On Red and Other Choking Hazards
Let the pearl earrings join their mothers in my lungs, the oysters and shrimp that have made their homes in my chest.
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I am leaning over the sink in the double bathroom of my childhood home. I do not understand why I can’t breathe. My dad is squeezing my stomach, or maybe it's my mom but that is the least of my concerns. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe but I am calm. It is not that bad staring at the drain in the sink, gagging. I chewed and swallowed. Why is it not going down? I can’t scream, maybe there is noise but I do not care. This sink bottom is cream colored, deep enough for my head to be in. I do not know how long it has been since my breathing stopped, this must be scaring my parents. I will not breathe again I guess. Cowtails, the caramel pipes with cream in the middle, have been my latest candy of choice for these kid taste buds that are not picky to anything but led me to this situation. My mom stops squeezing me, she spins me towards her and opens my mouth with her fingers. I don’t understand why this caramel pipe is still in my throat, I was swallowing the whole time. This doesn’t make sense. My mom puts her cold and thin fingers down my throat and snakes the Cowtail out of my stomach. It was fast and I am amazed to see that I in fact, had not chewed and swallowed at all but barely chewed and inhaled instead. The sweetness of caramel was slimy and mixing with acrid bile, but I can breathe again which means I can scream and the candy is immediately out of my mind. I suffered no loss but that ruined cowtail.
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I wonder why can't we eat tadpoles like we do caviar? Is it morally worse than eating frog legs because they are babies?
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It’s in the middle of the winter that I am most inclined to shave my head. Sometimes I wonder if this is like having an iron deficiency that makes someone eat ice instead of the nutrients needed to gain iron. I have instead decided to believe it is because in times where I feel consumed by the gray and cold, when my time spent outside is chosen for me by elements that I cannot control, the decision to shave my head is one change I can make for myself that causes no harm.
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When my freshman year of college bled into summer I began stealing lipstick, only from walmart or target, and only if they were bright colors. I told myself that stealing lipstick hurts no one. I can save money for food, and at least I am not giving money to a corporation that spends the majority of proceeds on advertising for beauty products to make women feel like shit about themselves. This stealing led to earrings and sometimes face masks or other pocket sized items. Nothing too drastic.
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An episode from an ER show: A woman came into the hospital over and over, repeatedly being misdiagnosed with asthma, then pneumonia. Nothing helped until one doctor took some kind of scan of her chest to see through her skin and rib cage into the thin, slippery lining of her lungs. Inside, some kind of seed had sprouted and was growing vines, hairlike tendrils, in and out of the lung lining. This has happened, says Wikipedia and WebMD, in sinus cavities and ears, any space that is porous and wet, like any hidden place on the human body. This is why I stopped eating sunflower seeds, and sometimes I wonder how many foreign objects I have sprouted in my lungs from constant choking on food.
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I wonder why I say “be sweet to your baby” to my cat who is destroying his stuffed animal? He hunts the toy duck with the plastic beads for eyes that are now dangling from its face in a spray of polyfil. The laminate wood panel floors of my own first home’s bedroom are spattered with soaked clumps of acrylic duck fur, after he attempted to drown the animal in his water bowl. I know he is just trying to kill and see red.
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Two red poppies, one in the mouth and one left unharmed and firmly rooted. Red wine with cheap brie, the kind that has mushrooms and I will eat it all in one sitting. Red raw throat. Red measuring cups that I melted to the stovetop red baby spoons red pens red hibiscus tea already sweet enough I will not waste the sugar on myself red beet juices red cabbage red hair never looked that good on me red berries are probably poisonous I do not know but I am not ready to try.
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Freshman year of college I had to give myself the heimlich after inhaling a stolen grape in the Cleveland uptown Constantino’s grocery store. I made my friend be quiet about it, because I did not want my choking to cause a scene.
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The Brightest Red Lipstick became my weakness. Any red. I looked into undertones and what works best with pasty, see through, grey fish flesh. I think multiple youtube beauty gurus answered with purples, dark reds with blue undertones, wine reds. I stole these, then realized after 5 or 6 similar shades that these were all incredibly dark in a way I was originally attempting to combat. I moved on to orange undertones, any that I could get my hands on in CVS, Walmart, Target, Walgreens. I was not bright enough to support the oranges on my skin. Any ounce of sun warmth left my skin in the Ohio-late-October.
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On Valentine’s day of my freshman year of college, my mom sent me a pair of earrings. Pearls, that she forgot to take the price tag off of despite never forgetting that sort of thing before giving gifts. She sent these expensive pearl earrings and my theory was that she knew if I saw the price tag I would not be able to refuse wearing them. I never cared for expensive jewelry, it was a hassle to not lose and I did not care for norms. Earlier in the year I shaved my head and she immediately told me that now I had to start wearing earrings, to remain feminine of course. The method of dodging this was claiming that I had developed an allergy to cheap metals, which was not a lie, thus rendering my pierced ears virtuously barren before I began stealing from Walmart.
