"I wanted to represent how we are made of different elements and/or how the Earth is its own character."
Amy Marqueshas been known to call books friends and is on a first name basis with many fictional characters. She has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawnand is a returning contributor toRaw Lit. amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com
Haunting Myself Non-fiction by Claudia Mallea
CW: Mention of Illness
The ways in which my body is the same as it was before my stroke haunt me more than the obvious differences. A glance at the fullness of my stomach through a thin blouse makes me feel haunted by a body that has since died. Seeing the tattoo of a Minotaur on my thigh below my shorts as I sit in my wheelchair reminds me of a lover kissing its little face then sitting up to kiss me. I’m unable to take these things as reminders that I inhabit the same body I always have, instead they jar me. Much like the first flickers of desire I felt after my stroke did.
These feelings of haunting grow even as my body becomes less and less cadaverous. When I first regained full, maintained consciousness (not just moments of lucidity between rounds of anesthesia) in neuro rehab, I found that my head had been shaved for brain surgery and that I had lost about twenty pounds. My then partner later told me that when they first visited, I looked like a child. I have never been visibly less well. Crop-circles of incisions covered my bald scalp as if my brain had been removed for autopsy. I was frightfully pale (anemic from the brain hemorrhage) and thinner than I’ve ever been in my adult life. Spasticity setting into the muscles on my affected left side felt like rigor mortis. Dressing me was like dressing a corpse. Guiding my stiffly unmoving left arm through a sleeve often took two nurses.
In the intervening year, I have regained all the lost weight, which was mostly muscle through extensive physical therapy, home exercise, and lots of eating. My stiffness is eased through twice daily stretching. My hair has grown out several inches. The return of relative wellbeing (in a newly disabled body) somehow feels unrelated to all my therapy and effort.My one wavy inch of hair starts to fall out from all the head x-rays I’ve had. I’m not sad about it like I still am about losing my long hair for that first brain surgery.
I mourn the strong, pretty, functional body I had before my stroke, even while proclaiming to everyone who dares use the phrase “new you” or “new life” that I am the same person I’ve always been and living the same life. Because how could I be living a new life if my old one never ended? Which it didn’t because I didn’t die. But the realization that this body won’t allow me to climb a tree or peel a mango devastates me for days. Acknowledging that what I’m doing is mourning means accepting that there was a kind of death. The idea of haunting forces me to do the same.
If this is a ghost story, I, the consciousness composing this, am the ghost. Possessing the same body first at the prime of her life in the fullness of health, then later in a weakened, compromised form. And in-between, in a hazy back and forth of consciousness cutting through drugged, half-dead or traumatized unconsciousness instead of the vertical streaks of light against solid black or navy of a Barnett Newman painting, my consciousness dapples light on the muddy background of my broken, confused brain and body like the craquelure on a Malevich black square.
Sometimes I, the ghost, feel like I am sharing my body with another spirit. I try to move my left hand, and spasticity extends my left leg straight. My ankle is flexed and my left foot taps a steady, loud, embarrassing rhythm for several minutes.
While my feelings of haunting or being haunted are growing, I reread Wuthering Heights. I burst into tears at a wholly forgotten scene in which Edgar Linton, Catherine’s milquetoast little husband, leaves a bunch of golden crocuses on her pillow as she wallows in physical and emotional malaise to bring her news of spring. In addition to the intimate sickroom scenes, I feel a pang of recognition at the haunting central to the novel. There is a literal ghost, that of Catherine Linton née Earnshaw who haunts her childhood love Heathcliff at his request. I ponder and then tweet: “How are you a man going to ask someone to haunt you then be mad when she does?” But isn’t that exactly what I have done to myself? I spent months desperately wanting my old body back and trying to summon it through therapy and rehabilitation. I spent hours visualizing my former, unparalyzed body, brushing my hair or taking milk from the fridge. I never gave a thought to where a reappearance of my old body would leave my new body. Never considered that this new, worse body contains my soul or consciousness now.
Claudia Mallea(she/her) is a writer/ archivist/librarian. Her archival work has cultivated a writing practice documenting her own lived experience. Her interests include film, classics, art history, medical history, craft theory, and disability justice organizing. @cloud__i__a (Instagram) @mylarsleeve (Twitter/X)