Mainshock
The day an earthquake struck New York, we sat on my couch and watched the exposed brick shake. It’s called the mainshock—when the centre will not hold. Bed-Stuy returned to itself almost immediately, the aftershock waiting to strike until my partner had fallen asleep mid-afternoon. The weather had been dormant, then volatile, much like our periods of rest that failed to compare to the intensity stored in the bedrock of us. But I have always thought that we were more akin to a rupture than a natural disaster. The pressure of us was rising in my three story walk-up, and I could feel the electricity in the air, suspending us with the seismic pressure that occurs just before breaking.
Dusk fluttered through my bed room curtains as I listened to a crab tree’s heavy droppings bounce off the fire escape, landing in faithful, arrhythmic thuds. My partner remained asleep when the aftershock came, the earth slipping on its shoelaces again, blurring its image of us in the stillness. Their dreams twitched by and my thoughts raced. It felt as though my body had been left in the mainshock, where unease fastened itself to each crack in our foundation. This practice of hyper-vigilance was an art my partner had not yet known. And in our moments of breaking, I failed to explain this fear to them: that there was still something worse yet to come—and how that was often a greater force than if something ever did.
It began with a human skull in August. Body parts were found in Dumbo for the fourth time that summer on jagged rocks near Jane’s Carousel, where we had sat unknowingly that same day. The news referred to it as “Brooklyn Bone Park,” where fragments of a soul washed ashore, found in pieces by passersby. Weeks later, shards of a spine appeared at the feet of a woman at low tide. Then, a femur. And a pelvic bone. I wondered how many times a person had to break apart for the world to pay attention. And how many I’ve walked across, unbeknownst to how a body returns to what it was made from.
Days after the election, Prospect Park is set on fire. The drought scorched the air first, then the grasslands, in two football fields worth of flames. New York landed in my throat as a thick black cough. No culprit was found, and there was no sound when no trees fell. But I smelt the gray matter for days after, stuck like cobwebs to my skin and hanging in the air like a storm about to break. But it already had, in black ink across the front page. The smog had trespassed state lines, treading into New Jersey where my mother called from. I informed her of my chaos, that we had gotten back together again, and she warned me for the hundredth time of the dangers that could come from my open mouth.
In a bar in Brooklyn, a man tells me about the indigenous practice of cultural burning—a tradition of preparing for chaos before it inevitably comes. He calls it “razing the field.” For thousands of years, humans have attempted to mimic this natural phenomenon, procreating a rebirth that was never meant to be replicated. But it is not randomized; that is up to something much larger. Cultural burning works in tandem with these natural cycles, igniting the next season by scorching what came before. Later, I asked a friend from the San Fernando Valley how canyon fires are raised and they tell me these fires have always been here. It simply replaces what lightning has always done.
2025 arrived with violence: a steel toed boot branding the earth with broken atoms. On January 7th, just one year and one day late, the California wildfires began, rife with cosmic impact. Sunset lost its footing on the Santa Monica Mountains, spitting up thick plumes of smoke. Eight months without rain had weathered the dry brush which had been watered all winter. Persuaded by the whispers of the Santa Ana winds, the drought coiled and ripened into bright infernos across the Pacific Palisades, then in Eaton Canyon. Joan Didion once wrote that these devil winds could be felt before they were seen. The air crisped with friction. Small pieces of the earth churned upward, pinwheeling down the mountainside before diving headfirst into the Pacific. Didion said that indigenous people would throw themselves into the sea when the winds turned like this. Perhaps they knew that all it took was the earth’s single breath to reclaim all that had been given. To remind us of the natural order of all living things.
In West Hollywood, “Juke Box Blues” sifts through our silence, marking the end of our last vacation together. I mix chardonnay and mango juice to sweeten the foreplay of another argument. We sing off-key in every conversation, their brown eyes dead and laughing as they rummage through my phone and accusations fly across the room, spattering like lighter fluid. Our most dreaded taboo had filled the room again, the one which divided bisexuality from the rest of the kingdom of queerness: men. It spouted insecurities from its lip like a dog barking. A man’s name in my phone carried more weight than any words I could ever say. Despite my explanation that this was a stranger, that we had barely spoken, that I wasn’t interested, it wasn’t enough to make up for this fundamental distinction between us. This possibility they knew existed in me, that I have chosen men before, was enough proof of my indiscretions.
I could not argue against this betrayal—of having loved men before—because if I did it would be dismissing something intrinsic to me. It was something that halved me, this ability to choose what kind of visibility my queerness could disguise itself with. But it felt more like the devil winds taking hold of me—falling in love—than a mask I took on and off depending on its company. It was only with them that I had finally attained this idea of something that I had always wanted: this validation of queerness which sustained me each time our centre refused to hold.
The way we fused together and fell apart felt both natural and disastrous. Our unrelenting cycle of conflict was stunting in the face of a world around me that had become an echo chamber of grief. My internal world had begun to mirror the external, and I had begun to look for it, these constellations of heartbreak that pulled the gravity of my life inwards. Heartbreak is a paradox in this way, how it consumes and connects you to everything. It allows you to sustain the love that is embedded into loss and to hold it near. It lets you continue to listen to it beating. But beneath that is the reckoning of knowing when an ending is here. When the mainshock is over and there is nothing more natural, nothing more disastrous, than wanting to submerge into the aftershock of grief.
Perhaps we need disaster to rock our centres. To create tiny cracks in ourselves that make us question, and keep us from holding onto ourselves too tightly. The world shapes these centres, resists them, and recycles them back to us into the natural order of living things. A fire is razed. Lighting strikes. A body is found. And we are reminded that sometimes there is no order to invent when things fall apart.
Beneath the exposed brick, I was the only one listening to the crab tree’s heavy droppings. This time, for a little while, there was no earthquake. There were no natural disasters. There was only the sound of gravity bouncing off the fire escape and the world’s faint whisper: it was simply the end of the season.
Read “Mainshock” in Issue 004 of The Reprise (+Order a Print Copy)
Caroline Elise (she/her) is a poet and prose writer based in Brooklyn. She is interested in the topics of queerness, heartbreak, and how natural forces influence our internal worlds. She is the editor-in-chief of Désolé magazine and a zine graphic designer. Currently, she is writing her first poetry collection about the intersectionality of grief and the natural world.