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The lipsticks I stole at first were liquid to matte reds. Bright, unforgiving red that, if worn confidently enough, one could pretend others would not notice their dehydrated lips. Matte lipsticks started my lip skin chewing habit, one that I prided myself on never having before. Red camouflages the open wounds, but fissures along my bottom lip grew deep in such a way that I began using tattoo healing lotion as a desperate salvaging attempt. My skin began resembling the paint peeling from a wooden deck, old and bloated with water damage, repelling the protective skin along with the matte red to expose raw, dark wood.
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Her retaliation was the gold post pearls. I spitefully decided to never take these earrings from my ears again, but she had also won. My bald head was once again a woman to her. My retaliation to her retaliation was to get another hole in my left ear pierced, but not my right ear to match. God, my mom hates asymmetry. When that piercing healed I moved the right pearl into the same ear as the other pearl. My left ear empty again. By this point, I loved these earrings and I never wanted to lose them.
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My mom taught me how to tell if I had strep, a virus, or just allergies by how red my throat looks. If it looks like raw hamburger meat, go to the doctor. If there are just blood red streaks, mucous, and pus filled lumps I should ignore it. After throwing up and nights of binge drinking, the filmy skin on the inside of my cheeks peels off when I swipe my finger through. This also leaves pus filled ulcers and raw hamburger meat in my throat, but I am allowed to ignore it because it is not strep.
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When the third hole on the left earlobe was pierced I moved the pearl from the first position to the third. My original earring holes became empty again and I won. Until on a tinder date when I lost my earrings in bedsheets. As soon as I noticed the pearl’s absence I made my hook up turn over his entire bed for these earrings. They were found only to be lost again in his bedsheets the next weekend. Then again and again until I learned to take them out before sex. I was mortified at the thought of losing the earrings gifted to me by my mother in some college guy’s bed. Just the back of one fell out during the point in time where I was binge drinking and blacking out frequently.
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Some mothers have their baby’s ears pierced as infants so the child will not remember the pinch. My mom made me and my sister wait until we were in 3rd and 5th grade. I would walk in and out of Claire’s at every trip to the mall, standing in line for the incredibly unsanitary piercing gun, and each time leaving because a grown man cried or a baby was held down. My sister had her ears pierced before mine even though she was younger, and I watched closely for an excuse in the form of a tear to walk out again. None came. I wonder if those mothers who chose to have their baby not remember the pain ever worry that the child will rip the earring out, find the enticing post and gem amongst their protective stuffed animals, and choke.
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Drunk Valerie put the rogue earring into an inner jacket pocket that I found months later, long after I had mourned the loss of one half of the pair. The lost earring back was replaced with a shitty metal backing from a Walmart set of jewelry. I recently lost the other earring back during my second therapist appointment with a new woman, but she was talking and I did not want to be rude by turning over all of the furniture in her office. The earring went into my pocket again, and the back was immediately replaced with a bastardized back from a missing front. The cheap metal of the replacement earring backs sometimes irritates my ears, but I suck it up because these cost more than I am worth and I cannot let my mom think she pulled one over on me, so I spitefully give in.
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Maybelline liquid matte ink lipstick, lips exfoliated and primed first, is the latest red to find it’s way into my pocket in the Rock Hill Ulta. It does not make fun of the grayness, the papery skin and dark eyebags, but instead turns me into a doll with painted lips. This looks best with no hair, no other makeup, just the red and two earrings. The red is not a statement of femininity, but a desperate attempt to cut the gray.
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What makes my mouth taste when it has been empty for hours? I do not think I have eaten snow in Cleveland out of the whole three years I have been here, but if I did I would probably choke. I cannot allow the forest of sprouted seeds in my chest, the cowtail vines, oyster clusters of sharp shells in the dampness, vineyards, and chewing gum meadows to be exposed to the Cleveland snow that I protect us from with red lips red embroidery floss red fishnets red flowers red tattoos red notebooks red cloth red nails red scissors red bowls red blankets red knit beanies given between friends redredredredred.
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That kid in the shining wrote redrum as a warning but I ran too fast into inhaling red rum red wine red whiskey in the middle of last winter searching for anything to survive the gray.
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This space heater in my bedroom has stopped glowing. I think there is no heat coming out but the hum tricks my brain into thinking there is. I just want to see one flower, please. It’s so grey here and if my skin already itches for warmth I don’t know if I can make it to April. Maybe I am just desperate for color but I want to dye my hair again. Nothing too drastic.
I think about the gifts I may give a future daughter and if I will coax her into what I think is the The Right Way. What inheritance will she get from me and my red smeared lips, my body half flesh half pearl and chewed caramel? What will explode from my stomach while she grows? Will the collection of inhaled objects, tangled and patinaed with phlegm, fall neatly into a box that can be wrapped and given as an heirloom? Everything she gets from me will become stained red, as everything I have received is tinted some color of obsession.
