Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By: Bridget Wadden

When the first ray of sun strikes down to slice your nightstand in two, my breath is hot against the inside of your forearm, and you are twirling pale pink bedsheets around the index finger that is not stroking my belly.

“Are you a sun person or a moon person?” you ask.

I suck my cheeks dry of a layer of sleep.

“For a long time I thought that I was a moon person, but recently I’ve been thinking I’m a sun person, actually,” I reply.

There is a pause, in which I rise and fall beneath your touch, and the chimes on the balcony are rattled by a chirping bird’s wing.

“Hmm,” you purr.

“Which one are you?”

“Sun,” you say, and your answer is immediate. You have always known this. As have I, of you.

We fall back asleep after that, or at least I do. When I wake to the whole room bathed confidently in light and you opening your eyes all slow and sticky, I get the feeling you were faking sleep in the first place.

The bedroom that you and I shared is still impossibly ours, though winter has come and gone. The difference now is that I have fallen apart all over it, all over this/our/my room. I do not think you would like the way my skin is stuck to patches of the walls. I think you would be upset by the corner near the window, which is filled with globs of fat and muscle, a pancreas and a handful of stomach and liver, that I have shoved out of sight and out of smell—almost. They fell out one by one in the weeks after you left, and in their place now is a ragged-edged, hollowed-out space in the middle of my belly, just below my lungs. I will not tell you that when I touch the deepest center of it, I feel my spine behind a layer of tissue. I will not show you the moss that has started to grow on the inside of this cavern of flesh. Will not beg of you to brush your fingers against the lichen that is teasing at this wound I’m bearing with such bravery. Such gusto!

The cavity did not exist Before, when two women held each other ceaselessly, and one liked to place a hand on the other’s back when they stood together at parties, and the other liked to smooth her lover’s hair between her fingers in bed, again and again until the hair was greased and the women slept. I am not sure now which one of us was me. I am not sure how to untangle, or identify, the hair from the fingers that combed it. I find myself desperate to replenish the space that used to be yours. I want to fill it with something I can touch and know. With a presence I can name.

I begin with flowers, pulling them from the beds on the balcony—you planted them, I watered them when you forgot—and nestling them inside this trench of mine. I tuck them beside the mushrooms, a newer development, and spread their hair-like roots so that they can latch onto as much space as they can reach. I dribble water on them and sit in the sun when it is warm enough out, but they do not take root. I wake up with crushed blue petals beneath my ribs, and not a single sprig or bud willing to fill me. They do not want to multiply the way I wish they would, until I am chalk full of flowers, smelling of spring.

The bed these days is not so nice to lay in, so I take the bus to fill my time. I try to sit across from interesting-looking people, though I recently overheard someone saying that ‘interesting’ is a non-word, so now I’m not sure what to do. Should I be looking for non-people?

I sit across from a bald man with a blank expression. He is both interesting and a non-person, I think, because how can someone look so honestly as though they have never had a thought or a feeling in their life? He looks around, behind my head at ads for health insurance, at the doors when they open and close. He is a mild-mannered dog with a good owner, and nothing of importance to concern himself with. He does not even concern himself with me, me watching him, me staring at this nothing man and believing he is not real. I sag with solitude. I frown with my whole body. He does not care to look me in the eyes.

When the bus reaches downtown, I drag myself out. I find people are best at taking up spaces that aren’t theirs. I talk to them, if I can find the words. I touch them if they want me to.

Around midnight, there is a man that does not like me very much who is wiping his fingers clean of me. He has a pretty face and a nice voice, and does not seem to care about the emptiness in my stomach. But he does not look at me when he lies back down against my sheets. I turn on my side to face him anyway.

“Are you a sun person or a moon person?” I ask him.

He turns just his head to look at me in bored confusion. “What?”

“I mean, do you think you’re more like the sun or the moon?”

“I don’t know. I have to wake up pretty early for work, so I guess I spend more time in the sun.”

“No, that’s not what… Okay. If your soul, or whatever, had to lift up out of your body and go to either the sun or the moon, which would it go to? Like, naturally. Following its own path. Which one?”

He thinks I am insane. He looks down at my belly for a moment—green, cavernous—and then back up at my face. He thinks he is making a connection, an Aha! one. He thinks I have been driven wild by my body’s disposal of itself. Maybe he sees the pancreas in the corner and figures I am in some kind of diabetic shock.

“Your room smells weird,” is all he says. He turns his head back up to stare at the ceiling for a moment before putting his clothes back on and leaving me, naked and awful. I don’t sleep.

Our (my) garden is full of tall and dewy grass, and so it is not difficult, not even at night so long as there is a full moon, to spot a garter snake from the way the blades sway in a weaving pattern. I stand still in the middle of the yard in the dark until there is movement, then plunge my hand into the green and pull it out with a wriggling body lodged in my fist. This one is still somewhat small, looks young and scared. I wonder if it is the same one you caught over the summer.

