At some point, I had to pivot from research to writing, but I’d given myself an assignment that seemed too big. The research could be endless. The essay’s organization was loose, no arc or resolution in sight. I kept forgetting to write about the bridge. The essay was like a river, mostly obscured from my vantage point of the paragraph. Bridges make water invisible, in a way: eyes on the road ahead, we might not even see what flows under us. That, for sure, was a metaphor, and I was instructed to write something that would represent or illuminate some aspect of the bridge and the bridge’s history, be it real or metaphorical, but I was lost in the meaning maze.
I had just a few more weeks in the tower and had produced only a sliver of what I expected of myself. In Winds, Waterways, and Weirs, I found reassurance in a quote from Blukis Onat:
Most legends were not structured to have a beginning, middle, or end. Elements and characters of significance were strung together much like beads on a string. Each element would have contained a teaching and could have many facets. Elements could be assembled and reassembled depending on the circumstances …
Neither the storyteller nor the audience necessarily knew exactly how long the legend would be or how the story would finish, nor did the story need to be finished, and often it was not. The legends could also move from the myth age, an unspecified time before the world became as it is now, to the present time, the recent remembered past, and to daily tasks that needed to be accomplished, all within the same story.
This comforted me. But maybe, beyond the essay, that comfort was part of my problem: my stressed, post-trauma brain didn’t believe that the story of my body in danger was over. Concocting possible threats became a perverse routine. Carl’s secretive silence was familiar, my favorite fear box. I could’ve told him he had to tell me what was going on or I’d end it. That never occurred to me. I loved him too much, or I loved the dream, or I loved the worry: the promise to myself I will never let anyone hurt you again because I will see it before it happens. I thought I could build a story to keep me alive, not a single linear narrative but a thousand tendrils of possibility, imagining the ways every pause might bloom into violence.
For work, in late July, I went to Santa Fe, a dry, high-altitude place where my face swelled and my throat ached. I called Carl every night before walking around the hotel vicinity looking for Pokémon. There had long been a spider inside me, most restless at night, and I needed to go outside to let it out. The moon shone onto the adjoining Santa Fe Outlet Mall parking lot, empty except for the unusual cluster of cars at the curb. I couldn’t sleep, but also, I wouldn’t sleep. There were too many animals to capture, monsters I’d never seen: a scowling rock with fists, a horse on fire, an ambulatory fossil with beady eyes.
People inside parked cars looked at their personal pieces of the glow. On my screen, I saw the Pokémon gym they’d pulled up to. I finished catching, walked back across faded white lines past the RVs and Silverados, and returned to the bed that was mine that night in a room that was simultaneously too hot and too cold, too close to people and too lonesome, too small and too roomy: no matter how many thoughts leaked out my ears, the room stayed empty.
When my relationship with Carl was new, he picked me up from the airport with a bouquet. When I headed back from Santa Fe, he asked if I was okay finding my way home by myself.
What are your triggers?
Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man”:
Indian women “disappear” because they have been deemed killable, rapeable, expendable. Their bodies have historically been rendered less valuable because of what they are taken to represent: land, reproduction, Indigenous kinship and governance, an alternative to heteropatriarchal and Victorian rules of descent. As such, they suffer disproportionately to other women. Their lives are shorter, they are poorer, less educated, sicker, raped more frequently, and they “disappear.”
Silence. Not knowing what could be in there.
Silence. Knowing.
Before colonization, Coast Salish people often depended on each other because of their reciprocal contributions in hunting, fishing, gathering, and other work, much of it gendered masculine and feminine. My research turned up similar descriptions of heteronormative marriage patterns among Cowlitz, Columbia River Indian, and Salish Sea peoples, although queer, trans, and two-spirit people were and are part of these communities. One book after another talked about married men and women splitting up work by gender: generally, women gathered and made food, wove baskets, and did other chores; men hunted, fished, built, and took care of heavy labor. Sometimes people chose partners, sometimes they were arranged, depending on the community. That’s what I read, anyway. In those books, there is no love, only tasks.
After I got back to Seattle, Carl said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever get married. Fuck the patriarchy.”
I can’t imagine that after settler violence broke up the Cascade people in the 1850s, the white men who married Cascade women knew how, in that ancient system of shared responsibility, to be useful.
If there is a future, and historians to look back at us, what will they say we married for?
Carl slept while I scrambled eggs. I used his method, not mine. I made his espresso with exactly as much cream and water as I knew he preferred.
We liked to walk around my neighborhood and point out houses we’d buy if we could. After he changed, he said, “I don’t know when I’ll be able to afford a house. Not for years.” I wanted to tell him, That is something we can work toward together, but I knew better.
When our ways of life were disrupted, Native women were asked to do more than ever before: to become everything we needed, everything they needed, healers for the world.
When I was in high school, my aunt took my family to see Tsagaglalal, or She Who Watches, a large petroglyph/pictograph of an eerie-eyed face looking down from a bluff on the Washington side of the Columbia River near Horsethief Lake. That place was once a Wish-ham village, Nix lui dix (the Trading Place), but in 1957, the opening of the Dalles Dam flooded it along with Celilo. Now it’s a state park. Tsagaglalal has been protected by a locked gate since vandals spray-painted petroglyphs and pictographs nearby. Somebody scarred her face with bullets.
