Were I able to follow directions, I’d take myself apart, find a diagram to rebuild me by. When I asked students to write directions to their houses, using a paper map, they left most details out. That was before Siri began speaking out of small rectangles, before Gaza lost its streets to dumb bombs. Smart and surgical are best, of course, as they cut the city’s flesh neatly, remove its tumors, rename the heart Terror. A group inflicts terror, a state mere barbarity. The state has nicer words; they earned them over the long tables, the lunch breaks, the paid leaves, the child care, elder care, so much care-giving. We give--not offer--care, and some of it comes as bombs signed by the enemy’s children. On his ninth birthday, a boy lost his family to an Israeli bomb. He sits on the floor, one eye covered in gauze, pounding his hands on tile. The stones of the Holy Land may be fake, but still they’re stained red. What happens when he is 10?
The social body pulled apart; spleen at war with liver, heart with lungs. No machine keeps them all running from the outside, though someone brought oxygen. I keep cutting sentences in half, then shortening them; I write propositions without results, set up experiments without lab equipment. I left my hips on the table beside some hammers, nails, and a few strands of wire. If I’d discovered anything from chronic pain, it’s that my self resides there, clutching the spine’s mast, embedded in a perfect storm. To wish it away is to want less pressure on my-self. The acupuncturist asks me two or three times about my stress. I have what I make myself on that factory floor, wearing inappropriate shoes and a dress better suited to church than to manual labor. Why are things “suited” to other things? What tailor has cut our cloth in such a way that we match? We’re like our own twin, hoping to reside as echo rather than origin. The cavern illuminated, water sculptor dripping translucent rock.
Maeve pushed the green bucket over, leaving the carpet wet, where water dripped from the ceiling yesterday. The house is flesh, but not wall; my body is an apartment, its corridors dank, doors numbered to imitate sequence, rooms full of bad furniture. There’s a nice view from the top. Farther down, the hip’s caves flood, set off shocks; some might call them lights, others pain. What number is that, from 1 to 10? It’s like betting on your own discomfort and never winning anything except the doctor’s quick nod. If the scale is subjective, then why assign it numbers? Are my numbers near yours, or does this have less to do with empathy than with the sliding scale that measures me? I feel 8s and 10s for Gaza, but I suspect theirs is another scale, unimagined in my damp room. Imagine the planes were bombing you, my father said, but he offered no numbers for his feeling.
Today’s photograph from The Guardian: students perched on a ledge in Prague, beneath large windows, evading a gun sight and its seer.
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