FOG IN A JAR

CYRUS SIMONOFF

Audio: Cyrus Simonoff reads.

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There are moments in the dark when my fingers are in another person’s hair, pressing their face against me, and enough blood has rushed between my legs that I can almost be swallowed. I have the thing that at other moments I do not have. And the rest of the time – Rosie calls it sublimation. “You’re sublimating,” they say, when I repeatedly sweep the front steps or arrange all the objects in the kitchen into straight rows and square piles. 

They say it not like I am sublimating one thing into another, but like the sublimation is an act unto itself. They mean the kind of sublimation that Freud talked about, where you turn desire – he meant a taboo desire — into a productive or socially acceptable habit, like work, or art, or even cleaning. Jung thought sublimation to be more mystical, more akin to transmutation. Scientifically, sublimation is turning something solid into gas, without ever passing through a liquid state. Skipping over the transition, going from hard and formed to uncatchable. 

One can take their longing for something hard and turn it into air, and I do. 

When I was kid, if the air was misty, I’d ask my parents to take me outside so I could catch the mist in a jar. They tried to explain to me that I was going to be disappointed. What looked thick and rich in the air wouldn’t look like anything at all inside a jar. Like clouds, they said, which look dense enough to hold you but, in reality, a body falls straight through them without any resistance. They were trying to explain differences in matter, but I didn’t want to hear them or believe that certain things which seemed the most real to me were not things I could touch. 

Eventually they would let me go out into the street with a plastic takeout container left over from the night before and wave it around in the air, trying each time to put the lid on more quickly, only to sink further into the disappointment they anticipated when nothing discernible ever appeared inside the confines of the container. 

The next approach was trying to catch smoke, which I deduced was capable of being caught because of the way it curled and stayed present in the room, and because it had a smell. If we set up the barbecue, or they cooked something on the stove top, I stood at the ready, pulling a glass jar down over the rising smoke and bringing a lid up from the bottom, like how you’d catch a fire fly. I’d take my jar of smoke into the closet and shine a flashlight through it in the dark, watching it roll and roil, my own jar of the start of the universe. 

Even the smoke, which I believed to be safe, contained, and mine in its jar, eventually disappeared. After ten, fifteen, twenty minutes in the dark, what looked so real and touchable just faded away, leaving me nothing but the empty container I’d started out with. 

Now, I’m writing my way around the hard thing I want. I want one part of me to close up and another part of me to grow. The part of me I wish for will not keep growing simply because I want it to. There are parts of me that do regenerate, and this, I think, is the root of my most private practice of sublimation, picking. 

After I got my breasts cut off, I kept the incisions open and alive much longer than I should have. One patch, on the side slightly towards my armpit, grew raw and inflamed. It was where a seam in the scar tape had exposed the stitches. The doctor and everyone else advised me, “Do not touch. Do not touch.” I even cut my nails as short as possible so I’d have nothing to pick with. But when I was spacing out, on the toilet, sitting in traffic, waiting for a text, I used the soft pads of my fingers to press around the swollen part. Blood came out, which grosses me out to describe but was addictive then. The slit was so small, you wouldn’t have known there was a place for anything to exit, but that’s the thing about skin and blood. The tiniest opening can allow so much out, like how a bat emerges from between two planks of wood siding. It was very hard to stop. That part of the incision did not heal for months. When it seemed like it was getting infected, I stopped for a few days. When the inflammation went down, I started again. I kept it a secret. I was in love with watching my internal matter, the red stuff, flow out into the world. Then, as with all love affairs, my attention went elsewhere, to a new project. 

When I shave my head at a ½ setting, I can see the scars from picking all over my scalp. A barber once commented on all the spots, assuming they were birth marks and telling me I had a head like a leopard. The spots are what’s left of the different projects from throughout my life, the love affairs that lasted until I found new ones. Touching the different spots sends me back to different times in my life. When I touch the indent at the top of my neck, right above my hairline, I’m a fourteen year-old girl sitting in first period, hair pulled tight in a high pony-tail, the smell of lip gloss, pencil erasers, and pomegranate perfume. For most of my adolescence I focused on the scalp. The scalp was good because the wounds stayed hidden. Even if it was clear my fingers were always buried in my hair, it wasn’t totally clear why. Though the mother of a friend, a therapist who worked with teenage girls, pulled me aside at a birthday party to say that a patient of hers who picked had nearly died from a staph infection that spread to the rest of her body. That scared me but did not deter me. I thought, still think, that there is a way to do it safely. You can protect the openings by letting them heal just enough, and then opening them back up. There are lots of diagnoses for why people pick. I like how it keeps me close to my body’s ability to heal, regenerate, and regrow. Also, in breaking through skin, I’m puncturing the divide between my insides and the outside world, making the barrier porous instead of impermeable, as I generally experience it to be. 

