The Vanishing Art

When my youth arrived, or finished, depending on the men you ask, I was unwilling to accept it. I knew the years before me would be transitory before I entered them. Marked like a smear of gore on the timeline of my life, filled with painful chemicals that snuffed out rational thought and turned my armpits and crotch into animals. Everyone tells you that it’s all normal, a laughing matter. Isn’t it funny, our bodies? As if we aren’t trapped inside them. Caged with literally no other option. I think they leave out the real details of this transition for one of two reasons: one, they forget how painful it is, like babies. Or two, it only gets worse from here on out – the sting of existence wears out on you, chafes your soul little by little. And you grow a certain tolerance for the misery like a drug.

Speaking of drugs, I have been offered some. There is no little voice in my head, spoken in the low gravel tones of my middle school health teacher, telling me to hesitate. One thing about the end of youth – you seem to outgrow certain fears. They don’t pay off anymore, or at least, not as much as hiking up your big girl shorts and taking your place…. here, secured between two strangers, in a circle where we exchange puffs of smoke like a courtesy rather than a membership pass.

But the atmosphere of the house, its essence, that’s the first drug you take. The night inside is heavier. Darkness leaks through the windows, cuts itself against the sharp angles of the lightshow in the living room. The ephemeral flash of faces, hung in elation, are tipped back to catch the lull of the soundwaves from the speakers. The living space evolved to suit its inhabitants. I glance across from where I sit on the floor to the couples sprawled over the couch, the rolling, diving limbs that seem to weave in and out of the cushions only to mangle themselves back into the body of another, never quite getting love but understanding totally, completely, the art of attraction.

For many of them, this is probably the most alive they’ll ever feel. Before graduation and the drudgery of sheet metal filing cabinets, of desktop computers lacking the RAM space to run League. I can see their deaths before they even think of them as deaths. It’d be wrong to blame any of them for seeking out the infinite here, in the soupy darkness of thrown limbs and silty things with perfectly smeared eyeliner. We are stranded in this moment, as if we swam so far from the future, we all ended up at the bottom of the sea.

Someone, a football player maybe, hollers in the kitchen. It sounds like the foreign call of an animal, one that invites the gathering of its own kind but warns away the others.

The bump against my arm is impatient, meant to draw me back into the premise of our circle. I take the blunt, tiny, like piece of red sun, bring it to my lips and suck down. I like to hold onto the smoke for as long as I am able, feel it tickle my lungs, burn up everything like a real fire and not the ghost of one. I cough it out. Everyone’s eyes flicker over to me, and I watch the judgements swim behind their pupils.

Some part of me believes that by being around them - and let's be real, they aren't human down here – I would absorb whatever magic they seem to possess. I know it’s impossible. The magic is an unattainable thing, woven into the glow of porcelain teeth and bronzy tans and swooped-out noses. I cannot unlearn the short fallings of my own body, just as they cannot unlearn the glory of theirs. Trapped, as I mentioned before.

I could be better, maybe, if we were in shallower water. If Amy is a beautiful jellyfish, or one of those creepy-ass sharks, I might be some sort of coral off the coast of Tahiti. Or maybe I’m whatever Amy’s species hunts, something that has to remain small and quiet. Amy is the only one here I know by name, and that’s just because she’s beautiful and sitting right across from me. She smiles like a cat, glitter catching above her eyes, and the claws of something akin to panic scrap along my collarbone.

I haven't subjected myself to this without reason. I am here waiting for someone.

Most people refer to him as Fitch, which is only because his first name is terrible. He tells people it’s Doug so they’ll agree, but it’s actually Max, which isn’t bad at all. He once confided that he’d rather be Fitch because it sounded like the name of a writer or movie-maker, and Max sounded like the name of a dog. I don’t think he remembers that time, though. It was before I moved.

Fitch and I have now found each other in the grim valley of ex-childhood friends. One might say we are acquaintances, which is a stupid, pretentious thing people say about people they know well enough approach without risking their image.

The point is, I am waiting for him.

I reach into my pocket and rub the two twenties folded up there, staring again into the murky dark. The blunt comes around another time, the ember perched on the last bit of kinder. My fingers pinch around it briefly before I fumble and it falls down to the carpet. Silence, like a little seizure of the heart, passes over us. I tell myself that I imagined it – meaning it was real in my head, which is the only place where such a thing as realness matters. A hand reaches out to pluck up the last bit of the blunt and fling it behind the couch.

