I had described to a friend at lunch on Thursday how I'm seeing the work and the forms everywhere I go: the knife at dinner and the tree being trimmed on Sacramento and the building being demolished. Life is the lab.
"So it's kind of like you're on drugs. All the time," she said. And we laughed, because yes, it's kind of like that. Except it's crisp and clear and awake and there's no sobering up.
In the final two days anything was possible as we all took to our own projects, sometimes with the help of classmates, sometimes solo; sometimes working diligently with no end in sight and sometimes flitting around the room peeking in on the new worlds others had discovered; sometimes listening and watching Gil as he talked and narrated dissections of the brain and penis and uterus, sometimes tracking him down to shove a heart or pelvis or pituitary gland in his face to show what we found. Skulls were cut clear open and brains pulled back to reveal the optic nerves. Hearts were unfurled to trace the path of blood flow through the chambers and touch a semilunar valve. Colons were plunged in a bucket of water to watch the epiploic appendages float and wave like a coral reef. Laminectomies were performed to remove the entire central nervous system intact and held high to a roomful of spontaneous applause. Eyeballs were extracted to hold the lens on a fingertip and gently squeeze out the vitreous humor. And chances were good that if you found yourself not having time to explore something in particular, that someone else in the room was already all over it and was happy to gift you with a full walk-though of what they were doing and what they had discovered.
As for me, I spent an entire day with Rose's left lung. The entire day, scratching at the tissue with a scissor tip to expose the branches of the heartlung tree. Arteries, veins, and bronchi appearing separate at their large roots that had lay in the mediastinum became as entwined and commingled as could be once they plunged into the airy, fleshy sponge. The entire day. I had imagined stopping at one lobe, but it wouldn't let me go. Imagine exhuming the root system of an 81-year-old tree, trunk giving way to a massive clump of earth, and gentling out the dirt to free each root, and each branch of each root, and each branch of each branch of each root, until the roots became so small that you lost them to the dirt you were gentling out. The entire day. When it was finished, I sat there with it, no words, as Gil and Julian came by. And they stood there with me in my silent tears. And we smiled.
I'm on my way home. I've said goodbyes, given thanks, and paused to honor gifts given. The three-legged red eye back, transitioning between ground sky ground sky ground sky ground, and wake sleep wake sleep wake, feels like a necessary reentry protocol after my last three weeks as full-time somanaut. Thoughts of massive whirlwind cleanup and cardboard box coffins topped with tealights are still fresh. Exhales and rest and thoughts of daily routine are settling in. Whatever happened in San Francisco is still happening, going strong. Inner space can't be left and can't be forgotten. It's where we reside. And like outer space, it's ever evolving, stars being birthed and stars burning out, and no clear line drawing one from the other. It's all just happening. No inner or outer, just this.
