Somewhere along the line the cigarette that we were passing back and forth became my finger. My finger, passing through into your mouth quickly, leaving damp—held firmly but gently in between your index and middle. I was there, I remember it, too, all of it, how you had trouble looking at me. Not even just in the eye, but looking at me in general.
Oh, Jesus. Am I ready to admit this? The afternoon I spent trailing along the Western coast of Ireland, watching the sheep and counting cobblestone borders, listening to long dead battle cries and Celtic hoots and hollers. I was thinking about the land as a body, the land as a body mirroring mine, mine mirroring my own homeland. You know, in the way that only bodies do. A different kind of rolling hill, a murkier sky, a darker shade of green. The moon that fits into the other moon. I was thinking about all of that. It didn’t make much sense then. It’s worse to understand it in retrospect. It would be harder now, to feel the biting wind and scrape my eyes on the craggy cliffsides. After feeling, well. After, well. Well, the feeling of—well, after I—well. I have to brace both arms on the metal countertop and count backwards from ten. How does all of that fit inside someone? Better yet, how does it seep out gracefully? I’d never smelled freedom like that. How did you make it graceful? I don’t know how it works. But it does. And when you see it, it’s hard to go back.
I am in here—with the freezer door locked from inside, it was an ‘accident’ they’re trying diligently to fix—my head is in between my knees with my arms wrapped around myself, and I can’t stop the feeling of the wind whipping my hair all around. There’s so much saliva in my mouth, swallowed rhythmically, involuntarily, and I wince at the slightly carbonated tickle behind my nose of water that will simmer for a minute and go back into my ducts. I can’t stop the thinking bit, is the problem. Like a child running circles around the sprinkler, making itself sick with exhaustion. It’s like seventy percent of me isn’t even here most of the time, it’s just trapped in that transcendent place where the mind lives. There should be a mind-body dualism, I thought. Thanks for nothing, Descartes—it’s now six straight hours in a row that I’m just to repeat the mantra stop thinking until it becomes meaningless lexical sludge, until I become a writhing bug on the floor of the freezer next to a half eaten box of year-old popsicles that we don’t even sell. It’s hard to feel like you belong in the world, fundamentally, when there seems to be a loud part of you that’s much too wild for it. I need the paper bag, the one somewhere in my room, I need someone to breathe all the air back into me. It was CPR, kind of. I have the marks on my chest where the defibrillator stuck its wires. I miss the split second where I understood everything in its entirety, and everything in the world was good and worth it and not scary, the second when the switch went on and the zap thrummed me all the way alive. First in my mouth it was metal, then it was fuzzy, then it was dirt—the wet kind, soil, and moss, and I knew where exactly in the world I had just taken a bite out of. The least important part of any of this was how painful it was. My threshold is still very high, and the thing about pain, at least the blinding kind—is how the body immediately forgets what it felt like. It just doesn’t matter all that much, how my chest kind of—I guess, peeled back like a can being opened. I shut it afterwards anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
I jolt awake (I feel like I’m always jolting awake in these) and my lungs are completely collapsed, and it takes until I get enough oxygen back into my brain (this usually takes me sitting up and leaning over) that the pain—not exactly pain in the typical, medical delegation, but in a very specific sensory way—the strange agony that comes from, say, a dry socket in the jaw, or a sinus infection all the way up your nose into your brain, almost a burning numbness, or a very cold pressure, the feeling that you’re split wide open and only air remains—this feeling returns, or perhaps only the memory of it. Regardless, there’s the ghost of a moment right before, when I’m wide awake and adrenalined up and about to be re-traumatized, where I taste the dirt, I feel the wind, and I see all of our rolling hills in their different colors, beating against each other.
~
Sam Backlund-Clapp is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in Notch Magazine, Pacific Review, and Bending Genres Journal, among others. She is presently, and always, in search of Las Vegas and precocious realism.