Blank Spaces and Barnacles
Artist: Morgan Herrin
I am sitting in the same cafe where I dined with her this past December, just adjacent to the same table where our conversations suddenly turned tense, and the illusion of possibility began to dissolve between us over plates of gourmet food and candlelight. The chairs are empty today, the cafe scantly occupied, a set after the production. Not just the table, but this cafe, the whole city, my hometown, a vast windy backdrop that has framed most of my stories and struggles.
There are empty spots in my phone apps where Hinge and Instagram used to occupy. Profiles fully deleted, impossible to revive, blank spaces (openings to myself?) remain.
There are holes in my belly-space, my “solar plexus”, where I am working on severing, unrooting emotional cords tied to her, to him, to them, and to that (thanks to this pwyc cord cutting workshop that I am returning to over and over as the tendrils come snaking back).
My belongings are in shambles, strewn across the entryway to the space I currently occupy, packed tightly in a basement storage unit in my old apartment building, being held by a friend, and stuffed into a suitcase in my brothers’ basement. I move from space to space, canvas to canvas. I am thinking about arriving in fullness, for now and I am existing in-between.
I am wondering how to tend to my exhausted and ill body in this time before arriving, how to share my process while honoring the process. I am wondering if I will ever arrive, and whether that is okay. I know there is so very much to alchemize, that is asking for stillness, safety, and grounded presence. I am using the tools I have in the meantime. I find the bathtubs, buy the bath salts, the candles, the teas. I find the floorspace everywhere I go, I bring my body to the floor again and again, I land once my back finds the ground. Floorspace is a container for everything to be held and released; the grief, the fatigue, the hope, the questions, occupying corners and curves of tissue. Creaking in my bones along with the floorboards as I fall into slow stretches. My body is a thicket, the internal landscape dense. Barnacles attached to bone and muscle with such devotion, scientists could study my grief and pain for its adhesive properties.
My situation is a blank canvas, the floorboards, the blank pages with cursor flashing, my hometown and its wide-open air and rugged spaciousness, the questions and inquiries into my next moves, landings, and vocations. My somatic processing is the gesture, my grief is the paint.
Empty spaces are portals, it is how I tend to this time and to myself that will inform where I go next*
*Thought/mantra adapted from this print I purchased to put up in my apartment once I land there again, where hopefully the work of grounding deeply commences).
For now, I commit to this process now, in-between. I commit to listening. I commit I commit I commit.
Something Blue
The car is hot, and my hoodie is wrong. It wasn't the wrong choice but minutes ago in the over conditioned cafe, but now it is, and the sweat is pooling. My bladder is strained, my stomach is sending hunger signals, and the usual cacophony of vague fatigue symptoms overlap each other in a tingling, fuzzy, sleepy haze. Three deep breaths later and I am slightly more present than before.
There is a blue thrift store tag on the passenger seat, and a blue Superstore shopping bag full of stones.
The tag reads $5.99, Men T-shirt, Lg.
It was a forest green cotton t-shirt, plain nothing fancy (Fruit of the Loom?) that I threw over my tank top in the parking lot at the blood lab before going in the other day. Hastily ripped off the price tag and there it lies to this day. I was a comfortable temperature in my tank top, but I couldn't bring myself to go in to such a sterile medical place with my unsupported bosom in full display, underarms fuzzy and wet. Body shame and genuine comfort can be strange to decipher between. There's nothing wrong with being more comfortable, but I must say I did take off the t-shirt right after the appointment. Perhaps comfort means different things in different settings, perhaps that’s okay?
The bag of stones has an entirely different story. These are stones of the dark perfectly smooth handheld variety. I held them in my mind even before I found them on the shore of Lake Superior earlier this spring. It feels bizarre to mention now, but I drove halfway across the country when I probably could have flown, partly because I wanted to gather stones on North Shore Lake Superior. These are very important stones, and they sit in waiting in this unassuming bag in my passenger seat, radiating summer car heat. I brought them back across the country in bursting barely-liftable luggage, and I simply can’t wait to land back in my tiny apartment, lay the stones on the windowsill and beside my bed, and then write more about these stones and what they mean to me.