Michael Wasson
Glimpses of a Life While Everything Remains So
Beautiful. The first word I am interested in learning, a seven-year-old boy sheltered by a forest, edged along a wide field that extends toward a darkening northern Idaho sky. Sai-yuh-kits, my grandfather tells me, pronouncing it with more English grip to lift it through his lungs. When my grandfather remembers some of our language, it’s always in fragments, little pebbles or twigs collected that once spoke of pine trunks and mountain valleys. I try to hold the word between my ears, long enough to see it flicker and quicken against the dark red of my inner eyelids, then brighten into an imprint of a past my grandfather never speaks of anymore.
The moon, I say, sai-yuh-kits. It is early October here.
•
In the middle of a city on the other side of the world, I look out my window. Concrete. A roll of desiccated toilet paper caked into the ground and almost splattered along the gray wall, as if it was trying to escape and never found the exit. I keep looking at my palms and fingertips. Tiny specks glittering of sweat. I have been, for years, struggling to breathe on nights like this. The moon there, staring down at me, burning itself into my window. Four years prior I lost one of my best friends. It is always autumn in this life, isn’t it? I tell my friends I love autumn. Always have.
•
It’s been over a year since someone touched me. Sometimes I find myself microdosing on the sense of care when my stylist washes and cuts my hair. The suds pressed into a million eyes resting on my skin, looking at the world from the earth of me. These times when I need to get my hair cut are the monthly moments of connection I remember to keep up. I speak to him, hiding my life behind pleasantries and extended small talk. But I am still here, in this chair, across a mirror, alive. Pathetic, I tell myself in the empty room of my tiny apartment in another city on the other side of the world, raking my fingers through my hair, trying to remember someone’s hands on my head, hearing again the pouring of warm water as if through my skull to let lakes and rivers of my life runnel through the folds of my brain. Every month, Is it too hot? he asks. No, it’s absolutely fine, I respond in his language.
•
The worst part of all of this is that my body is failing. I sit in cafes, my heart hurts, read books, my brain flickers with details of lives no longer in my life, either alive or not, sit on the floor of my room, see the walls purple into panels of night, lie on the ground, walk to parks, sit on benches, and I hear voices of people I love or loved. The world is here, each and every today, to be lonely with.
My mom says, I’m worried about you.
I don’t answer, I’m worried about me too.
•
My friend was found in a river. My friend was scattered into parts. My friend was autopsied. My friend was breathing. And then she wasn’t. I don’t know this yet. I am on the other side of the world sitting on a balcony and listening to an empty street down below while the world is afraid of itself. Pandemic world. Stay home. Crisis hotlines. Forgetting to eat. Needing a job, any job, to not be deported, to live on this balcony while I listen to someone in another apartment building practicing their out-of-tune guitar. The smell of grilled fish somewhere down below. It hits me. A baby crying, somewhere. Warmth.
•
My friend and I take turns saying animal words to each other, to see who ends up not able to keep it going, a game we’ve been doing for years:
wípwip—
qoq’áalx̣ (but I say it with that extra indigenous heft, like I’m pulling the word up from a river)—
yáaka’—wéx̣weqt— héy’uxc—palx̣c— ’
áacix!—
Hmmm . . . kiyéewiyew—
manáa? ’ituu híiwes? she asks me. Katydid, I tell her.
It’s like a green cricket or grasshopper, I try to explain. There’s a story your grandma and the elders went over with us from the book we’re working on. When together, these katydid, their call is apparently sáw sáw sáw. She pushes the liquid and breath of this chorus to the back of her teeth.
The lone katydid, I say, at the end of the story, rattles off something like, c’álalal c’álalal. It’s kind of bonkers. Check it out later when you’re at the language center.
She tells me, Say it again.
•
The worst part is news like this is accompanied with reminders of our tiny, silly lives, surrounded by a country where our bones are deemed nothing more than American and awful. A country that swallows us up, monstrous and godly. Daily a country hungry. I wake up. I haven’t seen my family in almost a decade. My brother sends me a message:
She’s dead. I’ll get more information when I can. Something domestic. I’m sorry.
I stare at my hands, until they glisten with an ache that I will carry in my throat and ribs and toes and neck until I re-enter the earth or sky or wherever myself.
•
I wonder how and when the word became sayáq’ic. Beautiful. It comes from esteemed or pleasing to a particular sense. In our history, there is only so much of it we can carry until we end up archived. Sometime—before America was this wide, westward expanded America—someone who looked like us felt a deep sensation. What did they see? Why did it fill their body with the pleasure of being alive? On a day, the land no longer this land, they saw it, whatever that was, and called it on their breath in a language I only speak to myself with the lights off: sayáq’ic. The fricative sibilance, the liquidic repetition, the almost glottaled, throat-nearing consonant, the middling vowel, the tongue touching the back of the teeth to be everything and true. This is the weight of a word that keeps me up at night. Something gorgeous and telling, hidden and blossoming from my neck that one day it will crack me open enough to say the world was everything I ever needed.
