the texture of something to hide-between

'i’m not a vessel for ghosts now, i’m a vessel for stories'

i wrote the piece below on neon yellow post-its in the middle of the night on the last day of august, this year. something wants me to type it, to post it Here.

i am referencing again my 2016 performance ‘reliquary: the body’ which you can read and watch here, which i wrote about on substack again recently. i cried listening to it, hearing my own words, watching myself, midriff exposed, all in black, red sheets, lighting a candle, holding it up, snuffing it out with my bare fingers. i brought the red sheets from the performance down from the closet in my room where they’ve been stuffed in an art-bag for maybe-years and listened to ‘gold dust woman’ by fleetwood mac a thousand times while still climbing out of sickness. stevie howling like a fucking coyote at the end; singing about that woman— the black widow, the pale shadow, the dragon.

and is it over now, do you know how?
to pick up the pieces and go home

the first line in ‘reliquary’ is i was studying for midterms in my freshman year of college when i found out i was pregnant; it was the first time i had ever mentioned it so plainly and in a public performance/writing. i wrote it in the bathtub in my ex’s house. a reflection on when it could’ve been that my body stopped being mine; i traced it back to my abortion. i wrote about childhood and fear and fearlessness and warmth and losing myself in other peoples’ bodies and the emotional violence of my parents’ relationship and the men, the men i felt my body belonged to at that time; i wrote about giving up my human body, ‘this reliquary filled with ghosts,’ and about becoming the fire instead.

this month is the month my daughter was alive 20 years ago; it was the month i found out i was pregnant, the month i became a mother, and the worst halloween-time of my life thus far as we started the abortion process.

the Night time is precious to me; i was returning and returning, when i wrote this, to that little girl i was who could never sleep. was always up feeling curious and tender and Alone.

this is for Her and all the selves coming to meet me from late summer into this early fall.

****

i wake up naked in the dark and bleeding

the opposite of what started ‘reliquary’ (7?) years ago.

it’s not like you can get rid of the ghosts but you can— i can— claim the vessel in which its all housed.

they were sacred, weren’t they? reliquaries.

i’m not a vessel for ghosts now, i’m a vessel for stories.

maybe when you claim the trauma, claim what has happened to you, it becomes a story and not just pain. not just a wound.

she didn’t have a name yet, back then— now she is a whole person. fleur, fleur sauvage, she existed, she exists, and so do i— do we.

he tells me his mother feels she let down his sister’s memory/justice. those words, memory/justice. together and side-by-side. my girl keeps sending sunflowers, keeps making herself known; we wove her back into the ecosystem, even in death— i told him, i hope i can show her son the way to the garden someday. later, later, someday.

there’s something about writing this, small, on post-its, yellow squares in this gold light. i woke in the dark naked and bleeding— touched that place between my legs; i dreamed of one of my mentors i didn’t yet have all those years ago. it’s 8 years, i amend, my counting slips, still on my fingers, blood-covered, i washed in the harsh bathroom light almost 1 in the morning. who knew you were here, now?

he asks me if i’m okay. i say i am a lil bit angry and a lil bit sad and a bit i want to curl up in a ball and not get up, a lil bit also fine— that i am going to drink tea and read poems and maybe punch something, and sleep. 3 out of 4 of those happened.

i’m writing, now though, and that always has felt like ultimately the right thing to do.

writing— poems and posts and journal entries and long long txts i send usually in the middle of the night but certainly not always— it is a marker of Being With Me and i’m allowed to off-gas the anger and disappointment that gathers in me like a dark star when you reply after 13 fucking years of this that you appreciate it, like i am a business partner or a formal email— the pen stops cold, why is this still bothering me?

my body hot.

i turn on the AC like you always need me to while you’re here, here in my apartment in my childhood home, this dream logic.

i gather the post-its, stack them more neatly, pull out a stray hair.

you can’t get this on a phone screen or computer.

i buried my phone once, in a ziploc bag in a bowl of dirt, i feel like i see ghosts moving, the slit beneath the door between my bedroom and kitchen— they’re still here, aren’t they? inside and outside of me, for so long for so long i didn’t want to be real. the first time i cried in therapy was her telling me— no, me telling me— that i couldn’t be peter pan anymore. that 29 to 30 hinge-place— but you can be real, she said. and i had no idea back then i’d get a New Name just like the childlike express but that it would be ME screaming it out to myself over the din of all this violence of collapse and heartache; we were never supposed to be have these secret windows into each others’ lives without permission. we weren’t supposed to be able to scroll that guy you had that one real pseudo-date with in your early 20s, scroll his 12-year relationship, scroll her baking business and her alternate musical ego. naked crouched on your floor at almost 1 in the morning, it’s actually unnatural, it’s what it is.

i needed a lifeline, too, you know. i needed my words to break the surface. i needed to post those pictures and write those statuses and captions. i needed to make myself real, heard in my blood naked in the dark in the middle of the night.

