She walked in and the smell of fresh grapefruits and magnolias walked in with her. Her head was bent: an overripe fruit hanging from a young tree branch. Her eyes searched the mosaic tiles of the floor. She seemed to look for an ancient map hidden in the crevices, but instead her eyes bore into the neatly accumulated specks of dirt, beautifully at home and safe in the in-between, border spaces. She shivered, fished out a wet tissue from her bottomless pocket and bent down to clean the spot. One swipe and the tiles glimmered, yet the little capillary stream of dirt seemed untouched. That was unexpected. She envied this dirt, its resistance. To be so exposed and yet unreachable. She wanted to bottle the feeling and drink it.
When did she start feeling like dirt? When did she stamp her body as unclean and unholy? Why did she think of herself as untouchable? She felt it sting under her skin and in her womb. The womb was the urn for her feelings, but sometimes she felt she was about to give birth to snakes. She had a nightmare once: she saw a snake slithering out from between her contorted legs and another from the depths of her navel, and the two were about to rip her apart when she woke up.
She sat down on the floor and felt the cold hardness of mosaic tiles against her tailbone. It wouldn’t do. She craved to become one with the floor, with the dirt, and stretch like a starfish in those crevices. Her body, without her permission, assumed an islamic prayer position: it kneeled, crooked her torso, pressed her palms and head into the floor. Her feverish forehead absorbed the coldness and she sighed out from relief. Then she reached the tip of her tongue right into the crevice and she licked the dirt. She imagined it was grassless earth under her and she – an evergreen fifteen-year-old body. In her mind’s eye her toes dug into a poppy field and her torso stretched like a tree under the clear blue of sky. She reveled in the imagery, eyes closed and forehead pressed to the ceramic tiles.
She knew she had to release the fifteen-year-old that kneeled cowering in the deep corner of her mind. That lovely body contained the buried wisdom and delight of living on the edges, forever liminal and unbound. That evergreen body whispered: What is dirt other than something out of place? These little specks, little remnants of life seem quite happy and attached to their new-found home.
So she thought: if she could take the dirt deep within her, if she became dirt, then she wouldn’t feel dirty anymore. She would just be earth, misplaced.
Writer | Mariam Beshidze ’27 | mbeshidze27@amherst.edu
Editor | Camila Massaki Gomes ’27 | cmassakigomes27@amherst.edu