Rosebud Lungs
Such an enveloping feeling of love I feel has washed over me . . . All whilst fearing for my fucking life: suddenly I had panicked at work and swanned out of the building for a smoke. I felt better after — but barely. The lead up to this I felt like I was dying (of boredom). So much psychic damage had been occurring lately that I was even visited by the president in my dreams and had gotten fired by him, personally. I looked out at the window and saw a heron flying overhead in the parking lot, seemingly low enough to have grazed its talons on the roof of my car. The internet company had terminated our service all of last week but just this afternoon had turned it back on. I checked my secret teapot and was floored when I had received a correspondence from my past life:
Ana Teresa Barboza:Bordado Y Transfer Sobre Tela(2008)
“I don’t know if you remember me, but I regret saying that I wanted to kill you when what I meant was that really I was afraid of myself. You are still someone that I know well like I used too. It is a cruel sensation remembering that I am human and that I am prone to accidents of heart. I pray that you find peace.”
Remember you? I thought. You live in my heart! Being contacted by a past life had been so jarring that I was thrown into a frenzy; I had no other choice upon reading my secret teapot than to leave the building, and this time for good. I made my way towards the bay nearby where a channel of water runs towards. It was a moonlit afternoon and the sun was being eaten. I was living in such an inspiration desert that I had begun latching onto even the most remote pieces of excitement that I was able. Truthfully, I should have taken advantage of my youth when I had had the chance, right then and there! — yet instead I watched it slip through the fucking cracks and have only begun making up for it now. It seemingly had always taken a breakdown for me in order to achieve a breakthrough. It’s just like earlier at the latte bar when the clerk was telling me that she had gotten a phone call from a woman who said that she just fucked her husband in a cornfield and then hung up. Sure enough, 45 minutes later she says that her husband arrives home with mud all over his knees . . .
To say that I had been existing in the doldrums would be an understatement — and between you and me, it’s felt this way ever since the quarantine. Aurelias thought that he was Bing Crosby and that every winter there would be a White Christmas, but when I saw the snowfall, it reminded me more of The Shining, where it was I who had paced amongst his mansion trying to outlast the blizzard from bed, to desk, from bed, to desk, from bed, to desk, largely alone and surrounded by ghouls and invisible gardeners amongst ballrooms long after blitz, slowly seeping into the galaxy and sinking lower, wasting my strength in aimless blows against the universe all whilst allowing my etheric double circling above to have my failures for me, crumbling under the unbearable lightness from the ground that I stood on and up to my lash line where the stone meets the water and gazing into the channel, suddenly I see the heron from before soaring over yonder and my entire life as a single flash glimmering past along with it. No light lay drenching, yet I remained deeply aware that nature was the only knowledge there was left; I thought of the twilight. They say it’s the only time when our world intersects with theirs . . . The only time we can feel the lingering regrets of spirits who have left our world . . .
I needed to contact my past self; I simply had no means of doing so. I tried contacting my beginner’s mind through meditation every evening to no avail. Even my secret teapot had become bottomless, and abyss-like. It was as if I had never even existed. And to think: all I had to do was take one good look in the mirror! I had become ensnared by a delirium so tremendous, that I began feeling like I was being murdered. Years went on like this . . . I stood absolutely no chance at growing older. Already I’ve come to terms with this but my future self is another story: I am now lost in nostalgia’s palms swirling around dearly and nearly in what probably will be the last stress-free years of my life, now that I think about it. The way I would once lay in the grass laughing and singing and yearning had paled in comparison to even the happiest days of my life at present. Today, one’s “adult” sensibilities simply do not allow for such pleasures: one must imagine themselves rubbing their face into the grass and making angels in the earth for the fear of looking foolish or insane. One must "go shopping” for what feels like is for ghosts.
