a spider’s song: a princess must rot in order to live

by Nathalia Dutra

⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅🏰 this piece is part of PRINCESS, our second digital collection of works. PRINCESS responds to the problematic of modern princessdom through pieces by theorists, writers, and artists. 🏰⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅

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The truth is that every morning I have to remind myself I’m a girl. I have to scream it out loud. Pin myself down. Perform a daily exorcism. I wish you told me it would be so lonely out here. In this perpetual girlhood of a tomb that is the bed. I sleep most days. Most. I did not know your hair could braid knots that weave into the sheets !!! How comforting it feels to be pulled and tugged and made feel aware that something inside me secretes a sense of vitality. You let a wig fall off your head when you shower. My scalp bled in competition. There was something vicious about most days. I tried to care but I couldn’t even.

But why is the sense of time so incredibly daunting? Why does it press me down and hold me captive? All my memories scream with agency. You are accountable. Carry the guilt. Bear the cross. Bear the cross. I store wine in my bone marrow. I hold myself captive. I am obsessive. Cataloging anything. My worst impulse is to understand.

• Oh hey! How is it going? - The process of somehow reminding yourself that you exist outside of your head.

Back in reality everything has always been unstable and full of arrows and shadowy and flooded. The house has always been full of carpets and boxes filled with naked plastic babies. I saw myself in one. Around an edge. I played there comfortably. They said I never made sounds and that my sister was born sleeping. We have always been aligned within this art of dying in silence. Of Screaming in whispers.

Once my head exploded in the middle of a room and I was left licking my brain out of the floor. trying to ingest parts of myself I had for an instant wished I forgot. It was brutal. Nobody noticed.

Once again I carried a dead body. Or maybe he said it was 3 times? Maybe 55. I carried a dead body in the backseat of my car everytime my father was driving. Once in the front seat.

It rained that day.

The dancing raindrops on the window have always given me more comfort than anything else around me.

I sat there. I sit there. I contemplate the car as a cradle. The car as a moment of protection. A moment of silence. A moment of music. A moment of beauty.

I am always there. what is to access a memory that does not hold an ability to die? memory as a portal. As an embodied introduction into the metaphysical nature of the present. I was there yesterday and tomorrow. I exist there. Why do all versions of myself flash before me everytime I try to blink? I have had this body through it all. It was always there with me. The physical discomfort of not holding ALL the remedies for yourself does not negate the remedies you hold.

You can not hold everything.

Hello? Can someone wake me up? I think time has fallen on my head and I am praying on my knees to be forgiven for the sins presented to me at birth. I have told you that you hold a power materiality can not capture. But you try to materialize everything! Physicality! Physically hold me please. Somebody press me down. Somebody hold me in an effort to bring me back together.

We were always driving. constant movement. Life in transition.

Where were you yesterday? I don’t know.

I erase in parts. on a daily basis. I press delete. Send it again. Edited.

Sometimes I miss a day of dissociative labor. I would ponder.

But my body is not mine.

Delete.

Paste something empty.

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Nathalia Dutra is a storyteller trying to make sense of life. Her work moves through memory, rupture, and survival ~ often grappling with what it means to tell the truth when language breaks down.
@n4th4li4dutr4