The Daily Work of Caretaking and Witness By Lena Ziegler

​                                                                                      The Daily Work of Caretaking and Witness – Part I.
                                                                                                     After Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts


          On other Saturday nights I passed time shuffling work from one side of the desk to the other, waiting for the piles of paper to talk. I shoved plastic objects into my body, over and over and over, until I sometimes bled, until I often came, until I wanted to leave my body, or be inside of someone else’s. I fell asleep on the floor, whispered words into my fingerprints, traced them through the floorboards, wondering who can hear them, if anyone even cared to.


                                              “Feeling Real…the collected, primary sensation of aliveness. It is a sensation – a sensation that
                                                                                 spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.”

          In previous weeks he said “you make me feel so fucking alive” but when we met, he said he was dead inside. No part of him meant this to be dramatic, or provoke my feminine urge to rebirth him back into the land of the living. He just said it. The same way you say you need to pick up dry cleaning, as if anyone does that anymore. I told him that inside my body was one long, sinewy string, pulling me taut, building my posture, forcing feeling within me.
          “That’s a good way to be,” he told me. “I just can’t do that anymore.”


                                                    “The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy.”


          Sometime later he told me the story of a little girl in Iraq whose throat was blown open by shrapnel. He used a pen to dislodge the terror from her voice. Now ten years later she’s still alive, working as an interpreter. They are friends on Facebook.
           “There’s this African root that can cure me,” he said. “For $20,000 I go to Mexico or Canada and take it.”
          He said some nights when he is driving he swerves to avoid piles of leaves for fear they might explode and take the hearing from his other ear. He’s said some nights he can’t fall asleep because he still hears screaming, screaming, the sound of humanity collapsing in sand and sweat.
           I tell him to go to Canada.


                                                                                                   “Love is preferred but not required.”


          His eyes frighten me, unsteady and bloodshot, his lips twitch with the trace of a smile, and every noise I wouldn’t have heard if he had not been standing there with me makes him flinch, but he told me that he doesn’t have PTSD like the other guys do – he keeps busy, he writes, then he kisses me and before I can take a breath he pulls me into him, my face deep in his scent, and I am immobilized, my bones conforming to his as he inhales in a way he says he has not in years, and I know he can’t remember the last time he’s held someone who didn’t ask him to let go.  


                                                             “How it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on.”


          I am a childless woman, but I know what it means to grow someone inside of me, tube feed them love until their mouth foams, and they spit up blood. I have birthed my own death story which reads like this: in the last hours of life on Earth, I cut open my body, peel back the skin, and scoop out pulpy handfuls of flesh with the cup of my palms and hand them to him, the long string of my insides dangling red and ugly.


         Through his jeans, I feel him grow in my fingers, like magic or majesty, or just a dick filled with blood like the rest of him (and me); life is hard and so many other things.
         Through his jeans, I feel wetness forming in a small ring, his dick salivating, puckering its lips for me.


                                                           “Her mind – besotted [it] with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary
                                                                                    experience shared by countless others is somehow unique.”


          Isn’t it interesting how you can like somebody so much you want to find a way to fit them inside of you (?) and then go on living (?) carrying around the muscle memory of the space you made for them in your body (?) every day bridging the emptiness you were born with (?)
           Isn’t it interesting how you can like somebody and want to be encased (?) swallowed whole by the fleshy warmth of them (?) as if you are only human (?) capable of filling, filling, filling something (?)
       How many times have you asked for a blow job, when all you really wanted was someone to kneel before you and cradle your tenderness with wet-lipped longing(?)  


                                                                          Sunday comes when Saturday is still sticky in the palm of my hand.


*All italicized text in this essay is from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.





                                                                                 The Daily Work of Caretaking and Witness – Part II.


Let us begin.


             i. Semi-strangers sink slowly. In this moment we are __________.

          I recognize his eyes are hardly blinking, but the voices of the girls laughing outside in their PINK sweatpants and the boys outside with their hearts pulsing through wallet-condoms and evening ambitions mingle and carry the night air, ascend the white-washed brick of the outside wall, and filter into my living room, through us.
             In this moment we are standing.


             ii. I tell myself this story.            
             Through the windows of each room, of each house, on each street, in each neighborhood, in each town, there are strangers stranger to one another than us to each other. Through the lull of our words, I confess: I don’t know how I feel, the subtext of which: I wasn’t ready to feel.
             Of all the semi-strangers sinking or standing, I begin to think of us as the greatest pair of all.
             If you want me, then I’m yours. He says this.
             In this moment we are holding.


               iii.  On dead leaf porches.
             Fight the urge to rename this something beautiful. It’s not fucking beautiful. It’s dead leaves on porches, burning through matches, never catching fire.


            iv. I fuck to come, not to conceive.* We all conceive of something. Words like forever and always branded in the scar of their letters, smoldering.
            He told me of scars on his ribs, now covered up with drawings. He tells me the story of aching, the father he almost became, the sunshine daydream of becoming someone else. All I can think of are my lips tracing his scar tissue, hardened PINK.


                v.  Misfiring from the start.
                We are semi-strangers sinking slowly, but in this moment we are falling.
                In love(?) possibly with everything(?).
                Through our fingers, interlocked and swinging, the girls’ laughs, the boys’ voices, singing. Singing.
                But here we are.
                In this moment we are something.



*Italicized text in this essay is from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

​


Lena Ziegler is editor and co-founder of the literary journal The Hunger. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Kentucky University, and is pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Bowling Green State University. Her novel Him & Her was a finalist in Autumn House Press's 2018 Fiction Contest. She has been a finalist in GoldLine Press’s Non-fiction Chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in Yes, Poetry, The Seventh Wave, Gambling the Aisle, Red Earth Review, Miracle Monocle, Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review, and is forthcoming in The Flexible Persona and Literary Orphans.