Doing the Worm

I made my coffee without a mug this morning. I didn’t notice until the espresso pooled onto the countertop, a puddle of brown on the granite. It was 5:45 AM, two hours earlier than I have been waking up this summer, but I must, I must get back into my routine.

Later, I had three more moles removed, sent off in packaging for biopsy. My back is a constellation of little white dots and one lumpy, huge scar that itches and aches, even two years later. I see myself in the mirror, I itch, and I am reminded that my body whether due to genetics, a childhood sunburn, or just because may always carry cancer waiting to come to the surface. On my best days, this serves as a gentle nudge to live, but usually, I just look at my reflection in the mirror and think, “Am I really a person totally dotted with moles waiting on their chance to become tumors? Is this me?”

In a few weeks, I will turn thirty. I feel tension between what was, what is, and what will be. Days like this, I feel like a little stump, shaded in the forest. I also know that tomorrow I will be a hundred year old Cyprus tree. My limbs will reach toward something. Maybe heaven, or the Sun, or nothing at all. Maybe I will reach just for reaching sake.

Nevertheless, I will probably reach, or maybe I will be a stump. I’m not sure it matters because I’m not sure I believe in the metaphor of the fig tree. Worms, and bugs, and moss, and fungi make their home in a stump, don’t they?

Yesterday, I read Ursula Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In the essay, she explores the idea that humans did not evolve from a weapon, but rather a container. That we did not first seek heroism or giant animal trophies, instead the humanest desire is “to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven with your own hair… and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch…and then later you put it in the medicine bundle, or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is scared, and then the next day you probably do much the same again…”

Hm. Maybe I am a human after all.

So, I put my slivered moles into my basket, and I put my spilled coffee, and I take them to my little stump. I share them with the worms, and they do a little dance because, for the first time in their lives, they are caffeinated. One of the worms even puts a mole on his face. Looking into the mirror, he wonders if he looks a bit like Marilyn Monroe now. He doesn’t, but I don’t tell him that nor do the other worms. The worms because they do not know who Marilyn Monroe is, me because I want to let him live his little worm dream. They keep dancing, and suddenly, I am dancing, too, because I am not a hero and I do not ever have to be.

Arbol Fondo by David Alfaro Siqueiros, seen in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and inspiration for this piece, which was derived from a writing exercise my friend, Kendall, taught me.