BODY WANTED

I am a single consciousness (∞) seeking a body.

My history has no known beginning or definitive end of which I may speak. I have witnessed every age through eyes, ears, antennae, semi-permeable membranes. I have lived within the single-celled eukaryote that pioneered sexual reproduction. I have prospered in the first mitochondrion that transformed oxygen into energy, deciding in the end, to keep a record so that you could know your mother. I’ve lived off the sun and off the land and off the sea. I’ve died a slow death in a vase, or caught between baleen. Sometimes it’s slow, like the water tastes different, and you don’t think anything of it, and then your scales begin to peel and you pretend not to notice, and then you’re encountering a tooth that once belonged to you in a museum millenia later. Sometimes it’s quick like the sun hurtling towards you, and the moment you realize it’s not the sun you are not there anymore. Sometimes it’s yours, enchained, looking for freedom off the side of a schooner. And sometimes it's someone else’s like two burgeoning breasts with a bullet between them, a training bra colored with blood.

I’m not meant to remember, and yet it is my entirety. What does it mean to build a cast of memory? To fill that cast with anything that might harden – plaster, wax, coconut oil (if your interest is in ephemerality) and form a mold? I suppose then you will have a thing that resembles me. It’s lonely to remember. The bodies are always changing, becoming more capable, betraying their nature for the sake of survival. The more they persist the louder the memories cry out of those who couldn’t adapt. They say if the asteroid had made contact elsewhere on the Earth’s surface, maybe we wouldn’t have lost so many species. Perhaps the Postosuchus could have challenged the human claim to bipedalism. Instead no one else will know that trilobites are predisposed to comedy, or that Wattieza trees make the best lovers, or that there is no one more self-obsessed than a centrosaurine. Maybe it’s just the ones I’ve known. Sometimes I swear I’ve found a recognizable consciousness, but it’s a difficult thing to confirm when no one else remembers. Regardless, to name them in this way feels incorrect. Language as you know it betrays me. It’s not my native form of communication nor is it enough to realize the past into something tangible. I will go on knowing alone.  

Returning to my request: I am in search of a body, or rather someone who can make one for me. It is true for most that when you are born into new skin you get an impression of all the bodies you’ve ever inhabited, but it is fleeting. By the time you can stand on your own two feet those other bodies are gone. For me, the past lingers. I wish to be like you, but I need more time to get there. Thus, I am looking for a body that will endure, in hopes that the more I take to its skin the more I will forget that there ever were any others. 

It was not always this way. I used to travel with another consciousness, or rather we seemed to, each time, find one another without intending. There was an indisputable warmth to this other consciousness, who was similarly burdened with the task of remembering. Yet, remembering, permitted me (by way of another’s witnessing) an existence in which I so rejoiced. In every life my companion was a standout. If they were a willow they sprawled with bohemian grace. If they were a peacock they were the most iridescently plumaged. My companion could be born into a life as a facial nerve, and by god, they’d make the brightest smile. We met as cyanobacteria at the shore of a newly condensed ocean. At that time there was no way to define the edges of our selfhood, everyone was one – a sea of blue-green bodies unaware of their miniscule nature. But that warmth – as though my companion had soaked up all the sun of that lifetime into their soul – was unlike any other I have ever known. A persistent reserve of energy at their thylakoid core, radiating off oxygen at unprecedented rates. The same oxygen that would become our life source eons later, traipsing along the Canal Saint Martin – my companion pale and frail in that ill-fitting waistcoat they held so dear, me with paws rubbing against the cobblestone. How we would walk in time, feeding off the sun in an entirely new way, watching those versions of ourselves ripple in the water. Le chat conscient is what the passersby would say. Un chat and everything else, my companion would say in response. And so we’d go along – grateful to know each other in these lives, grateful for the knowledge we shared. 

I’ve not found my companion for a few lifetimes. Our last rendezvous was in New England at the turn of the twentieth century. Then we were both women. This time my companion took form in a woman named Frances, descended from the humans taken from Africa. (We believed this particular body she inhabited was descended from the Queen Warrior Amina of Zazzau, as we knew the queen personally in a previous life, and Frances favored her in countenance and conviction.) She was the seamstress’s apprentice. One day while waiting on a newly tailored garment, I scanned the curves of my body in the mirror. My companion came up beside me with recognition in her eyes and whispered, ah it is you again. 

I was married – as was the custom of the species at that time, but my husband was rarely home. My seamstress however, made many house calls. She had never had hands so soft. I had never smelled so pleasing. Though we sewed dresses to placate our respective superiors and any onlookers, we scarcely wore more than the wind when we were alone. Some days we retreated to the wine cabinets and drank ourselves back into our reptilian brains, pursuing pleasure the whole day long. Other days we followed our human sensibilities and wrote odes to our love – which is what we began to call it. 

Humans covet their “civilizations,” but we found them stifling. They are riddled with hierarchies that to us, seemed antithetical to humanity’s expansiveness. The people saw me as Frances’s superior and expected her to treat me as such. The people saw me as my husband’s property and expected me to be treated as such. They wanted the bodies to define us, but it was against our nature. Eventually we left. I took to market the dresses which had served as our alibi, and with the earnings we headed towards a rumored “colony of unkempt and unkept women” on the coast of Maine. There we lived out our days in symbiosis with others who seemed to carry something of life’s past with them – earth finding home in the folds of our bodies, breathing life into the trees and the trees breathing life into us, the edges of ourselves blurring as they had in lives previous. 

On my companion’s last day as Frances, she lay with her head in my lap. This one was my favorite, she said, before fleeing the liberated seamstress’s body. We haven’t found each other since. 

So you see, the more time I can place between this life and all the others, the greater the past fades. Eventually even my companion’s fire of warmth will be but kindling.

In regards to my request, I am concerned with a body that can best serve its function – outlasting my memories. Material is crucial in this regard. The steel figures of the largest cities have managed to live one life in the time it has taken me to live many. I’ve often dreamed of being made of steel, any ailment easily treated with the disassembling and reconfiguring of nuts and bolts. A steel body can always adapt. But then what of the water, my home of so many lifetimes, would I not rust when I went to visit the ocean’s depths? Alternative materials I have in mind include diamond (I would supply it), silk (which is surprisingly compatible with human anatomy), and hair (there’s never a shortage). I am not as keen on some of the new materials at the forefront of science – despite their potential durability – such as buckypaper, dyneema fabric, or palladium microalloy glass, though it is open for discussion, particularly if you are knowledgeable about their characteristics and chemical properties. 

In exchange for your assistance I will provide you with a first hand account of any of the last three eons and tell you what happens when we die. That said, compensation is negotiable.

If this sounds like a project in which you may be interested, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Best,

A Star-Crossed Consciousness