You stepped through the bedroom door from the deck with your rain boots still on, even though we did not have a shoe mat. Mud sprang onto the wood, and you smiled giddily. Curled up around your left hand was a short, thin, little snake. Your hair was still long and heavy then, and the snake kept trying to stretch up and weave itself into you. I understood it, in that moment.

“Look who I found!” You could not stop smiling.

“Oh my god.”

“I was just looking for the bike pump, and this guy was all curled up in the dirt. He looked so scared.”

“Probably because you’re, like, a thousand times his size.”

I argued that snakes are freaky, which I don’t really believe all that much, but I didn’t want a pet. You replied that snakes are sweethearts, which I think is a bit of a stretch as well. We had a fight about keeping him, but not a real one. Not like the ones we were having towards the end. Nobody sobbed with their back against the tub. Nobody used words like ‘suffocated’, or ‘embarrassing’, or ‘careless’. Nobody threw together their favourite things in a suitcase and left without their keys in the middle of the night.

In the end, I won the snake fight, and we set him free together. So maybe this really is him, this teenage garden-dweller in my hands. I take the boots off outside, bring him in to where I sit on the bed, and place him on the soft layer of moss and tissue that lines my wound. He looks confused.
“It’s just like outside. It’s a home for you, see?” I tell him as I keep my hands hovering in case he tries to escape.

But instead, the snake starts to settle down. He examines the foliage that has taken me over, and nods his head against the cap of the tallest mushroom. He slithers around like this could be a forever-home, and I think I might cry of happiness. Suddenly, I am not empty, I am a garden. I smile and smile and try not to move so as not to scare him. We are one. I am not empty.

But snakes are faster than hovering hands, and when he darts out of my stomach and onto the bed, then the ground, then out of the room and into the living room, it is all ruined. I am sure he has found something plush to cuddle up in, something warm enough for his cold blood, warmer than the deepest part of me. I fall back onto sheets that are old and unclean, and when I cry, it is loud. The snake hears me, I know. I hope he feels terrible. I try to throw volumes of shame against his scaly body, wherever he is, at having left me for something so close to death under this bright blue moon. Crying, I look down at myself to examine my body and imagine your touch. I think you would take every bit of me that sits in the window’s corner and place it back in its spot until I become whole again. Picturing your hands on my bare liver is almost too much to stand. It is. It is too much.

It is not so much that I am trying to plug the wound, because there is nothing coming out of it. And the urge I feel is not one to stop it from growing, because whether it stays the same or is bigger will not change the fact that it exists. It is more so that I have the need to make its presence mean something to me. I need to see that it serves a purpose. I need to know that it never could have gone any other way for me.

Your photos of me start to taunt me from where I lay, unmoving. In them, my smiling face cackles, and it looks ugly. Wrong. Before I know it, I am tearing them all down but keeping them smooth in my palms. I take an envelope from my (your) desk, and slip the photos inside it. The sides bulge out a bit, even without my licking it shut. In the desk’s bottom drawer, I place the envelope in an open shoe box. It is squished by its borders, by the cardboard limits and by the dozens of other envelopes that are nestled together. Most hold letters, some many pages long. Others hold artifacts, little things you left behind that I cannot look at, but cannot throw out. There are many photos in here, most that I’ve taken. They document the hole, how it began, how it grew, how it looks now. I have tried to write your address on every envelope, but at a certain point I must remind myself that the only address of yours I have ever known is the one that is now only mine. I tell myself that one day soon you will tell me where you are, and the post office will have a busy day because of me. I will send you every word I can think of. I will send you my body in all its moonlit, dug-out, forms.

When the room becomes too much again, I clamber up onto another bus, the first one I can find. It is early morning and I haven’t slept for at least a day, maybe more. I forget to find an interesting/non-person to sit near. I am already slouched against a wall of seats and I look up to see, across from me, a young boy and his grandmother. All I can see of the boy is his little face looking up at me, observing me without judgement. He is engulfed, covered entirely by his grandmother; she is hugging him the way men in war movies huddle atop grenades to save their platoons. As much of her body as she can muster is at work, holding close to her grandson until he is just a face. He does not seem disturbed or annoyed. He looks entirely well-adjusted to the wealth of love he is being smothering with.

I watch them, with my greased and ragged hair, my dust-dry mouth, my eyes that are heavy and red. I want to crawl across the aisle and pull the boy from his seat, I want to take his spot inside his grandmother’s arms.

Possibly I am wretched. Possibly there is something vile snaking its way along my bones, tracing the paths that have existed in me since I first began to exist, because I turn sour as the boy watches me. Under my sweater and the coat that is too thin for early spring, the edges of the wound become brittle, and widen a little more. Leaning my head against the window, I beg the sun for warmth to seep into my belly. I only want enough to make this injury hospitable, into something less stubbornly dead.

Across from me, the boy does not break his calm. The grandmother does not move a muscle. I feel stringy tendons hang low and fall into the base of the hole. Another sliver of stomach tumbles free of me, gets stuck in my waistband.