•
My doctor slows down. I’ve been seeking help for my fluttering heart, the prolonged chest pains, the searing images in my head, the waves of shakes I get. He asks me in his language. I pause. I ask him to repeat it. I turn it and rub it kindly between my fingers to see its soft belly while the meaning glints like dust in a slant of sunlight.
Honestly, have you ever thought about suicide?
Yes. I break down in his arms. I haven’t been held like this in years, decades perhaps.
•
I haven’t called her by her name. I do, don’t worry. Often. It’s better this way. Trust me. Here, I’ll call her by her titóoqanm wen’íikt. And then I will translate it into something everyone can understand because I know pronouncing wéetxuuiis is impossible for almost everyone who’s here with me. Returns from far away. I’ll even put the parts of her together like this:
Returnsfromfaraway.
See? I love that everything of us rests in a given name, in a language that crosses and connects bodies and blood, despite so very few who can translate. I love that
I can write it down on a sheet of paper and hear a voice fall around like historical snow. It’s early March in this part of the sequence, and yesterday was the first snow of the year in this unbearable city. I have had this image since I was a boy— the snow of Idaho always falls inside me. I don’t know why, but it’s an image that lets me feel warm and loved. The snow is as warm as human skin in my image though. It endures the cutting blade of a body’s temperature. Anyway, where was I?
•
At the mental health clinic, I am prescribed medication. They rattle like bones in plastic cups, but I hear them when I place them on my low-set table like ’ox̣xọx̣ because I am who I am. I press a nail to expose them: p’ím. God, what has language done of me? I take it after dinner. Images gleam in my view. Flashes of faces of past loves, the backs of hands held elsewhere, previous classmates who’ve gone on, landscapes of Idaho and Oregon. A boy beside another boy, both afraid. In bed, I hold myself like I always wanted to be held. Arms only my own cradling my torso and neck, pretending they’re someone else’s. It’s okay. I’m here. Somehow, I’m back in my body, I whisper to no one. What does it mean to hear yourself, to keep yourself alive?
•
The worst part is that when I load up my homeland’s newspaper online I start with the obituary. I’m a terrible citizen of my nation.
•
Returnsfromfaraway and I spent evenings driving the backroads, listening to The Beatles or City & Colour or My Chemical Romance. Cranked volume on everything to remember summers of childhoods we didn’t always share. We could drive anywhere, and the world would make sense in its uncertainties and anxieties. Buying gas station snacks at Thunderbirds, watching slow creeks and talking about where life might take us in our own ways. Still young and forever indigenous in a land where we can disappear. I drive her to see my grandmother’s gravestone near the place where everything was created. Once, later, alone, nine- teen and on a whim, I drive to my grandmother’s gravestone to cry a cry that washes you clean. Why have I always been like this?
•
I want to tell you about autumn. This is the first time I’m using the second person to talk to you. The light through the gingko trees reminds me of our homeland. I don’t care why. The waterways along the clean streets here bring me the sounds of Idaho creeks and the muscled quiver of trout. When a father is lost, we call it autumn. October 29th is a day to honor the gunshot that made me. Where the dead return, we call it autumn. I repeat sáw sáw sáw (remember?) over and over, lovingly, but remember sáwca is the verb for I am alone, or I am doing aloneness. What am I even doing? October 31st has no dark borderlines, despite the hours we sleep in our skins and pray for our mothers to be loved and live. I am walking under the changing colors of leaves in my mid-30’s on some side of this earth to recall the crackle of winter fires and to see all our people laughing and loving, bowls of soup and bread and that field that forgets summer was ever the wind failing to touch us—and we’re all gorgeous and full of the blood that never spills and that American forgetfulness. The soil soaks up everything, doesn’t it? When a grandmother buries her granddaughter, we call it autumn. When the grandmother passes soon after, weeks later, we say the season’s gone forever. As one leaves, we promise to never dance for a year. We all get together to hold onto the dead’s materials and get scolded and cry a collective cry that I can never explain without wanting to scratch my skin off. Clean as bones pulled through flesh. Scratching my skin to be something new. We’re taught this. When the clear river stops running, I will have nowhere else to go. The end of the world is autumn, I’ll say. The beginning too. He put his hands on you, didn’t he? You know, I still have trust issues with men. It’s sad to feel. One day, I know I will come back with nothing but my same soft, broken hands and say, la’ám’ sasayaq’isníx, ne’é? Everything is beautiful, isn’t it?
•
Hold me, I say in my language. He holds me.