IV.
My feet find the muddy floor of a lagoon, slick with weepy laments and salty lumps of tears that never made it past my throat. They slip through the silky murk in lugubrious sweeps and squelch in satisfaction when they come to a stop. A moment standing still and they are sunk. But Spring Cleaning is too invigorating to stay sunk. There's the delightful prospect of discovering new fossils, gumps of litter, and chucked rocks that chipped my green-glassed chest. So my feet muck onwards, and my fingers like comb teeth come down to join them.
Together they sift and feel for seashells, search for brightly colored pebbles that used to cause a lot of pain. They stir up the silt, cutting their connection to my leaky eyes with pillowy clouds, with the confusion of endless possibility. Then I taste less pain in my achy heart and the confusion creeps up to my creaky throat and runny nose like wide, gravelly reflux. Gravelly and solid because it's a conglomerate. It's so dull and slow and indistinct that it feels fixed, but it's creeping wide and spreading. I tumble forwards at a slightly left angle until a shooting pain in my toe brings me welcome relief.
I stop somersaulting. The toestub is unexpected, but it's real and shooting and well worth the discomfort. As my injured foot wiggles to feel at the offending object, I am already living the glorious, sweeping sorrow and tender throbs and twinges of the lost and neglected and forgotten and incomplete. My comb teeth plunge like salad grabbers toward the discovery; they scrape the surface but I can’t pick it up. The surface is rough like sandpaper but slippery with moss and soft stringy seaweed and I even feel a barnacle. It fits perfectly underneath my folded hands, but it's heavy. It’s downright unmovable. I sit down in front of it and try to dig it out, but it doesn't loosen, and suddenly I realize that it's the tip of an iceberg. Suddenly I realize that I won't see it. I stroke the seaweed and scratch the rough surface til I feel its grit under my fingernails. Then I stand up and leave the treasure for the Lost Boy.
As I wander the lagoon I see a fireplace poker. It's hanging out of a tree that's weeping into the swamp. I go and touch the tree. Its skin is cold and dark and wet, like the nose of the poodle whose feet touch the floor of my room. The tree is hard and dense and it doesn't feel alive the way the drowsy hot tears of the lagoon feel alive.
But I know that it's living. It's the slowest heaviest thing and it can't be lifted, it's so slow that you can't feel it when you touch it. So I feel the most when I touch it, the most empty space of all. It's so empty that I can lie down in it and stretch out my arms and my legs and my head and my hip without bumping into any feet.
It's Spring Cleaning so I grab the fireplace poker and wade through the swamp. I poke at the various litter, I skewer it on the poker like a kebab. I pick up the empty beer bottles and eroding soda cans and mossy carpets and soppy cardboard. The kite strings and gumps of decaying leaves and tangles of cut fishing lines whose sinkers snagged twigs that drag whole beds of algae. I pick them up and look at them and move into them; I move through them, I move them and make space. I turn the bottles and cans upside down and hold them as their insides pour out. I hold them the way a parent holds the head of a child who’s vomiting. I look through all the vomit for treasures, I poke through all the sand until I find an empty snail shell that’s full of sand. When I pour out the sand it’s so empty that I feel it living. I lie down in it, I recline into the snail shell and stretch out. I lose myself until I’m back in my room, and I go to bed.
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