Trembling With Fear 01/30/2022

Your Home is Where My Heart is by Caitlin Fortier

There is a woman eating breakfast beneath the place where my heart used to be. It has become challenging to keep a sense of where I begin and where the rest ends, but I always remember where my heart is. She spreads butter on her toast and swipes idly at the screen of her phone. I wonder what she would think if someone told her that she lives inside a frame of my much-altered self. I wonder if she knows she sleeps on top of my disassembled and rearranged body, a body that is dead, and yet I cannot leave.

I did try to die. I want to clarify that I am not lingering here on purpose, not foolishly clinging to a life that no longer is. At first, I thought it was merely an oversight and that any day Thanatos or Hermes psychopompos would walk through the front door and cut me loose from my body. Swollen and distorted. Grown hard. Sturdy. Expensive, probably. Imported wood brought from the old country a century ago, brought across waters I never thought I would cross. Maybe Death came to visit me but went to where She had rooted me into the earth instead of where I was taken, a simple case of mistaken address.

Sometimes, I try to appreciate it. I try to consider it a compliment that I was this valuable, this useful, this trustworthy that someone decided to build their home of me and raise their children here. I believe the current resident is the third generation to reside within what remains of my body. Mostly, it just feels like a violation worse than that which my transformation was saving me from. 

There is no way to describe the sensation of growing beyond the dimensions you possibly could have had in your former life, of melting into the cycle of the seasons, the ebb and flow of the green, of finally letting your consciousness fade until you thought you could finally rest. Even a not-quite-mortal mind was never meant to be so unmoored from time, but the cycles of nature create a rhythm, a substitute heartbeat. I got used to being eternal and dreaming and part of something else that was alive and greater than myself. I hardly noticed when my hair was taken to crown champions and generals or when voices sang at triumphs, accompanied by lyres of laurel wood.

And then, suddenly, I was cut down at the level where my thighs used to be. Bark-stripped, split, planed and smoothed. Rearranged and put back together again in a configuration that no sane creator would ever inflict upon a living thing, held together with spikes of iron. My body is a phantom limb, and it bleeds forever in my mind, pierced and broken and never healing. Maybe that is what binds me here. Perhaps I have iron nails pinning down my soul. I don’t know. No one ever explained the rules to me. 

In the stories she watches, the flickering back-lit ghosts in the box, the spirits and creatures and gods and monsters always seem to know the laws that govern them. There are always forces that bind them to the material world and things that will end them. Perhaps if I knew, I could understand how to end myself. Sometimes I pray for help, though I don’t think the gods can hear me anymore. I try not to let myself believe they might be dead now. That probably seems strange, that I should mourn those whose appetites and whims have put me here, but I can’t think She meant for this to happen. I have to believe this was intended as a blessing, as protection. The stories all run together in the disassembled and re-distributed architecture of my mind. Still, I have to believe. She would not forsake me on purpose, the goddess who answered my prayers once.

I was young once and of a shape the woman now lying asleep would perhaps recognize. Sometimes I dream—I think all souls must dream or else go mad—and in my dreams, I am running, still, on legs long and strong and sun-bronzed. There are sweet dreams of racing barefoot over soft mosses and bathing in cool rivers. With sisters whose faces I no longer remember, I chase the deer and live by what the forest provides. What She provides. These are dreams of sisterhood, of companionship, even of love. 

There are also other dreams. In those dreams, I am also running, but here I am the quarry pursued. His face is beautiful and terrible, too radiant to look upon directly. I hate him. I hated him even before he caught me, before I was brought down, conquered by the work of swift flight. Always, the dream ends with him standing over me, the light of him blinding, with a smile that belies the violence it portends. On rare occasions, though, like this night, there are also her dreams. 

I do not understand the things and people and words the woman who lives within me dreams of, but at least He is never there. She sees me now, and I wonder what she must make of me, this wild young woman with leaves caught in her hair and eyes that have watched empires rise and fall and rise again, taking her by the hand and leading her through ancient woods. I hold her in the shade of laurel trees, and for a few fleeting moments, I am whole again. It will not last. Tomorrow I will wake up, be trapped and in pain, and she will not see me. But at this moment, in this dream-place between worlds, she knows me. My gods are dead, and my body is not my own, but my soul runs free in dreams.