I’m driving to Ottawa, more or less. I don’t know how to get there, just that the direction is vaguely north from my home near Albany, New York. My car glides up through the Adirondacks and further still, into what’s called the North Country, which hugs the Canadian border.
It’s said the forest here is so impenetrable people get lost in it. I wonder if they ever come out. I wonder if I’d want to.
* * *
I dream of having liposuction when I get to Ottawa. No idea how it works—just that I need to see a doctor and get my fat removed. I try to remember the date and place I have in mind for the surgery, but, as in most dreams, I cannot pin them down.
I will have liposuction because I look six months pregnant. My belly is not a pregnancy belly, but the gut you see on middle-aged men in the Home Depot parking lot. Since the world looks at me and sees man—their mistake, though understandable, with the moustache and all—I’m supposed to feel shame with such a belly. Body shame comes easily to me; I’ve carried it around since I was eight. So I want liposuction.
* * *
I’ll see about visiting a clinic for long COVID while I’m in Ottawa. Maybe there’s a two-for-one sale with the lipo. Some people gain weight with long COVID, me among them, so why not?
I suppose Ottawa has long COVID clinics. Hell, maybe they’ve found a cure. I whisper cure and my whole body lifts several inches off the seat of the car, even as I’m driving. After three years of bone weariness and copious sleep, brain fog and memory loss, diarrhea and discouragement, there’s nothing I desire more.
* * *
When I’m not driving to Ottawa, or dreaming of Ottawa, I meditate. My version of meditation is called shikintaza, or “just sitting”—on my cushion in the prescribed position, silent and attentive. As I watch the world go by, things come to mind.
Most of the time, Ottawa doesn’t. More often it’s the woodpecker outside my window, or the glow of the old wooden door, or the pain in my back after half an hour. What Zen teachers call here and now.
I try to focus on here and now off the cushion too. But all the desires press in on me—Ottawa and the lipo and the long COVID clinic and, maybe, my vanishing into the North Country woods.
* * *
I wonder if the roads in the North Country are as impenetrable as the woods themselves. Are there at least places to stop, grab a sandwich, ask for directions? Does every northbound street have a border checkpoint? Or am I plunging into a morass of nameless trees on signless roads?
And what if the asphalt turns to dirt, the surest sign of no return? By then I’d better know what I really want.
* * *
I know nothing about Ottawa—it’s the capital of Canada, but besides that—so I can’t tell what will happen if I make it there. My dreams drift toward another form of vanishing, one that might fit Ottawa. First, ditch the car so no one can trace it back to me. Then find an apartment on a bus line. Get a routine job that asks little. Enroll in Canada’s Social Security system if it has one. Get the lipo, the long COVID cure. Vanish into the city, a safer option than the North Country woods.
I could Google all this but I haven’t. It’s said you mean business if you act on your dreams, and Googling counts as action. So clearly I’m hesitating, like someone on a cliff edge wondering which way to step.
* * *
Centuries ago a teacher advised his disciple to “go, sit in your room, and your room will teach you everything.” I have two rooms for this. In one room, I gaze out the high window at God and God gazes at me and I disappear—what medieval sages would call mystical union, God and I melding into one. The other room holds my Zen cushion, on which I’m supposed to sit until “body and mind fall away.” In other words, till I disappear.
Disappear and vanish are synonyms, normally, but not in this case, not for me.
One day, from somewhere in all that gazing and sitting and disappearing, I see something new: how Ottawa and the lipo and the cure and the woods are all one thing—the desire to escape. Lipo to escape from pregnancy belly. Good health to escape from long COVID. Ottawa to escape from everything. The woods to escape from life itself.
Disappear and escape are synonyms, normally, but not in this case, not for me.
In this case all the words mean something different, and the difference means everything. Escape drives me elsewhere, in desperation, toward anything but me. Vanish takes me deep into nowhere, and I cease to exist. Disappear happens right here, in joy.
* * *
One after the other, the dreams vanish. They’re replaced by a message: Your belly is just your belly. Your sickness is just your sickness. That’s all. Not good or bad, not pretty or ugly.
It just is.
There’s no more need to escape. Ottawa stays north of the border, my car in the driveway, my long COVID in my body, my belly right where it belongs.
Days later I sit in my room, looking at God as God looks at me. Without thinking, I begin to caress my belly, languidly, back, forth, soft glides over soft curves. It takes no effort to see this is prayer, this is practice, my body, my belly, the whispers of each glide ascending to God, or where we think God lives, when truly I may be caressing God herself. My belly rises to each caress, truly pregnant if only with wisdom, a display of the life it’s growing in secret, here, now.
John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, cats, and whatever else comes to mind. Janelle’s work has appeared in The Citron Review, Catapult, the tiny journal, HerStry, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made several contest shortlists and earned a few Pushcart nominations. Find her at www.backmanwriter.com.
© 2024, John Janelle Backman
Halfway Down the Stairs 