On Dirt and Deities
I was fourteen when I found out I preferred myself filthy. I didn’t know what dirty was until the summer I learned I loved it. I don’t think I’ve looked particularly polished since. I like to look at the dirt on the soles of my feet and think about where I’ve walked. I like to lie in bed alone and concentrate on the smell of my own sweat. Last night there was a full moon and I swear that I bled more than usual, so much more, in fact, that I wondered if it was my womanhood waking with the sky. I don’t know much about lunar goddesses but I’d like to think that one was watching me back as I lay looking at her, as I bled and broke and became under the light of her yellow yawn. I wanted to climb onto the roof, get as high up as I could go, just to be closer to the floating bulb, so buoyant and begging to be worshiped, to be prayed to in a way I have never wanted to pray to anything, certainly not anyone, and I want to tell her that if I had to choose a time to turn into, a moment to fold myself away in, it might be the summer I stopped showering. The weeks spent in the wild with women, girls then, who were so much more than whatever I’d known before. More intense, more terrifying, more terrified, but only because they had lived longer than me and I don’t mean in years, but in moments, and I swear, for all I thought I knew of being female, they taught me the rest - that women were walking wonders who woke at dawn and summoned the start of the day, that we could haul bales bigger than us from field to foal. We ran and rode and raged at what it meant to be alive, realized we were in it now, and that was something to scream about. At night, the tight pack of us would sit around a small fire and speak of our time in the world so far and she, with her pale, freckled face and bed of thick black bangs, was living in a different one than me. She was whole, hollow too though, haunted by something I had never seen. A better rider than all of us and unashamed of her abortions. She spoke about them as I might now, angry with the man who had made her pregnant, then told her not to be. Four of them by the age of fourteen and it felt like the first time something so awful had been said straight to me. And I don’t mean abortion, I mean the man making her sleep with him if she wanted to stay with him, and the people who had pushed her so far that it felt like a fair exchange, and if that was better than what she’d known before, I didn’t need to know any more. I was silent as she spoke, her hushed voice quiet and courteous of the seven or so girls who slept around us. We huddled together on a bottom bunk while she talked about the lives she had already lived and how being on a horse was the only thing that made her want to live more of them, how if she could ride, if she could gallop a mare on moss soaked ground and jump over just about anything, then she would be okay. I had not yet galloped, had not fallen from a horse’s back, had not lived or learned at all, really, but it would come, I knew, by summer’s end, and I would find out so much more about things like soreness, satisfaction and shame. I would know how sweat smells on saddles, how to love something and let it go. I would learn, from strong legged women, who grew their hair long, what I was meant to be this time around, and I did gallop then, did hold on for dear life as I flew through the forest, squeezing my eyes shut, sometimes, as I tightened my legs and leapt over tangled limbs, roots reaching up from loose earth. And I did fall hard one day, wanting so badly then to dig a hole in the dirt and stay there until grass grew out of me, but the girls gathered around, all of them gorgeous and godly, in the way women who worship the moon usually are. Stop crying, they soothed, this was always going to happen. For the love of Selene, they said, look at yourself, so much freer than you were before. We can see it, they swore, you are filthy and fallen and full of life.
Elizabeth Lerman is a creative writer based in Brooklyn. She loves woods, waves, wildlife, horror, highways and alliteration. Through her prose and fiction, Elizabeth aims to examine the significance of small moments and the space they hold. Her writing has been published by Curlew Quarterly, Train River Poetry, and Coffin Bell Journal among others.