It happened. That strange sort of serendipitous coincidence thing.
I contacted Elisa Gabbert for the first time to ask about the release date of the audio version for her new book. (Her previous collection, The Unreality of Memory, is genius.) I had considered doing this many times over the last few months but ended up doing it today. We emailed a bit, and then I looked at her website again, following links that led me to a NYTimes piece where she does a close read of Auden. In it, she writes of Brueghel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, which is mentioned in the poet's Musée des Beaux Arts.
Hours later, I'm on a walk, listening to an audiobook of Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am and she writes about the same painting. I don't even care what the odds are. What I want to know is What is this?! What happened here? — And yes, I'm aware of pattern recognition and confirmation bias, but this seems beyond. Does it not? (Obviously, I need Gabbert to write about it so I can understand it.)
I am listening to the O'Farrell book, which is subtitled Seventeen Brushes With Death, because for years now I've considered a project called My Death Inches. I'll write about all the injuries I've suffered and how each inches me closer to death.
I had the idea while in Spain. I was wearing shorts and a straw hat. I sat down, crossed my left ankle over my right leg, and popped my hat onto my raised knee. The heat from my head had warmed the hat, which then warmed my knee. I wondered if that escaping heat — that transfer of energy — took some of my remaining life with it. I wrote a poem about it, and the poem made me think I should document my kidney stones and many fractures, my food poisonings and bike accidents and shower slips, the animal attacks, the overwhelming wildfires and crushing, lung-filling salt water, the broken glass, broken bones, and broken spirit.
There was the time I wouldn't stop crying as a toddler and the babysitter fed me rum to shut me up. I had to be rushed to emergency to have my two-year-old stomach pumped. Was my life shortened by this ordeal? Or the time M—— and I decided to try unfamiliar fruits each Thursday. That week was Mangosteen. I didn't know it wasn't ripe and I didn't know that unless ripe, it's all but impossible to open. The knife slipped, the serrated knife slipped, and cut the first knuckle of my left index finger to the bone. ("Bone white is very white," as Keanu Reeves says.) I should have gone to the emergency room, but: I didn't want the date to end. It wasn't even a real date. I don't think she was interested in me in that way. But I didn't want the night to end. Didn't want to say goodbye. So I held that finger under unbearably cold water as long as I could and M—— wrapped it in gauze as I grimaced and groaned. Then, we drank cheap plonk and talked for hours while the sun came up and the bandage filled with blood.
Obviously, I'm still alive. I didn't bleed out. I'm alright. You can't bleed out from a finger, no matter how deep the cut, can you? And it's pathetic, right? The whole thing — not paying attention while slicing is pathetic; neglecting the wound is pathetic; being so lonely you'd risk losing part of a digit or fainting from blood loss is pathetic.
Did that knife move me a little closer to death? Who can say? I do have a permanent lump on that knuckle. Twenty-five years later — tonight — I'm stroking it with my thumb. It has a tiny significance. What is that significance? Of what is it made? Is it misaligned bone? Severed nerve endings aching to reconnect? Or did my skin heal over and trap forever a manifestation of a memory of when I was so needing someone to love me that pain meant nothing — and, for the rest of my days, I could touch it and be back with M—— in that kitchen, both of us wanting to taste new fruit, but neither of us aware that it just wasn't time.
