We Are

So I started with writing prompts searched out online. I only had to read a couple to feel as if I was in a class for cranking out forgettable paperbacks that sell to tasteless housewives. None of them really represented or appealed to my style. I understand they were just meant to be provoking ideas to get my mind working but they felt two dimensional. 

"Buddhist shrine on a rainy day in urban area" - I wrote this and a few other sentences while listening to sound/music art at EMPAC. I'm choosing to build on this.

Rain in the city. Any old city. Or new one, for that matter. When we conceive of rain in our minds, I'm sure most of us associate the image and the sound with peace and tranquility. Rain is reminiscent of a kind of silence, despite the fact that it is an unceasing noise. No pauses. In fact, a slow drip with true silence between each drop is generally felt to be more distracting than the continuous pitter patter of rain. We love the monotonous droning of rain so much that we record and recreate it to help us sleep. Rain in a city, any city, does not have the same effect on our senses. Or is it just me? It's raining today. Looking out from my window, looking back at me is a sea of cloud with the tops of buildings like boats upon it. Sure, there is a dreariness about it that inspires a kind of film noir themed catharsis in the soul, but it doesn't remove me from my present reality. It doesn't take away the stress of responsibility that comes with being a self-sufficient adult in the twenty-first century. I'm late. Umbrella in hand, I take the stairs down eleven floors, out the double doors of the complex's entryway and stand under the awning. If it weren't for their own umbrellas, I would suspect the passersby to be completely unaware of the unseasonal winter downpour. No one pauses to avoid puddles or gazes up at the hazy sky between the buildings. No hands stretch from beneath parasols to catch a cold drop in the air before it hits the sidewalk. There is no smell of petrichor in the city to arouse our nostalgia or excite our primitive senses; just a lingering, heavy stench of souring garbage on every curb and corner. Perhaps this is why we rush from one indoor space to another; we simply move our bodies through the uncontrolled, unpleasant scents of the urban outdoors to the artificially sweetened ones trapped inside our concrete boxes. Sighing, I too push my umbrella open with a whoosh, shielding myself, and briskly walk into the deluge. 

Within the inverted cradle of my umbrella the falling rain is closer and louder, the sound intimate on the fabric as compared to the solid pavement beneath my lagging feet. It sounds as if the patter of each drop is a gentle caress, or a song sung just for me, although the music only possesses its magic because of the thin, protective barrier separating me from the sky. I don't know if it's the dreary city, or my existential anxiety, or my ever present, lurking depression but I suddenly feel guilty for this self-imposed isolation. My steps continue to slow until I have stopped completely. I gaze dully at my faux-leather riding boots and the water droplets that have dappled the hem of my light wool coat. When did I become so removed from the natural spaces between my apartment and my office? The rain continues its steady, persistent knocking above my head, begging to be acknowledged. 

My mind transports me back to a day, four years ago, as I walked with a soon-to-be-ex boyfriend in similarly un-winter-like weather. I wore my red rainboots with the cartoonish lobsters and held his hand while we circled the same pond we visited every day. My mother had just entered hospice care and my mind was serene for the first time in five months; finally, we could exhale that breath we had held onto for so long. Her suffering would be over. I relished the thought of such a calm, quiet ending. She was no longer screaming and crying and pulling out IVs, begging us to let her die. Her stomach was covered with loose, cotton-soft pajamas after months of having her fatty, pink, subdermal skin exposed to the world for repeated trimming of her intestines. No more nightmares, no more fear of the unknown future. I remember feeling a kind of warmth and comfort snuggled into my coat, fingers entwined with the man who would later become my abuser. That was when I got the call. Unbeknownst to me, my phone was buzzing somewhere in my ex's house, the voicemail picking up a six second message left by my father's voice. The voicemail that said "it's over". 

