Cryptozoology

Age 1: I screech when my mother leaves the room, fitful for a nipple, her arms powdery, unconditional.

Age 2: I bite; she stops nursing.

Age 3: I throw things. I can read. DOG. MAD. RUN.

Age 4: I climb the built-in shelves in the bathroom and can’t get down. My mother snaps a photo of me, crying, before lowering me to safety. The next day I do it again. 

Age 5: After watching a comet of bare-chested boys jump their bikes off an exposed foundation, I dump my bike in the dirt. At the base of a towering pine, I pick gravel from my hand and swallow tears. It takes more than just speed to take flight.

Age 6: My father is cold in the morning, ablaze at night. At church, I learn the concept of sin. I repeat, “Fuck you, Jesus” in my head, worrying I’ll go to hell.  I get my sister in on it, just in case. 

Age 7: On the first warm day of May, I bend to open the garage door when sunshine hits the back of my neck and detonates a grenade of joy. I imagine a million pennies. For the rest of the day, I pop wheelies in celebration of big numbers.

Age 8: Miss Ouellette is my favorite teacher and her gray hair is a halo of kindness. I feel safe in her classroom, so I learn everything.

Age 9: I am tall, dangerous, fast. I dream of flying. I sharpen sticks, hunt creatures lurking below the surface of puddles reflecting sky.

Age 10: Retainers on my teeth. I have a crush on my 4th grade teacher even though he cares little for my loud mouth, my desire to be captain, my hand flapping in the air with answers. I am the quarterback at recess. My mother shows us the fine art of quietly locking doors behind us.

Age 11: My father threatens my mother with one pistol, two bullets. At school, I get in trouble for talking too much and my seat is moved to the back of the class. I fashion a dunce cap from construction paper and place it on my head. Perfect the smirk. 

Age 12: I am wrongly accused of cheating on a test and a giant red zero appears to the left of my name. Injustice lodges in my throat. Fury is fuel, I realize. Sadness creeps in and stays.

Age 13: Cruelty is the culture of junior high. Small homogenous groups of pubescents laugh hysterically when confronted with difference. I question what’s funny, and drop a few rungs on the social ladder. I’m called weird for the first time. It rings true, so I adopt it.

Age 14: My eyebrows are furry caterpillars. A boy asks if I can touch my elbows behind my back, and when I try, he stares at my chest laughing moronically. At home, my father interrupts my chocolate ice cream by predicting my large body will only get larger, then pulls his truck out of the driveway before the ice cream melts in the bowl. That night, I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if I’m gross. 

Age 15: I do crunches in the bottom bunk. Eat less. Smell better. I want clothes we can’t afford, so I steal them.

Age 16: I take off my stolen clothes for a boy who takes his stolen clothes off, too. I adore his bottom lip, his white teeth, his delts. Adults hate how excited we are to touch, so they pile their shame on us. We ignore it, fumbling our way into pleasure.

Age 17: I finish my homework before the last bell, ace my tests. Chronically bored, I seduce my neighbor, a man twice my age who wears white tube socks with hi-tops. I scramble up a ladder into his bedroom at night, slip under the sheets, and mock him when he trembles. 

Age 18: I’m sick to death of my mill town. I drink Tanqueray and eat hallucinogens.  I write “Pink Floyd changed my life” on the back of a tee even though I can’t name a single member of the band. 

Age 19: I am accepted into an esteemed liberal arts college where most of the students don’t notice me. With no credit card, no car, and no dry cleaning ticket, I realize what makes a collar blue and what makes one pop. WASP seems an appropriate word for the sting they leave behind. 

Age 20: I fall for a man whose weather raises the hairs on my arm. He’s a handsome, low-pressure system. A month in, I’m introduced to his habit of violence. In the bathroom at my mother’s house, I tend wounds before slumping into the kitchen to burn a piece of toast, vowing to quit him. A few weeks later, I board a plane for England where my new, bespectacled Liverpudlian flatmate tells me he’ll piss on my clothes if I don’t let him into my bed, so I do. 

Age 21: I’m fat, depressed, my head stuffed with John Donne. Over the phone, my sister asks questions and lasers through my hazy answers. When she arrives, she glares so hard at the Liverpudlian we all hear the ping of his cock retracting. When it’s time for her to leave, she takes me with her. 

Age 22: My father and his fiance are killed in a motorcycle accident. I agonize over his last moments, convinced they were shaped by regret. I request a viewing of his body. The bruises on his knuckles are visible through layers of concealer, his hair politely combed. 

Age 23: My friend, Sadie, convinces me to pack my bags and head west. We rent a house. She feeds me, shows me how to grow vegetables, lets me borrow her car.  I start therapy.

Age 24: I get a job working with broken children. I get punched, kicked, and bitten. I make them breakfast, braid their hair, restrain them from hurting themselves. Most mornings, I’m up at 5:30am to ride my bike forty minutes through dull Pacific rain. It’s a crucial, minimum wage job.

