my body and blood are literal

Happiness could stay with you for a while. But it could never change you.

I wondered, absent-mindedly, if my astrologer could tell me if my Aquarius placements and full twelfth house were why I felt so strange all the time. Spencer, my astrologer, was a deadhead who lived on the west side in a beach shack, with dusty wooden floors and books peeking out of every cranny. When I had first called him, he told me he was having issues with his liver, and ended many of his sentences with the word “man.” You become endeared to the hippie-types who stay that way their whole lives. Many of them sold out and became parents who told their children they just needed to apply themselves.

I guess it didn’t help I was born under the sign of industrious Capricorn. Somewhere, I read that it was the journey of Capricorn to rise to success, only to become disillusioned with it, compelled to find meaning in life elsewhere. Capricorn was always working hard and always starting from scratch.

What was it that made me so predisposed to alienation? It didn’t seem to matter how many friends I surrounded myself with. How packed my schedule was. I made frequent calls home, the kind meant to anchor me to someone who loved me. And even then, after I had run out of things to say, and was beginning to reveal too much about my inner workings - these errant thoughts, that didn’t have neat conclusions, that often contradicted one another, that just stood still like the silk thread of a spider you might walk into - even then after I had left the conversation, right as I put down my phone, these old feelings would rush it. How was it that I was a stranger in a strange land, when the strange land happened to be my apartment’s kitchen?

photo by Tammy Rae Carland

There is something ancient about loneliness. Like the wind that whistles through the prairie, it lets you know that it had once touched the redwood trees, and watched the very first things emerge from the primordial goo. What else it knew was that anything that bustles with life will die, then bustle with life, and die again. It knew happiness could stay with you for a while. But it could never change you.

In the midst of this, I tried to remember where I was. The things teeming in my very real garden. The butterfly who hatched today had been a caterpillar slurry in its cocoon mere days ago. And it was indistinguishable from a worm before then. The husk was still glued to the wall outside. I was raised to believe that transubstantiation was possible. Whether or not it’s true is besides the point. One just has to taste the wine to notice it is blood. One just has to see the empty tomb. One just has to see it through.