This Year as a Compilation of Short Films I Can’t Decipher

My friend sends a video of her newborn opening and closing her mouth, testing the length of her tongue in air and then resting it back inside its wet, warm spot. Her spit and lips make soft sounds, the closest she could get to language. I want to come closer to how she must feel. It’s snowing. This baby was the piece of cloud that became a tiny frozen thing, part of her mother just a few days ago. And somewhere inside me is an egg encrypted with genes from my ancestors that’s waiting to become its own body, that someday could come out of me like snow from a winter sky.

***

I think of single-celled organisms squirming like goo, no spinal cord, no vertebrae. The clarity of their existence, like sunlight, how little they have to decide. They grow tired. They die. The newborn opens and closes her mouth. She doesn’t know her own mouth or the shapes it can make. She doesn’t know her eyes blink open and closed like her mouth. Doesn’t know that whatever she sees she is seeing with those eyes. The baby shifts her eyes, looks up and down. She can’t stand how much there is. She cries, and now her tears distort the world. But she doesn’t know that change is because of her tears, saltwater droplets made by her own body.

My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold.

***

As I cut mushrooms for dinner, I examine their undersides, little fans tightly strung together like slots in a projector slide. I stop chopping and stick my finger in to feel, soft as a velvet dress. But my finger is too large and cumbersome, and the mushroom breaks apart like a clump of dirt. I run my finger over the top and belly, texture almost like skin. Like the cheek of a lover, the way you can stroke it and something ripples inside you.

***

I have foot x-rays taken to check my bunion. The nurse puts the x-rays up on the light screen and leaves. I sit in the blue patient’s chair covered in flimsy paper like the patient I am and stare at my foot bones. The toe bones, the long bone along the side. A diagram on the wall tells me it’s a metatarsal bone. I don’t know what the x-rays are saying. That’s what the doctor is supposed to translate. I look down at my foot, my real foot, still bare. Toes wriggling like a sea anemone. I stare at the blue veins and red, protruding bunion. This foot is alive and attached to me, and inside this foot lies those bones, the ones glowing on the light board like a ghost. No, like a skeleton.

***

The baby is looking at herself in the glass of my friend’s phone screen, but the baby doesn’t know it’s her. The baby looks at her own face lit up and doesn’t know how to decipher it, the way I can’t decipher my own bones on the light board. How could she understand that she is the movement in the small glass rectangle if she is also inside herself?

***

An older man—maybe my father, but at the very least, somebody’s father—is distinguished looking in his glasses. He drinks a cup of tea every morning while he contemplates the changing color of the sky. He loves his children—he is a father, maybe even mine—and was there for them their whole childhood. I’ve known him a long time—maybe my whole life—and today I realize he is getting older, his skin less defined around his face. Then the man takes his glasses off to wipe the smudges on the bottom of his shirt. His face laid bare, I’m aware that in this moment his world is a blur, boundaries suddenly blended. And I’m aware that someone could come along and knock his glasses out of his unsuspecting hands and someone—maybe even me—could step on them and crack the lenses before he’s realized what’s happening. Just like that, the man would not be able to see. I am aware now that this man, though a father—maybe even mine—is only an imperfect body and his hands have a little shake and his eyes haven’t worked well in decades without these glasses. And now, this distinguished-looking man becomes delicate as the film on the underside of a mushroom.

***

It’s warm now, but the snow will come back. It always does. We’ll look out the glass panes of our window and see the shadows spreading across stretches of snow. My mother taught me as a child that when you paint snow, you don’t use white. You use blue. If I knew how to paint, I could paint this: shadows on the snow blue as the veins tangled beneath our wrists, blue as our fingers in the cold. By the time it snows again, who knows what the world will look like. By then, who knows what the baby will be doing with her mouth, what her eyes will see.