Scorpions + Roses + Goodbyes
The Self as Omniscient Narrator
When I was a child, my favorite baby doll would only open her glass eyes if I shook her. Otherwise, she could not see. Only in motion, the striated amber iris would show, the controlling pupil, taking everything in. Whenever I go through a big change, the uncertainty opens up like a portal and I’m a magician reaching into my black hat to my past selves who were also changing, growing. I am the alien in my own story, I come thundering down into my own body and plunge for resources. I am the villain of my own life, always digging for precious resources, expanding, exploding, paving crude paths over myself. Burying my past self in shallow graves after bulleting her.
Nine years ago
I got fleeced. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the man with the scorpion tattoos climbing up his forearms had me sign paperwork that gave him permission to take all my stuff. The twisting segmented black bodies were mesmerizing. With each wrist movement, the animals shifted around his arms. No delivery date. “It’s flexible,” he said. Only after I signed in three places did I realize he was missing half an ear. Like it had been cut or torn straight off. The other curled into itself like an abstract sculpture—Cauliflower ears; traumatic injury where blood pools and never drains. His hand touched my hand as we exchanged paperwork, pens. As soon as he drove away with everything I owned I got a horrible feeling in my stomach, like that might be the last time I ever saw any of my stuff again. I slept on the floor of my new apartment in a sleeping bag for three months and had one suitcase, one cup, one pot, and one bowl. I would get up in the morning and go to the college campus where I was to begin my job,a Visiting Assistant Professor of English. In new faculty orientation, my mind would sometimes drift to that scary place where I wondered what I would do if my term started and my stuff still hadn’t shown up, or if the term ended and it never showed up. A friend mailed me a book on letting go of material objects, just in case. I would read it at night and interchangeably feel empowered and humiliated crying into my sleeping bag. How could I be so naive? So careless with my own things? But also, how could I be so dependent on things? A scorpion’s sting is paralyzing, but I stayed in motion, for survival. I never saw scorpion man again.
Three years before that
My boyfriend of seven years drove with me from New York to New Mexico and left me there. But before that, there were two dozen red roses. After I figured out he’d been shooting heroin he showed up outside my work in the snow with two dozen red roses. I saw him out my office window, tottering down 12th street in the middle of a snowstorm, the red pushing through the white, like a wound. I don’t know why people buy roses as an apology but it should stop. It happened again, years later, another boyfriend, messaging another woman in the middle of the night, meeting her out for drinks, then came the red roses on a winter’s night. Red roses, the harbinger of new dead ends, the symbol for moments my life jumps the shark. On the drive to New Mexico, we fought a lot about his sobriety. He asked me lots of questions about if he ever relapsed—would I still be capable of love? I asked him if he relapsed, would I lose him forever to his drug of choice? Some nights we had sex passionately and wordlessly. Our words were angry, but our bodies needed to say goodbye. We spectated our own ending as we drove forward. I could trace on a map where we started to lose one another. Pieces in New Orleans, some in Atlanta, Austin; by the time we entered New Mexico I knew he was never going to come and live there with me as we planned. No more roses. He was terrified of the open space. As a city boy, the giant sky, the vast, seemingly ownerless slabs of land unnerved him. We took a Kayak to a man-made body of water and paddled around on his last day there. He thought it was silly we went to some concrete lake. “New York has water,” he said—why would I move to a desert if I wanted to be in the water? During one of our last fights, he’d said, “Don’t make me move to New Mexico and sit next to you while you write.” There it was; the third party in our relationship wasn’t heroin, it was writing.
Now
I have said goodbye to many people and things. It is painful, but sometimes it’s best to walk away. I have broken my own heart many times. With expectations, with future visions, with assumptions, with promises that were never said, but I hoped were implied. The longest relationship in my life has been with my writing. I have not always been dutiful, but I have been faithful. This is the fifth time I have moved myself to someplace I’ve never been to pursue this dream of writing. Maybe this time I’ll get it right. I have grown more protective of this relationship. I’ve pursued my own path that looks very different than anyone else’s by not compromising my desire for writing, by protecting my writing and my desire to write over many things, by refusing connections I think will limit my writing. I run from potential partners who drift in looking for a “wife.” I’ve already married my writing. I am my own harbinger. I am shaking in my new life, my eyes are open. I shook myself awake, away from my own small life. I am a woman, shaking, writing, a woman waiting to be written.
