11/08/23

So much movement outside today. Like something enormous breathing, rattling the windows in great pulls and blasts of its lungs. In the back yard fallen leaves dance up from the ground when the air gusts over them reminding me, lugubriously, of corpses reanimating.

It catches me up, this movement that seems like a living thing. Time dancing me like wind.

11/01/2023

All Saints Day, and the whole house smells smoky and greasy from the pieces of duck fat Jeff is rendering on the stove. The house will hold onto to the smell for days, probably longer. The house itself is a kind of collective memory.  In it we shed phantoms like skin cells.

The cut on my thumb, a tiny thing but persistent, has finally healed. For two weeks it has been giving a pang when I press it, a small cry for help. “I am here, I am here,” like the Whos in the Dr. Seuss story. The body is alarmist in that way, the slightest fissure immediately screaming for assistance. And I suppose this makes sense since any cut signals the start of a microscopic war, the outcome of which my life depends on. For days I’ve applied antibiotic cream and soaked the thumb in hot salted water, and now all that’s left is a tiny lump of scar tissue. Nothing completely heals. Or disappears altogether. What would that even look like? My body is a collective memory.