Wreath

I had never been to a sorority party before, and given my recent abandonment, I saw it fit to wear my black beret and a tight little number. The college homes in the coastal town I lived in had a very typical layout: hand me down couches, mismatched silverware, and multiple metal trash cans lined up against a fence that somehow always snagged the sun at its most vulnerable. This house was no different, the only exception being that it had a single budding rosebush out front. I found myself incredibly thirsty and ran my fingers underneath cold tap water. A girl who looked like she could have been named Katie rested her hands atop the tiled kitchen counter––the redness of her polished nails reminded me of my mother. I didn’t tell her that. On the wall across from me there was a poster depicting one of Georgia O’Keefe’s vaginal flowers; something about verisimilitude, about creating a language. I caught myself in an empty glass and even there I was transparent.

*

*

After a while, my crude emotions called for Taco Bell––a CrunchWrap Supreme to be exact. Disgust is one of the feelings I relished, and besides, the party was only a few blocks away from the nearest location. I walked on an uneven sidewalk brimming with sickly sprouts and the air clung to my collarbones like a heavy garment. Disoriented, I brought my index finger to my mouth and bit down on it until I left an impression. The woman operating the cash register gave off a sense of profound aloneness and I asked her how to cleave someone who had been stitched to the soft part of my skull. I was drunk of course. She swept her black hair behind an ear that looked like a conch. Beneath the droning hum of the OPEN sign I fingered the leftover beans and melted cheese.

*

Back at the house, in the yard, there was a crowd of ghosts. People extended their necks toward the moon and limbered their cinched hands over a pregnant ashtray. I cradled a half full solo cup and a man with a face like a dirty rag looked for an opening. He said, hey I’m from Brooklyn, and stuffed his fists into his sweater. I had heard him relay that exact phrase a couple of moments prior to another person, rather unsuccessfully. We both wanted to be someone. I said, that sounds great, can you hold on a moment? My legs carried me to the kitchen and I vomited a swan egg into the sink from which my false self erupted.

*

*

When I felt the blade pressed up against my skin, I had a vivid recollection of a praying mantis perched on a plastic lawn chair--the white kind that always seems to shed its skin with age and sag onto one leg. Inconsequential images were strung together like worry beads. My body was my own ferocious home. I persisted. I thought that if I punctured it in the right way, I would find another version of myself in the wound, sleeping away the peril of my violence. True terror is felt when you are left alone or when you watch the Other leave the room. On those occasions I wish that they would linger a little longer, perhaps placing their fingers on the door frame. I am terrified of love but I always hunt it down with bared canines, allowing the blood to seep tumultuously like liquid from the narrow neck of a bottle. In the minutes before the departure and after the sun shines down onto the Other’s skin I want to lunge forward and shout I love you, I love you, I love you! Please always exist in a state of leaving so I can experience true death. I hate being abandoned; there is no continuation. 

*

Psychologists say that the Original Wound stems from a need to be loved that is consistently not being met. I have often wondered how the soft breasts of the other woman must have bounced under the bright skylight in the room of my former lover. Though, the title ‘former lover’ does not fully encapsulate my propensity toward them. For a time, we were joined at the hips, and we let black coffee stain our shirts in the morning. I cracked eggs into the pan in the shape of a smiley face and shooed the cat off the counter. Intimacy was like morning glory; I found it in the cabinets and between the jams in the refrigerator. I am arrested by the urgent need to be loved. So, when my own blood began precipitating onto my pajamas and the floor beneath me, I felt the resonance of that sentiment. I wanted to experience it as if it was my own invention­­––loving, that is. Later, at the psychiatric ward, the nurse wouldn’t understand this––the demand to belong to someone. I was offered water crackers and I let the crumbs bury themselves into my clothing.

*

If enough moments pile on top of each other they will form a point of ecstasy. I have lived through many as such, but perhaps more poignantly after my mother picked me up from the ward. Initially, the orderlies had told her that I did not exist. This might have been true. I was very preoccupied with the sugar crystals on the pecan pie they served at the cafeteria––was not much of a fan. When nuts appear in dessert, I frown and tilt my lips in a downward motion, like freshly caught sea bass. Most gill-bearing animals live their lives in a constant state of demurral. Somewhere in my family’s photo albums there is a picture of me as a young girl hoisting up an emerald-colored fish on the coast of California. I had beautiful hair back then; not quite curly, but still soft and tender. In the picture, I am caught between a smile and a frown; something incomprehensible. Lavender laces the frame in a lucid purple, and the dried brush yields to what must have been a windy day. My small thumb is inserted into the fish’s mouth––angling it downward. We have the same face.

*

The state of non-existence defers to ephemerality. While my mother was being told that no person by the name of Chloe could be found at the facility, I dialed her up from the payphone next to the nurse’s station and talked about how the sun was shying away from me. I tapped in and out of transcendence. She, of course, was hysterical. The Ancient Greek word for hysteric goes hand in hand with the gendered disorder of the “wandering womb”. The condition insinuates that the uterus wanders around the body and causes a number of undesirable effects. I could have asked her, is your womb wandering? Do you look like a freshly caught sea bass? Can you tell that I am existing on the other side of this frosted glass, at this very moment? Instead, I kept to more bland things. The orderlies occasionally glanced at me and I rested my head on the wall. The sharp, hiemal nature of it created goosebumps on the nape of my neck.

*

*

Ecstasy in itself is a type of becoming. My fascination with unraveled women was reflected first in my mother and then in myself. I wish I could have watched her talking to me on the phone, paid attention to how the slight pigment of her pink lipstick must have rubbed off on the device. When I was much younger, before I knew words such as simulacrum, wrath, or sincerity, I remember my mother sitting with me in the master bathroom. I had a urinary tract infection, and she was begging me to urinate in a specimen cup.  I vehemently opposed as the pain ricocheted off of the plastic parts of my body. The bathroom’s yellow tile vibrated with each hot tear, somehow absorbed the saline wetness.  My mother was beautifully flushed from her frustration and her brown locks formed a twigged nest. I could have lived in it.

Chloe Tsolakoglou

Chloe Tsolakoglou is a Greek-American writer who grew up in Athens, Greece. She obtained her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School, where she served as the Anselm Hollo Fellow.