Stuff keeps crawling into my apartment to die

Indigestion #1

Hello. Welcome to my new semi-weekly newsletter where I talk about stuff that is weighing on me, things that are difficult to stomach and often do not have answers. I appreciate you being here. I hope you stay forever.

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Stuff keeps crawling into my apartment to die. Sometime in the sweaty blur of late July, I was writing in my dining room or maybe I was pasting pressed flowers to paper or staring at my screen and willing any sort of thought to bloom to importance. The windows were thrown open to the alley and the red brick building across from mine, it was a hot day and everything seemed to be either rising on the heat or flattened to stillness under the weight of it. In particular, a smell rose to meet me where I was. I blinked at it the way I might an old acquaintance. It insisted upon me. It was not a good smell.

I grew up in an old New England house, all thin walls and drafty windows, uneven on its foundation. Its faults were endless but most concealed themselves until winter crept up, staking spikes of hard cold into the earth. The first big cold was a reminder that we are not the only creatures seeking heat in the evening, the shift from fall to winter inextricable from the careful laying out rat traps in all the dark corners of the house. Behind the fridge, the back porch where we tossed the recycling, deep under furniture with all the loose change and dust bunnies, anywhere that we might be able to hide death without having to look at it too closely. The traps were pretty hit or miss. Sometimes the unwanted critters couldn’t resist a lick of peanut butter and they lost their lives simply and stupidly for it. Other times, they crept inside the walls for weeks, skittering close to where I slept but invisibly so. A lot of times, they died in the walls, maybe lost or hungry or because it was time to die. We always knew when it happened because the walls were thin and the scent of dead rat was a terrible stink that could not be burnt out with candles and simply had to be weathered until there was nothing left to stink. No one was breaking down the walls for one dead rodent.

I know the smell better than I wish to admit. I knew I was smelling it that day no matter how I tried to convince myself it was the garbage in the trash cans cooking in the sun and rising through the window like barbecue. I scoured the dining room looking for any sign of death, peering reluctantly into the very corners I expected to find the neat little corpse. And I came back with nothing. The rooms on either side of the dining room were perfectly inoffensive, no trace of decay. Over the course of the next few hours, I tried again and again to focus on my work but inevitably got up periodically, searching like a truffle hog for the source. It was impossible to ignore, it pressed at my olfactory senses to the point that I felt I had to be in some sort of Tell-Tale Heart situation, being driven slowly insane by a guilt I was not allowed to place. It had to be in the walls, and so I was forced to accept a measure of madness, a muscle that had thinned from disuse and so I just avoided the dining room for a while.

I found it this past Saturday while cleaning the apartment. Perhaps in the one corner I hadn’t checked. It had stopped stinking weeks ago and what it lacked in scent it made up for in sight, a rotted gray, pockmarked corpse, shriveled but still unmistakable as a little house mouse, a scurrying scavenger. I’ve never lived in a place that didn’t have some sort of recurring mouse problem and I always seem to catch them searching the kitchen in broad daylight. But I never saw this one darting about the apartment, no signs of it having been around for very long and so I was left only to imagine that it had come to my home looking for a place to die. It seems I was happy to provide.

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At the beginning of each spring when everything is stretching and breathing and making room for more of itself, I get to repot all of my plants, a task that brings me gorgeous joy. I forget at this point each and every year what is possible and often inevitable. Some plants are simply not ready for a new home or they don’t like the one they’re given or they reject the soil and die just to make a point. I do feel a measure of grief each time a plant dies on my watch, silly as it is. It is possible they do it to spite me. Every plant that dies in my home is unceremoniously dumped into a big Lowe’s bucket to compost and wither to its mushy essentials. And once a year after everything is settled, I take that bucket out back and return the matter to the earth, from whence it came, etc. The rest of the long year it spends in the dark of that bucket rotting slowly, quietly, unwatched.

The other recurring issue I decide to forget until it is again unavoidable is that I always end up with an infestation of fungus gnats in my usually overwatered pots. They are ugly, miniscule things that crawl up the walls and fly in lazy loops and bury themselves in the wet dirt so their larvae might feed off my plants’ carefully formed roots. They die off each winter of their own accord and I swear they will not return, I will not let them return. I am convinced there is no way they could be able to come back in full force when they’d died off so suddenly and entirely but they do return and their numbers are dizzying and eradicating them is Sisyphean, wet, and exhausting.

When they aren’t burrowing in the dirt, they just sort of crawl around the exterior of the pots, waiting for something to happen. What happens: I have a spray bottle full of neem oil, the prescriptive cure for their presence. If I have nothing else to do, I’ll sit in front of their favorite pots and wait for them to start crawling and spray with abandon. They’re such tiny creatures, one direct blast will flatten them, plaster their body to the pot and snuff out their short life instantly. I don’t know how to feel bad about it. I can walk around my apartment and kill two dozen of them in so many minutes and there will always be more. Their supply is endless. One totters around my head and I clap my hands together like a madman trying to catch its death midair. I kill and kill and kill and their meager corpses stain my walls but they keep coming back as though they come craving nothing more than to be added to my body count.

