We Within

Vertigo. That's the first word that pops up in my head when I sit down to define how I feel right now. In my mind's eye, I see James Stewart climbing a ladder in Hitchcock's universe. I won't fall, I know I won't fall, but the ground seems so far away. Is this the right metaphor to describe what relocating feels like? I know it is for me. Nine months ago, my partner and I moved to this town knowing we'd have to leave ten months later. Now, a month away from that end date, our world is spinning. We had a vision when we came here but the reality didn't match that vision. We thought we would find a little house with a little garden. We thought the lower costs here would help us save. We thought we'd have the peace and quiet we had been craving for so long after living in the big city for many years. What we found instead was a temporary apartment with higher costs and a lower income than we expected. We did find quiet but not as much peace as we hoped for...

I lie down and my body and the surface underneath become one, flesh and fabric intertwined. Too tired for verticality. Three weeks ago something invaded my body, something whose name I still can't recall despite having been told twice, despite having repeated it myself so I would remember, as if tasting the word would help retain it. All I know is this is not unusual. Bodies are invaded all the time. When you're alive, everyone and everything wants a piece of you. Life attracts life. Songs from another world play in my head as my body attempts to get rid of this foreign entity. It fights and fights, sending waves of sharp pain on top of a layer of dull pain. The invader travels through my body. It's strange to imagine this microscopic organism exploring the life I contain. I heard our bodies hold more bacterial cells than human cells. What does that make us? More home than human? I find beauty in that thought, our cells dancing with all these other cells. Isn't that tru...

I've been thinking a lot about a movie I saw as a child:  Powder , perhaps not a great film, but the impact it had on me was powerful. I like this description I read on Wikipedia : "[ Powder ] questions the limits of the human mind and body while also displaying society's capacity for cruelty, and raises hope that humanity will advance to a state of better understanding." The main character, Powder, is a sensitive young man who has the ability to conduct electricity, emotions and energy in general (bear with me, keep an open mind). I identified with him in the way he perceived the world and in his sensitivity but I desperately wished I had powers like him, and there was a very strong reason for that. In one of the most famous scenes from the movie, a group of men hunt a deer. During the poor animal's last living moments, Powder acts as a conductor between the deer and the man who has shot him, making the man feel in his own body the pain and terror the deer is ex...