Little Weirds(30)

Before we all got here, there was a garden and the garden was good. I know that this is also the beginning of the Bible. The Bible is not the only book that is authorized to talk about good gardens. There are magazines about good gardens. There are TV shows. This is just another garden story.

The garden was growing and there were people in there and they were tending to the growth. It was living and they were living, and they were full of blood and bones and air and germs too, and it was fine. A cruel deity spied on everyone from a shitty patch of the sky, where it was more mud-colored rather than that celestial blue-black that helps our stars to stand out. He was a “he” and he saw all of the people as an “us” and so he was bitter and wrathful when he realized his loneliness. And he saw the mighty garden. He saw how fertile the soil was and how varied the garden-culture was, and he just twisted even tighter in his knobbed and dry identity.

He sent down a bad pod to shove itself and burrow in the garden. And while one man was harvesting more than he needed one day, he held the extra in his hands and he turned his eyes to the side toward something that whispered to him. It was the imposter pod. It had become a plant.

Think of it like this: The story is not that a woman named Eve ate an apple, but that a man bent down, his hands filled with the weight of having more than his share.

This made-up ancient man who I am putting in this useful story did not walk toward the community but instead he opened his mouth and the pod-plant slithered right in. A live vine went right into this human fellow. The vine sprouted greed and loneliness and panic in the man. The vine said, “You should have it all. It should all be you. Everyone else is trying to make you less of you and you need to stop them.”

The first man with the root of the alien vine in his body went out and opened his mouth again in front of others and the vine shot right into every single person that he spoke to and they all took the vine and the lie into themselves. The root got stronger and stronger. It became a system of grabby tendrils that made a net and everyone was in it. It controlled how they talked and walked and made love and made art. It was in the way they had their babies—and because after a while they didn’t even know that it was there, it was in the babies. And thousands and thousands of years later it was everywhere, in everything.



I open my mouth and reach an invisible hand down into the deepest part of me. I get into myself even though it is scary. If I deny that the root is in me, I will never change. I know that nobody is immaculate and so I don’t shame myself anymore—I just try to weed myself so that I don’t wither and weep. I reach down and start to pull the root.

I am pulling and it tortures me, make no mistake. When I yank the vine a bit, when I disturb the root in its little grave inside of me, it shows me all of the memories of all the times that I honored the pod like a drooling fool. Holy moly, this shitty vine grips tight to my soft pink brains and infuses my thinking. It says that I am a hypocrite and it says it in the voice of authority figures, ex-lovers, even my own mother. But I am allowed to rehabilitate and move forward, so I give myself reasonable counsel: “This is nothing but spooky stuff from a freaked-out root. This is what happens in an exorcism, babe. The bad thing wears the faces and forms of your failures and family and it says you are hurting me.” I keep an eye on my stamina and I pull slowly and consistently.

I watch the pod whisper to men that if they really pull it out, it will pull off their penises. I am just one woman pulling an ancient cultural root out of her spirit, and I am not a doctor or a shaman, but I can say, just as a citizen and an ally, that nothing will happen to your penis if you stop being a misogynist. It will still be the same penis. Maybe if you stop listening to the insidious whisper of a centuries-old pod, you will have less stress about your penis, though? Just a theory but I’d actually bet money on it.

It is strenuous and isolating to do this work within myself. I pull and the root tells me that I look ugly while I am pulling, and that nobody will want to have sex with me anymore. That is scary because I want to be nice-looking and have romances, but my job is to listen and hear how these are cruel threats and outright lies. My job is to pull. Every time one more inch is pulled out from inside of me, I feel relief. I start to look different. I look more specifically like myself. I look less like someone who hopes that a pod will accept her, and more like a flower who busted up out of the soil, in the middle of the night, fed by equal portions of sunlight and moonbeams. It actually feels more sexual than ever.

Eventually I reach so deep that I rip out the root. I dangle it in front of my face. It is a shrunken, sad root, quite small compared to my heart, dull in color and unable to pump life. I take one last good look at that poison pod and I just go ahead and fling it. I fling that pod back into that gloomy section of outer space that is for bad gods with sickly and sour spirits. I wipe my mouth off and I say out loud, This stupid old root was nothing but a cosmic clog.

I need a helpful myth to show me what came before. I need a new made-up story to deliver me into the real life that I would like to live.





Fur

I dreamed I lifted up my little breasts and lining their undersides was a soft white-and toffee-colored fur, not hair, and I thought: “Oh man, how am I going to deal with this?” and then I was sad that I couldn’t keep it.

It was my own fur, of course, but I knew that I would have to get rid of it.

My fur was so soft and clean. I felt it with my hands and it was as if I touched a dearness for and in myself as well as a sorrow that I had forgotten. And in the dream, I realized that women have simply never been told that they have soft white-and toffee-colored fur beneath their breasts.