nostalgia, by marie anne arreola

 i know this nostalgia pill is pointless, and i feel sorry for anyone who hadn’t had a choice but to take it, though god knows i sneezed away the symptoms to reside closer to the essence of my life, before it fell out of my hands. this is a spoonful of willpower that is certainly limiting me, but the fizzy taste is of effervescent oranges, and so i drink it with cold water to savor the sweetness of the past until it hasn’t passed except for weed and a recent sensitivity to the disease when i experienced it firsthand, seeing it deteriorate the bodies of my senior animals; the desire to make it stop, like a seed desire, but almost rooted within me. i see the green bathroom tile from when i vomited after my first high school party, and the way grandpa cleaned me up and invited me to join him outside, under the moonlight that illuminated the dusty seats of his tractor; when we spoke a language that was pure to us: the sound of confession, but without any guilt, as it often was for me in church—and that was why i’d stopped attending. language spilled over as my sadness freed my tongue. then, other small artifacts emerged once both of my grandparents were dead. a knife with blood on the handle; a photo taken at a stream before the well was built. my grandfather, unmistakable despite his thick mop of brown hair. with no specific memories or stories to tell about the future, the varnishing had to kick in. i spread my photo albums out on the wet grass. others couldn’t see the life in my head, so when i wrote it, i took pains to get the spelling right. every trace of a sensation like footnotes embroidering the soles of my shoes. the dates and ages could only suggest one thing. there was an unspoken question in the transcontinental silence. how many generations must face family symptoms like a record before they can be overcome? there’s a space beneath the wood of the coffin. in that empty space between the emission of some leftover sound, i thought i’d detected the murmur of a strong wind that began to whip over my cerebral garden. to train introspection, everything must be attenuated beneath the curtains of silence; like my father forgets to send his card on my birthday, or calls to let me know he won’t be able to visit. the days were reduced to the ticks of a karmic clock, and i think that may be the reason for my nostalgia, because everything that floats survives through the body’s channels for a reason, and maybe i’ll manage to swim down to catch the hands of the clock with my own. so i want to go down to the deep end on a new day anyway, to jump from the bridge i’ve built with my sadness, into the stagnant pool in which a reflection of the sky peeks out like a promise or another trick of illusionism. there’s room for other worlds within the body’s clarifications. and i only mention this because the ants have already crawled out of my ear the morning after i fainted on that wet grass; their thousands of little legs causing a tingling that didn’t hurt, but tickled me as they marched toward their earthly assignments. i’m no longer sure if i took a pill or the whole day off to graze the fields.