dissolving margins
The changes began last Thursday, or maybe it all started long ago and I only just then noticed. I was walking out of the Safeway into the parking lot, when I touched my hand to my car door and suddenly failed to perceive any boundary between my fingertips and the chrome paint of the car exterior. It was not, I should say, that my fingers passed unhampered through the entity of the car, as if I were a ghost or other corporeally unleashed being. Rather, my hand seemed to rest solidly on the handle but without any value, shade, texture distinguishing the two.
I was frightened, of course, in the way that any woman suffering an unexpected feeling in a parking lot might. Dizzy from the sudden realignment of the world around me, I made a great effort to wrest the car door open and tumbled to the seat inside. I dialed the number of my physician and he was able to make an appointment for me within the hour.
The man was a great help — he seemed to understand the blurriness that had overtaken the formerly sharp contours of objects around me, the static surrounding my outlines. Typing careful notes in his records, he prescribed a half hour meditation each day and an hour-long walk each week. I accepted the remedy gratefully and went promptly to the CVS to get the prescription filled. But my optimism flagged when, upon delivering to the pharmacist the doctor’s recommendations, I was met with a blank stare. This is when I noticed the second change.
In addition to feeling a blending of my self-material and other-material, I began to notice a distortion of the scene in front of me. Where before, I seemed to be operating in a world of spatially ranked objects, an item beside another in front of another behind another, I now observed a single plane of orientation. The pharmacist’s glasses resting on her nose, the shelves of varied pill bottles, the cash register on the table, all were flattened against each other into one static picture. Intellectually, I knew there must be depth and distance separating these things, but to my mind it seemed that if I simply reached my hand out a few inches, I could touch them all at the same time.
At this point, I understood that I was too late to follow the doctor’s orders, that I had slipped past where his help could reach me. I went to visit the priest.
Despite all the other changes of the day, the church still seemed beautiful to me. The stained glass and tall spires touched me the same way they had the times before, and I found comfort there. I sat in the booth and began my Confession:
“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been four months since my last confession. I have destroyed the sanctity of the self, I have eliminated the boundaries between self and object. I no longer respect the unital elements. Hand upon desk and body upon chair melt into each other, there is no definitional negation of one and the other. I have reshaped the world around me, collapsing layers into each other and annihilating the laws of molecular integrity. I am the keeper of my own universe, one where selves dissolve into one another and depth has no privilege. But Father, forgive me, I have sinned further — I lie to my husband, I tell him I am ready but I still take the pill, I’m scared that if a child comes out she won’t be human but something greater and stranger, this country frightens me, I worry that my flesh-blood-water won’t fit inside its container and will seep out into the ground, the dirt will drink it up and I will rot below the ground in order to feed the trees, there is too much violence in the air I’ve been smelling it for weeks, I think my brother has drunk it, he’s not the same as he was before, the sugar tastes different, it’s bitter, I asked my sister if she felt it too but she didn’t answer, something is happening to us, if you pay attention you’ll see that everything is moving much too quickly, we’re reaching a turning point, they’ve realized we’re ready, my body is losing its form, I must concentrate before the shape collapses completely, before I am lost to the fire and ash outside, please I need to concentrate.
“This is all I can remember, Father. I am sorry for these and all my sins.”
Nothing has changed since that Thursday, other than that I must now complete the 15 rosaries assigned as penance by the priest. My condition remains no less or more than when it began. I don’t know my goal in recounting these events to you now; maybe this, as narrative, will give back to me the silhouette that I’ve lost.