I like the way Wasco/Warm Springs/Yakama artist Lillian Pitt tells Tsagaglalal’s story on her website:
There was this village on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. And this was long ago when people were not yet real people, and that is when we could talk to the animals.
And so Coyote—the Trickster—came down the river to the village and asked the people if they were living well. And they said: “Yes, we are, but you need to talk to our chief, Tsagaglal. She lives up in the hill.”
So Coyote pranced up the hill and asked Tsagaglal if she was a good chief or one of those evildoers. She said, “No, my people live well. We have lots of salmon, venison, berries, roots, good houses. Why do you ask?” And Coyote said, “Changes are going to happen. How will you watch over your people?” And so she didn’t know.
And it was at that time that Coyote changed her into a rock to watch her people forever.
Signs in the park warned of rattlesnakes. My grandparents always did, too. On the way out, we stopped at the strange ruins of a little stone house, and I took photos of the rocks against the hot blue sky. The house seemed as though it should be haunted, but I felt no ghosts, only snakes.
When I told a Native friend about the stalker, he asked, “Elissa, tell me the truth: Did you do love medicine?” I hadn’t—I didn’t even know anything about love medicine that I hadn’t read in novels—but what had I done? In the only language I had, I called myself cursed, punished, worthless, abusable. I wasn’t thinking about the old stories about people who know where dangerous beings live and go anyway. You’re supposed to figure out the story’s lesson for yourself—it’s not part of the plot, but beyond it, situated in the listener. Sometimes, the old stories don’t take shapes I know, don’t resolve as I expect. I can’t learn the
intended lessons until I understand relationships between actions. Story is a system of cause and consequence that builds sense from the incomprehensible. Settler colonial stories take shapes like mountains and send us scaling the side, focused on the summit. We reach it, and everything after is the comedown.
I’ve gone to the mountain. There was plenty of work to do, berries to pick. I didn’t think about the summit. And I’ve gone to the mountain that destroyed its own peak and obliterated life with lava and ash. I sat by a lake the eruption made, then left. What kind of story is that? There are shapes inside me that look like the ocean, flat and unchanging only if you look from the wrong place.
Carl’s neighborhood, still, to me, is the Seattle of the grunge era. The houses are mostly the same, with boxy old Volvos and world-weary RVs in the driveways. Seattle is part mirage, an idea divorced from material reality. As soon as I moved to the city, I updated my Facebook profile with a quote from Dave Grohl: “All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.” Carl seemed like hope in a body, the dream rising from a black stage, pushing through the soles of his Vans into his sliver of a form roughly the same size and shape as Kurt Cobain’s, though they look nothing alike. In the car at night, driving to a dive for dollar tacos, we moved through the mirage. When I was with him, I could pause the work of propping up my dream with money and plans. We slid along a loop of magnetic tape, unspooling toward an end point, a decision needed: stop or flip.
August was for picking salal. The bushes all over campus were full of berries nobody ever picked. I ate them even though they were probably sprayed with toxins. I thought about going to the forest to pick from unbothered bushes, but I didn’t. I thought to ask Carl, but I didn’t. He kept getting surly with me, and I didn’t want the salal to see me upbraided.
I got an email from my ex-boyfriend Kevin:
This is going to sound really weird, but do you remember a few years back you thought you saw yourself from the future on the bus? I think I may have seen you from the past. Once or twice a week I work from home in the afternoon and walk from Denny to my apartment around 12:00. Every time I walk up there I see a young girl with black framed glasses wearing pajama bottoms and boots sitting against the wall smoking and playing with a cell phone. Sometimes she’s wearing a wool hat, even when it’s hot. I swear she looks just like a younger you. She has a round face and freckles and looks like she’s in her own world. I almost thought about asking if I could take a picture to send you but I couldn’t think of a way to ask without sounding like a complete freak. I get the sense that she might be high.
It didn’t sound weird.
That night, I cast a spell: I wrote the attributes of my ideal romance on three circles, buried them next to my $200/month parking space, and burned a candle carved with the word MARRIAGE. One of the documents I read in the tower said Cowlitz people used to dig into the ground with their hands so they could contact the other side. I didn’t know whether it was true, but I had to ask the spirits to intervene, or else Carl would leave me.
The next day, he broke up with me. I was intimidating, he needed space, and it was time for him to work on himself. I could not change his mind.
I got in my car and drove all over the city, ending up in Madison Park. It was night. I waded into the dark lake. Looking across the expanse of ripples, I felt, for the first time, that I was inside the water, made of it. I wanted a'yahos, or any spirit power, to tell me why my happiness had to be destroyed, but I heard only sounds from bars where I used to get wasted.
For days, I couldn’t leave my bed but I couldn’t sleep, either. I couldn’t eat and so I didn’t walk much.
I told my therapist about a prayer I’d been saying, something another sober friend told me that summer. I liked the prayer so much I said it over and over in my head hundreds of times a day: Show me your will in ways I cannot possibly misunderstand.