“It was almost out anyways,” a boy says, shrugging. My mouth pulls in a smile, like I meant to make a joke - anything to shine the light of individuality upon me, to rectify the mistake. The boy is gone, though. None of them are watching. The circle breaks open like an egg, vulnerable and dead before its life could begin. I don’t know where to be other than this place on the carpet, so I fold my knees up and refuse to move. I tell myself I am safe waiting here. Then everyone is gone and I’m the only idiot sitting on the floor - so I sigh, down the rest of my cup in three gulps, and surge to my feet.

Alcohol used to be enough, especially before I moved back. It made me feel like the world was real, enveloping around me as though I were truly part of it, not the uncomfortable biproduct of several million years of evolution. Truthfully, I’ve spent the majority of my life floating half a mile above the surface as the rest of the world turns, unspooling the distance between where I had been and where I needed to go. Alcohol made it all sync up. There was a sweet spot in drunkenness I could equate to a feeling of self-worth, which sounds insane, because it is usually followed copious amounts of vomiting and showers where I had to sit down and cradle my skull like a precious fruit.

I wade through the crowd into the kitchen, my eye skimming the smoke and bodies to catch sight of the russet hair or that shitty backpack, with the knot of the strap tied together peaking over one shoulder. The wash of relief that comes when I finally see it is enough to spur me forward and snag his sleeve. I greet Fitch, forgetting to wipe the elation off my face, and watch him smile and assume I am under the influence of something greater than the choking crowd and nicotine vapors. He asks how I am doing, and before the words leave his mouth, I am aware he intends for this to be a short meeting. I let go of his arm to pull the twenties from my pocket.

“I wanna try some stuff,” I say.

“What, you mean, like, drugs?” Fitch replies. His voice and eyes are both slow, sleepy, which some might mistake for simplemindedness. But it’s caution, deliberation. Fitch has never failed algebra, which is more than a lot of the people here can say.

It makes me think we are alike, but therein lies the problem.

“Yeah. What do you have?”

Fitch takes a moment to glance around us, and I am afraid his attention is slipping through my fingers like sand. When he pushes down the hallway, gesturing for me to follow, I do.

The house is perched on the edge of an orchard. Walnut trees march away from us in neat rows, twining their boughs above to make tunnels full of darkness. People stumble and kiss around us, nearly knocking me over, and I am compelled to go into the orchard and leave this place forever. Fitch takes my money and fixes me with serious eyes.

“Listen, I know we didn’t talk since we were kids, but like, I don’t really see you as someone who buys drugs.”

My stomach rolls. I am not someone who buys drugs, not really. I want to say that I’ve happened upon them, that they seemed to seek me out. But then I sound like someone who believes in universal fate and astrology, when really, I just need to crawl out of my head for a bit. I mentioned how alcohol seems to bring me back to Earth. Most of the time, I’d rather be on the moon.

“Yeah well, I know some stuff.” I say. He nods, and bends over to riffle through his backpack.

“I got some acid tabs, benzos, mollies…...” Fitch looks at me.

“Whatever,” I say.

“Here.” Fitch hands me a little bag with two pills the color of stale piss inside. “You’ll like that.”

I pull one of the pills out and swallow it. Fitch’s eyes widen a fraction, and he tells me that I should have cut it up. I tell him my tolerance is high. Fitch shakes his head.

"Whatever, man. You gotta get someone to babysit you. I ain't got time for this."

Fitch pushes past me into the house, and I settle against the wall, into the blackness like it's a cloak.

And I wait.

____________________________________________________

There is one good thing I've gained at the end of my youth. I call it the vanishing art. It is a practice taken on by those who are already invisible, who have already reconciled the death of experience simply in knowing that it doesn't exist. Not when trapped in the confines of a skull, senses all wired to a mass of pink that sits contently in the dark, out rising the semblance of a person, a soul. Sometimes none of it is right.

It began in the womb, where my head refused to form correctly, the plates of my skull floating in suspension over the most important organ of my body. I had to wear a helmet until I was a toddler. It was the first and last war with my body I ended up winning.

The real issues came when I didn't think right. I sat through most of kindergarten with my behavior card flipped to red, an obscene bloom of color against the stagnate, perfect green of my classmates. Then my features came through: the acne, the swell of fat over the lip of my jeans, and the angle of my nose.

It was in those moments: those critical notes taken in front of my bathroom mirror, that I knew I was someone who could tip, perfectly, effortlessly, into any sort of tragedy, and it would never matter more the angle of my nose.