Age 25: A rejection letter tells me that I will not get my MFA in writing. I have pistachio ice cream, shake a blanket out under a silver maple, and fall asleep watching quaking leaves.

Age 26: I fall in love with a Scorpio poet. He is Italian and Irish with eyes that burn. His nose is beguiling. We are glorious together, self-destructive.

Age 27: In all senses, I have no shame.

Age 28: I start grad school and ditch the Scorpio for a man with liquid eyes, like a doe. He smells good and pays for brunch. I decide this is it.

Age 29: My brain is exercised daily, as well as my body.  

Age 30: In the company of women, I cook, laugh, cry, dance, and learn. 

Age 31: After a match every Thursday night, the women’s soccer team I’ve joined gathers at an English pub to swallow beer, grub fries, and sing songs. I get engaged to the doe-eyed man, his addiction to pornography a problem I can solve.

Age 32: I have an affair with my fiance’s best friend, who is married to my friend. I’m a friend fucking a friend, fucking over friends. One night, I’m startled from sleep with a premonitory dream - rot has almost reached the core. Two weeks later, I board a plane and fly home, slamming the door on a city that allowed me a decade of growth.

Age 33: Back in Maine, after an impoverished winter, I meet a woman who smells like toasted coconut. She’s mastered the charcoal grill and howls with approval when I rip through a rack of ribs. We play card games until sunrise, sleep in her backyard tiki, float the river in a dinghy. I leave her in late summer, heartbroken. I’m devastatingly straight.

Age 34: AffairMan flies across the country with a novella of reasons why we should give our relationship a go. Nine months later, we have a daughter. Infancy drains me, so I ask my stylist to give me a haircut that will make me look like David Bowie. My long hair falls to the ground.

Age 35: My heart bursts with love for my daughter but the tedium of early motherhood has whittled me down to a nub. I discover most new moms feel the same way, except the religious ones, who are lying, and the rich ones, who have an au pair.

Age 36: Spontaneity is a raisin in the crack of the couch. My daughter’s eyes, a mighty green river.

Age 37: A Mi’kmaq man who loves men and sushi holds a fat piece of unagi between chopsticks and announces it’s time for me to journey. He offers to guide me, but I decline, fretting appropriation. He laughs at how white I’m being. He guides me; I befriend Black Water Snake. 

38: On most days, I’m irritated with my husband and argue relentlessly for domestic equity. A couple’s counselor advises us that it’s never good to keep count. I ignore her advice and tally my husband into submission. Good sex keeps our marriage afloat. He’s a seasoned musician, I tell my girlfriends, so he can do ten things at once.

39. I hang art and dig flower beds. Organize my closet, scrub floors, cook from scratch, wash and dry dishes. The country feels like it’s cracked in half. My husband and I discuss an open marriage. Instead, with his help, I found a nonprofit. With tiny acupuncture needles, I poke holes in an epidemic of pain.

40. I eat magic mushrooms on my birthday and have a panic attack in a bar strung with too many Edison bulbs. The next morning, after a shower, I examine my body and dislike nothing. I do a celebratory dance. Within seconds my daughter joins me, celebrating what she doesn’t understand. Her laughter spills out the open window.

41. Chaos erupts in our country when a pandemic is allowed in with little fight. Overnight, I go from professional to stay-at-home mom. Doctors weep on television. From the couch, I watch footage of people pressing their palms against glass, saying goodbye to the dying. My husband’s work booms in pandemic circumstances, his home office a bunker of normalcy. Spring is long, dull as dishwater, my normal coping skills whisked downstream by a steady current of stress.

42. A line from Samuel Beckett makes its way to the front of my face: Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. I crack books instead of beer, force myself to read the same sentence over and over, words leapfrogging until they settle. I read until I feel alive again.

43. Back to work I go. Back to school she goes. Miraculously, we’re still married. It takes a year to heal.

44. Levity outpaces bile. Our daughter fills the house with song and dance. Her bright eyes and pink cheeks are facts. I commit to adventuring once a week with my best friend - for five hours on Thursday nights, we do whatever the fuck we want. I dance ecstatically.

45. A woman with a heart sickened by pain starts a rumor that I’m unfaithful. Evidence is my ringless finger, my nights out sans husband. I spend an entire month upset that anger is not understood as a primary emotion, and instead only secondary to grief. I have Big Fight inside of me, not Unshed Tears.

46. I walk three miles a day, identifying roadside weeds, observing how they change through the seasons.When someone shows you who they are, believe them. I stumble across these words and they free me from a sticky trap. Love may not always exalt, but it should never debase. These words free an ancient splinter. My husband is kind to me as I recover from trap and splinter, and our friendship comes out of hiding.

47. I try to resist becoming infatuated with my own knowledge as much as I try to resist people infatuated with theirs. I warn my daughter against people who overcomplicate things to the detriment of a solution. She’ll miss me when I’m gone, she blurts, then saddens. I embrace her. I won’t be sad since I’ll be dead, I say. We laugh maniacally at this, riding a fun wave of love.