There’s a certain laugh I never laughed again that is stuck in the broken doorbell at the side entrance of a restaurant on Hemenway Street. It sounds like crackle-buzz-dropped signal across fraying electric cables strung between now and seven years ago, like the punchline of a joke I heard that year, which I will only repeat if you want me to, like I’ve been pressing the buzzer for two hours but I’m really standing in an alley with my forehead and hands up against a brick wall because the restaurant closed for good and none of the students walking by with horns in black cases taller than them have ever heard of it and cannot tell me where it went.
Planted in the window box of the building with the white facade down the street is a spray of flowers pink like the inside of a bloody mouth, but on Friday evenings the flowers wither and waft away, leaving room in the bed for all the things I should and shouldn’t have done or be doing or do to sprout and gnarl together, stubborn roots twisting long and deep until they bear deceptively heavy fruit [it is always hollow], bitter and unsatisfying, and did you know the reward for obedience and conscientiousness is more and more labor and less and less passion and exhilaration by way of mistake-making until you die upright and steadfast and alone in the tradition of a church you have not entered in years?
Six of my left ribs and two from my right have been extracted, repacked, and distributed in the following locations:
the railing closest to the Mermoz side of the foot bridge across the VDN that I was always too late or too embarrassed to use for fear of appearing like a tourist or a stranger;
the lone three-legged iron chair sitting in the middle of a football park in Nyaniba Estates, one more seasonal storm away from losing the last flecks of green clinging to its back;
the copper wire beneath the yellow strip that opens the back door of the Silver Line SL5, specifically when you press and press and it doesn’t sound so that you have now missed the Downton Crossing stop and are now on another loop further away from your self than you have ever been;
the steel tip of the cane belonging to the green-suited man who unlocks the empty room for the art show and laughs when I ask how long until the end as if we didn’t all start dying as soon as the clock struck midnight and we were born;
the spring in the cigarette lighter you and I pass back and forth between each other as you and I stand at a bus stop in the January of winter and did you notice the you and I are shifting and slippery, a safe, convenient device for confusing my selves, the reader, and people I should not love [it is too late], for refusing to commit to any of these personas and making it impossible to tell who the message is really for [it is for you];
the ring holding the key fob to an apartment building with carpet rubbed smooth and bald in some places in the lobby and an empty pool with cracked tile that has not seen use since the 80s;
the cap on a bottle of wine that rolled away from the rest of the offering at the crossroads and all the way down Esplanade Ave until it fell into the water and sank;
the gold leaf in the manicure glossing at the end of fingers on a/my/your hand that I should not hold and bring to the cradle that is the point where my neck turns into my chest [it is too late].
Between the lines of code that make it so that the cursor flashes just so and the words appear neatly rowed, as difficult as their meaning may be to decipher, there is evidence of my undoing
<<set $shatter to true>> How am I still functioning when I have dissected every aspect of my physical and spiritual selves and scattered the remnants down the length of the scroll bar and across any winding road I’ve ever walked? How am I still whole? [I am not, but almost no one is, especially those who believe they are. None of it is pathological, unless it is].
I have picked at my selves and called it accountable and picked at my selves and called it self-regard and picked at my selves and called it grown. I have crouched and burrowed and hidden in the hollow where those eight missing ribs once sat and called it introspection, as if I am nothing more than a collection of mementos that falsely prove I will never amount to more than the sorry sum of these parts that I am or am not. It is enough. Recovery must begin as soon as I can bear it or else I run the risk of leaving more and more smudges of my face on collars and shards of my bones on bus seats and hairs from my eyelashes everywhere until there is and I am nothing [left]. The long, winding beach road past Labadi or any other long, winding road is not my spine; it is a road at the end of which there is a house with wooden shutters and a deep clay-floored veranda or a loft with a ceiling of exposed beams or a low house where the life I am living spills out of French windows into a garden as alive as my pleasure and the work—pages to write, rice to boil, meat to marinade, clothes to wash, wounds to tend—is done graciously and with care if not always well [there is always tomorrow] and my hair is at its absolute fluffiest, perfect for someone—me/you/blank—to sink into with ready hands.
***
zoegadegbeku.com 
1 Comment