Around the time Rosie first pointed my sublimation out to me, I started gardening a lot more. I had just moved into a house where things could be planted. The backyard, and the property’s front retaining wall, were overgrown with ivy, bamboo, and other bushes that were not native to Los Angeles, but which outpace and outgrow the plants that would have covered the city’s hillsides, valleys, and streambeds hundreds of years ago, before people who weren’t from there choked out the indigenous plants with their own plants and remade the landscape in their vision. Shifting the earth around the house from an area dominated by invasive species to a place for native plants became my obsession, at the register of catching fog or smoke. I was fixated on ridding the area – the property, I guess — of ivy and bamboo, which is not dissimilar from trying to catch fog in a jar, in that it’s nearly impossible. 

I’d go into the backyard wearing gloves and use a crowbar to get under the thickest, woodiest parts of the ivy. I’d put all my force into it, in a way I probably never had in my life, as a person who historically was afraid of using my body in physical ways. The ivy, if you cut the tap root that connects all the smaller vines to their energy source, dries up and browns in a few days, making it easier to pull off the fencing and whatever else it has engulfed. If you can’t get to its source – which I couldn’t, because it was on the other side of the property line, the other side of a fence I was not allowed to cross – then it will always find its way back. And, it seems to me, that if you tear it off the fence, it knows not to go there, and makes some kind of choice, from then on, to travel underground. You find one small leaf of ivy, which you can tell is fresh from the light green of its epidermis, far away from what you believe you have destroyed. If you pull the fresh leaf up, a long stem takes you back towards the source, just an inch or so below the surface of the ground, like a buried telephone line. 

This process – burrowing so as not to be found – was even more extreme with the bamboo. After being cut down, the stand knew that growing up in one clump wasn’t safe and so it started sending out its rhizomes. Hardy stalks seemed to grow overnight, farther and farther away from the initial stand. What I had thought was clumping bamboo somehow transformed into running bamboo. And so every morning, fueled by frustration – most definitely not by acceptance, or by gratitude – I went out back and hacked at the ground around the shoots, trying to find the rhizomes and pull them out of the ground. The rhizomes were thick, heavy, potato-like things in the dirt, with gnarled shoots going out in every direction. I could never get all of them. I learned that even a small shard of a rhizome could regrow, gathering the strength to send out more runners and shoots. Soon the backyard was full of holes and piles of dirt, from all the places where I’d hacked at the ground.  It had been a smooth surface, mostly covered in grass, when I first moved in. 

Finally Rosie said to me, “Is it possible your anger is about something more than the bamboo?” Was I envious of this organism’s endless capacity to generate and regenerate, to shoot thick, erect protrusions out from the dirt in a matter of hours? Was I attached to my digging, to finding the irrepressible shoots’ new sites of emergence? Maybe. But I still felt like if I didn’t get rid of the bamboo I would never, ever be able to think about anything but the garden for the rest of my life. 

I wanted the bamboo gone so that my fantasy of what would grow in its absence could become real. So I could let it go. As long as the planting plan only existed in my notebook – pencil blueprints of the garden, with the common and Latin names of plants filling up the margins – I did not have room for anything else. I did not have patience. In sex, for example, flash card images of unplanted plants rolled through my mind’s eye. While being touched, I saw the pronged fronds of a poppy seedling appearing in the dirt after spring rain, the silky red bark of a mature Manzanita branch, purple Arroyo Lupine blossoms growing into a vertical tower. I wanted their forms, to smell them and touch them, to watch them grow and see them shake in the wind.  If the bamboo was not gone, and the dirt was not cleared, then the salt bush, the bladderpod, the barberry, the toyon, the pitcher sage, and the buckwheat were, to me, already dead. 

CYRUS SIMONOFF’s writing and reporting on grassroots anti-prison organizing and trans politics and aesthetics has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Truthout and the Intercept, among other publications and anthologies. He is the author of A Year Without a Name (2019), and finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

Originally published March 2021 in poiesis 2.1 by w the trees.