As I stand there reminiscing, an unusually static object among the hustle and bustle of the city, I hear a low dooong ring out softly through the curtain of rain. I don't actually hear it so much as feel it; the long vibrations of the unseen bell weaving deftly between each drop like a sorrow-seeking missile designed for my despondent disposition. My mind snaps to attention and directs my eyes slowly upward from the sidewalk to a rough stairway set into the wall at my left. It looks misplaced in this modern city of crisp ninety-degree angles and evenly poured concrete. The wide stones comprising the steps are uneven but worn smooth from untold centuries of flowing water and glisten with the morning rain. I raise my head to see these steps continue up a steep slope for some time before disappearing into a stand of trees I had never noticed before. Another dooong resonates so powerfully it seems to originate as much from within as without. I realize I have been holding my breath as I exhale shakily and suck in the cool, wet air with a deep gasp. Sparse foot traffic continues to bustle past me, their eyes glued to their phones, unaware of this imposter detour cut into our routine. Momentarily I question my next move, subconsciously knowing this decision will fully remove me from the game I had previously been playing for the last five years. Feeling a tingle of excitement scatter across the surface of my arms and into my fingertips, I carefully ascend the otherworldly staircase. My umbrella drops from my hand, forgotten, inverted to collect the rainfall into a small pool. A playing piece has left the board.

The rain comes down more heavily as I make my way upward and small waterfalls begin to form at one side of the step stones. The flowing water is clear, showing no signs of washing away built-up debris despite the apparent age of the stairway. Every ascending stone is pristine as if lovingly cared for by a geological or architectural zealot. In spite of the downpour, the next dooong reaches my ears with greater clarity and the deep tone lingers a moment longer. I urge my legs to move faster but they remain stubbornly calm and leaden, forcing me to maintain a somber pace. My mournful march continues on mechanically, accompanied by more frequent and dolorous dooongs until I have reached the summit. I turn to survey the city below me... but it appears deliriously distant to my eyes and all is veiled in a thick fog. Neither the sound of the cars nor the bright lights reach this haven, however I can still identify the tops of the tallest buildings peeking out from the hazy smog. The city resembles a dead, abandoned shell of some ancient animal resting in a post-apocalyptic grave. The image sends a chill through my body and I truly feel the cold and damp for the first time since my departure. I mourn the loss of my umbrella whose absence I somehow cannot explain. Stuffing my hands into the deep, woolen pockets of my dewy coat, I face the trees that border the past and the future. They expand outward into a dense forest, a fact inconceivable to my eyes and irreconcilable with my reason. It is impossible that such a place exists in this industrial wasteland, but I shrug off my rational objections and disappear beneath the bower before me.

The air cools as I walk on until the rain turns to snow and the tree branches reach out white gloved fingers to me in an icy welcome. On either side of the dirt path the bare, bony trees blend with the evergreens, extending endlessly, breaking up and disappearing into the fluffy curtain of flakes. A curtain closes around me as the path is swallowed up by snow, now only discernable due to the bordering forest line. I feel as though my body is a ship adrift whose only heading is the single, repeating dooong reliably ringing ahead, slicing through the deafening silence of the monochrome world. The dropping temperature turns the raindrops on my coat to beads of ice and my body convulses in shivers. It is soon too cold even for snow, but as the veil dissipates, I can see the path ahead open up and pass between two pillars. I approach them with awe, my heart beating rapidly as I recognize that they are part of a massive Japanese torii, the peaks of the horizontal beam hidden behind tree tops and snow. The traditional red lacquer has faded and chipped. Moss and lichen grow happily wherever the underlying wood is exposed, mottling the remaining shellac like a mosaic. I reach out a finger to brush the smooth surface when a bright light from ahead fills my vision. I move my hand to cover my eyes but the light is everywhere, reflected on the engulfing blanket of snow. My eyes protectively squeeze shut but the light seems to slip between the lids like icy nails on frostbitten fingers. The feeling of my flesh being wrenched from my skull incites a scream to bubble up from my chest, more from terror than pain. But just as quickly, the aggressive anomaly recedes and my lungs fall still.

