“What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.” –Lidia Yuknavitch
I search for the gentleman inside me. Swallow elixirs in order to make sense of the smoke and rough. I obsess over the wing span of my spine. How many words can I bench press. What can I digest in order to turn my body into a billboard reflecting what I really feel.
I visit an alchemist in the west village named Saje. This elixir mixer gesticulates me to sit down as he peruses narrow shelves with a collection of bottles, all varying in sizes.
Achillea millefolium, the alchemist speaks. Scent of chrysanthemum. It will carry away your wounds.
I grab this blue bottle with scratches like scars along the side from the alchemist. Inhale some of the liquid and drip it onto my weary tongue.
It will swallow your pain. A tonic for the blood you weep over, he spoke.
At home, I drink enough tea to float me away. When I walk, I can hear the tea leaves slosh around like an ocean of impatient waves.
My bladder empties and fills and empties and I take more drops of elixir in order to fill in the lines of my soul.
Previously in the west village, the alchemist had said to me, Take this ocimum tenuiflorum. Its holy will remove your fever. The heat of your questions scalding the remains of your day. And I am throwing in urtica dioica to treat the hemorrhage of your worry. Be mindful of servings. You can overflow your heal.
There are some parts of bodies that have no answer. In the most intimate parts of the day or night, I close my eyes and pretend away some of my bones. I wonder how my skin will fall. I cut out words from newspapers and magazines stuffed into my mailbox. I throw these letters in with the hot water and tea leaves. I drink sounds. I swallow fragments. All these pre-recorded meanings become something else. I give birth to something else. And this cannot fit into any box because these words are just beginning.
All of this is part of something similar to healing. Closer to meaning. Touching the tip of what all this means to be alive and searching because all these scripts are subject to a rewrite.
Aimee Herman 