The woman thought it odd the way people were—the blood that comes out of them, the way they embody some words and exclude others, the ambiguity they bring to arguments, the beliefs they convince themselves of. Humans were like a population of walking dreams, she thought. Not the kind of dreams one yearn for—the strange, disconcerting kind. The kind one wakes up cuffed to in the middle of the night. A specter of groundless graveyards and amorphous faces. The kind where moments repeat themselves and toes talk instead of mouths. The kind domestication stays out of because to be tame is to be dead.
On the night the woman found herself thinking this, she stood at the edge of a windowsill observing the lights across the way. She was drinking a cup of ice cold, watered down absinthe. Three sips and she could feel it in her head. The night before she’d bled so much she woke up in a puddle and dripped ruby amulets on the way to the bathroom. She used a feather from her wing and the droplets of her flow to tell herself this.
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and eat a meal by yourself. Light the candles, set the table and revel in it. The food uncoils you.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’s dark, night is loud and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
She stopped. She put the feather down and let her eyes glaze over as she stared at the wall. She found herself thinking about the purifying qualities of vast cerulean oceans—a place where listlessness runs silent and the Jacaranda grows from the cracks of coral reefs. She thought about the anomalous undercurrent of nature’s force swishing through shelled dwellings, causing a city like transience—one organism washes in while another washes out. In and out, in and out—cyclical, fast, forcibly clean. There was something about her existence that felt this way — minus the cleanliness. A living mind, although equal to the ocean in depth, does not have the salt or sand to disintegrate what once was. The mess runs deep and personal — no room to scrub.
She realized the morphologies of a life tell a story only the liver of that life can hear. Who and what washed in and out of her ocean—objects, color pallets, lovers, homes, countries, villages, communities. These were all the tangible things but then there were the intangibles—the thoughts, emotions, memories, unprecedented boundaries. All the senses and all the scenarios, all the love and all the hate, all the ambiance and all the emptiness. There can be life in the same place there is death — on the same ground — touching arms, chairs, eating off the same table, but in one fell swoop, one inescapable wave, the fork falls to the floor and the spine relinquishes responsibility, letting head fall to plate. It’s unnerving to consider, and this is why so many people seek out aggressive linearity, she thought. Like tightrope walkers, they know that the second they veer from the plan there is open air. If the net is there they bounce back, climb the ladder and get on the rope again, but if the net isn’t they’re left to walk the ground or not at all. It’s the ground-walking we are scared of, the woman thought—the broken ladder, the inability to inhabit skies when war breaks out over land and ownership. When people are enslaved on the same dirt they move against, pray for and sleep atop, there is nowhere to go but up or in—groundless graveyards and amorphous faces, moments that repeat themselves and toes that talk instead of mouths. To be tame is to be dead.
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and treat it like a living room. Water the plants, pull a book from the stack you leave splattered across the table. Read until the words uncoil you.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’s dark, night is loud and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
Her mind was relentless now. We live in a place where there are boundaries of all kinds simultaneously knowing of boundlessness and it is this knowledge that makes everything we exist within irrational. There is nothing rational about concepts built on irrational behaviors. We are where we start from, she thought. The woman is the womb and the wombs carrier. The womb and the womb’s carrier are the vast cerulean oceans and the uninhabitable skies. When she decided to stop staring, to stand up and move, everything she realized here would be gone. That is how her brain worked — things were there and then they weren’t, she was there and then she wasn’t, he was there and then he wasn’t, they were there and then they weren’t, it was there and then it wasn’t. This is the simplest thing in the world to know yet we base so much on staying. Why do humans want the roots of the tree and the rootlessness of the fish and the birds? Why do they want to ground themselves like snakes, to take flight and to swim? Maybe it is the want that stops them, the desperate need for all things that keeps them missing the joy and fullness of one. As the woman perused her insides, scraping at the walls, trying to understand the specs, she knew nothing was as she thought it was. Every assumption and belief she had was built in her womb and rejected in her woman — that abstract word she couldn’t remove from the waking life and prayed for in the sleeping one. Her mind shifted, her eyes glazed—she realized the wrongness she understood was a mysticism of sorts, the kind they’d kicked, hung and burned, laughing as the smoke disintegrated, blowing on it as it wafted further and further away. They didn’t realize spirituality lives in the poignancy of a vagina, the elixir of human flesh—a concoction of sky, ground and water. Whether we are buried, burned or drowned, we find a vagina to seep back into. We don’t just grow bodies in our wombs—what comes out returns to us with the vigor of snakes, birds and fish – slithering in to swim through our veins and fly through our minds, only sleeping when we forget. groundless graveyards and amorphous faces, moments that repeat themselves and toes that talk instead of mouths. To be tame is to be dead.
