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, wailing, 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 speed for 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 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 she offers.

Age 9: I am tall, dangerous, fast. I dream of flying. I sharpen sticks, hunt creatures lurking below the surface of puddles that reflect 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 soundlessly latching 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 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 disgusting. 

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 deltoids. Adults hate how excited we are to touch each other, so they pile their shame onto 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 his 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 internal weather raises the hairs on my arm. He’s a handsome, swirling, low-pressure system. A month into our fling, I’m introduced to his habit of discharging trauma through 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 bedroom, 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 retracting cock. 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, and 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 by an nasty hiss: rot will soon reach 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 a spiritually and financially impoverished winter, I meet a woman who smells like toasted coconut. She’s mastered the charcoal grill and howls with approval when I snarl, ripping fat from perfectly seasoned ribs. We play card games until sunrise, sleep in her backyard tiki, float the river in a dinghy. I leave her 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 sleepless tedium of new momhood 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 aren’t.

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.  I befriend Black Water Snake, but write about her carefully. 

38: On most days, I’m irritated with my husband and argue relentlessly for day-to-day 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 many things at once.

39. I hang art and dig flower beds. Organize my closet, scrub floors, cook from scratch, wash and dry endless dishes - small antidotes to our country’s increasing appetite for cannibalizing one other online. My husband and I discuss opening our marriage. Instead, with his help, I found a nonprofit. With tiny acupuncture needles, I try to poke holes in an epidemic of pain.

40. I eat magic mushrooms on my birthday and have repeating panic attacks 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.

41. Chaos erupts in our leaderless country when a pandemic is allowed in with little fight. Overnight, my role changes from full-time professional to stay-at-home mom. We watch doctors weep on television, people attempting goodbyes, tearful faces on screens, palms against glass. My husband, an employee of a business that booms due to circumstances, scurries away to his office after breakfast - 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, glowing from the page: 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. Occasionally, I dance ecstatically.

45. A woman harboring the kind of pain that poisons the heart starts a rumor that I’m unfaithful. Evidence is my ringless finger, my significant group of male friends, my Thursday nights without my husband. I try to talk to her about it, and she bites. I spend an entire month pissed off that anger is not understood as a primary emotion, pissed that it’s understood as secondary to grief. The only thing making me sad is that I can’t slap her.

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. I stumble across these words and they remove an old splinter. My husband is kind to me as I recover from the trap and splinter, and our friendship comes out of hiding.

47. I try to avoid becoming infatuated with my own knowledge as much as I try to avoid those who are infatuated with theirs. I sit my daughter down and tell her things are often more simple than she’ll be lead to believe, to beware those with a tendency to overcomplicate things to the detriment of a solution. She’ll miss me when I’m gone, she says, and saddens. I embrace her. I won’t be sad, I tease, since I’ll be dead. We laugh maniacally at this, gleefully present in our humongous love.