273. Bone After Bone - Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Suleika Jaouad, Untitled Fever Dream X (2022)
And you see, it really happened in this way, and I really can tell it to you no other way than this. At the bottom of that laneway, objects came from everywhere, ordinary and flawed, on days when time and place no longer knew the way, and I took them.
Maybe the events of that year really started with finding the nests.
When I began to brood, not over a clutch but over time.
When I began to try to sculpt it, day by day, alone, wandering, again and again, without scale or horizon, the same field, the same lane, the same stretch of wet, hungry land. When I stepped, in a way, outside & inside, above & below—the flow of it all, the flow of my own blood; enough to really let those objects come. To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce.
The objects, when they came, swept me with them in their flow, and rattled my bones.
Creamy-white dove eggs, opened but unbroken; the skull of a badger, too sculpted to even seem real; on Mother's Day (my heart cracked open like a dry seed-head), a perfect, otherworldly antler, from the field's exact middle;
I took, I took, I took.
Bone after bone, porcelain white and willowy: sheep and deer, horse and fox—the pelvic girdle of a delicately bird-like rat—objects so creaturely as to make the longing that had grown inside me slowly, quietly, ease.
There were birds, that year, so many of them as to seem unthinkable.
There was a wren, always a wren; that year was the year of the wren.
And you see, it really happened in this way, and I really can tell it to you no other way than this. At the bottom of that laneway, objects came from everywhere, ordinary and flawed, on days when time and place no longer knew the way, and I took them.
I took every single thing into my arms and hands and home, that year: I was compliant.
I knew at every turn I could not go back to how I lived before the objects came. They were an invitation I could do nothing but accept.
Time did the things it does when we aren't looking, and soon my lover began, while walking on his own, to find things too. Things, you understand, that never once had come his way before that year. His nests were, to my eye, more gorgeous than my own, but I felt no jealousy. It was such sweet relief to speak of those objects, of what I saw them as taking the place of, somehow. We sat, each night, as the names of those we'd lost were read aloud and we mourned for those we did not know, behind the daily count; faces we had not seen but could not turn away from now. A silence took up residence; it lay in circular objects, things we knew had once been crafted by the careful, repeated movements of the bodies of birds.
You lost, too.
You grieved.
You wondered when it all might end; if ever.
The grief, the one I went there first to bury, still came in waves, as we all have known it to; the deep water that none of us will ever fully swim through. It paled, though, so incredibly, in the face of the sorrow of those days. I held it to the sky and watched it fade. I saw its steely greys and charcoals water down. I watched the ache for what I did not have turn chalky, I stood and let the fledglings drink its milk. It sounds formulaic, as though I forced it in some way, but that year came to me like a field of bleached white bones.
I can't go back to who I was before that year.
That time was like no other, all of us thought—but we knew it was exactly like any other, too. The swallows arrived at my new home, found safe sanctuary, and built their nests.
- Kerri ní Dochartaigh
