Lane Speidal

Sitting here naked except for 2 pieces of thick gauze, thinking about the death of my body.

I’ve been close to death my whole life, knowing from the beginning that my death was always there guiding, holding, waiting in the shadow cast by the flip of a door, in the damp indentations of mud where I step into the earth, in a reflection seen through the window of a car or misaligned mirror in infinite small and slipped and flipped places you can catch it. At times it haunts knowingly, at others burrows in a burning way, at others still it embraces warmly cushioning you in a perfect sinking outline.

But what I’m talking about is the knowledge of death that a depression can give, not the knowledge of a slow dying of the body that a sick person earns.

The first, more ideological and abstract it is conceived through a bitter comparison of imagining that living and dead are opposites. It is made stark through romantic internal pictures of a pill or a knife or a gun. Simple tools imagined as keys to freedom. At times it has felt that I was leaning so hard at that door that it began to bow on it’s hinges and if someone were to leave it unlocked I would simply fall in.

This is death as a past or future statement, one is live then one is dead.

The second, more realistic and daily is realized slowly through the pealing and flaking off of body parts. Through inability to do things that you always without question assumed that you would do. Shapes that you have patterned forward into the rest of your life you are shocked to find inaccurate. This is a dying, this is a action, this is a practice. This is every day packing up your limbs damp and close to you taping them down tight hoping they will be there tomorrow. This is the knowledge that the death of every green leaf passes so slowly that to the leaf, it’s a whole life.

Flaking pealing dropping parts like forgotten unimportant coins, the cells drop one by one until they form a steady rain of leaving you. You know something’s wrong but you can’t say quite what because you don’t have the knowledge, the language to know that body is an impermanent state of cells sometimes travelling together. Bruising leaking hoping you try to build a future body out of imaginary skin but there’s nothing there when you reach for it. The edges of you keep whisking away. Will that be a hole forever? Will that be a scar?

Will thick pink new skin be able to climb that chasm?Will you know yourself if it does

Lane Speidel was born in New York City and now lives in Philadelphia. They are a pre-school teacher, a Scorpio, a trans non-binary person, an anxious pooper, a member of Vox Populi, a graduate of Tyler School of Art, queer, 2nd runner-up for “Smartest” in the Renaissance Middle School Year Book, the oldest child of three, and a very emotional individual.

I like to walk sometimes, I like to collect trash, I like to feel my friend’s hair, I like to put my body upside down, I just decided that I love myself.