Each spring, the tombstones of Ettenmoor Manor crown themselves in colors older than kings. Stern stone figures trail trains of creeping phlox, ancient etchings are smothered in thick vines. Blood red poppies reach through cobbled stone and soft petals bloom outwards in downy ripples, circling and circling as the air is filled with a sickly sweet perfume. If you walk amongst these tombstones in springtime, you will forget the damp grey that fills graveyards in autumn, or the aching chill that sweeps through them in the dead of winter. You will linger, heady with perfume. You will wonder when it was that you came here last, and why it was that you thought to leave. Eventually, you will decide to stay.
Anxiety twists bedsheets in its sleep, coughs up coffin nails, drowns out sounds with cotton swabs as it clutches a locked metal box to its chest. It hides daisies behind a silicone mask as it dresses for war, leaves the house without saying hello to the postman, feet shuffling in shoes tied too tight. Or anxiety is water tempted from an empty mouth, anglerfish swishing in a red tide, dried seaweed swinging on a line as beachgoers sip lemonade from plastic cups. Anxiety sunning itself on a warm rock. Anxiety digging up the roots of a dead tree. Anxiety scraping faces into the dirt, remembering names from old postcards and playbill casts from a highschool theater. Anxiety is a musician twisting piano notes into guttural objections, scattering sheet music across the pews like a firefighter on the Fourth of July. It scrapes mud from its boots with violin strings,
Woman is fuchsia falling apart in October, softly humming lullabies through an angel’s teeth. Woman is pomegranate seeds sliced into revolving stars, dissolving into marzipan, sweet honey dew hymn, silky skin pierced into a garden for plastic garnets. Woman is wind watching a sinking ship, mountainslide counting bones, child eating crushed sweet peas in a thunderstorm, pushed into rolling door, running stairway, laughing streetlamp. Woman is bleeding gums, tongue. Woman sheds feathers like raindrops, drips tattoos from her skin in inky rivulets, woman dances, woman cries, woman lies down with the lion, golden and asleep in a sunbeam, dreams.
1. There are sixteen paper cranes hanging from the ceiling, dancing with the vertigo of sunrise panic. Wait for your organs to stop falling while you count them. One, two. Sixteen is smaller than you think.
2. Leave your phone on read. Leave it face down next to the Christmas cactus and let it die next to the drying dirt. Consider water. Cacti are better alive.
3. Wash your hair with argan oil or tea tree or coconut. Wash your face blank. Cover your body with your softest sweatpants, then a blanket, then your own arms. Add a layer of soft pattering rain.
4. The curling iron will remind you of depression, so pull the old radio out of the blueberry box and listen to waves instead of wearing them. Skip the breakup songs and opt for ski resort ads. Skip car sales entirely. Dance, if you can.
The Piper cleans spittle from her pipe. Saliva, it seems, should have been grey all along, akin to dishwater and drain water and whatever the chimney heaves out. The pipe is packed in a velvet case, neat. The case is packed in a slender hand, ready.
The first time I was kissed was yellow. Not National Geographic yellow, or house-paint yellow, not even buttercup yellow really. The yellow of flames devouring themselves in a wood stove, only softer. Rising moon yellow, only wide and warm and not so far away. I remember the streetlamp and the way lamplit snow looks like dust from heaven, but the color I remember was more inside my body than out of it. Funny, how color can make dark December feel like the sun.
Sometimes, when I miss you, the wind blows through my skeleton. I think these bones must be hollow - what other explanation can I give that haunting hum? Stumbling, a child fumbling the ridges of a flute with unpracticed fingers.
I suppose anxiety is a bit like the Pied Piper, promising to cleanse my life while stealing something else. I remind myself that panic is the verb used by children with monsters under their beds and thrill-seekers plummeting on bungee cords, strapped in, but I get distracted by all the words and forget that I’m strapped in.
I’ve started collecting the color yellow. Not in a jar, just with my eyes, as if photocopied dandelions and soft butter could keep me warm.
Maybe it’s because yellow is the color of the house I learned to walk in, the only house where I’ve drawn on the walls, but I never finished that painting anyway.
If I could I would pin daisies to the windows of your bedroom, soft as you fall asleep, but chest-deep is too far for placebo sweetness, and I love you too much to lie.
You will not say goodbye to your red-speckled eyes, and it hurts my love, but I cannot promise an end to the empty nights.
Your heart cannot stop its rabbit-quick convulsions any more than your lungs can give up air, and the only spoon-fed serotonin will leave you more hollow than before, I know.
I know you need a final day, to count on, to count to, to scratch onto the floorboards with your fingernails but the best I can do is tell you that you will get better long enough to breathe.
You will get better long enough to wake up with a light chest, rested in clean sheets.
I forgot about the milkweed. I forgot the divet in the creek, forgot that I can’t describe the sound the water makes. I forgot that wind tastes like freedom.
Dead flowers look stark, look more beautiful than I’d anticipated. Raindrops cling. The leaves let go.
I spent two weeks, twelve weeks, half a year between walls. More than six feet apart, but still not an expanse, not like here, edge to edge vision, farther than I can imagine reaching.
And I forgot there was this much sky, grey, white, orange and blue. It didn’t fit in my bedroom, so I was left staring at the stagnant ceiling, on cut carpet that doesn’t grow.
This place feels naive, as if someone forgot to tell it to become paved parking lots, square boxes of (masked) people, identical to the ones on the advertisements saying, “Give up the flowers.
