MIA NELSON Social Isolation

MIA NELSON | SOCIAL ISOLATION

Alone, I practice the strangeness of goodbye. I walk past the mirror and interrupt myself, stuttering. I see my reflection in a limp green teacup and ask about a daughter who died. I mis-congratulate myself on the pregnancy, I stumble over an inappropriate joke to the boss who is also just me, but mirrored in the garden pond. You can say all the wrong things even if you’re talking to yourself. I offend, I blubber, I cry in the bathroom. I am off-putting and too eager. I talk about myself behind my back. I do not invite the her that is me to sit at the table with our brown bag lunches. I do not share the biology notes. I don’t ask if the she who is I is feeling okay. I smell the vomit on her fingers and I ignore it. What a freak, I think about my disjointed, stupid selves. I would never invite myself to the party, I would never offer to share my lip balm, I would never run my stockinged foot over my shins under the dinner table. I would never choose me to dissect the sheep’s heart. I say hello and goodbye to myself each time I leave a room in my empty house. I turn the lights off and my own voice comes back to me, angry at the sudden dark. I bang on the bathroom door and tell myself to hurry up in the shower. I wake up exasperated that I haven’t planted the tomatoes yet, angry that I dog-eared the book, that no one cleaned up the cat pee in the living room. Of course, there are moments of tenderness. I sometimes read to myself fables about two-headed birds, one who eats only spoiled fruit. Sometimes the she that is me sets out a nice table of chicken buttered the way I once told her I like best. Occasionally, we slow dance to the rhythmic sound of another me peeling tangerines in the kitchen. This is the abating of misery: my selves spoon feeding each other honey in the refrigerator light. This is the miracle of body:

a gentle, insane chatter that smells like survival & unwashed hair. In the skin of my brain I am the worst roommate imaginable. I leave cups half-filled with misery over every empty space, I let the food rot until it smells like saggy beauty queens, I leave all the doors flung open so the animals can flee, & I mislabel the living and the dead. Even worse, I often name myself both: my two souls, the one alive and the one dead, how each moment they wake to the horror of the other.