In spite of having convinced myself that I’d successfully encapsulated, sealed and healed them, past wounds leak out when I don’t expect it. I don’t mind so much if they leak out when I’m alone—I’ve got that down to a science—but when they leak in public, like an unexpected period on a newly menstruating teenager’s white jeans in the middle of Science class, I rush to cover myself and steal away, ashamed.
(Is there a sweater big enough for the job?)
I read, a few years ago, that some of a fetus’s cells can cross over the placenta and remain in its mother (or pregnant father)—permanent remnants of connection and disconnection. Sometimes one fetus’s cells can even seep into the next fetus’s cells, should the mother (or father) get pregnant again.
Relationships, Break-ups, Divorces, Deaths. Are they like that? Microchimeras that remain lodged in our essence? Only to spill out into the new?
“How to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest — for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both — must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.”
– Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveler (emphasis added).
Perhaps there’s no helping it.
The non-blank-slated-ness brought us each here.
How will we write the rest?
kfw 2021
Undusted Corners 