Reluctant Weaver
An essay
She stares at the USB port on the back of the seat in front of her. A white cord sticks its tongue in the hole perfectly shaped to receive it. Anonymous, efficient, effective. Energy flows like magic from the plane to her phone.
I am not the character in a story.
Maybe this, too, is pathological—the uncanny resistance of a sick mind to a healthy universe. What human hates stories? A strange and broken creature.
Strange. Broken. Labels are a way to name animals without smelling their shit or learning their language.
If she were a character, might she want to live without language? Her hero’s journey could be organized around the pursuit of this particular iteration of freedom: not a lack of language but the fullness of meeting the whole world, body and soul. She’d need to wander as far from a home built of abstractions—her paper house dangling in thin air—as the east is from the west.
But, like a child, she refuses to give up one for the other.
The USB port powers the colors flashing on her phone. Her son watches a digital Paddington search for his grandmother in the Peruvian jungle. She considers writing a review of the movie—funny, incisive, self-deprecating. She does not.
If her life were a story, who would tell it? And in what tongue?
Clouds the shape of various French pastries—baguette, croissant, whipped cream—pass under the airplane. She wipes pretzel crumbs to the floor.
If her life were a story, what genre would it be? Stories pull fistfuls of threads from an infinite tapestry. Each story reweaves them on a tiny loom. Her bodymind is a tragicomedy without beginning, middle, end. She is a rebellious and reluctant weaver.
I am not the character in a story.
Sometimes she pulls a thread and feels a shock, some magic moving wordless and anonymous to the tips of all ten fingers.