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and find a bed floating in the ocean. Listen to the waves slap against wood edges, let the scent of salt cleanse you as you slowly uncoil.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’sdark, night is loud, and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
That night the woman cried when she spoke about it. She wasn’t expecting to, so she placed her face in her hands and stayed there until she was done. She tried to get up and walk out of the room, but he told her to stay. Meaning, don’t run from it. Meaning, sit with it. Meaning, I’ll sit with you. It was one of the many ways he showed love without realizing he was showing love. When the tears came he asked her why. She wanted to say there was a mystical energy that ran through her—it wasn’t from her, it wasn’t something she created, it was an outside entity coming into her body. It hissed and rattled and it happened on the inside, when she stared at walls, eyes glazed over like an animal before death. Sometimes it happened when she slept. If she said that he would have asked her what she meant. He would have asked how she knew the haze in animals’ eyes before death—that yellowish patina of lost hope. She’d never been a killer, he’d say. He would have wanted to know more about what exactly happened. He would have wanted her to explain the unexplainable. As she cried, she stepped outside of her mind and watched the conversation in front of her. A woman talking to a scholar, the son of a lawyer, a soldier of the high academy, telling him about the mysticism inside of her – trying to explain the hissing and rattling, fumbling through the process, attempting to define the indefinable. When she came back in, head still in hands, tears still falling, one sentence came out.
“I’m crying because I know there’s something else.”
That night she had dinner with her friend Sanga—she told her about the conversation as it happened. Before the crying. “Feminism and the female fight—I can’t help but think it’s a distraction,” she said. When a group of people are fighting for something, fighting for the right to break labels or laws, the right to step out of the innocence and purity they’ve been trapped in, the right to vast amounts of sex without shame, the right to be leaders. The right to be sloppy, loud and unkempt, the right to nudity without sexualization, objectification, the right to walk as human. The right to say no and be heard because the law and the community uphold truth, so much so that no one has to lie, and when they do, it is a sign of their own pathology instead of a tattoo on the arm of every woman. When a group of people are fighting for something, fighting for the right to break labels or laws, the goal becomes about the breaking—the being of the person they said they couldn’t. But, what about the person that is? What about the mysticism so many of us feel inside? What about what they never took from us because they couldn’t? Where does all of that go? The breaking and the being. When women become the owners of their own bodies, de-sexualized, listened to, believed and unbothered, standing in front of everything, what will we remember about ourselves before we fought to have what they had? What mysticism will we realize we forgot amidst the chaos that came with becoming? When we stand nude in the window at night and feel the wind hit us under a starlit sky. When we stare up at the diminishing light and the sliver of moon that’s left and we hear the breathing of our sisters in far off places staring at something too. What will we yearn for then?