The bright light was accompanied by a soft but insistent whirring. Fluorescent bulbs are on their way out in homes and schools and hospitals across the country, but there in the cold, rigid depths of the OR waiting room a dramatic standard had to be met. What heartbreaking story could be told without the ambiance of blinding (yet flickering) white lights and an irritating buzz to the key of A? "Her large intestine is ischemic and needs to be removed immediately," they told us, mere days after downgrading her from the ICU to a more chaotic, four bed room. She was whisked away in minutes, confused and half blind from past strokes, murmuring in incoherent confusion. I furiously ripped the "get well soon" cards from the wall I had decorated in the hope of fortifying our courage. How had we come to this? Only three months ago I was still arguing with her over insignificant, emotional flights of fancy. Only two months ago I had responded to her gradually worsening sickness with weariness and apathy. I had wanted her to be the mother I saw carved in stone; solid, reliable, an endless fountain of generosity and support. She couldn't even support herself physically, but I wanted sympathy for my recent breakup. Weeks passed like this in our house and as she deteriorated, so did I. I isolated myself from the situation until her condition was front and center. Until the strokes and seizures took hold. Until she was transferred to the best neurosurgeon department in the state. Even then, I was certain she was strong enough to overcome it, because she could do anything. Her body broke first. Her mind endured longer than any mind should under such conditions, which I believe led to a more spectacular break in the end. But we weren't at the end then... we were just beginning act two of three. So there we were, my father and I, waiting for five hours to find out to what extent my mother would be able to live her life after such a surgery. One would think we would be immune to the grief by now; this surgery was already preceded by countless others. What's one more life altering procedure? What difference would it make to cut away another piece of my mother? Her body had already been reduced to a fractional machine with broken, irreplaceable parts. Every time she came back from the OR it felt as if they were returning an automobile with fewer essential components. Yes...the whole crisis had summarily demoted my mother from a gregarious human being with vast social connections to a body that could barely be maintained. As I silently sat in that hard, cold chair I had time to fluctuate between catatonia and contemplation of how a hospital system efficiently chisels away a patient from a colorful individual to a catalogued fragment in a scrap yard. Time flies when your brain is traveling the astral plane or floating in a strong brew of trauma tea. The sky was dark beyond the windows when the surgeon came to us. The CAT scan had been misleading; her large intestine was okay. I tipped over into my father's lap to squeeze my eyes shut in grief-driven relief. I pressed my fists into my eyes and sobbed until I saw lights flickering behind my lids. This time... this time she was okay. Horrible, dreadful, misguided hope burned anew in our frazzled souls. I pressed my eyes harder and harder, "please make it end, make it stop, I don't want to go through this again, please..." while the fluorescents carried on their whiny chorus.

Eyes squint open as another dooong soars through the thin, frigid air and rattles my body. The vicious white light is gone, replaced by a worn wooden shrine at the end of the stone lined path, simultaneously intricate and simple. My body had slumped down to the ground, back pressed against one of the lacquered pillars. Legs push feebly against the ground independent of my consciousness making me feel like a cornered animal facing certain death. I meticulously regain control of my body, forcing the medulla oblongata into submission with the same firm patience the dog whisperer shows a feral animal. A laugh escapes at that thought, a loud bark in the powdery silence that echoes back at me from all sides sounding increasingly menacing with each reverberation. Hands cover my ears against the aggressive vibrations, teeth gritted against the pain, brain resisting the urge to shout for fear of the cacophony that would undoubtably ensue. After another minute the laugh that no longer sounds like my own diminishes to a whisper and finally dissolves, unlike my breath which seems to continue collecting in the air about me. The mist around the shrine has gotten thicker, though the change is of yet barely perceptible. This fog is now partially mine, partly of my body, as if the clearing encasing the shrine is a womb cradling a new life and my breath is the amniotic fluid. Another laugh threatens to explode out and trembling palms press to mouth to hold it inside, hesitant of releasing more breath and sound for fear of what they will contribute to this life sized snow globe. My body has calmed now. The laughter has been quelled. I tell my limbs to stand and just like that we are as one again, flesh and soul. However, it feels as though I must keep a conscious grip on both to prevent them from drifting apart. We are as one. Distinctly separate and yet carefully coordinated. We walk slowly toward the shrine, each shallow breath thickening the surrounding air seeming to restrain our progress, yet the building becomes sharper as we approach. Body pulls hungrily toward the shrine, mind pulls wistfully toward the mist. We keep them together. "We are as one", we tell them. We and them. Us. Me. I was me when first I arrived. Now I cannot distinguish myself from us. Breath comes faster, a heartbeat flutters. Disassociate. A dozen shattered pieces of us that was me. Here where we begin and end.

