contagious and spread to other people—so we have to do it to protect them.” I asked them, “What is my illness?—how would it spread to others?” They said, we think we understand it now.”
Then, they brought in another doctor that I had never met that said: “Your situation demands great courage;” and told me, “The same thing happened to one of my best teachers when I was in medical school.”
Touch, To Know What Giving Is
The body’s memory had forgotten what touch was—what it felt like—its power. Something else remembered the nights of joy where sleep was easy, remembered the attuned rush of breath when getting up in the morning; but the body knew nothing of this and felt itself become ridged under the skin in jagged cold peaks that pressed painfully into itself. The body knew only the cruel starkness of what was when without memory of touch.
The body spent the brightness of the day walking at a constant, quick pace. As there was transitioning into dusk, the walking continued but the pace slowed. As night came, the pace quickened again. Only when exhaustion came was it time to return home and try to sleep again. Sleeping well though the night was rarely possible without great amounts of exercise if the body did not know touch.
The something else struggled, looking in different directions to see things in new ways to try to discover what it could do to make things better. It wanted touch so intensely that everything seemed to blur, distort and taunt.
The body kept walking.
The something else kept struggling.
One day, after many months of walking until exhausted, as dusk again came, the body stopped walking, moved to stop by a force felt beyond its limitations as just a body, when it met a large, mixed-breed dog that had been abandoned. The dog was frightened—a pad on one of its paws had been sliced open from broken glass. The body knelt down and petted the dog and then lifted its leg to examine its paw. Panicked and hurt, the dog bit the arm of the body very hard, but as this pain went through the body the something else that struggled came together with it. The dog, sensing the change, rolled onto the ground on its back.
As this person re-approached the world after having gone through these experiences, there was a sense of intimacy within a community that had no boundaries—so even around strangers far from home. And the intense want of touch became the desire to come together with another as the body had come together with the something else.
A To-Do Today
Through their living room windows, the sky was orange the night before. There was a mouse in the wall between the kitchen and bedroom that kept them up. A cat was there but slept. Their apartment, though imperfect, was, after nearly eleven months, beginning to feel like a home.
This day, they drove east one hundred blocks to pick up some t-shirts that one of them liked from a department store. On the way back, as one of them was reading the crossed off to-do list that they had written that morning, so that they made sure they didn’t forget anything, while the other drove, there were gunshots, and a bullet just missed their car. They continue to have trouble accepting that they could be killed so violently when things seem so safely ordinary.
Touchdown
There is a place at the edge of everything—near where the campus meets the canal, where the university hospital and the sports arena overlook each other. “So much struggle,” he thought.
He thought of how strange it was for there to be a game full of cheers and ambitions right next to so much death. He thought of birth too—and wondered if any newborns ever heard a loud, happy burst of excitement from a crowd of thousands of people just as it discovered the world it came into, wondering if one did what the effect was.
Potty Training For Potty Mouths
Walking into a bookstore, used and new books covering most of a city block, with multiple floors, there was an overwhelming feeling of disgust—imagining all the books as one living beast that crushes those that enter it between its thighs.
“What more can be offered!? What is worth doing beyond this abyss?!”
After looking at the map to find the bathroom, making it across the store and up two floors, while urinating, there was a stranger’s voice from a stall that said: “People have been doing this in their own ways since people have been around. It is important not to let everything you take in block and sicken you—so be healthy in what you eat. Sometimes you need to push a little. Be patient. Sometimes, like now, you have to deal with crap—but other times there can be wondrous things that come out of what happens.”
Making it back across the store and downstairs on the way out of the store, a feeling of empathy with all the parts that made up the book beast overpowered all other feelings; lucid thoughts arose that went beyond the mass of books, finding a deeper appreciation for them and for what went into them—the thoughts led all the way back through time so as to know all the ancient stories and why they were told.
You Are Beautiful Inside Your Insides
The gradual decline of the hill, from where the shops are to where the park is, made her feel as if the entire length of concrete that made up the sidewalk was one long strip of belt on a treadmill that only seemed to be taking her somewhere. Around her: there was movement on the street; along the sidewalk was the wind waved parts of shrubs and weeds in a bed made for flowers; and there was an indecipherable sign-language from the handless, fingered arms of differing trees.
As she got to the park, she saw the beginning of the trail that turns along with the stream. Remembering the last time she was there, when it was a hot day and she got cold as she left the sweat of the sun to an area just off the trail that rises above the stream overlooking the fish that is so thick with trees that it was chilled to near darkness—where she imagined in this place as if she was at the bottom of a lake in a secret forest as a special creature.
Turning at a certain point onto a short path leading off that trail, she had passed through the areas she felt as wild to a play field and parking lot. Shocked a little from the changed surrounding, she looked around slightly shaking. There were several cars and a dozen or so people of various ages doing various things.
She saw a park bench and told herself a story. “There is a park bench that floats in the air,” it began. It continued, “When someone is able to get up to it, as it sometimes comes close enough to the ground, the person can stay there without eating or drinking or any other bodily need or want, staying this way still in time as a cloud or moonlight if one of these were an only vision for an entire life. There is no way to know what determines when the person touches back down to the ground, but when it does happen the person is gone only a few hours or days even if it would have been years if time had not been still. Nothing is different for the person who has sat on the bench that is known by that person. And there is no memory of this, so there is no experience. The only difference is that there is a greater connection to the beauty of what is encountered, so that there is never a complete sense of giving up, that the person would find the separation of oneself from this beauty before the time of letting go worse than any suffering.”
The woman walked back to the sidewalk—this time going uphill as she took her first steps again on its hard surface.
Prehistoric Urges
They climbed to the top of the brontosaurus at the museum. She bit one of his ears as they fell. Landing on the baby brontosaurus, their fall was broken. She bit his other ear as they realized they were still alive.
As the pain became increasingly severe from her continuing to bite his ears, he saw a vision of something that would be stupid to call simply beauty. He felt strong. A changed man, as they say.
But the pain overpowered it, and he felt another change within him. He turned into some kind of medium- sized, carnivorous dinosaur that he didn’t recognize. He moved to bite one of her ears. But accidentally ate her head.
Upset, he turned into an egg.
Ten years later, the egg hatched two invisible dinosaurs with large chewy invincible ears.
It’s Okay
To Have Vision
Light through evening window, painted sky. He discovered it today. Most told him it didn’t exist.
For the past few years, he was convinced that he didn’t exist, being absorbed by the doubts of others. But now, for the first time since then, remembering himself, yet not forgetting his relationship to others, how they shaped and inspired him, even if indirectly, even if they doubted him, he felt real to himself.
His vision viewed him in reaffirmation.
The Man With A Mirror For A Face
No one could ever tell what ethnic background he was. It seemed that from every angle came a different guess that made its way around the world. Somehow, he seemed to be whatever someone else saw him as, he not helping the guesses with his voice or manner or what he said. People would look at him and see themselves. Only a few spent their time considering his parents—who would seem, upon consideration, to make up two halves of the whole of all the people of the world.
The Woman Who Was The Earth
There was a nameless woman who had no identity of her own but who identified with everyone else, as well as every living and non-living thing, to where her personality encompassed all around her. At first, the range of this was nearby only; but then,
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