Guest Writer: Grey Johnson

Requiring a Swift and Precise Adjustment

We exchange several evocative emails in the beginning, and your quick responses when we write leave me sputtering to keep up. Everything I say seems to come out of me distorted, stretching and twisting, pausing and leaving gaps. Already you influence something as basic and personal as my speech, and you have rendered me incomprehensible, at least to myself. I feel as heavy and sodden as the earth. My wits are covered with a crust that is miles in depth. Wishing to tell you my thoughts, I feel as though I am trying to explain to a cloud what it is like to be lava, buried.
You seem to think I am a brilliant writer, and claim to be seduced by me. This makes my legs feel shaky when I pass near my computer, and you know it. I lean on door jambs, tables, desks. Chairs are not stable enough. If I could find a giant oak, I would press my face into its mossy bark and cry, for I know already you will show me no mercy, because I will not admit to needing it. I am a child on a swing, and while I watch the sky, your spirit widens in it like a thunderhead. There is lightening sparking from you, and the majesty of you leaves me blinded to the small world on the ground, where my feet are supposed to go. I ignore the fact that all of this is occurring electronically.
My imagination creates a house for us, and we seldom venture outdoors, since you don't know you live here. You spoon me and I become a gate, loose on its hinges, feeling as if I clang when touched. You rock me, and the clanging in me builds with a dangerous resonant frequency. Inside, my heart shakes like thin vibrating metal, making rattled offstage storm sounds. When we do go outside the little house I made for us, you want to be chased. On my favorite chase, you ran along the entire clothesline, snatching each item off with a hearty snap. Clothes pins shattered and flew like popcorn. We ran laughing, but I was afraid that something was about to happen, perhaps the line itself would snap, and sting, and leave a mark for others to see. I stopped chasing after you, and crouched, sweating, in a tumble of beautifully scratchy leaves. Feeling them crumble against my cheek, I found that the only item I had been able to grab was an intimate one, and sadly worn. It took four days, but I wrote a kind of poem about the evolution of this singular, imaginary garment. I even know what it tastes like, and how it feels in my mouth.
I know approximately one person in the physical world. He begins to look at me oddly, I think. To me, it feels as if you and I are a heavy, ponderous thing, with one eye trying to see two, or even three, worlds. Are we a storm? Do we live in the wild center of it for a moment? Are we to become a refreshing shower, still and settled afterward? I think of my skin as our barometer, but it does not say what kind of weather we are.
In what is my own actual home, I lurk and worry like a doubtful guest. While fiddling mindlessly with the hose, pretending to tend the garden, and ignoring the soft clash of the pots in the kitchen, I pull the collar of my coat up to my ears, turn my back to the wind, and wait. Soon, my hair, as I knew all along it would, is whipping the sides of my face. It is suddenly long and black, and enters my lips. It spanks my eyelashes.
I do not recognize myself. I have become a different person. My real person does not recognize me, either. We make a trip to the doctor. Adjustments to my medication are executed with swift precision.
Someone is faintly calling me home, and it is not you. There are sirens, gaining and receding. You do not understand these alarms. There are stinging nettles of rain, and their speed is such that they make me bleed. My lips bleed first, where I have spoken too much. I feel punished. So, like a good girl, I run inside and throw myself against the door, pushing hard, pushing against the very same air that I breathe in order to live. Suddenly, the wind stops, sucking all the air out and away, snatching the door shut fast, tight, and hard. I find myself, in a kind of relieved brokenness, with my hand on the doorknob, looking through the window. I am watching for me, and I see myself alone and quiet. In a few days, I will put on my worn and muddy garden boots, and apologize to the weeds as I pull them. In a few weeks, I will relearn how to sleep, and be unable to recall how any of this felt.

© Grey Johnson 2010

Grey Johnson lives in a small town in northeastern South Carolina. Her garden is very important to her, and so are her dogs. She reads and knits rectangles, but seldom knows what to do with them. She doesn’t have a blog or website, but writes some on the Six Sentence Social Network. You can also check out a brilliant little collection called Your Pajamas by Grey on Issuu.