8.

Lately when I brush my teeth at night, I'm overwhelmed by thoughts of my own mortality. Really, it's when I floss, because I think of my stepmother who failed out of dental hygienist school telling me to take care of my teeth because they are the only ones that I will ever have. Then I think of myself with these same teeth, but much older, and I wonder if my teeth will have deteriorated from another campaign of depressive neglect or just old age. Then I think of my teeth as part of my skeleton, then myself dead with these same teeth ( the only ones I'll ever have ), and I wonder what process will eventually reduce them to dust, how long it will take. It's easy to imagine my decomposition through stiffness & bloat & decay until I am skeletonized, but then I can't imagine it; what happens to my skeleton ? How does it return to dust ?

As a kid, I would periodically look at the Wikipedia page for corpse decomposition. I would visit the page so regularly across my childhood that it feels like a physical place. It's surprisingly unchanging too; since childhood it's had the same five images of a pig decomposing in grass at various stages. The pictures stop when the grass around the once-pig is flattened brown & all that's left is a skeleton. But what happens to the skeleton ?

As an elementary schooler, I would listen to my parents' shared MP3 player as I did the dishes & one of my mom's songs was Hello by Evanescence, which I somehow misconstrued to be about a deceased girl stuck in a coffin with only her own thoughts by very literally misinterpreting the lyrics:

Has no one told you she's not breathing?
Hello, I'm your mind
Giving you someone to talk to

I was concerned that after I died, my mind would be stuck with my corpse like the girl in the song, and so I would worry a lot about my eventual burial. ( This is around the time I started sleeping with my arms crossed over myself in case I died in my sleep. ) This predated my regular visits to the corpse decomposition page on Wikipedia, so all I could imagine happening to me after death was myself, still intact, at most sleeping the cartoon death of childhood in a coffin deep belowground. It's too dark to see and I am experiencing the worst thing my childhood self could imagine: I am alone with my thoughts for the rest of time, excruciatingly bored to numbness, & all I wish is that my thoughts could end completely; I am scared of having to exist forever & wish for the real, uncartoon death that I can't even conceive of yet. I wish now that I could return to that fearlessness, unable to even equate death with permanence or ending; return to innocence.

There is a Buddhist meditation wherein one imagines a corpse through the process of decomposition. This is something I've done forever without being taught, but nothing comes from it; I just continue to imagine corpses decaying in a circle. I imagine teeth in a field. But in my field, the grass isn't flattened brown; the grass is tall & lovely.

3.

Terrible dreams last night, a condition of me writing again ( the inner life has to bubble & spit like magma ).

First, sleep paralysis. A dream about suffocating, my lips & tongue swelling. Sleep paralysis for me is the very physical sensation of being pushed into the bed, into sleep, unable to lift myself from it; it feels like succumbing. I was able to briefly surface from last night's dream in intervals, enough to open my eyes but not to move, only to be pushed back into the dream again. Like Ivan Ilyich describes dying: being pushed into a big, dark sack. The dream was the same each time. I was in a large house, somewhere temporary & hotelish. I felt my lips swell, then my tongue, then I couldn't breathe. It was incredibly vivid. Sometimes Suzanne says that she has the sensation that she is dreaming when she's really awake, but for me, it tends toward the opposite; reality is such an oppressive force that often in my dreams I am aware that they are just dreams, or at least that the reality I'm experiencing is somehow wrong ( the source of many nightmares ). Suffocating wasn't like that at all, which is perhaps why it was such a frightening experience for me. After getting pushed back into sleep a few times, I was finally able to move & to get out of bed. I sheepishly went & sat at the kitchen table, hoping Suzanne would stay awake, but almost immediately after I appeared she went to bed. It was the only time since the events of this earlier summer that I wished we were still sleeping together.

Second, I fell in love. I don't remember her very well, just that she was a woman & she was running away from home & I was very much in love with her. It was the only time awake or asleep— so living— that I have ever experienced being in love, even though being in love mostly consisted of weeping for my lover. Waking up felt like a heartbreak, also my first & only.

1.

I spent the day with someone named after a month of the year. My sneakers were still in Suzanne's car after our weekend trip, so I wore my sandals. My feet became soft this summer while I was laid to bedrest, so I'm now in the process of rebreaking-in shoes that I have owned for years. ( It's astounding how quickly the body can undo itself. ) I didn't anticipate walking very much, but we spent at least a few hours walking around downtown, across the Burnside bridge, & to a graveyard where we mercifully sat down on a bench. Like my newly softened feet, my muscles too became soft this summer. When we encountered stairs, I had to lean onto the handrail each time & limp through my descent because I am still sore from a hike ( that would have previously been easy ) with Mega Latios a couple of days ago. Normally when I am in pain, I think of it as mortification of the flesh & try to just tolerate it, so I walked without complaint. Toward the graveyard, I felt a sudden relief of pain & water spreading across my right foot; a blister burst open, the most offending one. After this walking was much easier, though when I looked down to investigate the wetness, I saw that my feet were covered in dirt & wounds & felt selfconscious.

On the bench I mentioned that I have a phobia of cats & Month of the Year said that growing up in their midwestern log cabin, they had an oldwoman neighbor who would take in stray cats that she wouldn't spay or neuter, making more & more cats, so Month of the Year would see cats in the woods. One day when they were five or so, they saw an entire group of cats appear at their door, so their dad drove to oldwoman neighbor's house to check on her. Month of the Year stayed in the truck & watched their dad go up to the house. Their dad created a visor with his hands & leaned against a window to peer inside, then suddenly withdrew & brought a hand in front of his mouth in horror or disgust. Their dad got back into the truck & said oldwoman neighbor was fine & drove them back home, but Month of the Year could tell ( at least in retrospect ) that the cats had eaten her body.

I said that as a child I was afraid that I would die & that my mom's cats would eat my body. I saw an episode of a show on Animal Planet once about dangerous animals. I remember exactly where I watched it, the upstairs living room. I remember our carpet & the large size of the TV which is positioned toward the left in my memory. The episode was about a woman who lived in Florida & found baby snakes which she took into her care & house. One day one of the baby snakes bit her & she died, then her cats ate her body. The TV show talked about her like she was so stupid, which seemed cruel to my childhood self; it still does. She committed the crime of caring too much. I had always been afraid of my mom's cats because she had locked me in the closet with one of them, among other torments, but the fact that they could eat my dead body was another thing entirely. Being afraid of cat scratches, I could feel at least some amount of relief when a cat wasn't in the room with me, but a cat eating my dead body ? That's something that couldn't be prevented. It seemed almost inevitable & I felt alwaysconscious of death since then. It was also the first instance that death seemed real to me, beyond a child's conception of death as temporary & cartoon, or death as sleeping. It was the first time I considered the body after death; a body that could be eaten by something seemed very dead, irrevocably so. Too, the reason the cats ate her body was because it took some days for her body to be discovered. Despite that at that point in my childhood one of my dad's punishments had been shunning me for days on end, it still hadn't occurred to me that I could live a life in which I am alone & forgotten. All of these never before considered details of death made it seem unfictitious, uncartoon, unavoidable & from then on I was in its shadow. I wonder if I would have developed differently, more rightly, if I hadn't seen that episode of TV, or if some innate sensitivity & morbidity would have won out, if I was predisposed to loss of innocence.