Cryptozoology

Age 1: I screech when my mother leaves the room, fitful for a nipple, her arms powdery, unconditional.

Age 2: I flash teeth; she stops nursing. 

Age 3: I throw things. I can read. DOG. MAD. GO.

Age 4: I climb the bathroom shelves and cannot get down. I’m stuck, forever. My mother snaps a photo before lowering me to safety. The next day, I do it again. 

Age 5: After watching a comet of bare-chested boys jump their bikes off an exposed foundation, I dump my bike in the dirt. At the base of a towering pine, I pick gravel from the heel of my hand and swallow tears. I realize speed and lift are necessary for flight.

Age 6: My father is cold in the morning, ablaze at night. At church, I learn the concept of sin. I repeat, “Fuck you, Jesus” in my head, worrying I’ll go to hell.  I get my sister in on it, just in case. 

Age 7: On a warm day in late spring, I bend to open the garage when the first strong rays of the season hit the back of my neck and detonate a grenade of joy. I imagine a million pennies. For the rest of the day, I pop wheelies in celebration of large numbers.

Age 8: Miss Ouellette is my favorite teacher and her gray hair is a halo of kindness. I feel safe when I’m in her classroom, so I eat up everything she offers.

Age 9: I am tall, dangerous, fast. I dream of flying. I sharpen sticks, hunt creatures lurking below the surface of puddles reflecting cloudless skies.

Age 10: Retainers on my teeth. I have a crush on my 4th grade teacher even though he cares little for my loud mouth, my desire to be captain, my hand waving high with answers. I am the quarterback at recess. My mother shows my sister and me the fine art of soundlessly latching doors behind us.

Age 11: My father threatens my mother with one pistol, two bullets. At school, I get in trouble for talking too much and my seat is moved to the back of the class. From paper, I fashion a dunce cap. Perfect the smirk. 

Age 12: I am wrongly accused of cheating on a test and a giant red zero appears to the left of my name. Injustice lodges in my throat. Rage is fuel, I realize. Coldness creeps in and stays.

Age 13: Cruelty is the culture of junior high. Small homogenous groups of pubescents laugh hysterically when confronted with difference. I question what’s funny, and drop a few rungs on the social ladder. I’m called weird for the first time. It rings true, so I adopt it.

Age 14: My eyebrows are furry caterpillars. A boy asks if I can touch my elbows behind my back, and when I try, he stares at my chest laughing moronically. At home, my father interrupts my chocolate ice cream by predicting my large body will only get larger, then pulls his truck out of the driveway before the ice cream melts in the bowl. That night, I gaze at myself in the mirror and wonder if I’m gross. 

Age 15: I do crunches in the bottom bunk. Eat less. Smell better. I want clothes we can’t afford, so I steal them.

Age 16: I take off my stolen clothes for a boy who takes his stolen clothes off, too. I adore his bottom lip, his white teeth, his deltoids. Adults hate how excited we are to touch each other, so they heap shame on us. We ignore it, fumbling our way into pleasure.

Age 17: I finish my homework before the last bell, ace my tests. Chronically bored, I seduce my neighbor, a man twice my age who wears white tube socks with white hi-tops. I scramble up a ladder into his bedroom at night, slip under the sheets, mock him when he trembles. 

Age 18: I’m sick to death of my mill town. I drink Tanqueray and eat hallucinogens.  I write “Pink Floyd changed my life” on the back of a tee though I can’t name a single member of the band. 

Age 19: I am accepted into an esteemed liberal arts college. Most of the students there don’t get me or don’t notice me. With no credit card, no car, and dry cleaning ticket, I realize what makes a collar blue and what makes one pop. WASP seems an appropriate word for the sting they leave behind. 

Age 20: I fall for a man whose unsettled weather raises hairs on my arms. He’s a handsome, swirling, low-pressure system. A month into our fling, I’m introduced to his habit of discharging old trauma through violence. In the bathroom at my mother’s house, I tend wounds before slumping into the kitchen to burn a piece of toast, making a vow while slathering it with butter. A few weeks later, I board a plane for England where my new, bespectacled Liverpudlian flatmate tells me he’ll piss on my clothes if I don’t let him into my bed, so I do. 

Age 21: I’m fat, depressed, my head stuffed with John Donne. Over the phone, my sister asks probing questions and lasers through my hazy answers. When she arrives, she glares so hard at the Liverpudlian we all hear the ping of his retracting cock. When it’s time for her to leave, she takes me with her. 

Age 22: My father and his fiance are killed in a motorcycle accident. I agonize over his last moments, convinced they were shaped by regret. I request a viewing of his body. The bruises on his knuckles are visible through layers of concealer, his hair politely combed. 

Age 23: My friend, Sadie, convinces me to pack my bags and head west. We rent a house. She feeds me, shows me how to grow vegetables, and lets me borrow her car.  I commit to therapy.