i’ve got to bring her back here now, all doorways and red sheets— he refused me sex in the most kind-of responsible way possible the other day while i was hinge-ing in crisis. years ago there would’ve been other beds to find myself in, other men i loved or wished i was falling for, to call. this time i sat with the pain and it took me through the entire black-golden night— the air conditioner is fast-tapping an emphatic sound— most of it crying incredulous to an aged mary oliver with a bad cold reading her own work at the 92nd street Y. this is how the angels reach you, this is how the teachers reach you, this thing that could bore a hole in your brain could also be an instrument of such whole-making; we have a toxic relationship with our primary mode of communication— can you imagine? no such thing on this scale with letter-writing, i am always letter-writing, telling you in this golden dark night now to please Hold On.

hold on for what you know New can come. not just the unforeseen collapses and heartaches but the positive, the Positive Unknown.

you didn’t know in the blazing, the baring and bearing of your pain back then you’d still be thinking of that girl, all doorways and red sheets. you became the fire instead, my girl, you did— and my, what a fantastic burn, your voraciousness leapt an entirely new (old) consciousness. your hunger to live, to learn hearts and bodies, to write, to read, to create, to make, to WRESTLE WITH, this Angel, the Angel of yourself, white-winged with the sword before you ever read that rilke poem, before you ever rebirthed into this ecosystem, before you even knew home could exist outside a man’s body and you didn’t have to burn yourself to the ground to find out.

there were always seeds, here, weren’t there? germinated in the fertile soil only fertile from the sacred desperation of your heart. sometimes it seems like i’ve stepped nowhere on this earth but in circles or backwards, but i swear to god this little yellow stack of post-its tells me otherwise.

i am almost 40 not nearly 30 and the wrestle of these nearly 10 years has given me all the precious stuff of my life.

she has a Name— fleur sauvage, fleur sauvage, and i have a name, rooted me to tree family and radiant starlight sometimes explosion, Newness, the air conditioner stops, i think i hear music, or a baby crying. sounds about right.

in these in-between spaces in the night where you don’t want to say anything, in which you let that original darkness fill the shadows and night-light. you remember, the cyclic sounds the refrigerator made, all the black shapes on the ceiling. all the stuffed animals stacked at edge of bed, all the places you went. tell me how it is you still remember them. it’s not world-building, he said, when it’s something that already exists that you can walk inside, almost 10 years later, can i feel that way about My Own Life? my hair that doesn’t grow anymore and my guts that still hurt from time to time and these wings on my ankles it took 3 hours and one tiny break to ink indelibly, how to remember i had such patience, such stamina, to know the pain would come and make it a meditation, breathing, not flinch.

i will always be scared, maybe. but there’s an ecosystem to be scared, inside of, now. and maybe all those years ago, too. all or nothing, i weave you back together, i take all these threads and bone pieces, these fractalized sacrednesses, look at what i built, no, look at what i found was Here in all these ruins? it’s Me. a container for the sacred, not only what’s Dead, but also, Alive.

i didn’t know it then— but there was a wolf who would cry over all my dismembered pieces, it’s why he showed up. it’s why the story Didn’t End, it’s why the story became Real in a sense beyond dictionary definitions of what constitutes Reality and what isn’t. this Extra-ordinary reality Is ordinary and that’s the magic all the surrealists and the alchemists knew, some flash of light moves across the upper portion of my room, it doesn’t need to be explainable, a girl becomes fire, a girl became fire, who learned what it was like to Be Burning in order to survive.

i’m Grateful and half the time i don’t know what that word means, i call myself a deathworker sometimes and i’m still afraid to die and just be woven into Nothingness, i guess, “stuck in dirt, looking up,” i consciously take a pause to expand my ribs— i have held all this, haven’t i? i have also learned somewhat impossibly against my nature’d-ly to pour out. i’m not the last vessel to exist. my vessel exists inside a vessel and someday when i pour myself out it will be my daughter showing me the way to the other side; i have to live close to these edges. there’s no way to skirt or skim around it.

maybe i’ll go back to sleep now, this black-golden light with a rainbow sheen, iridescent. Burning. it’s the shape of my wings in the wildlight. “a creature of indescribable wonder” they said, i say— hand cupping post-it, i wonder why i didn’t write when i was a little girl up in the middle of the night. all in my head. and in my body, carrying these fears and memories. so alone, Interior and Separate, though right beside.

there are crickets now i couldn’t hear when i was younger. tiny tiny ones reminding me of the kind of sounds you make only in the Night. the importance of their music, the texture of something to hide-between, the texture of Night, lamp held at doorway in the black.

the child calls again.

from the backyard, from the ethers, from the inside-space i need to Praise to keep telling her is Peopled now— there is an ecosystem now— it’s not just her and not just her and i and not just those men, their bodies, their homes, their chests—

8/31/24.

i fell asleep with the pen under my pillow.

fotos from ‘reliquary: the body’ performance by geo geller. <3