Lydia

20. It’s been a while. I’m not angry anymore. I still have Lydia, just not in such a tangible way. I imagine that she is with someone who needs her more than I do. When I see a slug or a snail on the trail, I think of her and how she taught me to see beauty in everything. 

10. One of Lydia’s favorite things to do is watch documentaries on Netflix. When she cries, her tears come out as pockets of pondwater, complete ecosystems with bacteria and minnows and algae. Her tears freefall and gather around the surface of her moss-covered torso, accumulating enough to buoy her up until she is floating above the couch, held up by her own grief.

2. I participated in extra-curricular activities and finished high school with good grades. I went to college and majored in a field likely to bring me financial success. I graduated college with a degree and high honors. I showed up at interviews with a crisp copy of my resume, a polished smile, a solid print pencil skirt. I denied my own happiness, and then I denied the absence of my own happiness. I chased empty goals and full bank accounts, and now my life is a broken mirror.

 15. Fiona Apple is our official dancing music, because that’s what was playing the first time Lydia danced in front of me. Sometimes we dance like hikers making a new trail up a mountain. Sometimes we dance like mountain lions stalking a squirrel. Sometimes we dance like honey swirling through a cup of hot tea. Always we dance to an undercurrent of joy. It sucks us under with a watery power.

12. If Lydia were a person, her aesthetic would be middle school art teacher. If I were a creature, my aesthetic would be poorly constructed cobweb, catching only leaves, twigs, and dandelion fluff. If Lydia were in outer space, she’d be the North Star. If I were in outer space, I’d be a black hole.

14. This man from my past, a boy really, kept me small because he was small and he didn’t want me to get any bigger, because keeping me small kept him powerful. Even still, I gave him all I had, and I offered it over and over again, like a penance, or a prayer. Now I’ve escaped, but I don’t know what to do with my freedom. My life is a shadow, a fear, a wanting. 

5. I don’t know what to call her. I point at myself and say my name, and then point at her with my eyebrows raised in a question. She doesn’t understand my question, but I understand the look of confusion on her collage of a face. I name her after my mom’s mom, who always paid for my subscription to the kid’s magazine Highlights.

8. Going to work is different now, because being at home is different now, too. I bought some houseplants from a local nursery. Lydia plants her fingers in the soil and lets them sit. When she pulls her hands back out, she rubs the soil into her skin, like lotion. I feel like she was made just for me, but I still wonder if some day she will leave, and everything will go back to how it was. 

6. Lydia likes her eggs raw. I’ve given them to her scrambled and fried. I even made her an omelet, with mushrooms and onions and peppers. She refuses them all with a single head shake, opting instead to make a delicate crack in the shell with her green branch fingers. She holds the shell against her lips and slurps out the contents. A joyous hum radiates from her small potent body. 

11. We go on walks. At first, I was reticent to leave the house, made lazy by my own despair, and fearful of what the neighbors might think. Lydia is stronger than she looks and, also, she is invisible when outside of my apartment. Even I can’t see her, though I hear her walking beside me. Her feet make wet slaps on the sidewalk. 

4. I watched the pile of green sludge begin to manipulate itself. I pinched the inside of my elbow to prove to myself that this was real life. Out of the green sludge poked limbs like branches. A covering, like the fluffy bright moss on tree trunks and big rocks, crawled over the sludge, giving it structure. A skull emerged, and from the skull, flesh and skin. Its face looked like a child, a cat, a bird. 

18. Lydia left. I still don’t have a boyfriend, or a job that brings me joy, or any clear sense of purpose. But she seemed to think she could go, I guess because I paint on the patio and dance in the kitchen and drink herbal tea and go for walks out in the forest. It’s cruel for her to come and ensconce herself in my life, then walk out the door whenever it suited her. Who does she think she is, Mary Poppins?

13. I am shouting. It’s something Lydia and I do together when we’ve had a bad day or we’re feeling upset about something that maybe happened to us years ago that we aren’t over yet. We picture the person who hurt us, their face plastered up on the ceiling of my apartment, and we say all the things we wanted to say, but couldn’t. “I do NOT think it’s cute or funny that you’ve been sleeping with that girl you said is your lesbian friend,” I shout. Lydia lets loose a string of shrieks and garbles and I know what she means. She’s been hurt, too.

16. I am breathless. Near nightly dance parties have been a tradition for a while, but tonight’s has been longer and more rambunctious than ever. We stomp and swirl and bounce against each other. Her feathered leaves and branches mingle with my frizzy hair. My skin is sticky with sweat.

19. Lydia has been gone over two weeks now, and I’m still cleaning up after her. I find swatches of moss in my bed and piles of twigs in the corners of my kitchen. I find notes of painted symbols and pencil sketches in my living room. Pockets of floating pollen greet me the moment I step out the front door, and I know it is her. I still go to my painting class. I still dance in my kitchen. I still drink herbal tea. I still don’t know why she had to leave, and why she showed up in the first place, if she wasn’t going to stay.

3. I am cleaning out an old trunk that my mom dropped off, after purging her house of my childhood belongings. I pick up a dusty forest green colored crayon. It cracks in half as I grip it in my fingers. It’s been years since I’ve made anything. I feel a warm oozing on my fingers. A trail of pigment streams from both broken ends of the crayon, gaining shape on my area rug that I ordered from Amazon.

1. I am following the rules that someone else wrote. I am playing a game that I had no part in creating. Every day is the same. I wake and I wash and I dress and I drive. This isn’t what I dreamed adulthood would be like when I was a little girl, fresh and watery with hope.

17. I signed up for an art class being taught at the local library. Lydia helped me. She comes with me every Saturday morning and holds my hand when I get anxious about what color or brush to use. She knows when I’m anxious because of how I’m breathing. I don’t have to say anything. She just knows.

9. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I ever finished cleaning out that old trunk. If I cracked a colored pencil in half. If I punched a hole in a tube of my gouache paints. If I tore a page from my drawing pad. Maybe I’d have enough creatures to play a game of baseball at the park down the street.

7. I am not as shocked as I imagined I’d be at Lydia’s appearance in my life. She defies categorization and maybe that is why I am not fearful of her. Lydia has her fingers in the cobwebs of my soul. Her teeth are gnashing on the swirls of my destiny. She isn’t here to create fear, but to dispel it. The first night, she climbed into bed with me and curled up on my pillow, on top of my head, falling asleep immediately. When I woke the next morning, moss and leaves were entangled in my hair.

Erin Schallmoser (she/her) lives in Bellingham, WA, works by day as a naturopathic clinic manager, and delights in moss, slugs, stones, wildflowers, small birds, and the moon, when she can see it. She’s also a poetry/prose editor and staff contributor at The Aurora Journal and is still figuring out Twitter @dialogofadream. You can read more at erinschallmoser.com/.