EVERY MORNING, I GET OUT OF BED.
Sometimes, I think I might not. That it might be better for me to pull the covers over my head and burrow deep like a hedgehog until summer combs its fingers through my hair.
But I resist, because I am a human girl and it is only March.
I turn off my alarm and cannot help but read IRAN ESCALATES RETALIATORY STRIKES AS U.S. SIGNALS LONG BATTLE on my screen, courtesy of the Times. Briefly, I contemplate what my life would resemble as a hedgehog. Just for posterity’s sake. An existence marked by gnawing at caterpillars and avoiding the badger’s claw. Hedgehogs don’t have grandmothers who cry every morning over their homeland, or cousins named Sahar stranded on the opposite bank of an internet blackout. All they know is the forest floor and slivers of sky winking between treetops. Eat, sleep, shit, survive. Repeat.
I etch-a-sketch the thought away and rise to make breakfast. Every morning, it’s the same. A slice of Trader Joe’s sourdough, one shade shy of burnt, slathered in still-melting Kerrygold. Two eggs, soft scrambled, glistening in the dusky light from our solitary kitchen window. An apple, or perhaps a handful of blueberries. A glass of mango kefir. I douse the eggs in hot sauce and enjoy them piping hot. I never get tired of eating this breakfast, and yet, certain mornings, I contemplate coating my tongue in a spoonful of peanut butter and letting my tank run dry. Just going, going, going on fumes, until I’m gone. Certain mornings, I wonder if a physical ache might be an appropriate companion for whatever my insides are harboring.
I wash my dishes and try not to think of the 165 girls whose elementary school was bombed in Minab. The funeral was yesterday. There is so much I’m trying not to think about, so much that it’s becoming hard to keep track of it all, which means I’m thinking about it hard enough to make sure I’m not thinking about it. I close my eyes and feel the hot, soapy water sud against my fingers. As I set my plate on the drying rack and reach for another glass, I try to envision myself on all fours, scoping the mossy floor for earthworms and beetles. I try to imagine what an earthworm might taste like. It must be soft, easy to sink into with my insectivore teeth, which are sharp and sabered and capable. It must taste like the Earth, because eating worms is the closest you can get to eating life itself, which is bitter-sour and buzzing with nanoscopic life and so ripe it is nearly decayed, but is instead rendered all the more sublime by its proximity to rot. I could learn to love it, I suppose. If it meant I could leave all this behind –– the crying grandmother, and the marooned cousins, and the 165 innocent girls whose lives were robbed by men in tailored suits. I reach for my mug only to meet air. I turn around; the shelf is empty; my hands have gone soft and flushed like an overripe plum; I’ve unwittingly washed every single glass in the apartment.
***
I walk to work and pass a frozen rat sprawled across a bed of piss-stained snow. My insides lurch, as if I've just witnessed a road-splattered fawn whose mother is waiting up at home. My mind must still be snagged on hedgehogs –– although I have just learned that hedgehogs are not, in fact, rodents, but Eulipotyphla –– because, for a split second, that frozen rat is no longer the most hated-and-feared lifeform in New York City. It is just one of God’s creatures with a once-beating heart that deserves to be mourned. So I listen to the new Mitski album, which feels appropriate for mourning, and keep walking, and if, perhaps, I begin to stoop closer and closer to the paved concrete, slipping into more of a four-legged crawl than my usual gait, well, no one looks twice, because I’m in Manhattan where people mind their own business, which, in this case, means turning a blind eye when a 23 year-old girl’s palms and knees start making contact with the Houston sidewalk.
***
Schoolgirls, rats, road-splattered fawns whose mothers are waiting up for them at home… Grief’s undertow swirls me into the deep, dark nothing.
