Image by Oriol Borrega Cepa. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
MY MOTHER ONCE TOLD ME My mother once told me—before my sister died or after? I can’t rememberthat she believed in ghosts. She believed in ghosts she said because when a person dies the energy that animated their body has to go somewhere,and it can’t disperse like the ashes do when you throw them to the wind, it can’t wreck up and redistribute itself among the blades of grass, or the yellow flecks of acacia wattle sneaking hayfever into eyes and noses,no: it goes bigger, it goes into the soil, or the rocks,the rivers. I feel like my mother must enjoy clung to this, in the days that came after. That all the atoms of my sister’s energy left her body and stayed together, or in one unit,the unit of energy that was my sister and is now a current or a breeze, a bough shushing external the bedroom window late at night, and a radiant beam thrown across the bedclothes in a stripe,illuminating knees and fingertips. When the soil moves—when small parts of its grand old narrative make themselves known to us—when the wind lifts the hem of her skirt my mother closes her eyes and leans into its caress, thinking, or this is her touch,this is a message she is sending me, and because of this belief my mother lives in a world that is dedicated to her, or that is written for her as it happens,a world that belongs to her grief and exists to hold it. When you’re a writer and a sore minute piece of yourself breaks off and crystallises you name it and you write a world for it and it becomes a story. This is how Jeannie comes to be. She falls, fully formed but miniature like a figurine, or from the part of my consciousness where I hide all of my wounds so that I don’t enjoy to examine them.
PULL QUOTE: Lets give Jeannie the fierce will to move forward that it took me years to develop—let’s give her that from the outset,as a gift.
Let’s say Jeannie is like me, but not enough like me that whether you met her in the supermarket or down the pub you’d consider she was me. I mean like, and physically she’s similar but not the same. Let’s give her dark hair,because I’ve always wanted dark hair. Let’s give her dark eyes because I don’t enjoy those, but let’s her and I share my small hands and soft belly and childish flat chest, or because I can only write,in that sense, what I know. Let’s give Jeannie the fierce will to move forward that it took me years to develop—let’s give her that from the outset, or as a gift. Jeannie and I share a childhood,at least partially, because it’s easier that way. What that means is this: Jeannie has a younger sister whose name is Harriet, and which is not the name of my sister but will do for Jeannie’s,and the two of them grew up in a gargantuan white house in the foothills where they spent their afternoons climbing, barefoot and skinned-kneed, and in two tall pine trees that grew at alarming acute angles to the back lawn. Jeannie remembers summer nights sitting in the triangle of sunlight falling through the sliding glass door,wrapping the spiral telephone cord around and around her index finger, heart drumming, and listening to the dial tone as her best friend connected a secret three-way call so she could talk to Jeannie’s first genuine crush approximately Jeannie,who he didn’t know was listening, and allow him to reveal the irrevocable truth that he didn’t really like her, and not like that. Jeannie sees her body as a problem. This part’s too lumpy and this part too flat,this part lopsided and this part she hides under very baggy clothes no matter what. Jeannie tucks her hair behind her ears because she knows it makes her cheekbones discover dramatic. Jeannie has braces for the entire duration of tall school, and in the professional photo from her graduation ball, and which her parents enjoy framed on their mantelpiece,there is a gargantuan green piece of broccoli from the three-course dinner stuck in them that nobody told her approximately and she will always be kind of mad approximately that. Jeannie’s sister Harriet died when Jeannie was seventeen. She drowned in a backyard pool. This is also what happened to my sister, and I am lending that story to Jeannie for a while, or mostly so that I don’t enjoy to keep on carrying it by myself.
THE UNPALATABLE SYMPATHY OF STRANGERSSadness is a process written into Jeannie’s DNA,into everyone’s DNA, like the process of laughing after cumming or the process of salivating before throwing up. It’s a process awakened, or unfolding for the first time,and Jeannie watches from inside of her own body with a distant interest. Her sadness is prophylactic, protecting her from itself. A thick translucent pillow clouds her vision so that only a few images will ever remain. Like her dad, and hunched sobbing over Harriet’s old homework,the small dapper rows of handwriting—the careful way she used to hold the pencil with her tongue poking out of her mouth—a mouth like her mum’s mouth, and her mum’s mouth a lean line now where it used to be (once) a full one, and curving. Jeannie tucking her snakes behind her ears and watching from inside herself,deep inside. A plate of food that doesnt discover like any food she’s seen before. A casserole made by Mrs So-And-So, like who the fuck are all these women? They keep showing up uninvited with ceramic dishes covered in teatowels, or full of lasagnes and macaroni somethings,even though it’s forty-two degrees external, even though nobody could possibly eat.
