Sometimes I want to wallow in my own filth as an act of grieving. That which was once on me, some dead skin flake or some crumb from a plate of dinner I made myself, is now on the floor, destined to be conveyed into a dustpan and eventually to a distant landfill. But I am not ready to say goodbye to it, so I leave it lying around, no matter how gross it is to live with one’s own crud. It is a piece of me, it was once a part of me, two days ago, back when I was a different person. I haven’t yet said goodbye to the man I was, I have not yet bid him farewell and told him how sorry I am that I no longer have room for him in my life. That is going to take some time. Therefore, the pieces of him, the particles of cheddar cheese that fell off his lunch plate the other day now lying on the floor, must remain, until I am ready. Am I to rush through the process of grief?
Ditto for the unmade bed whose blankets lie in my room like the abandoned husks of snakeskin molted off against a rock. It is true that when my bed is made and I go to lie down on it at the end of the night and I gently fold open the covers I am greeted by the spirit of sanity and organization and some subliminal message comes to me from the past, from earlier in the day when Mr. Clean-and-Spic-and-Span had the foresight to convey this comforting message of order and peace to his future self by doing the chore of making the bed. But that is not what I always want. Sometimes I want to crawl into my bed like I am going out into a dark pond, where the light is too dim to be able to see where everything is, where I bump into the flotsam of daily living like a rowboat missing its oars. Sometimes I want to be reminded of last night’s fitful sleep, which tore the covers about and pulled the shams halfway out of the pillows. I want to be reminded of the troubles my past self found in his sleep in the impress his head left on the firm pillow. “I remember you, how you hurt,” is what I now think amidst the chaos of the twisting sheets.
During the pandemic I got into the unfortunate habit of skipping showers. But was it so bad? I would walk out into the street, faintly redolent of a day’s worth of humanity, breathing the air of a planet in contraction. Frozen in the lockdown, the world was stony and historical, traced by the ghost of its erstwhile economy. To take in the neighborhood was to walk through time itself, as the quiet streets, bereft of hum and persiflage, resembled the tranquil ruins of an old civilization. To have taken a shower would seem like an insult, I thought, for the sweat and dankness on my body was the only thing left from that time. Why would I wash away the last remnants of a dead society?
My laziness and procrastination have their benefits. The microorganisms hatching eggs in my scalp may one day be my pets. The more the merrier. Why may I not be like a loamy soil, full of worms and bacteria, some fecund matter within which hungry roots latch on, shooting their leaves skyward, towards heaven? Why can’t I have the vulgarity in me, the sin and filth teeming in my skin, if only that my thoughts and my breaths, like the trees that grow from compost trying to touch the sky, might invoke the heavens? Of course I know it’s futile and that eventually I would rot. The eggs must go. But for a minute, or maybe even a day, I want to be the dirty forest floor, full of mice and mosquitos, setting the scene for the abundance of growth.
Maybe that is one value of grieving, to set the scene. I should wish to say my long goodbyes at my leisure, without heeding the calls coming from behind my shower curtain, by the Head & Shoulders and remoisturizing soap bars gathering their own bacteria on their exteriors. I should stay with my old friends, both on my body and on the glossy black Yamaha piano. The dust that grows on its lacquered finish is positively radiant when the crepuscular sun lights it up: like an image slowly appearing out of the invisible emulsion on a large sheet of 3M paper, the picture that greets me is of a long, grey unmowed lawn. I want it to get big enough that I might lie down on it and look up at the ceiling, pretending it’s the night sky.
The stories that are here, as we all gather at this festival of dirt, are inimitable and precious. And they will never come back. The stories must be told, they must be told now and seeds must be planted. The next crop is going to grow and the next new thing is going to come. These accoutrements will eventually suffer their fates, by vacuum or by shower head. In the meantime, I need to stay right here with my friends.
I get it. I'm doing my best not to borrow future grief. On days when it's hard, I clean my dog's hairbrush and leave a little pompom of fluff for the nesting birds.
Beautiful, Carlos.