Make no mistake: I am not its willing prey. No, at this point, I’ve tried homeopathic remedies, old wives’ tales, and sticking needles into voodoo dolls of Mullahs only for them to crawl out of gilded caskets, eulogies half-sung… I’ve tried compartmentalizing/ intellectualizing/ fetishizing in an effort to outrun/ outsmart/ evade. I’ve tried throwing those pesky emotions in a blender, adding one scoop of vanilla collagen powder and a frozen banana, and just letting em’ riiiiiiip, pulverized with the touch of a button. One time, I tried a Bottomless Emotions Brunch at the Four Seasons –– charcoal-grilled over a low flame, grief took on an exquisite flavor and the char nearly killed all its sting. The waiter had coattails and a Transatlantic quip that evoked a sexless Fred Astaire. I must recommend the grilled grief, Miss… Would you like the side salad or fries to go with that? Excellent choice, Miss, our potatoes are fried in 100% beef tallow with just a smidge of Unadulterated Female Rage. I even debated a mood-altering substance that promised to cure…. no, no, why resort to that when I could CHANNEL IT INTO MY ART!!! This one’s right up my alley, turn that frown into FUEL, like a Sylvester McMonkey McBean machine for ANGERSADNESSGUILT. Don’t let the emotions govern you, govern them, yada yada, except now that I’m facing the mountain of laundry on my bed that needs to be folded, I can feel it start to crawl its way up my stomach and back into my chest.
Because, you see, there are a million-and-one methods to avoid the undertow of grief, but only one way to really feel it.
***
My body has become littered with mystery scrapes and bruises. They materialize overnight in the oddest places –– the crook of my knees, between my index and middle fingers, the underbelly of my breasts. My bedtime routine now includes applying an arsenal of band-aids to the carnage.
One night, Naomi raps on our shared bathroom door. Enter at your own risk. From my position on the shower floor, legs splayed outwards, I’ve got courtside seats to her sharp inhale. You must’ve really eaten shit this time. The medicine cabinet bangs open, revealing enough LUSH samples and depleted bottles of nail polish to betray our hoarding problem. Call me the humpty-dumpty of Houston, I shrug, also I think Ava’s using Teal the Cows Come Home. Naomi hands me the hydrogen peroxide, her gaze landing on my sparkling fuschia toenails. Actually, I’m looking for Gettin’ Miss Piggy With It. I grit my teeth through the sting of disinfectant: In. My. Room. Before letting me wince and whimper in private, she lingers. Do you know what happened to my baby carrots? Someone tore the bag and chomped half of every single carrot. Isn’t that bizarre? Sorry, I don’t even know what I’m–– I probably just bought a damaged bag. Fucking Trader Joe’s… The door clicks shut.
I’m usually a good sleeper but, that night, all shut-eye evades me. My feet –– heavily blistered, the glittering fuschia polish doing nothing to conceal the fact that I have the toes of a Neanderthal –– beg for movement. The sidewalk of Avenue C greets me. Here, I’m joined by the light-feather footsteps of the murdered schoolgirls, and the steady roll of my grandmother’s wheelchair, and Sahar’s garbled speech as though underwater. Faster, slicker, river of pavement carry me to a memory-less land. I begin to run, shedding a trail of band-aids, all ten of my Gettin’ Miss Piggy With It toes working overtime to dodge the Jackson Pollack shit smears and runaway needles because, oh yeah, I seem to have forgotten my shoes.
My feet lead me to Tompkins Square Park. The naked branches of the willow, robbed of their softness, sigh against the windless night. Spring teases us from the future and, in preparation, the Good People of New York have nestled hyacinth bulbs into the hallowed soil. It is all they know to do. When I was younger, I thought everyone worshiped spring like Iranians do. By jumping over fire, and reciting Hafiz, and filling our homes with the smoke of wild rue to dispel evil. I thought everyone clung to the idea of annual rebirth as our only chance at survival.
The hyacinth bulbs are too young to have sprouted petals. The soil is cold and dense against my palms, which have begun unraveling the Good People of New York’s handiwork. Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem, Another Birth, churns in my mind on machine-wash.
I will plant my hands in the garden/ I will grow/ I know I know I know.
The hyacinth bulbs are too young to have sprouted petals, but some of them are mother to nascent leaves. My breath roils with something wild. It might be anger, or desperation, or worse –– hope. I claw the dirt off the leaves to reveal their green hearts. In their virginal innocence, they arch toward the flickering lamplight, a phototropic, would-be caress.
I shall wear/ a pair of twin cherries as earrings/ and I shall put dahlia petals on my fingernails.
The hyacinth bulbs are too young to have sprouted petals, but some of them are mother to nascent leaves, which I wrench apart with a violence that feels both alien and uniquely mine. The green looks sickly against my trembling skin, nothing at all like twin cherries or dahlia petals. The lamplight winks out of existence. No one wants to bear witness to the girl with the hands of a gravedigger, rocking back and forth in a bed of flowers that will never grow.
