Emotion is embodied.
Our heart races, our gut churns, we sweat, we go weak in the knees. We feel.
Lorn believed this: memory is not emotion. Memory is fickle. It seeps into you, as if you’re porous, a being of clay waiting to be infused, to be made more than you were in the past.
Memory is a plant. It twines its roots around your heart and sends its budding branches of leaf, thorn and fruit into your mind.
There are two eclipse seasons a year, two or three eclipses a season. Only half of these are solar eclipses where the moon occults the sun, hiding its light.
It had been a good idea to take her memory and hide it, to change it, to bind it to an eclipse and let it go. But the pain remained, a shadow of heartache and anger in her body that she no longer understood because the memories were gone. The smell of vanilla made her heart beat a war rhythm, made her want to kill. And rain clenched up her chest hard, so that she breathed in gasps but didn’t know why.
So Lorn chased eclipses, hoping to find where she hid those memories. Hoping to understand.
]]>The temple was small. Few people lived there, surviving off their own labour, off gifts of food from the nearby villages. They taught him, showed him things, darkened his mind because sometimes truths are unexpected.
And people came to him, too. He made friends amongst the devotees and supplicants who stayed on the temple grounds. He was considered wise. This was flattering and worrying: while they thought his advice was good and sensible, advice and knowledge change people.
The change was clear to him: some nights, after hours of writing, he woke from his nightmares screaming.
They asked him to leave. His notes were incomplete, but his approach to the Elder Ones, he was told, was warped and twisted. In turn, he was warping and twisting others.
With his few belongings — the clothes he came in, writing implements, his notes — he made his way to the closest town.
Writing the manuscript came easily. This was no longer a project to merely record someone else’s truth, but would be a warning to the world.
Just as he’d made friends of the devotees, he now made friends in the town. One described himself as a printer, setting text not in solid blocks, but to individual bits of cast letters, moveable as needed between locations on a page of typeset text, and reusable between pages. This reduced the time and resources needed to typeset a book so considerably as to be somewhat miraculous.
But the printer needed advice as well — people saw this ability to easily create typeset text as a tool of corruption, allowing foreigners and slaves to share knowledge in their own written vernacular, on topics not appropriate to be shared.
The printer was afraid, because it was true.
So he told his printer friend not to worry. He, a writer of manuscripts, and he, a printer of books, would together make plans.
Print was a tool of corruption. So too shall his book be.
He still sometimes woke at night, screaming.
]]>Plants grow from between the tiles. Their little stalks have broken through the grouting and sprouted, looking like a rainforest of moss and tree in miniature.
“Why do you leave it?” her boyfriend asked. “I’d be so pissed if I was your landlord.”
“It’s good to see things growing where they’re not wanted,” was her answer. And that was true. “And sometimes you need to break things to move on.”
“That reminds me of that Japanese thing, kintsugi or something — where you fix up broken things, and, you know, not try to hide the damage but, like, make the cracks and stuff beautiful with gold inlays and shit.”
She laughed. “No, that’s just trying to return to the status quo. Make a pretty thing whole again. Think of Schoenberg — he wanted to break down tonality in music. Make a mess of things. Show that music can be free of our expectations and the status quo and still be beautiful.”
“What the hell are you on?”
“Sometimes broken things should stay broken to make space for new things,” she said. It was good to break things, and that was true as well.
“I’ve never even heard of — who? — Schoenberg?”
She pondered the little plant, the tile-sproutling, and wondered if it was time yet to break up with this person. To grow into new things.
The grouting would be broken apart. And the underlying concrete bed crumbled, transformed into dirt for roots.
]]>And the door she came to the passages through would always be unlocked, a way back to wherever she’d come from.
Not this time.
The lock snapped into place as the door closed. And each door she tried after, each one, was locked.
Three days of walking through the passages since then. And every door: locked. There were only the passages, the closed doors and stairwells. No windows. No rooms. No people. This was the passages.
She slept on the floor, jacket for a pillow. She had no food, no water, but also no hunger or thirst.
Then the passages changed. The paint was a bit more peeled, light bulbs slightly dimmer, flickering, sometimes even burnt out.
The passages grew darker as more lights failed. Some forks and stairwells led into blackness. The wall-plaster was now cracked, chipped enough to expose brickwork.
Down one of the dark forks was something unexpected: a beam of light in darkness, not a cold electric bulb, but a small lance from a wall, scattering stray motes of dust.
The plaster and brickwork had crumbled enough to make a small hole through the wall beside a door’s wooden frame.
Only her finger could fit, but the brickwork was crumbling, and she needed no food.
]]>Night. Quiet roads. Rain. Street lights reflect in puddles. A small food store remains open and mostly empty. They take credit card. Leslie speaks some Japanese. The owner is looking for help in the kitchen, so now Leslie has a job. She stays for a few weeks.
Door 257. Humid. Hot. Walking through the door is like walking into a wall. Tombouctou. She speaks enough French to get by.
Door 258. The land is moving, rising and lowering, swells in a storm. A boat.
Door 259. Night. Cold. Lights are off. Someone’s home. She makes her way down carpeted stairs. A cat yowls, lights flick on but she’s already in the street. Leslie teaches a medley of languages to a classical guitarist who would like to one day leave the Ukraine, but who worries that they’ll never practise enough, never earn enough.
Leslie also worries. When she stays too long in a place she can feel it, approaching, door by door, person by person.
Door 260. 261. 262.
