#9
On Christmas and 'The Year of Magical Thinking'
I danced myself right out the womb
I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon?
I danced myself right out the womb
O, dear darling baby, distantly I still see past January: blistering, wintery, wistful.
Festive processions now wade through as I tenderly glide out onto the ice. Ruby red candy apple in hand, hard as stone, lips wet and sticky-sweet, with broken teeth I find myself reflecting upon all that has transpired since that one-true-fated frightful happening. Somehow, without any forewarning at all, dear reader, after all mine sickly strife and forged healing, I am back to the beginning: that white-hot wet heavy center of it all. As lovers twirl and circle dancerly, I falter in the rink. Blades of silver collide and apple falling from mine bloodied palm, sugared shards lay strewn atop the frost.
I’ve got a bowling ball in my stomach, babe, bulbous and swelling and fatal. I salivate mercury.
Anaïs Nin as Astarte in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) dir. Kenneth Anger.
Before thine streets were lined with garlands of gold and bushels of holly, days and nights ago my love, I entered through a wooden door to find The Year of Magical Thinking waiting for me. I looked to that book, babe, with both dread and longing as it lay atop my tea-stained nightstand. From its tender pages emanated a ringing sound that I felt fearful of. In throes of impassioned grief, Didion speaks of spending the evening with her husband, John, building the fire and preparing, lovingly, dinner-for-two. For a delicate moment Didion looks away, gaze downturned to her plate. She writes: ‘John was talking, then he wasn’t.’
“Don’t do that” she chides to his now-body, slumped forward at the dinner table.
A momentary panic forms: acid-churning and hard to swallow. A gut punch I deign to chase, rationalisation of the happening, and then, the horror of its permanence. After the ambulance, the hospital, the mortuary - pen to paper beneath clinical light - Didion returns home alone to find, resting softly atop an armchair, her husband’s house coat, just as he’d left it. Thrust upon her with jarring immediacy are his belongings, in an unmarked plastic bag: ‘…a pair of corduroy pants, a wool shirt, a belt…there was blood on the shirt.’
A grand upheaval transpires when a person dies, a ritual of sorts whereby their effects, the summation of ones’ lifetime, are organised into simple categories, ‘keep’, ‘bin’, ‘donate’. Didion performs this ritual alone, remarking upon the strangeness of it all. She keeps, above all else, his shoes – in case of his sudden return. This illogic, this lack of reason, dear reader, sprouts thine ‘magical thinking’. A perpetual force to will him back to life. What if, dear reader, I dream it to be true, too? If I were to will it into the world, walk through the door with open arms, pleading, could that be a just prayer?
Much like Didion, I still anticipate the return of that one, wavering form. The whirring murmur of an engine outside comes, quietly, to a stop, as warm threads of red cascade through frosted glass. The rattling, plastic handle of the porch door is pulled down and pushed through within enough force to prompt a dull reverberation throughout the house. I lean forwarde with bated breath, eyes and ears flickering to the squelch and scrape and thud of heavy work boots. Then I feel, dear reader, beyond any semblance of truth, that I had dreamt the Badness.
I feel and know relief, and then, I see my Brother before me.
Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming.
The Moon cycles briskly, babe, as I feel an earnest desire to dip my toes into that black lagoon. To feel the horror with bright, hot tears, to be pulled right back by unknown forces, to be there once more, mud between my toes. Lids resting, mouth apart, cold hands gently threaded over dust and bone. A dagger to the heart, blood-bursting. O, those lies I have told – of growing, of moving on and through as ivy pierces mortar. I cannot grow nor tread water, love, for now I look down as I write and see an iron ball at my feet.
That hole in mine heart, that palpable loss, grief, tripe, dear reader, has now it seems come full circle, and I carry it. I carry it.
All falls before me as I turn to Dorothy trembling within the castle of the Wicked Witch. Fresh tears glisten and roll down Technicolor cheeks, framed by satin ringlets, as Dorothy wails: “I’m frightened, Auntie Em, I’m frightened!” The apparition she envisions, awash in a gloss of Kansas sepia, cannot see Dorothy beyond her crystal veneer. Dorothy clutches and clambers at thine orb in desperation, falling through the dreamhellscape of Oz and pining for the familiar. What I would give for a mirror, babe, a body of water, a crystal ball, a circle of hands held around oak!
Give me magick! Allow me to self-immolate!
I danced myself into the tomb
I danced myself into the tomb
Is it strange to dance so soon?
I danced myself into the tomb