i ask my mother what grief is. we both know the answer, but i want to hear her say the words. she looks at me, tells me what i was expecting to hear: "the body collects."
the women in my life are always mourning a loss. i see it when i shut my eyes, feel it in its most physical form. i am standing by the ocean and the wind beats against my face, stains my cheeks ripe and red. i lick my lips for the bitter taste of sand and saltwater, smell the burning in the air, ashes to ashes. smoke billows up in plumes like a forest fire at the shoreline. there it is - grief.
my mother is right. the body collects. it rots away in your belly, a homemade poison - tomato soup and arsenic - and you don't know your nose is bleeding until somebody points it out. a handkerchief to the face, a wide-eyed stare, you drop dead. grief. the mind collects knowledge, experience, emotion, memory. the body collects feeling, looks out miserably through the attic window onto the street below.
i returned to the house i grew up in once - the smaller part of a duplex on a busy street. my room was on the second story, the stairs creaked when i took them, two steps at a time like i did when i was little. i wanted to make the walls bleed, make them cry. plaster peeled at the cornice in my old room, and i remember waking in the night to see a ghost at the end of my bed, shaking his head in disappointment. i wanted to break the house's bones, but it smelt the same as i remember - mildew and my mother's perfume.
my mother does not have the answer i need. i wonder where i begin and end within myself, where i move from mortal to infinite, from corporeal to absent. i wonder if i am the ghost, if the memory itself gives me a body. bounce between feeling -
puke, pain, puncture wound. i am back in my skin.
this poem accompanies an essay i wrote on grieving as a woman of colour - maybe i will share it one day.
image: "rough sea near lobster point" by robert henri, 1903
the "forest fire" by the sea is a reference to a hindu funeral rite.
"you remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
why hold onto all that? and i said,
where can i put it down?"
anne carson, the glass essay
title inspiration: out of context glance at annotations from "sharp objects" by gillian flynn - "your health is not a debt you just cancel. the body collects, camille." another notable three word out-of-context quote that sticks with me: women get consumed.
