In Which I Move Again
Kelley Evans
I moved from city to city, traveled from person to person, and then I tried to
define myself through writing, but that doesn’t work, no, not at all . . .
–Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
Breech
I came into the world butt first, my head folded over my legs, backing out of the womb. The doctor might have cut my mother, but he realized my position too late; she was open and I was traveling, groping, looking for an exit I could fall into.
Accident
I have fallen off my bike four times. The first time, my shoe laces became tangled in the gears as I careened downhill. A pile of sticks broke my fall with puncture wounds. The second time, I skidded out on gravel left over from a winter’s worth of icy sidewalks. The third time, I hit a hidden culvert on a grassy down-slope, flew forward off my bike, and landed on my chest. I felt a sharp, forced collapse followed by a desperate gasp.
These were the falls of my youth.
When I was twenty-three, speeding helmet-less downhill, a butterfly with a wing-span of six inches landed on my bare thigh. I shook my leg to free it, but the force of the wind pinned it to me, as if I’d acquired my own bug collection, the iridescent blue wings stretched out on the roundness of my thigh. In my attempt to save the specimen, we both went down.
Though all four falls were injurious, it’s the butterfly’s sting that I can feel most in memory.
A Place I Live
Washington, DC has too many vibrations. Helicopters buzz overhead, chopping up the turbid atmosphere, cutting up your sleep into a rhythm your body can’t contain. The metro only takes you so far, can’t bridge the divisions. Your body, young but aching with old joints, walks everywhere.
My Car
Faith was my first car. She broke down frequently, and the name came to me shortly after learning about nihilism in college; the exact logic of that connection escapes me now. A ten-year-old Honda Accord when I got her, she died just three years later in the middle of Nebraska, during a cross country trip with my boyfriend to his home in Denver. I knew Faith was prone to overheating. Nonetheless, I pushed her across squelching summer plains until she suffered a complete engine meltdown.
We stayed in a motel that night as we waited for my boyfriend’s mother to drive the eight hours to retrieve us. We fit my bike inside her mini-van, which I used, along with buses, to get to my temporary jobs all summer.
Mobility
What if travel is home?
Another Place I Live
The mountains are full of hunters, they say, but I don’t care. I find a sunny spot in the woods—sun to keep the chill off—and I read without clothes. Not that I’m far from civilization. My cabin-mate passes me in search of her own reading spot. “You’re naked!” she says. Skin is still so new to us, worthy of laughter. She nests in some grass, putting trees between us. Southwest Oregon is like that—warm inviting spaces not too close together.
My cabin-mate is an artist. She draws her menstrual cramps. When she tosses the abstract pastel in the trash, I fish it out. I am in awe of how she can see her body.
One night we all decide to go skinny dipping by moonlight. I’m the first one in, throwing my clothes off as quickly as I can. The last one in says, “I’m Eve!” We lie on our backs and look up at the stars, kicking in the water, floating further and further into the night above, unmoored.
Ticket
You don’t need a ticket to walk out your front door, but you need one to get back. And you are always away. Even with the advent of internet grocery shopping, you find yourself needing to go out, to accumulate more slips of paper—Metrocards, bus transfers, receipts for gas, passport photos. You can count them to see how much living you’ve done. It’s never enough.
Echo
I ride my bike—still clad with training wheels—up the sidewalk to the corner, but I don’t cross the street. At every driveway, I stop and watch the cars in the intersection ahead. Pretending it’s my intersection, I wait for the car to go before pedaling on. I am practicing driving, I tell my mom when I return home for ice water.
Mobility
Is a trap. Is the way you get caught moving again, selling off most of what you own, putting the rest in your car named Joy. Her body will house your body for two and a half months, or at least will take you to the campsites and motels and friends’ apartments that will harbor you temporarily. The only constant is Joy.
Breach
Your first apartment in Albuquerque is a studio you rent for $200 a month. It reeks of the cigarette smoke leaking through the vents from the neighbors’. When the cops come one night and ask if there’s been a disturbance next door, you tell the truth. The neighbors visit soon after and tell you to mind your own business. You should have remembered all the nights in that other big city—how to keep quiet, how to be intimidated by the neighbors more than the police. In that city, the woman in the apartment across from yours screamed at her children, who wailed. But then, you never had police at your door, asking for a confession.
Another Place I Live
I spoke fluent Danish. I ate liverwurst on small pieces of rye bread—my PB&J at daycare—and although I’m a vegetarian now, I still get occasional cravings for it. For dessert, my taste buds curled around almond paste and custard, flaky dough, smooth licorice. My mom fed me tomato soup from a can and packaged American cheese in slices. I didn’t like either, but I ate it anyway. I would tear strips of the orange square into perfect, skinny rectangles, and this was entertaining enough. I was three.
Once while in daycare, I swallowed my gum. I felt I should tell Antje, but I didn’t know how to say it in Danish. I don’t remember how I finally told her. I still have no language to complete the memory.
My mouth remembers another incident. Running down the sidewalk, from my mom’s side to my Dad’s outstretched arms, I tripped on a crack. The fall knocked out my top front teeth. For weeks I wore a crusty scab above my mouth like a mustache. I would stop in the hall mirror, my head barely visible above the side board, and I’d finger the bumpy, dark brown mass, lick it.
Echo
The road is the sound of the engine, the vibration of the sun visor loose in its clip. The road is the sound of my stomach gurgling soda bubbles. The road is my elbow bumping the armrest a split second after the dip. The road is my mother’s high-pitched hello when I arrive, her tight embrace around my shoulders. The road is the sound of her voice on my cell phone. The road is dots that don’t make a straight line. The road is the taste of exhaust from the car that has traveled twenty feet more than I have. The road is my dry eyes tearing. The road is desire.
Mobility
I slipped through nine states and two other countries, moving every couple of years, sometimes away, sometimes moving back to where I came from. Ohio thinks it has me, but I know better.
