A Manual for How to Love Us
ELECTRICITY
Before there was light, there was a surge that swallowed what was formerly known to be light. The People stumbled around their houses, tapping on the glass, not sure how to lure the glow back into the cages they made to hold it. It was a bounty that had always just been there, like sudden bursts of laughter behind locked doors, or water pouring from a faucet. Able to see the guts of lightbulbs for the first time, fashioned from friction and simple wire, The People grew panicked. They had lived so long in illumination they’d never considered the properties of darkness.
At first, they felt the absence physically, like every yellow pigment in their bodies had been licked away, leaving shapeless cavities, unexplored territories of meat and vein and wishing. They learned for the first time to migrate by blind noise, to recognize the shapelessness of their own shadows. They touched without speaking, came to know friends by the unique funneling of breath through nostrils, and lovers by the particular lack they were nursing. They mimed fingers the shape of candles, made lanterns of their skin’s hollows. They sometimes took comfort in the blanket of night and allowed themselves to be lonely, knowing that in the dark, there is always someone you can’t see watching. They sometimes did not try their best to be kind to one another.
Sometimes they tried very hard, and when it seemed they had succeeded, The People might, for a moment, hallucinate a spark, might imagine the lamplit flicker of a face come into view. They realized if they visualized the light clearly enough, it could be so again: the wires of their bulbs electrified, the neon of a supermarket’s smile, the orange glow of a childhood kitchen in the humid middle of night. This is how they were by the time you were born, The People, shuffling in a blackness they believed could turn inverse with the power of crude hope. The lightness of memory more brilliant than it had been in reality: this is the world you were born into.
THE TONGUE
Before those futile ladders of meat called limbs, this wet, writhing appendage was your first way to reach into the world. It carried pieces of the world back so that you could inspect them, and decide which pieces to reject as Not You, and which pieces you would choose to absorb as Part of You. Mouth-knowing is our first learned passion, the perfect symbiosis of the desire to experience and be experienced.
However, once a body grows to a certain height and weight, The People no longer approve of Tongues, preferring use of the more obvious (if less sophisticated) human limbs; the loss of the reciprocal relationship of mouth-knowing is our first trauma. Each Person will try to recreate it years later, in a struggle known as intimacy, but find sadly that the punished Tongue has atrophied, incapable of its familiar ecstatic knots.
THE HERO
The People say you are The Hero of this Story, but you are not so sure. You have never owned a cape, you fear fire and sharp objects, could never jump from a building and land safely. They tell you that you were brought here for a reason, and that reason is to learn how to be very, very good at all this living.
Once you are proven, they say, you will get a star. Whether you will own the star or become the star, you’re not sure; they’re not clear if a star is a thing you can hold in your palms like a morsel of food, or a thing that burns bright and untouched on a wooden shelf in your room, or if you’ll be pulled out of the flesh you walk around in so that you can zoom up to greet your star where it lives. You stare up at the night sky in wonderment at all the freckles on the face of this universe, the staircase of your spine creaking, and you are deeply frightened. You catalog the stars obsessively in the pages of your mind, wonder which one will be yours, how long you have left to prove yourself, who will get to choose.
MOTHER
Before she was yours, she was Someone. She belonged only to herself and to the bitemarks like rose petals lovers left behind on her skin. When she was Someone looking for Someone else, she was terrified in the aimless way of all People, and all she wanted was to tell a Person about it out loud, face to face. The Story goes like this: When she met your Father, or Someone before your Father, she said to him: I’m terrified. He asked her why, and she tried to form new words that meant, I’m afraid you’re going to give me everything I’ve ever wanted and then you’re going to take it away and afterwards I will still have to go on being alive (for this is what all People are afraid of). Eventually she said something that was not exactly that, and when he responded, his words were stone—not mausoleum walls scrubbed white by rain, but something for a pocket.
Twice in her life she felt it: the bright hot flood of fear that comes when you know that you are about to love something. The first time was then, with him. The second time came into the world with you, and never ceased.
When you are born, the doctor, once a child himself, will make note of the smell of salted fruit. Your Mother’s human fear will remain, but time will mangle it into a different monster; she will by then have seen joyless babies at dawn, their milky eyes serene and pensive, and become disturbed upon realizing they could see something she’d missed. Her voice will become as faded and indistinct as her partner’s, though her hair will always have its own swirling mobile of planetary light. She will look at her family and think, How do you survive having everything you ever wanted? Can violent beauty also be a kind of trauma?
