Someone told me that if I’m going to write about fishing, I need to fish. And if my hands freeze around the metal? If the water seeps over the top of my waders? My comfort depends on my never picking up a rod and reel. All that to say: I have never seen my friend’s grave. 

Dreamsick 

I dream bright hot and itchy. If I don’t take my medication I feel drunk and flop from one side to the other, sitting up in frustration when any haze I fall into twitches away. I close my eyes to rapid patterns and star bursts and open them to stare at my ceiling and think feverish homesick thoughts. When I take my pills I know my dreams will stain the inside of my eyes, sticking the lids together. These dreams underpin my day until the moment I remember I am awake. Then they are gone and I am left sorting memories. Did you die? Did I? Here in the field the seeds and grains are difficult to see between the grass blades poking through the soil and lowering sun. My legs are red and creased from kneeling and there are no ants or birds or mice to help me see the difference between wheat and bulgur and lentil and poppy. Perhaps I am just piling dirt. 

The Littoral Zone 

A couple months ago my mother and I had to dig up my grandmother's grave. I looked away from her face. My mother didn’t: her eye is gone, her skin is gone, and her mouth is a big hole. I said: Okay. My mother: it doesn’t bother me. I looked out at the ocean licking up the shore towards the graves. I said: I know you want to be buried here, but when the waters rise bloated with glacier melt the caskets and stones will be lost and I won’t see you anymore like that time in the grocery store when I barely came up to your hip and you disappeared around a corner. My mother: I know. I said: and I don’t want to dig you up and look at you but if you ask me to I will, so please don’t ask me. 

Sôma and Sêma 

My Mother used to bring me to play in the cemetery near my home. She said I would talk to and hug the headstones. They’re rough and leave a grit on your cheek when you press against them for too long. Now I sit and stare down through the layers of sediment and the concrete vault that prevents the ground from sinking. People think these things are for health, like the corpse can reach through the dirt and infect them if not properly hidden and sealed. Really it’s so the cemetery association can mow it easier. I asked my brother: what do you think our grandfather’s face looks like now. He said: I don’t know. Obviously. We’re not really supposed to know. In Greek folklore, a vampire or vrykolakas is described as bloated, gums pulled back, reeking. We’re not supposed to see that part. I smelled it once, steaming up through the holes in the floor. My friend said: I think it’s roofing chemicals. But we knew it wasn’t. That night I stared awake on the couch and felt insomnia crusting in my tear ducts while I intermittently sprayed myself in perfume. The cardamom and black tea helped me drift until the olfactory grace period wore off and I saw the man down below, the flies clustered at his mouth and eyes and the damp, soiled patches on his front and back, climbing up through the floorboards into my nose. What does eight years smell like? 

At the Table 

Now for another. My mother talks to me at the table where everyone eats and eats. They crack open shells and lick their fingers. I can’t eat even though I’m hungry. At summer camp I would sit lonely and try to imagine pushing pasta through the tight clench of my throat. After the funeral, I made noodles for my Mother and watched as she let them congeal into a spaghetti brick that dulled as the butter dried. A cockroach skitters on the old dining room table, flicks its wings and twitches its antennae to tap my Grandmother’s hand. She springs up: it hurts, I can’t grab it, it hurts. I said: I can touch it, it can’t hurt me. I’m not dead yet though I’ve crawled into my mother’s grave to wait. I wake up crying and stumble down the hall to my parents’ room, marionetted by the seven-year-old who lives under my skin and knows it’s safest in the crook of my mother’s neck. 

Lacuna

If she was alive I wouldn’t talk to her brother but she’s dead so I do. I take these phone calls and texts and I leave them scattered to step on like a bit of glass. I am happy for his daughter’s name and that he lives somewhere warm, even if he does not want to see me in his neighborhood. Even if when I walked through the door his mother could not stop screaming. I consider what it is to be a bruise someone else presses. 

Leviticus 13:1-44 

My friend tells me I died. I asked how and he wouldn’t tell me. He said: It was just so sad. So sad. People say that when they don’t know how to say it. I do not understand what he means. When my friend died I wasn’t sad I was sick. I knew I was sick because no one knew how to talk to or look at me. I kept my hands to myself to not infect anyone. I kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t have to see them plug their ears at my grief-stricken glossolalia. I don’t remember my brother’s bar mitzvah but I remember sitting in the pew and reading about leprosy. Every high holiday, every service, I would sit and read about skin and contagion. It’s not really leprosy—it’s tzaraat. The skin, the hair, the home, all scaling and impure. I pick at my own, the chicken skin of my arms riddled with little scabs, my scalp bleeds, my throat locks and I can’t eat, my room dirties and I watch where the dust and hair collects around the furniture legs. Her dad asked me what she thought of him and I couldn’t remember anything. I said: she loves you a lot. 

I Braided Your Hair 

I’m going to her grave tomorrow. Or the next day. I don’t know. Maybe even today. At the time I’m writing this, her birthday was a few days ago. My shoulder snaps when I move it. I have not lived at home in seven years. I no longer consider killing myself. The grass has grown over deep. There are robins and ants and a huge tom turkey. I don’t know where her head is when I lay down over her. The base of the headstone is littered with fallen rocks, shells, bits of coral. I stroke the grass and think of her hair—curlier and darker than mine. Neither of us knows what the other looks like anymore.