For months after, I began taking walks back in the old neighborhood in order to pay my respects to the auspicious places of where I had once lived in hopes that retracing the stone tape would act as a lightning rod, and that deliverance would strike. When I had arrived in front of my old apartment, I ran into Mrs. Duckler (who was always an earful), who said something along the lines of: “To be sure to stay happy and healthy! Oh, I’m just out here waiting for my husband. We refuse to take the bus, what are you crazy? And we live in Rogers Park, for chrissakes! Everyday I order him an uber and I walk him into the foyer and we wait together like I’m taking a kindergartener to school, though I don’t know anything about that since I never had any children, and when he comes home and he is late he says to me, “Mommy, I’m so sorry I’m late!” and I say ,’Oh shut up, I made dinner for you so that’s the end of that!’” The light in the foyer began strobing which I took as a sign of perfect beauty and a link to the inextricable; I felt, at last, like I was onto something.
The next day while I was at Aurelius’ theatre, I began writing this piece in order to further my communion with my past self. Shortly after, my momentum came to a sudden halt as I was greeted by a tall Englishman who had told me that he was here to repossess his company’s machinery that we had wrongfully assumed. He proceeded to show me a work order in which he was to begin dismantling our commercial kitchen for nonpayment, when a squadron of crawfish appeared carrying away our refrigerators, dishwashers, and various other rectangles of steel out from the commissary and loading them into their giant trucks parked out front. When I had phoned Aurelius, he had confessed to me that his finances had simply gotten the better of him. I felt an immense guilt and thought it for the best that I throw away and trash this story altogether. After all, my paychecks from writing were nothing short of invisible — yet I continued admitting these meaningless publications into the world by the strength of my personality and for myself alone.
When I had arrived back at home that day, I looked through a box of what felt like prehistory: my old watercolors and sketchbooks and piles of pen and ink drawings and poems and collages and so on and so forth. I recognized a recurring sigil motif within the stack that jumped out at me immediately — that and the ever-present deployment of linework that was either inebriated and curvaceous or meticulous and regal whenever the occasion called for. I had almost forgotten, that on the back of every finished piece, I would sign my name and write about two or three sentences about the “meaning” of the work. All of my art passed through a filter (in my mind) which imbued the end result with a mystical quality, as I saw meaning, much to my detriment, in all things. I remember vividly when I had copied this passage from Henry Miller onto one page in particular: “Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it.”
I laid onto the floor and breathed, encircled amongst my many creations while repeating this mantra over and over again until I eventually disappeared. Suddenly, I became awash with one of my earliest memories: I had stapled and taped together several sheets of paper and cut them out into the shape of a person, as a life-sized self portrait. It was my first time being home alone and I remember doing this because I was afraid to be by myself. I paraded through the halls proudly carrying my picture and chomping away carelessly on a cupful of ice (which I happened to enjoy at the time) when one of the crescent cubes had lodged itself inside of my throat causing me to collapse along with my self portrait, only for the ice to be forced out once I had walloped onto the floor.
My first thought in that moment was that I had risen from the dead. Though today, I can see beyond that: I had been given self actualization, et alia, a purpose. Art wasn’t dead as long as I had something to say about it. I had every reason to believe this and my secret teapot to prove it. Had it not been for my etheric double, ankling overhead, who knows what would have come of me. When I awoke from my vision I grabbed one of the ancient pages and decided to write back:
“I know you, but you don’t know me — but if I saw you today, it would be nice to catch up. You have always been a dear friend as far as I’m concerned. I, too, have committed a multitude of sins that no rain can wash away. I wish to absolve yours . . .”
I am no saint: even I must admit that I can detect my soul slowly filling up with a wrought-iron, however imperceptibly . . . When all it is I ever wanted was for breakfast to last as long as possible. One day, I fear that my lungs will lose their country completely (like yours) and I will have no other choice than to allow them to fill up with water and just be done with it. I know that despite all of this, the one thing I have learned is that I have always stayed true to myself through hell or high-water. Never have I faltered, though I have even been cast away because of this. Even so, I am an upholder of scorching the earth when necessary: I wholeheartedly believed in destruction whenever it allowed for the creation of something new. If one does not kill the past, eventually it will come to kill him. It is only today, that I possess the mental dexterity to accomplish what I had envisioned in my minds eye all those years ago that my naïveté made impossible to actualize . . . My spirit has been quickened by an evolution long forgotten and unbeknownst to me. I came to realize that really I was one incongruous organism, from the day which I was born from tonight until tomorrow, the only thing separating me from the Eternal Present were decades of sleeps leaving me endlessly refreshed until forever was over.