Organ Tender

There is a nook between my mattress and the wall. Some nights, I take out my brain and hide it there so I can sleep. Some mornings, I leave it for the dogs to find and fight over, still a better existence than residing in my head.

After a day of wandering through the heat, I toss it in the freezer and hope the throbbing stops. Every evening before dinner, I set it on the tabletop and dissect the parts that are not mine. So often, I have drowned it in the tub when silence is all I want or poisoned it just enough that I believe in happiness. It does not belong in my skull, and it returns for safekeeping only when I am feeling sentimental — “do you remember when…”

“I’d rather not.”

There is a stuffed bear holding my secrets. When my heart is sick, I rip it from my chest and give it to her. When it is empty and aching, I smash it between the pages of a book until it is full. Scribbled on the surface like the graffiti of a high school table are all the names that still haunt me.

When it burns from anxiety, I leave it in a dark room all alone. I question if it is really mine or someone else’s because it feels used by everyone but me. When, on rare occasions, I palm it tenderly and massage the chambers like the knotted ridges hugging a lover’s spine, it beats mockingly — “what the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t know. My brain is somewhere else.”

There is a pot of earth on my patio. When my stomach is in knots, I bury it there, and it unravels like a bundle of roots ready for spring. Sometimes, I have forgotten how to eat, so I lay it to bake beneath the sun, hoping exhaustion will urge the memory. It is usually wanting for something other than food.

If stress leaves ulcers, I mend them with a slick of honey and peanut butter. For certain hungers, I must concoct fragments of blessings I have not known, can only imagine. Occupied by butterflies, I hook it on a line and drag it through the river. Gorged with water, it cannot float away. At night, with nothing to satiate but dreams, it groans — “I want everything.”

“We are what we eat, and I am mostly an illusion.”

There is a strangeness in my body. I do not try to make sense in the tending of organs. Eventually, my skin twirls like ribbons through the washing machine, and my liver is soaking in a jar of lemonade. My intestines are still mourning the appendix that went missing years ago. And my lungs spa in a steamer basket, purging remnants of toxic vapor and smoke.

On the floor, I will stretch in all kinds of contortions to let bare muscles and ligaments release the grudges they have held for too long. Wandering through the house, a shell of what I could be, I check on the organs like a night shift nurse, unwilling to disturb their much needed rest. I gather the trespassers in the backyard like a criminal line up — “You need us.”

“I don’t need anyone.”

There is a truth to it all, whichever way. Hatred, shame, dread — I toss them into the fire pit. Those who have yet to prove their guilt watch over my shoulder as the flames devour. I claw a hole in the rockery and bury the rest there. They will certainly resurface for the next tending.

Once I am free of awful burdens, I return the renewed organs to their rightful places. They shift and stretch into the newfound vacancy within my body, cherishing momentary relief. Yet, they know they cannot stay — “this is our way of things.”

“This is our way.”

There is a cycle we cannot break.