Naomi DeMarinis
I take the color of the early March dawn, and I place it in my box. I take the smell of dirt along the sidewalk exposed by melting snow. I take the concrete, the backlit mountain, the woman talking on her phone at a picnic table in the park in the blue and black light. I take the sound of the robins. I take the sound of the train. I take my dog in the dark shadows of the dark trees, and I fold them all in.
Tansy is my favorite flower—bitter, yellow, the smell of bees blooming in the sun—I take it and the staggering yellow butterfly from three summers ago, tasting each found flower, petals reaching for her like fingers, opening—the touch of her not-tongue, touching—proboscis licking rain from the flowers’ fingers, nectar. She doesn’t seem to know where she’s going. I take her not-tongue. I take her stagger and the rain that is not rain but a metaphor for nectar. I take the fingers—or petals—waiting for the butterfly to land—or fall—and to somehow find everything she needs before she’s no longer here—in the world—needing. I’m not dying, but I’m always saying goodbye.
I should visit the nurses. When I left the last time—knowing I’d miss them—they said I could always come back and say hi. And I said I would, but it’s been months since the end of leukemia and its treatment, and I haven’t. I love them in my memory. I miss their kindness but not their presence. Jim, Caroline, Sarah, Hannah, Britney, Roxy, Julie, the Britney they call Junior, and others whose names I can’t remember but who are just as important as the ones I can. I take their gentle hands, I take their eyes meeting mine, I take their quiet when I cry—letting me cry—and I put it all in my box.
When I was about ten years old, I decided to pack up and leave—I don’t remember why, trouble with kids, a solution-less problem—and I put everything I thought I’d need into a cardboard box. I took all my socks, I took all my underwear, a few clothes, some books and stuffed animals with a plan to bungee the box onto the back of my bike and ride up into the hills above Rattlesnake Creek. I would camp under the trees. I would make a bed of duff, and I would live in the duff under the trees and drink creek water and read my books and change my socks and underwear every day. I might have packed some granola bars, thinking I would eventually find berries. Where are you going? my mother asked. Away, I said. But what I couldn’t pack—my mother—I couldn’t leave. I want to believe that memories are as much things as matter, that I can take what is un-takeable. And I try, folding in the memory of my mother and the memory of deciding to stay.
I feed sense into my body. Chocolate melting on my tongue. The smell of bread. The taste of bread. The sun on my face. The sun in my eyes. The touch of a hand through my hair. As we lay naked together in bed, a man I loved for a while said,I hope it’s okay that I don’t love you. And I wanted to say but didn’t, what are you saving yourself for? His skin on my skin seemed like the sun and was—is—part of the sun. I take his light, his warmth, warmth that cracked through the cold of ten months of treatment, running blood back into my veins like snowmelt seeping into streams. I could be angry that he pushed me away, but I don’t know how much longer I will be here, so I fold it in—not his not-love—but his hands on me, life on life.
I can’t stop imagining my death, a staggering dark not-memory made from idea and image and fear, seeded by my now-gone leukemia, its white petals like fingers, opening, waiting for me to land—or fall—a pale death grown in me without my knowledge, finding me—in the world—needing something I didn’t know I needed, the edge, a view of the end, a reason to pack my mind with small, sweet bites. I lick my lips. I taste like words. Cancer took my platelets, my red blood cells, my immune system. Dampening, extinguishing, it made me bleed, so when I think about my death, I think about blood and not enough of it. Exsanguinating, hemorrhaging, bloodletting, blood-losing, blood-spilling, blood-shedding, bleed-outing, bled dry. I am in a bed, I am on the floor, I am lying by the side of the road, and I am bleeding from my eyes, my nose, and my mouth, and I imagine the soft-slow lightening sky. Tansy, bread and chocolate, Caroline and Hannah, and butterflies and skin rush toward me then past—doppling—and the clock in the part of me that counts without counting—heart, breath—fans out and fades with the shadows, the spaces between the ticks widening across the count until there’s no counting at all, and death dawns like an opening eye—open—and my box breaks as the earth rolls, holding nothing at all.
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Naomi DeMarinis lives in Missoula, Montana. She writes of love, loss, and the quiet work of recovery and becoming.