old blisters, took these after a funeral when I was 17 (they are blisters from formal shoes), so weird to find them!, originally uploaded by a secret humming.
Remember your ankles and how they carry you from place to place? Maybe the places remember your feet somehow too. Don't you hope so?
Once I spent a lot of time noticing the backs of my ankles mostly on account of attending my first Catholic funeral. I was around 17 and I was reverent more than mournful because I didn't know the boy well.
I really can't detail how strangely beautiful this funeral was.
I am sure you can picture the church windows. I am sure you can recall the heavy silences of funerals for young deaths. I am sure you can remind yourself of the way cheeks ache and heat up when you can't help but tear, even if only for the sea of mourners around you. What a relief one finds in large masses of people surrendering to their eyelid's desire to close. You remember that you are small in churches which are tall and precisely weighted with the hardness of stone. But your ankles!
If it weren't for the long walk home or the slightly ill-fitted Mary Janes I wore, I would have forgotten my ankles too. What a brave joint to bend under the pressure of my woeful solemn frame that day! I had to take a picture because somehow I felt these little blisters remembered in a way i longed to remember. They seemed to keep a secret, not so much about ill-fitting Mary Janes, or long walks home in winter, but about that place-- about how certain places at certain times make you sit very still and quiet. And certain places tease out all the vessels in your face until it is beaming bright red. Sometimes the appearance of a blister seems a most fitting way to remember.
The moodiest membrane of all time that is my skin, has been recording recent events for me which I do not recall. It is a weird map on a truly imprecise globe! I am not sure where or when certain bruises or blemishes emerged. But what I can read from this little cryptogram of cloudy matter, is that while i like nothing more than to watch the flocks of birds and run around in the same old snowy circle that i love so dearly, it is time for a new place! a new blister perhaps? at least for a little while, just until my eyes wake up and feet tell me to sit back down.
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