The cat bones lay in my closet, wrapped in their plastic shell, for years.
Actually, we had never really proved the bones came from a cat; they could have been the remains of a dead squirrel. I remember picking them up out of the dirt, my long brown pigtails brushing the ground as I bent my back, squatting with my knees under my chin. The stream, our sacred river, rushed by as we went about our work, too busy bringing sustenance to the land to attend to the fallen in the battle of life. I remember sunlight, spotted between the shadows of leaves.
My father, always teaching my sister and I to love knowledge, suggested that we collect and study the pale, hard bones. How they ended up in my closet for over ten years, I'll never know. Perhaps it would have been more ceremonial to wrap them in a shroud, or to bury them with a makeshift cross (as we did to each fish that had left us for thhat big tank in the sky), but a plastic food container served them well. Their home was peppered with seashells when I unceremoniously threw them out one day, cleaning out my closet without the air of marked finality that usually accompanies cleansing rituals.
I didn't bid adieu to the clothes I tossed; nor did I linger over the sneakers that needed retiring. The toys went downstairs, to be sold or given away. The art supplies were dutifully stored in my closet; I preferred a simple pencil or charcoal and a scrap of paper anyway. But the cat bones never harmed me, and hardly took up any space. There was simply no place for death in my life anymore.
What a strange thought. The opposite of life is not death. It is nothing. Life is everything. Everything that has ever been, that is, and that will ever be. But nothing...just try to picture nothing...I see a white room with gray shadows. A void. But even this has color, has feeling, has shape. Nothing is always scarier than something. But try and "see," try and imagine nothing...I dare-
No. No more dares. No more driving home my words with biting suggestions, intimations, and my uniquely cold voice. Even thinking of it makes my mind slip back into Ice Queen mode, as some have called it. And not without reason. Coldness, cruelty, are so hard to pull away from. It's not just the power, though that gives you the strength to fight back. It's the rush, the satisfaction, until even that disappears and you don't realize how far you've gone. You call it progress, but it feels empty. Lines and gestures on a stage, pulling and pushing at the audience, but never meaning a single word.
I've spent too long living my life in third person - driving the me out of my soul, my actions, my words - to find out who I am, what I'm like. I'm not even an I, just a conglomerate of the bits and pieces of my lifelong performance that got rave reviews. What could I say that would have the most effect? What would read the best? Just how far should I narrow my eyes? Worse than a disease. And I had no antibodies. Not even a former version of myself, an innocent self, cringing inside my plasticine shell. That malleable, moldable outside and inside that I presented anew each time I met someone. What would make me irresistible?
I broke free from this seductive prison long before I threw away the cat bones. They were not even the start, the genesis of my life as a chameleon. They reminded me of what I had to build, and of what I had. Just bones: no heart, no tendons, no thoughts; disjointed, unable to stand on their own.
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