Falling Asleep First is a collaborative zine written by Six Stars Writing Club. It contains work from Brelynn Aja, Kate Comstock, Jillian Osborne, Gabby Nelson, Sophie Caligiuri,and Grace Andersen
Soft Tissue
Kate Comstock
Women used to leave flax in the stream and wait for it to soften so they could comb through the fibers. Otherwise, it would be too sticky to separate the fibers from the core. Sometimes, you have to break something down to its parts to relinquish it into a new life. Broken down, flax can be combed, spun, woven, and worn. In its new life, it drapes over skin, or the edge of a bed, and then we call it linen.
• • •
When I was 18, I accidentally let myself float out through an undone seam in my skull, and I’ve been levitating over my body ever since. Like the helium balloon that no one caught, which might’ve said “Happy Birthday,” or “Get Well Soon,” I was born into the wind. Sometimes, when I’m not paying attention, I drift off so high that I can’t tell if the tiny people are real. From way up there I dream in shapes and dots (are they fields and cars?).
My voice breaks as an echo from somewhere.
My memories flee from me
like a dream upon waking,
deteriorating over the span of a morning.
I try to stay near, pulling myself closer and closer to my body. Sometimes I feel like I’m so close, and I imagine climbing back into myself and being tucked into the safe warmth of my skin for a bedtime story about how everything will be better in the morning.
On the hill I made a textile when I wove my fingers through the grass. Again, I was trying to come back. I thought the ground would be good for that. My skin tangled with the green: over under, over under, demonstrating proof of my realness. In the end, only my hands were real, because only my hands were woven with the earth, grass giving them form.
(Surely I will be real when I’m buried. When the earth weaves all of me into fabric.)
Before going home, I ripped that same grass straight from the soil like a child on a field trip.
I think the blades of grass grieved with me, each of us finding that in whatever ways we existed, it wasn’t the same as being able to go back to where you came from.
Imagining the place that I came from, the muscle of my heart glowed in my mind. I put my hand on my chest in the dark Texas summer and hoped the beating would wake me up from losing myself. There had to be a home for me in there, because when I was 12 this was my heart, and I knew I was real then. I tried hard to remember, blinking from my mind nightmarish thoughts about how all your cells replace themselves every seven years. I wondered how your heart can break if you’re not sure it belongs to you anymore. Scrunching my eyes, I hoped as hard as a girl can that if the likes of a god oversaw me, it would let me keep my heart—the tissue of it, the fabric.
The same way a clam sucks an irritant into a pearl, I coated my aching in iridescence to keep myself safe from the abrasion of grief. The edges of my pain softened and the beauty pulled parts of me to the surface of lucidity. In the light, my pain shone lustrous and smooth. I carried my pearl, and collected other beautiful things. I fell in love with the different ways a piece of yarn can become a textile. I braided my hair, and I thought of my braids as fabric. I ran my hands over the tissue of my skin (fabric), held a leaf between my fingers (fabric), and spread butter on toast (fabric).
I fell in love with fabric because fabric is beautiful, and because I think my body is real when its shape is made sense of by something else.
I swoon at my body being held. Being real. The kindest thing is a hand on my cheek, outlining the shape of me. The kindest thing is a sound, oscillating air into waves, waves washing over me, the shellfish of my body closing over a pearl in the ocean of a song, or a voice, or the white noise traffic.
I asked for a voice, for a bedtime story. Move the air around me, or else take me outside and put me in the wind. Anything so I can have a shape.