I sat there beside her, feeling morbidly fortunate that I had gotten there while her body was still wrapped in the warmth of life now lost. I was just as much a shell. My muscles commanded my frame but my mind was barricaded far away in a dark place. I viewed myself as if through a kinetoscope as I reached for her hand, my slow movements independent of my consciousness. Her fingers were still flexible as I clutched them and rubbed the unique prints of her fingertips with my own. The frightened child in my subconscious believed that at any moment she would squeeze my hand back. I laid my head beside her on the bed and joined the unfathomable, untraceable vortex of time. Some part of my mind remained tethered to the human condition as I vaguely recall the gradual cooling of her flesh and the moving shadows across the wall. I remember an budding of irritation that later bloomed to rage when a nurse came into the room to tell us my mother was with god now. My father would periodically walk over to her stone solid body and stroke her hair, vocalizing our sore belief that she was no longer in pain. Each repetition made the words feel more like a mantra to soothe our living suffering although the phrase was directed in apology toward her greying death mask. I don't remember removing my hand from hers. I don't remember sitting outside her room talking to my family. I felt my mind and body drifting further apart and the terror of the dramatic dissociation pushing me to ground myself. I did so with a knife. The pain reminded me that my body was mortal and alive and present and mine. I took that same knife back into my mother's room and sawed off a lock of hair. The strands were thick and wiry. I felt her head rock as I separated the keepsake from her scalp, apologizing silently for the disturbance. As another wave of tears cut down my face I squeezed her hand. Her hand. A remarkable appendage. We grasp at the comparably massive fingers of our parents with our own tiny replicas when we are infants. We ensconce our hands within those of our trusted elders as children for comfort and guidance. We interlace lithe digits with our lovers as adults in acts of passion or publicly accepted displays of affection. My mind always went back to her hands on that day.

Her hands...but were they still hers, when her consciousness had long since separated? My hands on her hands, but no longer mine when the mind that commanded them had gone elsewhere. Her, me, we, us. Did the mind and body ever truly combine to foster a single, sentient being? Us, we, me. We never existed independently of one another. We desired a shard of ourself to love. We collected a sense of self within this primordial soup, like drops of water condensing on a cool surface, coalescing in a pool. We were always as one. Until the weight of "self" separated me from the air into a form that fell heavily out of Us. Me, a droplet of falsely conceived individuality flowing defiantly away from Us in a gravitationally bound river. Me and me and more me rushing faster away from Us unaware that the faster the river moves away from one point, the faster it returns to that point. A spherical miracle the me's don't see while the Us waits patiently.

We feel that the body is cold. We feel that the body is tired. We are at the shrine, hands resting on the saisen box. It is empty, and we have nothing to give. But the shrine does not seem to seek a monetary offering. I am begging Us to be individual, to find something sharp enough to cut a path free of Us, to provide a blood meal to this damning death knell. The low dooong is soft as a caress, emanating from within Us and stroking vibrations along Us lovingly. The building is simple; an open front with the saisen box and a single back wall offering shelter from wind and rain that has never reached this moment. Trembling, We strain against Ourselves to rub exposed flesh on the splintering box, desperate to coax a bead of blood into the maw of the shrine. It is not enough; no such contribution can satiate the call. Our well of hope having been drained all those years ago, We abandon escape. We squeeze the body between the offering box and the back wall, trying to retain the sense of self with the feeling of hard matter against flesh. I try to pull myself apart from Us; a fear is gripping me that We are trying to soothe away. Me is within We, mind feebly tries to tell itself as body communicates individual sensations. Splinter in finger from the attempt at freedom, cold frost coating downy cheek hair, teeth chattering. But each sensation is like a satellite blinking its message in the vacuum of space. They belong to what We thought of as me. We know the body is separating like a shell sloughed off after molting. We look at me from within and without at once. The skin shell shivers gently. The eyes are open wide, beginning to ice over in the unnatural, deep cold. Fingers and nose blacken with frostbite; changes that should occur over hours or days happening as if fast-forwarded by VCR. The unnaturally dense vapor closes around us like a pall with the last of our breath. We release a low dooong and the vibrations sweep through Us and stir Us like a loving breeze.