FATHER
A ship, a shape, a shift in temperature, a slab of wool, a suit of feathers, a caution, a potion, a phone call, a bird’s jaw, a congress, a forest, a fondness, a fortress, a fevering, a flight of stairs, a flock of doves, a northbound train that’s finished boarding, an ecstasy, an error, an erasure, a drum pounding, a doctoring, a denial, a damaged umbrella, a hallway with lamps on only one side, a house with windows only in the floor, a panel of glass with shutters on both sides, a pair of hands both red and shuddering, a shattering, a lifeboat with only one bench, and on deck the band playing loud their lunatic sorrow, a harboring, a hope, a hole in the dirt, a bath in holy oil, a bear’s chest, an olive nest, an accident, an absence.
SISTER (ITCH)
Perhaps you have a Sister. Perhaps she is a cherry-scented gust of smoke, or her smile is the steely rind of a lime. Like a fork in a flower’s stem, she can bloom at any moment into a friend or a Stranger. A Sister is a thing that burrows just beneath the flesh and can’t be burned away by any fire The People have created. She itches and itches, like a loose tooth you can’t bear to pull.
BROTHER (THUD)
Perhaps a Brother is your lot. And a Brother is, as you will learn, a lot. If you catch him while he is sleeping and press your ear to his chest cavity, you’ll hear the hammer of horses’ hooves pounding beneath his skin. Remember the sudden music of him, and pray the horses don’t find their way into his hands—The People refer to this as a stampede, and fear it to the point of bloodshed. If your Brother has a name, wait until it’s fluttering around the room and try to catch it in your mouth. Swallow it fast, so that if his body goes to the grave, a part of him can remain on land, moth-winged and carelessly gentle.
GUILT
One unremarkable afternoon, it blooms plum-violet and lovely like a bruise, its source a mystery: did you breathe it in unknowingly, a virus loitering on the sidewalk between streetlamps? Swallow it in cherry tomatoes from the garden? Press it between canyons of skin like a rotten accident? Like a shadow-limb or a phantom sibling, it follows you everywhere you go. When you grow legs and wheels and engines to slingshot yourself across the land, it still knows where to find you. In hotel rooms, in deserts and tucked under mountains, it slips into your sheets and lies silent beside you, an always-warm bedfellow.
It’s smarter than you are, and ancient, and if you try to drown it with poison or cut it out with a pocketknife, it simply moves to another part of your body. Stupid child, it says, don’t you see that you’re only carving off pieces of yourself? As soon as you think you’ve caught hold of it, it slithers away. You can hear it awake and humming all night, a faint song swimming in your bloodstream. You are not a child, you try to argue, but you have grown so tired.
At least, it reminds you, you will never be truly alone.
HOUSE
Houses are structures infused with a magic only the inhabitants can see. When you are asleep and you dream of a building, or a forest with the warm tunnels of a building, that building will always be your House. When The People read Stories about humans who live in rooms, they lack the imagination to picture any House that is not their own. A House can be composed of a room, or can be the silent space between rooms, or can be the skin that covers a collection of many rooms (also referred to as cells). Sometimes a Person will lose their sense of direction and show up inside another Person, mistaking them for a different kind of structure. A House should not be confused with the heart, which also has rooms, but whose rooms are deafening, nailed shut from the inside, and smell incessantly of burgundy.
HOME
Home can sometimes appear in the night as the ghost of a House that has been abandoned by its magic, but often, it cannot be seen with eyes. A symptom of nearing Home is violent, musical trembling and a fever that reddens the chest—while distance from Home manifests as pain in the throat, and the sensation of a wire being slowly removed. It’s been known to appear as a shadow of lamplight at the end of a dark hallway, so gorgeous it coaxes you almost out of your body, where belonging is an old lullaby you can almost, just barely, remember the words to. Of course, this is mostly speculation; very few People have ever found a genuine Home in the limited span of their lives.
SOMEONE
See: Home
STRANGER
The game is this: each time you meet one, try to figure out if they are Someone, or simply a collection of bones with intention. Test them with your voice, your mouth, your hands. Watch to see if your words bounce off them like raindrops, if they circle like gnats, if the Stranger shakes them off like a wet dog or eats them one by one like jellybeans. Examine all edges and angles of their smile for potential foundational problems, leaks or cracking or faulty construction. Bite into a randomly-chosen part; take a chunk of them away and watch what grows back in its place.