“When you say a prayer like that so many times,” my therapist said, “you could be praying for a purging.” Like THE TOWER card in tarot: something is leveled. An earthquake, a fire, a cataclysm. And then a beginning, inevitably. She suggested I take a break from that prayer and try another for a while: Heal my heart in ways I cannot possibly imagine.
The following day, my friend Elissa Ball wrote on her “Hit the Deck Tarot” Facebook page that we might be “wrapping up major life lessons in The Underworld,” work that began in fall 2012. She said some of our blocks and fears might be illusions. “Desire, sexuality, personal truth, obsession, power: These swampy waters are shifting deep inside you.” We could shed old patterns “like snake skin.”
I was crossing the underworld river. Not by bridge. By a canoe with a hole in the bottom.
By August, I’d been filmed by three TV crews, each of which asked to capture me unlocking the door, entering the tower, ascending the stairs, typing, and looking out windows. Some wanted me flipping through books; some wanted me walking the bridge. They filmed boats and trucks, bike people, the bridge breaking itself in half. They all got shots of Rapunzel from below. One trained the camera on the big crystal I kept on the corner of my desk, glimmering and shaking while cars rumbled over the bridge. The reporters asked what I was writing about. Land, I said. I didn’t say, my sad heart, my forever subject I knew nobody would think was worth the money.
All summer, over and over, with lenses trained on me, I leaned out the window and arranged my hair to mirror Rapunzel’s. I unlocked a door for show. I typed on demand: I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Universe: show me your will in ways I cannot possibly misunderstand. Heal my heart in ways I cannot possibly imagine. I think I am going to cry and they are still here and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Show me what to do. Show me what to do. Show me what to do. I was betrayed and lied to. He’s still lying. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. I’m pretending to take notes on a book. I’m not going to cry on TV. I’m not going to cry.
Carl killed a spirit we’d birthed in dreaming, a third body spun from expectations and hope. Alone, I had no chance: there would be no house, no stability, no rest; no sharing, no company, no comfort. I had never grieved like this, all electric feeling, no hiding place from pain—sober.
A friend said, “Grief doesn’t ever go away. We just shape ourselves differently around it, around them. Around whatever is painful. And that’s the way it should be, even though it hurts. It’s part of us.” And I thought, That is the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.
There, of course, had been someone else. I made him tell me. The way I made him tell me was by asking.
One of my last photo shoots at the bridge came in the days after he broke up with me. I was crying too much for makeup. My eyes were dark-ringed planets. The photographer, making small talk, said she worked at an escape room: groups of people got locked in rooms where they solved puzzles and riddles together to get out. This sounded like torture, but then again, everything did: sitting in my office chair while she documented my stinging face; looking out the window and pretending to ponder something deep but really just imagining my way out of the dead dream alone. In the photos, you can see my soul left my body for a little while. Or maybe I’d buried it deep in me for safekeeping. I was no longer a person who drowned feelings in whiskey; now I drowned them in the fluid of my own wrung-out body.
Under the bridge on one of my last days, crossing the catwalk to the bathroom, I noticed a sign: “100% fall protection required beyond this point.”
The writing shall represent or illuminate some aspect of the bridge and the bridge’s history, be it real or metaphorical.
I’d spent so much time watching yachts I’d forgotten all about bridges. I felt as if I hadn’t thought about a bridge in months. Just now, all this time later, I did what I should’ve done first and googl
ed bridges. A bridge, it turns out, is a structure spanning an obstacle, allowing passage. The metaphor only works once the obstacle shows itself to be a river and not, say, a cliff’s face. Even if I work my metaphor until it locks in—what then? What good comes from saying one thing but meaning another?
Rapunzel got her hair back in August, hot yellow like the belly of a star.
At the end of August, the Volunteer Park Conservatory had a corpse flower about to bloom, a rare thing; this was to be the twelve-year-old flower’s first blossom. Since I was trying to live in the moment and develop interests beyond work and infatuation, I decided to visit the conservatory, a Victorian-style greenhouse stuffed with cacti and tropical plants; it was always closed when I passed during one of my long walks. Making an intentional trip struck me as a frivolous use of time. Without a man, why do anything but work? But I knew I was being asked to solve a divine riddle, and I’d located my next move in a self-help book: I’d embrace my freedom, start a self-discovery journey, get intimate with myself, grow my power.
I tried to recall the odor of the botanical rot that had coated me when I fell into a swamp and thought I might die two years earlier. The corpse flower, though, was said to smell like Limburger cheese, garlic, rotting fish, and sweaty human feet. I had a head cold and couldn’t smell anything. “I can’t stand here anymore,” said one of the people crowded into the glass room.
I didn’t realize until I googled later that the flower wasn’t in full bloom yet; the spathe (the frilly green leaf jacket) had yet to open to show its dark red inner surface and fully expose the spadix (the yellow spike). Wikipedia said the rotting smell beckons to its pollinators, carrion beetles and flesh flies, while “the inflorescence’s deep red color and texture contribute to the illusion that the spathe is a piece of meat … Both male and female flowers grow in the same inflorescence. The female flowers open first, then a day or two following, the male flowers open. This usually prevents the flower from self-pollinating.”
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