I would go willingly into calamity if it meant release from the confines of my body. I would choose death, if I knew what came after.

But I don't, and I am left with the vanishing art.

And I am numb in the orchard.

I am one of the trees. Earlier, hours or minutes, I had lurched from the side of the house and wandered into the copse of straight, ordered trunks. When I realized the forest was the orchard, and the word had been slipping my tongue for the past few steps, I could hear the slackening of locks, the creak of hinges. I had one foot out the door, right in the curve of the moment, when everything becomes distant and real, the world zooms into focus as you shrink into yourself.

I press forward, trailing my hand in the air. There is no fear of the dark here, even if it presses against me, cold, yet more welcome than the house and its inferno of bodies and smoke. I am settled into a woozy state of comfort, the kind that comes when your brain is subdued into a mess of fast acting thoughts, not one of them worth trying to wrangle into any sense. They start out as formless. But soon I begin to see them, a shift at the corner of my vision, forms cast out from my head and into negative space between the trunks and branches. Unreal. I lurch to the center of the trail, walking quicker and quicker in the same direction before I realize, stupidly, it would be wiser to turn around. Safer. So I stop.

There is a practice of constant self-soothing you must master in the vanishing art. You seek out places of comfort. You repeat thoughts until they make sense. Everything is fine. Don’t be scared. None of it is real.

In the seconds it appears before me, the owl is real.

It brings a cold wash of air and the starchy scent of feathers against my face. The eyes shine like headlights into mine, empty void to empty void. It's a barn owl: sugar white underbelly, with dustings of cinnamon and cardamom. Briefly, before the cage-grip of fear comes over my motionless heart, I imagine it as a pastry.

I do not register the fall until the cold of the soil seeps over my back. It's not a shock, but a lull, as though the Earth has been a cradle all along, and I've found myself coiled in her roots, a child returned. Time stretches and I haven't taken a breath. My torso burns, holding onto the moment as if it wasn't death, trying to keep it down like a bad meal. I see vaguely that I must have become the owl because I'm so desperate for oxygen that I've flown out past where it ends.

I beg it to come down, and it shushes me with a brush of its wings. And I think, this is true invisibility, I will become the earth here and the sky will pass over me as before, all worrisome things ripped into carbon. To say that I am nothing would break the laws of nature. I would understand later that I had simply changed.

But then my heart squeezes, clenched by God, maybe, or the defiant will of my brain.

I thank them both with tears that wet the ground to mud.

I don't know how long it takes me to realize I can move. That's the issue with drugs - if you haven't gathered - time seems to change texture: slipping away like silk ribbon or catching like a rope. I come to believe that my bones have unfurled from by back and burrowed down into the earth, and I have to learn carefully that my body is my own. When I rise from the ground and I'm taller than the trees.

The owl stays with me as I head back towards the house. I feel the brush of its wings over and over, like a warning or a comfort. Soon the house is before me and it doesn't matter which.

There is missing time before I make it to the couch. Vague moments with my face, blissful and empty in the bathroom mirror. The melding of my body with all the others, so seamless there were moments where I knew I'd lost it, that I was somewhere else, and my limbs were being puppeteered by a being who understood the world better than I did.

The owl is gone before the night ends.

____________________________________________________

I hear sirens. The sound sits at the edge of my ears, unquestionably loud. It’d mean the same thing one hundred miles away. I leap from the couch, stumbling over a few bodies pilled on the floor, their arms crooked behind their heads to form pillows. I throw a glance behind me, catching a crowd of people huddled in a circle. Some of them press hands to their mouths and cry. Most of them are yelling, pointing accusatory fingers to the person on the ground and then back up to the house, which is filthy in the morning light, much akin to something that has been pulled up from the depths by a trawler, bloated, with none of its mystery preserved. I realize, sluggishly, that I don't have time to deliberate what has happened, or why someone won't seem to wake up.

The owl comes back like the prick of a vein. I pick up my feet and run for the door, heading for the orchard. I want to see it again, lift the veil of last night, understand the brush of feathers over my skin, the points of my shoulders pushing down like roots into the Earth, a cradle made of softer things. As I pull it open, Fitch hurls past me. I cannot describe the look on his face because I've never seen him wear it before. I want to hug him, to tell him there is no distance that the years or miles I moved away could put between us. The friends we make in childhood are meant to be forever. But he doesn't see me. He runs straight past.

I smile, I forgive him as I move back into the orchard. I understand.

It's just the vanishing art.