Enter the forest. You can find one practically anywhere. A forest can hide in your boyfriend’s house. It can sprout from an elevator shaft. Or grow across the street, sharp tips of conifers pushing their way up through the cracked asphalt.
Venture into its devouring darkness. You can go on foot, ride a bus, or take the metro. Choose your path wisely. As your dad used to say, “Only God sees every possible path and you walking all of them at once, but a human can only walk one path and eat up what it offers. Or be eaten.”
Such sharp teeth. They tear you open, render your pink flesh away from white bone, make you realize the limitations of your art, your inability to go beyond the constraints of narratives you’ve been grandfathered into by the teachers at your ridiculously expensive art school. Teeth dig into your self-esteem, tear away the achievements made in therapy that your mother paid for, when, in all honesty, she could have saved herself a lot of money (and you – a lot of pain), if she gave you up at birth to be later adopted by the childless king and queen in a high castle just beyond the forest. Do not digress. Teeth rip you open, leave you naked, bleeding on the sidewalk, drowned in the stomach of a beast, torn apart by the bullets of the hunter who later says, “I was just trying to help” and is immediately forgiven by everyone.
When you find yourself in the ground, crawl your way back. Grow through the bedrock, minerals, metal salts, and the unseemly organic matter. Push aside concrete to sprout up in the gnarly stem of a juniper tree. Bloom like a garden of blood-tinted roses.
Lock yourself in the tallest tower. A cookie-cutter apartment block will do just fine. Do not open the door to strangers. Do not order pizza. Do not cry. Take up pottery, knitting, yoga. Be ambitious in your cross-stitch projects. Poke the tip of your finger with a thin, silver needle and die again. Come back as a bird. A snake. A precious stone.
Wear the skin of a donkey until it grows into you, becomes one with your shoulders and hips, bone and sinew. Squeeze yourself into the fragile joints of a frog. Grow a pair of white swan wings.
Bite that poisonous apple.
Wake up in the morning with your mouth full of pomegranate seeds.
