I’m here today to read you an essay about ribbons and also because I was invited. I wish I was better at singing, but I’m not even a fiction writer. If it’s recent and not something from the online Sheridan Libraries at a certain university whose name I don’t want to say at the risk of sounding snobby, I probably haven’t read it and will probably not be a good conversationalist after the reading if you ask me about this book or that book, I just want to say that up front because I am planning on trying to socialize. Also I realized after I wrote this that it’s all about me and a lot about my family. For a while I’ve been trying to be okay with honesty in writing and reading—I used to do a lot of reading from inside things or in front of things, but here we are in real lives and my one real life inhabits every corner of itself and I don’t have anything else to investigate or I don’t need anything else to investigate or I am trying to tell the difference between the two, so what better way. I’m sorry to be so confessional; I hate that too. There are parts with no ribbons, and I’m also sorry about that, except that there is a thread, if ribbons can have threads, of course they do, ones that fray when you pull them apart.
Essay about Ribbons
He left the baker’s string bracelet
hanging on the corner of the book on the bathroom mantle, if bathrooms can have
mantles. I want to say what else is on there because the way things are set up
is in case anyone were to ever come over. There are two things suspended in
resin, separately (they do that with clear casting resin): a dandelion puff and
a fake antique globe from my Dad’s desk (he’s still alive, I just liked it and
took it when I went to college). There are also shells and pinch pots that in
the past have been used as ash trays, and a picture of my first classroom of
kids, and two horseshoes turned the lucky way, and an envelope by this kid Sam that
he handed me once with five dollars in it that says, “Give my Oreo cookie Ms.
Lauren.” I told him he could have an
Oreo and that he should give Mommy his five dollars. The last time I went to
the dentist they said, “Oh,” and something about my gums, and then I went to Wal-Mart
and bought an electric toothbrush which really freed up some mantle space
because it’s stored in the medicine cabinet and so is the toothpaste which is
in a mint green mug, which I just realized is totally appropriate by virtue of
what it contains—I love a closed circuit and I would consider that a closed
circuit even if it’s just based on one aspect, that being mint paste flavor. I
have a pinch pot with floss and tweezers in it, but I didn’t feel like it was
okay to have toenail clippers in there so those are in the cabinet too on the
other side with my worthless deodorant. The book with the baker’s string bracelet
says, “You already have everything in your own pure quality. If you realize
this ultimate fact, there is no fear.” I was brushing my teeth there this one
time—before the electric toothbrush—when everything went really weird. I
texted. I was too afraid to get in the car. I tried to read Everything Falls Apart, or When Things Fall Apart, or When Everything Falls Apart. I took a
Xanax. When I woke up I didn’t throw the bracelet away. I’m not sure if it’s
still there, hold on. No, it’s not there. It is there.
I am almost okay with the autism
awareness ribbon magnet on the back of my car. My hatchback. My 2013 hatchback.
I own a tote monogrammed with my initials. I go to Old Navy by the season. In
50 years it will have been like having a “childhood schizophrenia” ribbon, or a
Willowbrook ribbon (which, ironically, when I searched for its name by Googling
“Kennedy institution shut down,” returned the website of my workplace). Also in
50 years my autism awareness ribbon magnet will be on a spaceship on its way to
drop the kids off at Mars. But right now it means money toward deconstructing
beauty. I mean scientific research.
The iconic autism puzzle piece motif
is a problem, as in an omission; something missing. As if something to be
solved by the smug puzzle-put-togetherer. A hole in the puzzle brain to be
filled. An otherwise brain-shaped puzzle in a head-shaped frame held together
with that puzzle glue we gave my Dad to paint on his 2,000 piece Planters
Peanut puzzle so that it could be hung on the wall. It’s easier to look in the
couch cushions for the missing piece than to change the head-shaped frame. No
edge pieces—takes longer. Takes acknowledgement of the other and new words, or
no words. At the risk of sounding romantic, there is sadness there, in those
eyes which are often set deep. Here is a choice to stop having to spin around,
or to say, “Hey, let me spin, and leave, and never come back, or when you do,
bring me the soft part of the bread with ketchup to dip it in.” I have sat next
to one of my friends when he toggles between Google image search pages of color
swatches. Tonight I looked up “kinds of green” to find the color of the mug I
mentioned earlier. Tell me a time when your arms have been full and you haven’t
used the wheelchair ramp. Tell me you haven’t smelled your fingers when you’re
alone.
