STRANGERS

If I could open the crown of my head to meet more of it, I would. I would use a razor, the kind meant for microplaning (which didn’t give me baby-soft skin, only a beard of small pustules)…

But before that there are these double-tipped fabric markers on sale at House of Quilt. The purple side is air soluble and disappears within 24 to 48 hours. The blue side is water soluble, except it isn’t really. After a wash, there is still a faded blue line in the crevice of all my seams. So I would use the purple side to make a dotted line around the circumference of my head.

But before even that I would tie up my hair and take a wrap strip (which look the same but are not the same as neck strips, which are too short, even at the back of my head where it starts to resemble a cone because my mother did not rotate me as a baby. “SIDS,” she told me later on, with a shrug). With the strip I borrowed from my downstairs neighbor, my Aunty Dee, I’d wrap my edges so no blood gets in them. 

And I would take a stitch marker, except those are not sharp enough to pierce flesh so, instead, I would take my quilting pins (longer in length than sewing pins) and pin one at the back of my head, in line with my cervical spine so as to be symmetrical and to keep me from cutting twice. 

After snapping an apron around my neck I’d lay down newspaper, lest Aunty Dee walk up clutching her nervous dog saying, “Well mudda…” And suck her teeth. And adjust her robe and sigh. 

Lest she continue, “What I told you ‘bout the blood, Jo. Dirtying up my carpet, man” and the curly white dog, which look like it’d stain from a drop of my blood, start to yap at the smell of it, and Aunty Dee go back down the stairs grumbling all the way: “Tief me damn molding strip too.” 

Then I would begin to cut. I would cut off the cap of my head so that everyone and everything might flood in and I might finally understand something and I might finally understand you.

I might understand you and I might finally get to be someone other than me. Who? I might let in someone on the train, or in the bar, or at the laundromat, or on the apps. I might let God in. I might let in what was before blocked, sludge in the clogged pipe.   

There would be no need to call my mother and squabble about her mistakes (especially with respect to my head). I would say nothing to the mailman and how I want him. I’d think to call my therapist - I would not need her services any longer. Not with my brain absorbing everyone into it, like a cauliflower could absorb oil and spice into its starchy channels. 

I would have no need to take my open crown to the park after a good rain and plant it in the ground, to feel the tangles of mycelium and insects. I would have no need to do that because from my apartment it is already all here and, anyways, we are Nature anyhow, my apartment and me.

And I wouldn’t need to worry about Aunty Dee and her shame about me and my ways. 

And I wouldn’t need to wonder about you. 

How do you bathe? How do you pray? How do you shit? Cry? What do you think about when you go to sleep - and what do you dream about while you do it?

I wouldn’t be desperate to know you because I would be you already. A bellow of wind down the new, pristine pipe.