Age 24: I get a job working with broken children. I get punched, kicked, and bitten. I make them breakfast, braid their hair, restrain them from hurting themselves. Most mornings, I’m up at 5:30am to ride my bike forty minutes through dull Pacific rain. It’s a crucial, minimum wage job.

Age 25: A rejection letter tells me that I will not get my MFA in writing. I have pistachio ice cream, shake a blanket out under a silver maple, and fall asleep watching quaking leaves.

Age 26: I fall in love with a Scorpio poet. He is Italian and Irish with eyes that burn. His nose is beguiling. We are glorious together, self-destructive.

Age 27: In all senses, I have no shame.

Age 28: I enter graduate school and ditch the Scorpio for a man with liquid brown eyes, like a doe. He smells good and pays for brunch. I decide this is it.

Age 29: My brain is exercised daily, as well as my body.  

Age 30: In the company of women, I cook, laugh, cry, dance, and learn. 

Age 31: After a match every Thursday night, the women’s soccer team I’ve joined gathers at an English pub to swallow beer, grub fries, and sing songs. I get engaged to the doe-eyed man, his addiction to pornography a problem I can solve.

Age 32: I have an affair with my fiance’s best friend, who is married to my friend. I’m a friend fucking a friend. One night, I’m startled from sleep by an ominous hiss: rot will soon reach the core. Two weeks later, I board a plane and fly home, slamming the door on a city that allowed me a decade of growth.

Age 33: Back in Maine, after a spiritually and financially impoverished winter, I meet a woman who smells like toasted coconut. She’s mastered the charcoal grill and howls with approval when I snarl, ripping fat from perfectly seasoned ribs. We play card games until sunrise, sleep in a backyard tiki, float the river in a dinghy. I leave her late-summer, heartbroken. I’m disappointingly straight.

Age 34: AffairMan flies across the country with a novella of reasons why we should give our relationship a go. Nine months later, we have a daughter. Infancy drains me, so I ask my stylist to give me a haircut that will make me look like David Bowie. My long hair falls to the ground.

Age 35: My heart bursts with love for my daughter but the sleepless tedium of new momhood has whittled me into a nub. I discover most new moms feel the same way, except the religious ones, who are lying, and the rich ones, who aren’t.

Age 36: Spontaneity is a raisin living in the crack of the couch. My daughter’s eyes, a mighty green river.

Age 37: A good friend, a gay Mi’kmaq man and lover of sushi, holds a fat piece of unagi between chopsticks and announces it’s time for me to journey. He offers to guide me, but I decline, fretting appropriation. He laughs at how white I’m being.  I befriend Black Water Snake, but write about her carefully, since whiteness has pillaged the language I’d like to use. 

38: On most days, I’m irritated with my husband and argue relentlessly for equity in domestic duties. A couple’s counselor advises us that it’s never good to keep count. I ignore her advice and tally my husband into submission. Good sex keeps our marriage afloat. He’s a musician, I tell my girlfriends, so he can do ten different things at once. Their reaction tells me who is having regular orgasms, and who is not. 

39. I hang art and dig flower beds. Organize my closet, scrub floors, cook from scratch, wash and dry endless dishes. The unparalleled sweetness of co-sleeping with my daughter is an easy gratitude in a world that can feel predatory and cruel. My husband and I discuss the prospect of opening our marriage. Instead, with his help, I found a nonprofit.

40. I eat magic mushrooms on my birthday and have repeating panic attacks in a bar relentlessly strung with Edison bulbs. The next morning, after a shower, I examine my body and hate nothing. I do a celebratory dance. Within seconds my daughter joins me, celebrating what she doesn’t understand, her crystalline laughter refracting through my bedroom.

41. Chaos erupts in our leaderless country when a pandemic is allowed in with little fight, slaughtering groups of people already shouldering our sins. Overnight, my role changes from devoted professional to stay-at-home mom. My husband, busier than ever, scurries away to his office after breakfast, a bunker of normalcy. Spring is long, dull as dishwater, my normal coping skills whisked downstream by a steady current of stress. Like legions of other parents, once my kid’s eyes shut for the night, I pour a stiff drink to catch a wave of dopamine. 

42. A line from Samuel Beckett makes its way to the front of my face, glowing from the page: Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. I crack books instead of beer, force myself to read the same sentence over and over, words leapfrogging until they settle. Readitating, I call it. It helps. I polish off a large stack.

43. Back to work I go. Back to school she goes. Miraculously, we’re still married. It takes a year to heal.

44. I’m bitter, but my sense of humor outpaces my bitterness. Our daughter fills the house with song and dance. Her bright eyes and pink cheeks are facts.

45. I spend an entire week arguing that anger is a primary emotion, pissed off that it’s understood as secondary. Occasionally, I let go of everything and dance ecstatically. I walk three miles every day, identifying local weeds and trees, acquainting myself with them through every season.

46. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” I come across these words and and they free me from a sticky trap. Love may not always exalt, but it should never debase. I read those words, too, and the words remove an old splinter.