Sometimes she asks herself if she is being followed, if this isn’t the doors and her fears. But the feeling returns.
The follower never relents.
Nairobi. An abandoned oil rig. Jeddah. Samarkand.
Footsteps on an empty street. A shadow on a street corner.
Door 263. Driving for uber in a car owned by a taxi company. Travel through the car door when the anxiety approaches.
Door 264.
]]>The monastic Order was declining, but valley locals still thought well of the monks, and her parents were living hard years of illness and little food — and so it seemed that offering her up would do some good.
At the monastery’s bone orchard they asked her parents to say their goodbyes. Bones of the dead had been placed in mounds or strung together to create shapes: macabre trees, bone white bushes, benches to sit on. This was a place for things to decay and to pass away, a place for goodbyes.
When she was 67 she returned to the monastery. She’d lived her years as a mendicant, travelling between towns and villages and living wherever people would shelter her, carrying no more than what she could carry, teaching and helping when she could.
The monastery in the hills was now abandoned. The bone orchard was still there in its own way: vines had entangled themselves in everything, hiding so many of those bones that had not yet crumbled with time and exposure. No one was here to tend the place, but she supposed that this was natural, if unbalanced. Sometimes things are overrun, sometimes they decay away. The Order of things is to move on, and soon so will she.
]]>And this is a time for celebration, just not a celebration of what the company wants. After you’ve said your goodbyes and walked out of the office, you text, I’m sorry! Something’s come up! I won’t be able to make drinks tonight. Enjoy yourselves.
This is your freedom.
Bruises begin as blue stains. Their colour shifts, fades to yellow as they heal and once the red blood that had seeped from your veins and arteries ages and breaks down.
You go home.
Bruises and cuts take a long time to heal. You want them to heal.
But some wounds don’t heal well — scars remain, joints hurt when weighted, mobility is lost. Tiredness seeps in to bones and flesh, pervading all.
It’s been a long life of doing things for others, spending your days making a living. Familiar thoughts surface: what is next for you? What do you want to do, now that you don’t have to spend your waking hours working a job just to survive?
What are you hobbies? There have been many over the years, but they’ve come and gone and been given up to the daily grind of work.
What is important to you? What was important?
You sit and wonder.
]]>You open a new bank account. There’s not a lot that you can spare, but every month you deposit the little that you can. It’s an emergency package, a parachute, a hope.
Close to your work, at the mall, you have a spare set of car keys cut. You keep them at your office, with a bag of spare clothes and your passport.
Red is anger. We say, to see red.
The colour red doesn’t appear alone: there is the yellow puss of infection that’s the tint of anxiety, the blacks and greys of rot, of fear, of numbness.
You want to shout, to scream. That was something you learned (quickly quickly) to not do. Anger is one way to be hurt. Crying is another.
Your current friends are his friends. They’re all his friends — your friends hadn’t liked him, and he very much didn’t like them. You’re going to miss having friends, but maybe you can reach out to people you used to know?
But old friends are a way for him to find you.
Job interviews are stressful. The job you find is across the country. The job offers a fresh start, cut off, distant and alone, but hopefully unfindable.
The last few days of your old job are paid leave days. You don’t tell him. When your leave begins, your first stop is the office to pick up your travel bag.
Everything else you leave behind.
Sometimes rot needs to be cut away.
]]>You sit at your desk. It’s been four hours since you’ve arrived at work. When you have to, you answer emails. Otherwise you sit at your desk.
You sit at your desk.
You just sit.
Yellow isn’t the only colour of rot. There are the greys and greens, the shades of damage, decay, mould.
You can’t do this work anymore. The work — you’re told that your work is fine. People are happy with your work. It’s good work. Only that’s not how they behave. Every moment convincing people that it needs to be done is a struggle; every moment is an argument for why something had been done.
Arguing that the work isn’t wrong. That it is fine, that it is good work.
You’re tired. And you don’t believe their words anymore, just their actions.
So you sit.
Rot isn’t only decay — fungal bloom is growth; eggs laid that hatch; the eruption of maggots. Things grow and change, become what they are not.
You are bad at your work. Avoiding the continual struggle and doublespeak means avoiding work. Avoiding work means you are worse at what you do.
You sit at your desk.
You are worse.
It’s important to stop caring — so that the bruising stops, so that the hurt is less. So that the rot can settle.
Rotting things can’t be used for what they were originally intended for.
The rotting apple no longer feeds. Mostly.
]]>So he tried.
It was early spring and the flyer recommended starting with potatoes — they were easy to care for and difficult to hurt. Some of the old potatoes in the kitchen were sprouting. He sliced these into chunks, a sprout per chunk, then planted them.
The waiting began.
It wasn’t just waiting. At first there was watering — much later, when little leaves broke through the surface, he would examine the seedlings daily for pests. He felt glad. They were little growing things and he was caring for them.
The pests came. The aphids sat under the leaves, out of sight, and he took care to lift each leaf as he sprayed insecticide.
But one day the leaves began to die — not because of pests, but because it was time to harvest. He dug into the ground, careful not to damage the tubers themselves. When cleaned of dirt they were bulbous with soft skin and firm flesh.
He had grown them. Now it was time to cook.
But this was when their problems became visible: their centres had a small empty space, a hollow surrounded by brown, rotten flesh. Each were like this, healthy on the outside but hurt at the core. These couldn’t be cooked with.
He didn’t try to grow food again. He had to hold on to his own heart.
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