Town beach, Westford, Massachusetts. I’m five years old and learning how to submerge my face in the water. Swim lessons take place rain or shine, so I pray for thunder and lightning. Underpaid teenagers take a group of shivering tinies in flotation vests out past where our feet can touch, and train us to stick our faces in fear. My mom and toddler brother Ben watch from the shore. Ben will learn how to ride a two-wheel bike when he’s four; I’ll be seven with the training wheels on. I’m sensitive and fearful. Things take time.
Once, I calmly move away from the swim group and retch, leaving behind a white and orange thready substance floating on the water’s surface. Nothing has ever come out of my body looking like that since.
I learned to submerge my face, but not without dramatics. The day I finally did it, my relieved mom took me to the Disney store, and I got a stuffed Aristocat Marie as a reward.
I saw all the dirty, nasty things about the town beach. The main specter took the form of drifting bandaids, gently released from their owners’ bodies by the lake currents. My most extreme fear was touching the bandaids with my feet-- I stepped very carefully. I watched my peers with trepidation, their bandaids hanging on by one sticky half, the small imprints of blood from scratched bug bites visible on the white pads.
One day, I decided to remove the bandaids from the water. I dove for Ariels and Spider-Men winking up from the sand. I spotted even the camouflaged nude-toned bandaids. I pinched them between my thumb and first finger, and deposited them in a small pile on the shore. Mom was horrified by my pile. I was too. I didn’t know how to explain what I was doing-- but really, I was just decluttering the water.
I’m a professional declutterer now. The weird things aren’t what you think-- I find everyone’s drugs and sex toys, but that’s whatever. I’ve perfected the skill of acting like I didn’t see that vibrator and giving you time to stash it away. The weirdest things are all the little crumbs of meaning we accumulate. I touch other peoples’ crumbs as I’m making their beds, smelling their sheets, wiping cobwebs out of their trash cans. Buttons, pebbles, earring backs, a single Mucinex in foil, clumps of hair. I touch almost everything a person owns in the course of our work together. Possessions aren’t just vintage coats and hardback books-- you also own the fragments of toilet paper floating in that no-man’s-land between your toilet and the wall.
In my childhood bedroom, under the second window, for many months, sat a ladybug, its desiccated body leaching color until it was a faded red. I carefully wove footpaths around it, as if it were furniture. I couldn’t get rid of it, either, because then I’d feel the crunch of its body in the tissue. When it occurred to me years later to pick up dead bugs with a clump of tissues to mask the crunch, I felt like a genius. At last, I think my mom vacuumed the ladybug for me. Remember when you were six and the world didn’t make any sense? I didn’t know how to get rid of the ladybug.
It’s still hard to know what’s trash and what’s not and how to get rid of anything.
We wish on eyelashes, but not on fingernail clippings or eyebrow hairs, despite their similarities in shape. Then the eyelashes float onto the carpet, where they become trash.
I’m not hoping to create a smooth world without trash. That will never, ever happen. There are month-old potato chip crumbs under my couch right now, and at some point, I will muster up the energy to move the couch and sweep them away. For now, the chips, the crumbs in my house, and in everyones’ houses, are little stories. They are tethers to the physical world. The acne of the floor. Proof that life happens here.
And then we clean up, and the mess returns, and on and on. I love doing this for work-- participating in life in this way. It’s brave to touch the bandaids. Someone’s gotta do it.
Dear friends,
Yesterday morning I was pretty sure I’d never think of anything to write about again. It wasn’t a dramatic crisis of faith, I just kind of thought, “huh, maybe it’s over.” Then I went outside. I don’t feel that way anymore.
Allow me to recommend Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush if you want to laugh in a wry manner; Person by Sam Pink if you have Seen the Darkness but are currently feeling pretty good; The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard if you can’t stop thinking about the flooding in Asheville and want to feel less crazed. (I finished the thing I was knitting, and am back to the books.)
I have been submitting my work *AND* I got my first rejection— but it was the nice one, where they essentially say “OK we actually read it and thought about it, no for now, but submit again in the future.” WOOHOO! A win is a win is a freaking win!
Here is the dread-busting task I will execute after sending: I will tell the barista at this coffee shop that the water urn is out of water. I need more water.
Thank you to all who “like” my posts. I have been informed it’s a kind of annoying sign-in process so when the “like” comes through, I know it was an effort and it means even more to me! Feel free to also leave a comment while you’re at it. I’d love to hear from you.
Enjoy your Tuesday. <3
Emily
It’s brave to touch the bandaids!!!
gonna wish on my fingernail clippings now