If We Opened People Up, We'd Find Landscapes - Varda Said
"If we opened me up, we’d find beaches."
All week, which started for me on Saturday, I’ve been saying, it is Saturday, it is Sunday, it is Monday, today is Tuesday and tomorrow is Wednesday, because the dump is closed on Thursday and I haven’t wanted to forget that I need to pack my trash out. This morning, I woke to the sound of chainsaws and after standing in the yard, craning up, I have been unable to watch the men swaying and slicing down one of the trees in the neighbor’s yard. I go to the dump, I pull a splinter out of the bottom of my foot, I watch the bay change direction, my feet grown soft from winter.
My five days of writing, turned into mostly five days of reading, and multiple trips to the grocery store, for lentils, and an onion, carrots, and celery, coffee, garlic, then a cutting board and black pepper, and then bottles of water, shampoo, soap, trashbags. I kept forgetting to buy a razor.
I am trying I wrote to
to be less self conscious about taking photographs.One evening I work on the script late into the night finding a few details, discovering what was resting on a car’s dashboard, the name of the main character’s father, a discussion among all of the characters of what the mother wants. (Fame, of course.) I think about what it was like to be a teenager, and it was so painful, and I’m trying to imagine what that pain could look like on the screen. Scraped and sandy and desperate. The fingers on the edge of a drum.. I begin threading sentences together for the application that everyone I know and love is also threading sentences together for. Why me? Why now?
Stick to the plan. I try to tell myself when I begin to tip over into despair. You know where this story is going. A few weeks ago having laid out the scenes until almost the end, until I don’t know what’s at the end that isn’t cheesy, that isn’t the truth, that is it’s own truth. Cut to black. The end. For D.
I eat mint chip ice cream out of the carton.
Yesterday as the sun began to go down, I took a self portrait for my closest girlfriends, thinking about Francesca Woodman, my body bare and in the sunlight, and they all coo that they want a print. And I don’t recognize myself, back to the camera, feet folded under me, and I think what a shame it is that so many of us grow up hating our bodies, that for so long I found mine a nuisance, something I didn’t want to think about, or tend to, it’s femaleness something I wanted to shake but couldn’t. (Why me? Why now?) That even now, I can forget I have one, that someone leaning in across the table and remarking upon its existence surprises and unnerves me. And there is so much more I want to say about the body but there is a horse I keep driving by, brown and white spotted, tossing its mane in the sun that I wish I could photograph.
How strange it is to be in a place that has absolutely no personal history. And I wonder if this is what it is like for people who leave their hometowns. Clean, clean. Fresh fresh. And I have forgotten going back to mine 17 years ago and never thinking of leaving.
And all day long it smelled like summer.
Loved reading this. I feel like I was there.