Holidays passed me by this time around. I didn’t miss them. They didn’t miss me. Everyone is happy. Sleep has been a wild ride these days. Woke up at 11:30, happy for it to be early enough to do a couple of shots then sleep hard straight through to 6. Or so was the plan. Didn’t quite work out but none are the wiser. I got distracted by the fan blowing air onto my legs. Normally my way of relaxing to sleep is to imagine breathing through my feet and hands. With that little breeze blowing over me it felt the breathing was being done for me, and on me. I remembered the women who, for no evil reason, could not stop themselves from breathing on me when we’d lie in bed. I’d repeatedly ask (nicely) “don’t do that” but they couldn’t not. I have to tell myself not to do it, too. I breath down my arm and it keeps me awake, so I cover that arm, or whatever extremity portion is downwind from my exhalations. But covering myself in this manner when it is someone else’s breathing seems rude, or unkind. “We’re lovers. We savor each other’s every breath.” Yeah, right. I wish breathing did not have to exist. It can be a chore. Heavy breathing, or inhalation, is by some considered a signal of a personality trait. Haughtiness? Exhaustion? Coronavirus? I had the impossible-to-catch-breath symptom early in the ‘demic. February and March, even into April, 2020. It was hard to be sure, though, because anxiety (before I took meds regularly) commonly caused shortness of breath. I also had a cough I’d blame on phlegm, and which never sounded like the crackling, hacking Covid cough that eventually caught up to me. That was memorable when it finally got to me, the cough I was actually worried about not experiencing, suddenly erupting to where I coughed like a fucking lawn mower in a desolate stretch of road in East Williamsburg. I must have been blasting germs 50 feet in every direction but no one, and I mean no one was around.
Talk about breathing… breathing for the earth. I might get composted, or at least make that an option. It looks cheaper than other alternatives, though look for the funeral industry to find ways to make it an expensive spectacle, just like they did with burial at sea. I like the idea of fertilizing the earth and being part of a tree, like its spirit. I once joked about a burial site that had been overcome by a large tree, saying “Granny’s ass grew up to be a nice tall Oak.”
Previously I wanted to be cremated, with my ashes left in a niche at St. Michael’s Cemetery. But after an in-person consultation with one of the people there I never heard back, and that contributed to changing my mind. I do sort of want some kind of physical monument to myself, for all my adoring fans to slobber and slave over. But does it even matter? In my niche would be The Wild Thing, of course. A Sorabji.com coffee mug with pens and paper detritus stuffed within. The wood box I built myself when I was in grade school. It contains photos and mementos of every woman I ever loved. And last but not least I’d want a mirror, in which visitors would see themselves.