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There’s a spider nesting on the windowsill in my sunroom. She’s a bigger girl, about the size of my thumbnail with sharp-looking legs and a compact body. I’d like not to be afraid of her but she only comes out of her hole just often enough to startle me each time and she moves so quickly I can always imagine I’ve just seen her darting on the periphery. I could kill her I suppose, if I care enough, but I’ve got bugs living in my plants and I need something to eat them so I let her be. She’s been watching a batch of tiny black eggs like periods on paper for months now and I keep waiting for them to hatch so I can swat the thick web away but so much time has passed, I’ve been wondering if they’re not dead too, if they were never going to break through, spindly and hungry for all she’s been catching in her thread.

In her web right now: a smattering of the very bothersome gnats I’ve got her on the payroll to take care of in the first place; one normal sized fly, the kind you might expect to get caught in a spider’s web; and one plump, dark bumblebee, looking like a bundle of tangled black thread. I’ve been wondering about this last one, how something of its size even managed to squeeze itself past the window screens which are all intact and relatively flush with the window frame. How lost it must have been to end up here and to suffer the final consequence. I find myself thinking again that maybe it came here to die. That it seemed like a good place to do so, somewhere fit for endings.

And I wonder, as I always must: did I invite this? Every dried flower I’ve taped to the wall, brown wilt stalactite hanging from the ceiling, bags of rotten petals pocketed to trap their scent. Always an avocado or two or the whole bunch going bad on the kitchen counter. Always an apple with a sinkhole in its side inviting fruit flies out of the thin air to sink their teeth into the stink. Always pale flesh-like mushrooms rising from the heavy soil of an overwatered plant, moisture too ripe for anything but decay. Have I purposely curated the perfect space for deterioration? Am I the crypt keeper?

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I moved into this apartment three years ago with my partner at the time, sickly in love and full of rot. I was twenty four and had never looked in a mirror. Every night, I poured a heavy glass and then another and another until my gut grew so cold and heavy I could not feel the decay. They worked in a coffee shop and came home each day smelling of stale beans and thin sweat. We talked and talked and hardly anything ever came from our smart mouths that wasn’t a prolonging of some future death. It was love, this is true, but it was also ugly and greedy, shifty-eyed and avoidant.

I woke sometimes in a cold sweat thinking my insides were turning black. When I felt a sharp pain licking the sides of my stomach, I joked that I must be experiencing liver failure as if I didn’t actually believe it. But I did believe myself to be a rotten creature and all I could think to do was speed up the process with further fermentation. There was another person dying in the room with me and so I could tell myself it was sweet, the way that rotting garbage has its own sort of sweetness, repulsive but understandable. 

My partner had chosen dying before they arrived to me. Over and over they tried to choose life for me but never for themself and with all manifestation occurring externally, the inside couldn’t hear it. No amount of talking can reverse the process of decay. Sometimes, when you think you might be ready to die, all that matters is finding a comfortable place to do it. Beneath a wilted bouquet, curled up next to the compost, on a pillow of spidery thread pooling sweetly in the sunlight, in the kitchen sink with the dirty dishes and the fruit flies circling the drain. With someone else to lie down and give up with.

I had to excise them in order to choose life and my hand was forced to wield the scalpel last October. I poured the cheap bottles of sugary wine down the open throat of the bathtub drain. I woke up in the morning and kissed my stomach like a closed-mouth apology. I looked the pockmarked corpse in its face and said okay, it’s time to go. I shoveled all this death out onto the driveway like pushing heavy, brown snow and if I sobbed hard enough to purge a ghost from my gut, it was only because I caught the sun in my eye. Nearly a year ago now, I killed death in each of the rooms in my apartment and still the scent lingers. It lives in the walls.

It might be that I’ve built a funeral pyre irresistible to those looking for somewhere sweet to die or it might be that I’m just used to noticing the smell of it. Either way, I don’t think I mind it very much. The sight of it is a joyously stark reminder that I’ve chosen life, a working stomach and a future love that is not a corpse tied to my brittle-thin ankles. I am not looking for a place to die but a thing worth staking my life on. Can you smell it on the wind?

jw

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if i’m turning in your stomach and i’m making you feel sick / am i making you feel sick?

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What I’ve Been Devouring

With only one album comprised of 8 songs, Haley Heynderickx has somehow managed to end up in and stay in my top five favorite songwriters of all time. This song has only cemented her spot. I can’t stop listening to it, her voice, the way she plays guitar, I feel it in my lungs. This song has also cracked open the meaning of the novel I’ve been working on the past couple months and given me the final push to complete it. If you want a little preview of the novel’s central theme before I start sharing it later this year, check this song out. Or check it out anyway, it’s incredible.

I’ve been forcing myself to read the classics after too much time spent thinking that it’s embarrassing to show up late to the party. Le Guin is revered for a reason. This novel is the epitome of the word ‘imaginative.’ A really incredible world and Le Guin fills it to the brim with interest. As I’m struggling to come up with a title for my own novel, I cannot stop thinking about how The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best novel titles of all time.

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A Creative Week in Digest

I am so close to finishing this novel and the ending is really exciting me. The story has taken so many turns and shifted in ways I could not have predicted when I started writing it so the editing process is looming like its own behemoth on the horizon but I’m feeling excited to tear into it anyway. This story continues to fill my heart.

In the meantime, I haven’t found much space for any other art-making but I feel at peace about it. I took some photos on Sunday during a gorgeous afternoon spent at my favorite nature reserve. It’s super poorly managed which I frankly love. There are downed trees everywhere and the paths are always wet and hard to navigate, the whole thing does not scream of made for human use! which I find very sexy. Here’s some stuff I saw:

teeming with thick tadpoles

i do not know my mushrooms

smelly lake, probably smelly birds