“The sepia portrait of all five sisters in Grandma’s parlor photo shows five wispy blondes…They were pale, translucent, and somebody had tinted their picture slightly so that their cheeks and the roses were a faint peach color.”
I am reading this page from my back porch where I look over the roofs of two houses and onward to a cemetery. I am letting each page speak to me, letting a line present itself to me. What did not present itself: a sentence about the dizziness of watching a field in full bloom pass by the window of a car, a sentence about cotton like spider silk, a sentence about the feeling of air conditioning and a Cadillac. Those things felt too alive for today.
Despite the specter of death always over it, the graveyard I’m looking at is where important portions of my life have been lived. Those things that make being alive feel like being alive. I've kissed under the blink of the spotlight that comes on when it detects movement, I've smoked cigarettes and talked to my friends until the morning birds began to chirp. Once, I sat on a picnic blanket with my head on someone's shoulder and told him I thought my heart felt everyday like it was going to burst open. That it had felt that way all summer. I had written in my journal, laying on a twin bed in Vermont that August: one day all of the love inside of me will break free and the world will eat from me, as if from a giant cherry.
The graveyard was the last place I gathered with anyone before the quarantine set in. That Thursday was all sharp new buzz of a haircut, clove cigarette smell, chill of spring like the air itself was wet. I feel less like myself these days. Myself feels like a ghost sitting on the bright grass of a grave or the cold stone of a mausoleum. She is far away and unknowable. The artist Sophie Calle once picked up a lost address book on the ground on some street in Paris and worked her way through the contacts to see if she could understand the man who had owned and lost the address book. The search was inconclusive. The many sided jewel that might have emerged seemed more like a bad, muddy photo. Many of the people she spoke to had little to say. They were acquaintances or had long ago lost touch with him. Nonetheless, she made a record of what happened.
There is a common pop psychology belief that you are a composite of the five people closest to you. That your speech patterns will begin to mirror theirs, you will pick up their habits, they will form the shape of your days. I see three people now. C brings dirt and exhaustion home from work, the embodiment of the sharp smell of forest on a night of autumn camping. A is magic running out the door every morning in black spandex, doing makeup by a bright mirror at night, glitter and mystery and nerves. B is determined, beautiful out of the shower at 7:30pm every night, brow furrowed over a guitar, love too heavy in me to be able to even see him clearly. Right now, I can hear a beagle howling next to a gravestone. The baby next door cries in the backyard every single afternoon. Our cat scratches at the window. The squirrels skitter in our walls. Is that five? Is that more? How many animals to account for one human? Do you know me better now? Am I just trying to teach myself something about myself? I feel as if I sit every day with a portrait of myself and color in my cheeks to a faint peach to remember that they do sometimes still flush from sport, from love.
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