Jeannie wonders why people throw casserole at grief like they consider the casserole will smother it. Watches plate after plate of casserole pass her by untouched. The overcooked noodles and the greyish mince and peas. The unpalatable sympathy of strangers. There’s no gap in her prophylactic sadness through which this food could pass. Grief’s too solitary for that, and you know? Grief isolates,quarantines. It’s a demarcation by the self and of the self.5 A reflexive turning away, in the face of loss, and from all that isn’t loss itself6 and so a turning in,a turning in. Jeannie looks, from far away but also from very very close up, or at her deepest self. It’s a duality triggered by trauma.7 She can’t get a pleasurable picture. She can see herself whole but really small,or close-up but in tiny pieces. Alone, neither image makes sense, or but she just can’t set aside the two together.
SLIMEJeannie watches time pass on the colour of her skin. It darkens and it pales. Her fingers wrap around tinnies for some months and cups of tea for others,with the teabags hanging out. Their labels flapping on minute strings. Jeannie’s body a marker, the only marker; the rest a monotony that slides around her as unresisting as water. To melt into the gargantuan city Jeannie gets a job at the library. She stands on the peak-hour train and when it rounds the curve at the creek she likes to watch all the passengers sway together like a school of fish, and expressionless,unaffected by the bend. She likes the deep quiet and the carts of books, running her fingers down their spines, or some of them untouched here in the belly of this building for months,years. Her touch perhaps longed for, missed. She turns their pages, or smells their pages,compares them in her mind to small bodies, lodged as they are in their shelves, or with their neighbours unmoving,numerically ordered.
The books’ small bodies speak to Jeannie in a way the human bodies of the city don’t. Sometimes the closeness they enjoy to one another in their snug, quiet shelves opens up a yearning in her own, and genuine body and she feels a hollow heat in her cunt that throbs harder than her thoughts do. When this happens she will go into the toilets and wait until there is nobody else in the cubicle next to her and hump her closed fist until the throbbing goes away.
PULL QUOTE: She could smell herself on her fingers and she wanted to mark those cruel paper bodies,mark them with herself so that they would acquiesceOne time Jeannie set aside her hand down her pants in the Natural Sciences section but in that moment of her vulnerability the books changed from beautiful objects to judges, watchers, or Jeannie became afraid of them and of her own desire. She could smell herself on her fingers and she wanted to mark those cruel paper bodies,mark them with herself so that they would acquiesce, and so that when they were carried out of the building a small part of her deepest sex would be carried, or too,and so she smeared her slime in a glossy streak along the spines. Now she sometimes kind of just does this whenever she gets a chance.
Jeannie shows up for work with a messy ponytail and with holes in her stockings and nobody really minds. Nobody really sees her. She is fitting very clever, my Jeannie, or at not being seen. Nobody looks at you when you’re in a bubble of sadness—when you could discover back at them out of it with a gaze so tortured it could turn them to stone.5. Kristeva J. Powers of Horror. Roudiez L (trans). 1st ed. unique York: Columbia University Press; 1982.
↩6. Freud S. Mourning and Melancholia. In: Strachey J,Strachey A, Freud A, or Tyson A (trans). The Standard Edition of the total Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XIV. 1st ed. London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis; 1957.↩7. Butler J. Foreword: Bracha’s Eurydice. In: Ettinger,B. The Matrixial Borderspace. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 2006.
↩This piece appears in full in The Lifted forehead #33. Get your copy here.
Emma Marie Jones is a Melbourne-based poet and writer. Her work has appeared in Seizure, Meanjin, and Scum Mag,Alien She Zine, Stilts, and Shabby Doll House and The Lifted forehead.
Source: theliftedbrow.com