There is an alley/ where the boys who were in love with me/ still loiter/ and think of the innocent smiles of a girl/ who was blown away by the wind one night.
***
In the end, it happens rather slowly. Like my body is giving me a choice, waiting for me to resist, and I just… don’t. It starts with my teeth, which grow knife-like and jagged. I give up kissing, then going out entirely–– the temptation is too great. Next, the hair begins to thicken across my body, until I forget what it is to be cold. My roommates are kind enough not to mention the interminable shedding; after all, women’s bodies change all the time, and the three of them are the compassionate sort. Then comes a series of subtler changes: my pupils expand until they eclipse my entire iris, my nose grows smaller (if only my grandmother were around to witness this), and my skin develops a pinkish hue not unlike the flush of a newborn. To avoid scrutiny, I take to wearing a massive pair of 70s sunglasses I picked up from God-knows-where, along with a black turtleneck. I enter a constant state of sweat-soaked perplexion, falling asleep dreaming of soil –– cool, and dark, and wet with sky-dew –– only to awaken at the witching hour, marred by my newfound oral fixation for anything soft and waxy. The only cure tearing into the bags of Trolli’s I bulk-ordered in all shapes and flavors. I expand both outwards and inwards, becoming rotund and stooped. Soon, I only leave the sweaty mush of my bed to crawl into the shower, where I sit, motionless, and let the icy water pool around my toes. The quills come last. Like military stripes, or a black belt. At that point, it’s a relief.
***
Earthworms, as it turns out, do grow on you. Sourcing them hasn’t been too tricky, since the East Village is teeming with parks and community gardens. Tompkins has become my main stomping ground, a phrase I used to toss around in my former body, but which has gained a fresh meaning. These days, it’s where I eat, sleep, shit, survive. REPEAT. It’s not a bad life. I don’t have to worry about badgers or foxes, only the singing man who relieves himself every morning by the stocky oak where I’ve burrowed to sleep. I spend my days curled in its hollow, oblivious to the raging world and all its raging inhabitants. The despotic toddlers whose stubby feet thwack against the plastic slide, their nannies trading gossip on the sidelines. The businessmen with their unscuffed loafers, clopping by in rushed staccatos like the mules they are. The geriatric death metal band that performs for free every Sunday, right after the Farmers Market where Solidcore groupies stock up on dino kale and free-range eggs.
At night, the land is mine. I share it with gangs of rats, and slithering roaches, and shadows of young couples against moon-drenched cobblestones, their legs intertwined in wrenching urgency like the prelude to a Greek tragedy. I shuffle through dry leaves to find mounds of fresh dirt, where I can bury my muzzle and forage. In these pockets of silence, I bathe in the cavernous hunger that now permeates my existence.
Grief would not know how to find me –– even if it tried.
I do not know how to find myself –– so I stop trying.
***
No one knows I was once a human girl who cried on the subway while clutching a hyper-realistic stuffed cat. No one knows how I used to walk like I was being chased, like I could gradually wander away from myself during the glistening, purple night. Leave my soul to do laps in Washington Square Park while I returned home, all shiny and new and soulless. I mostly avoid humans, but every so often, I’ll overhear bits of conversation –– “What are you wearing to Lauren’s birthday?” “It's Carolyn Bessette-themed, so all-black” –– that awaken something in me. Had my roommates and I started watching Love Story mere weeks before my transformation, or is that a false memory melded by some maudlin perception of my former life? Lately, even those eavesdropped snippets are beginning to emerge as garbled swirls in the air. I usually cast them aside like apple cores –– the effort of parsing through the jumbled sounds for any salvageable bits is outweighed by the ephemerality of it all. I feel no remorse for the girl I used to be; this city is rife with 23 year-old bisexuals who don’t know what their futures hold. They will come and go. But the Earth and its worms –– they will remain, long after my small bones have been absorbed by the Tompkins soil.
— KEEMIA SARAFPOUR
Keemia Sarafpour is a writer based in New York City, originally from San Francisco. Her work often explores the uncanny, ephemeral details at life’s periphery. In the fall, she will be pursuing her MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She writes sporadic and self-indulgent personal essays on her Substack, @keemianotkimia. In her spare time, she enjoys wearing skirts and eating tart frozen yogurt.