. Contrast, he said, allows us to appreciate details and small words that would otherwise live and breathe unnoticed. Magma was different from the mighty men that followed. He never dug his hands into her without permission. He made her, but she inspired him; it was not as if he dominated her existence, not as if he took her for granted or owned her. Rather, they owned each other quietly, worked to make each other better.
She is still unsure where he ran to, or even when he left. Maybe the fire of youth extinguishes slowly before we can be bothered to notice? She wishes she would have thought to throw another log on the fire before the embers cooled completely. Starting a new fire is always harder than stoking a story that has yet to reach its ending. And now that the men came and dug out pieces of her heart, stealing away with the metallic greens and blues of history, she feels too empty to be inspired back to youth and vitality. Tired, she thought. I am tired. As if tiredness was a part of her emotional repertoire; the poison of exploitation had been dripping into her rocky veins since they first entered her and was causing a sleepy dullness to overtake her former glow. She shuddered as the snow began to blanket her hair and the days descended into night. Cold too was foreign. She had never felt a likeness toward any one type of weather before. Yes, she thought, they have tainted me, turned me human. Slowly I am gaining preferences and sensitivities. She even began to think in straight lines instead of circles, could feel the ticking of their clock. Maybe they had replaced her heart with a time-measurer, ruining eternity with measured splices. Now, all she could do was wait in her shell of indifference. Hibernate, really, like the grizzly creatures that crawled under her arms each winter for warmth.
Wait for what? she thought. For a transformation? For electricity to flow again from her brain to her feet? For vengeance and anger? For the return of her youth and the lover that once defined her? The questions vibrated through her drowsiness, like an earthquake too small to be a sure reality. She drifted into half-consciousness, spiraling down a fuzzy tunnel of confusing indifference. When I wake, she thought, change will be sitting at my feet, waiting for me to slip into it like a freshly pressed dress. When I wake, East will be West, and West will be a new kind of North that I won’t recognize. With that, the lights dimmed, her breathing slowed, and she drifted into the world of men.