If tree bark, or any hardened substance: they are not Someone.
If fur, or bone, or any fragment of creature: hold them gently, then lock them in a quiet room, and swallow the key for safekeeping.
If a buzzing with no source: this Stranger may require further interrogation, but check first to make sure what you’re hearing isn’t just the wind eavesdropping through an open window.
If a hive, stillborn: run, cut your hair with any knife in reach, and take immediate cover.
If flowers, or fresh leaves, or any variety of budling: it is possible they are Someone. Before you celebrate, though, look away and turn back quickly. Watch how their flowers behave when you leave a room, whether the petals begin to dance or rot.
THORN
A Thorn is rarely seen coming, except if you live on a tall mountain and make a habit of cloaking your body in weapons. It can be an interruption in the Story, or can become the Story itself. A Thorn takes many forms, but the symptoms are the same:
anxiety :: homesickness :: the full-body sensation of sparking like a dragonfly’s wing under a microscope :: irrational levels of nostalgia :: impulse to declare war that lasts four hours or longer :: nausea :: a metallic sheen to the skin :: voiceburial :: paleness of the Tongue :: leakiness in the orifices of the face :: a soft, air-filled grief that can not be held without gloves :: excessive thirst :: shapeless frustration :: the tops of hands stained as if by thunder :: sudden nighttime visions of a Stranger’s face, usually in the shape of a man never met :: motion-sickness :: inability to view street signs :: sensation that the head is filled with arrows :: strong odor of maple syrup
There is no known cure for a Thorn but to rip it out and hope it doesn’t take too much of you with it. If there is bleeding, as is often the case, you can dam the wound with your Tongue. If Someone nearby is willing to lend you their Tongue, that will also suffice, although this method is generally unreliable.
STORY
Story is the name People give to their regrets. The things we do not regret do not become Stories; they dissolve, while regrets, indigestible, linger within the human body, bouncing off cages of bone. When The People find a Story particularly troublesome they might try to trick it into leaving their body by drawing its various names on pieces of parchment and hoping it will show up. Every Story trapped in writing functions both as an apology and a record of unchecked shame.
There is only one Story, but many ways of arranging its words, so that it can appear to have multiplied. Stories are very old and get impatient of dressing up the same way too often; they crave adornment and require variety.
The Story that is every Story is that you have swallowed something ugly and now you need to convince Someone to dig it out of you, Someone with a shovel and the right type of map. The Story that is every Story is that there is a wolf’s eye beneath each Person’s Tongue and it grows hungrier with every passing year. The Story that is every Story is that there is something, sometimes many somethings, that you will spend most of your time on this planet longing rough and messy for, and once you get that thing it will feel almost like it didn’t happen at all.
A secret The People won’t tell you is that it barely matters how good you are at living if you are able to accomplish love. When The People discovered love as a shortcut, they grew ravenous for it, constructed monuments in its honor, painted their faces in its favorite colors and made their days long ritual parades in sacrifice to it. Sometimes what People love even more than being in love is feeling like part of a Story. We want to be a narrative with purpose, structure, referenceable blueprints, a definite ending. Love is the name we give to the precise moment when we are able to recognize Someone as an unreliable narrator. When we tell each other our Stories, we are attempting to construct a manual for how to love us.
WELL
There is a Story that goes like this: some Person existed for a while. The Person’s Mother and Father walked in and out of rooms, breathing quietly. The Person’s Sisters and Brothers floated clumsily in the yard. They might have been imagined. They were all very small in comparison to the landscape.
Some Person might remember opening a door to a closet of cabinets and drawers, into a long, dark wooden hallway, and walking down that hallway to a room with a roaring hearth, where their Mother was weaving her pale-gold hair in the loom, spiders weaving blankets for the sunlit corners. Someone somewhere might remember this as Home.
A well is a sigh in the ground where we can return to ourselves. What goes down into it is a secret, and what gets brought up is always the surprise of what we didn’t know we needed. A well is a mouth that replenishes, a revolving bucket of give and take, of being regifted what we’ve given. It’s a hole to store joy, spread it out to scrape up against the hollow inevitable parts of living. In the bottomless throat of dark and stone, a brightness festers.