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and find a peacock chair at the edge of a river. Sit with your feet in the shallows, hear nothing but the sound of water running across ground and rock as you slowly uncoil.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’s dark, night is loud and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
The next morning, when the woman turned the radio on, voices were talking about an upcoming segment—it was called, “We May Have Left Nature but Nature Didn’t Leave Us,” and some male doctor or philosopher would explain this phenomenon to those willing to listen. What will we explain when it’s our insides we are fighting for? When it’s the woman’s voice transmitting across valleys and tundras, will she tell them her insides follow her like rattlesnakes – shaking and hissing behind her and beneath her feet? Will she tell them that whenever it gets silent, or the rattle is too far away to hear, she shivers? Will she tell them about the time she woke up and heard nothing—no rattle, no hiss, no slithering along gravel or dried pine limbs crunching beneath scales? Total silence. Will she tell them how she closed her eyes and saw a man sucking on a set of nipples, or how she couldn’t see the face? Will she tell them that something about this visual without the sound of her dreams in the background was petrifying? Will she tell them she didn’t see babies, or think to herself how much she wanted one — that she didn’t get excited to hold them or try to make them laugh by touching their little baby belly buttons and speaking in baby twang? Will she tell them she didn’t go to her friends’ houses and wish she had infants and husbands to go home to? Will she tell them her dreams didn’t end with childhood – that they followed her into adulthood like an entire universe of sleepless crickets, and that now her dreams and her insides were one—groundless graveyards and amorphous faces, moments that repeat themselves and toes that talk instead of mouths? Javelinas that rise up amongst the trees, chasing her somewhere she never would have gone. Will she tell them that to be tame is to be dead? What if she became a dreamless vessel—wordless, noiseless, touched by the hands of strangers? She heard a whoosh, and thought if that were ever the case she might actually want babies. Crave them even. Need them to shake, rattle and crawl across gravel—scraping their knees as they went. She’d touch their bellies and talk in baby twang to fill the silence, the void, to put something back inside the vessel. She’d breathe a part of the baby in at night before sleep and close her eyes content with its presence. Never wondering what she’d breathe in if it wasn’t a child. All they’d hear from this is that she’s a hypocrite, scared, unable – we’re meant to be the vessels for others, they’d scream. The whoosh happened again and the rattlesnakes were back. Dancing viciously, buzzing loudly, rattling to her beat, hissing to warn her that they were there. The woman smiled at the sound of their fury. Breathed them in deeply and felt their pulse beneath her skin. Her body slithering in waves beneath the covers—a smile crawling across her face before she closed her eyes.
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and find a stone tub waiting for you in the middle of a singing forest. Listen to the wind and the chirping of chipmunks and birds. Feel the heat and steam surround you as you slowly uncoil.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’s dark, night is loud and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
Dreams ran across her mind like flowers across open fields in summer sun. She picked the ones she liked and woke with them in her hands. As she brushed her teeth that morning, she stood at the bathroom window watching a baby and their mother laughing in the yard. She heard the rattle and wondered if the snake was close enough to bite. She spit her toothpaste and went back to the window, but this time there was no baby, no mother, just patches of moving grass, sky and a set of billowing curtains in a distant window. She put her fingers on her lips and then brought them to her nose. As she reveled in the stench she thought – the other vessels are surely there somewhere beneath the ground, behind the curtains, flying above the clouds. She listened for the breeze that blew when they were near. Something about the listening, the breathing and the rattling brought her closer.
The woman’s arms fell dead while she slept—both of them at the same time so neither limb could lift the other. She flailed the middle of her body, trying to create movement, fearful something would snap if she thrust the wrong way. Watching her arms bend without permission reminded her of how weak she was, and for a moment she could feel the powerlessness of paralysis and everyone who ever felt it hit her insides at once, causing her to flail more, waving her dead arms like a dying birds’ wings, until she could feel them coming alive again, until she had control over every feather. Then, she sat there, focused, lifting them the way she wanted them to lift, turning them the way she wanted them to turn. The wind stopped and the feathers morphed into arms again, and suddenly she remembered she was a woman not a bird. She bit her finger to see if it hurt and wiped her saliva on the flesh around her nipples.
Imagine you could crawl into your womb and find the fiery hue of the immortal phoenix waiting for you at the edge of an endless field. You mount it, your blood and theirs becomes one, and as you take flight you begin to uncoil.
Imagine you stretch your body out and the womb stretches with you. In the physical world, it’s dark, night is loud and you are sleeping. No one sees the perpendicularity of it.
***
Melissa Hunter Gurney is a Brooklyn based writer, educator and conservationist. She is the co-founder of GAMBA Forest, a community art space and literary lounge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization put in place to combat systemic oppression around property in the Americas. Her work tends to explore the multi-faceted experiences of Pan-American women and artists and can be found in various publications including: The Yale Review, Pank, Post Road Magazine, Great Weather for Media, Paris Lit Up, Brilliant Short Fiction, Across the Margin and more. For a deeper look visit https://melissahuntergurney.com
Armstrong Literary 