What I want to say is that there is
mystery there and presumption of suffering and our compulsion to solve or ease
or assimilate by force, and all of those things are necessary and compassionate
and horrible. Objectively there is beauty there just as there is beauty
everywhere. I dissected a cow’s eyeball and there was a membrane in the back,
behind all the structures and diagrams. It was opalescent and concave. It was
the beginning of the universe. The cow never knew it was there. And what was my
knowing? It was extravagant. I peeled off the membrane with tweezers. It lost
its concavity; it folded over wet on itself and was black. There was no name
for it that I could find, and yet surely it continues in every cow eyeball to
this day. Surely we have named it, and it is ubiquitous and gorgeous and
completely functionless and mundane and the cow with its stomachs just keeps
chewing and knows when to lie down for the rain. People believe that like they
believe that feeding a cow its own hair will make it forget its former home.
The cow wouldn’t want to do either of those things.
I would like to design an awareness
ribbon awareness ribbon for my spaceship.
My dad didn’t really go through a
puzzle phase but he did go through a model plane phase and a stamp collecting
phase and for a while has been in the gardening phase which has included a pond
phase. On Christmas we take turns opening things from youngest to oldest. In
the past there have been so many presents that we’ve been late to Grandmom’s
house. I’ve been ashamed to have significant others come to Christmas; luckily
it starts around 7am so that’s a good excuse because we have to leave around 6
to get there on time. Between the pond and the new sunroom and the presents,
I just don’t know. When we broke up my parents brought me a flat-screen TV
from Costco. They walked around the yard holding my hands and my dad asked me
which color of some flower I liked better. My mom sent me home with zucchini
bread and her own Tupperware, and she gave me a set of mixing bowls, and my dad
gave me a Christmas cactus. The other night they came and we went to Grano down
the street. They loved it. I showed them where my leg was bitten. I said,
“Shoot, this place is BYOB, I forgot.” My dad said, “That’s okay, we can have
water.” They had just come from the baseball game. My dad was wearing a soft
tangerine t-shirt. My mom was wearing a darker orange top with a collar that
looked like a braid. They had gotten some sun. The water glasses were small and
the water came in a tall glass bottle with a stopper and my dad said it was
some of the best flan he’s ever had.
Do you feel like this is
disingenuous? I’m just trying to be honest with you and I know that even the
fact that I read that first part about not reading many books these days was
not quite honest because I was reading it instead of just saying it. I felt
like even making eye contact with the audience and trying to be honest would be
confrontational and would require something of you which some people would say
is collaborative and I believed that at one point and probably will again but
to me it felt presumptuous and demanding. Am I trying to just seem like a nice
person?
Could I describe DNA as
ribbon-like? I’m afraid that my twin sister and I are not actually identical.
When I found out from my mom that we were in two separate fetal sacs I was
devastated to a disproportionate degree. I thought we had had our bulbous and
bent limbs around each other, and our foreheads touching during that big
preparatory snooze, and that some nonexistent pink light had illuminated the
same fluid around us with no membrane to filter it and change our experiences
of it. The fact that this knowledge didn’t seem to affect my sister isolated me
further and I assumed a lack of concern or callousness on her part in utero.
This is why I can be codependent, or not why but this is symptomatic of my
codependency. She said, “Laur, it’s not like we weren’t together—those sacs are
so thin, I’m sure we were still touching all the time. Are you really sad about
this?” I probably teared up and she probably said that we should go for a walk
and get out for a little bit.
I haven’t said much about my mom
and nothing about my brother—my mom of course did our hair and so there were
ribbon barrettes for holiday pictures, so there’s that. My brother had hair
like corn silk but straighter and would cry until he choked and gagged on the
other side of the baby gate at the end of the hall. He’s so angry most of the time.
I made him candles for Christmas. In conclusion, a bracelet given in Harper’s
Ferry for him to wear on the trail, a magnet to one day be stolen from the back
of my car, gluttonous Christmases, vascular membranes, and the downy hair of
small children. Things that can be held in the hands and between the fingers,
all of them. Material. I would say “woven together” or “fabric” but thankfully
there is no tapestry, just a fragmented experience like yours but with
different people in all the parts. My sister likes a library metaphor where
each person is a book, and certain shelves more familiar and with a certain
smell. That’s pretty good and I was impressed that she had carried around this
thought probably for years with no need to share it until necessary. The end.
Lauren Bender is a teacher, student, and twin living and working in Baltimore. Publications include The Dictionary Poems: Some Bees (New Lights Press), Whale Box (Publishing Genius), [there is no YOU in poem] (Big Game Books), and I'AM BORED (Produce Press, with Kevin Thurston). Selected exhibitions/performances include CorpOreo (Transmodern Festival) and Big Pink (The Baltimore Museum of Art). Lauren curated the BOITE: Show&Tell series at Minas Gallery in Hampden and is co-director of Narrow House. She feels pretty good lately.
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