It is late and I don’t know who I am anymore.
My old life has been squeezed into an 8×10 square foot storage unit in Harlem and, barely two weeks into my voluntary exile in Buenos Aires, I have nothing to replace it with. I don’t know yet what my favorite bookstore is or who my habitual coffee date will be. I haven’t yet figured out what the best running route is or which store sells the freshest selection of fruits and vegetables. If I have to go to the hospital, I have no emergency contact person to write on the form.
I am a twisted knot of emotions balancing on the edge of a very sharp knife. Fall to one side and this has all been a colossal mistake in which I run away from life when things stop making sense, only to spend the next few months in a foreign land trying (but failing) to write myself back to sanity. Fall to the other side and I am a kick ass chick who isn’t afraid to leave behind the stable job with health benefits and the gentle boy with the confused heart to seek out adventure and inspiration in the city they call the Paris of South America.
It is late and I am reading The Physics of Imaginary Objects, a book that was awarded one of the few honorary spaces in my luggage primarily because of its haunting cover — a mirror perched atop a podium draped in black velvet; the image of pine trees reflected in the glass, a wire running down the front and disappearing among the dead braches scattered on the forest floor. The cover is the perfect encapsulation of the experience of reading this collection of stories — quiet, evocative moments tinged with something dark and foreboding lurking at the edges. Indeed, reading The Physics of Imaginary Objects is not unlike the balancing act I am grappling with in my own life. I am constantly unsure which way to fall.
Tina May Hall has a talent for making the incomprehensible seem perfectly sensible. I read about a woman who falls in love with the meteorologist who appears each night to her on the local channel. She experiences “perfect happiness in the four minutes and thirty seconds that they coincide each evening,” only to have her love grow sour as, forecast after forecast, he insists on predicting rain that would destroy her prized daffodils. In the end, she knows it was never meant to be. “He existed in rectangular spaces, and her garden is humpbacked and sprawling, irregular, unkempt, maybe the shape of her heart.” Of course she had to end it with the man on the TV, I think. I have known love like that.
In another story, a woman cuts off her own finger and keeps it in a jar by her nightstand, where “[i]n the morning, it twists to feel the sunlight.” Over corned beef and coleslaw with a man who can only speak with the aid of a silver voice box, she tries to describe the moment of spiritual ecstasy that led her to slice off a piece of herself. “[I]t was if her perception of everything slipped for a moment and she knew what she was supposed to do.” Makes sense, I think. One must act accordingly when presented with flashes of such singular conviction.
I read on. One minute I am awash in the dreamy romance and lyricism of the text. The next my teeth are clenched and my fists are in balls as I anticipate the arrival of a shadowy presence — a wolf, a witch, a man with an ax. Images pass in and out of my consciousness like waves. A dead squirrel in the wall, “a tang in the air, sweet-sour, like menstrual blood, like the hair under his arms where I liked to bury my nose.” A red-hooded girl walking alone through the forest, “as clean as a river stone underneath, fresh-shaven, flossed, exfoliated and moisturized.” A wife sitting on the porch thinking about tagging cicadas, “recalling the way these somnolent insects sip tree sap and wait out the dark, the way they sing themselves from the ground.”
As the night mixes with the dawn, I discover my favorite story, “Skinny Girls’ Constitution and Bylaws.” I savor its lines out loud as I am brushing my teeth: “We chant Plath at school assemblies.” “We will not stick our heads in ovens. We will not throw ourselves from bridges, nor weight our pockets, nor disturb our veins.” “In fairy tales we are the last to be eaten.” I cannot stop. I recite its words like a mantra as I am lying in bed waiting for sleep to come: “We eat; we eat.” “Everything is bone, bone, bone.”
I love, love, love this book.
It is almost morning and I’m not sure yet who I’ll be in this new corner of the world, but I am crying and laughing at the same time because at least this I know: I am a reader. Forever and always.
