Inertia

As I enter death, my body’s cells scatter. Skin cells peel away from ligaments, ligaments from muscle, muscle from the slick surface of bone. Picture a polyester skirt swirling in the drum of a washing machine. Picture particles of it flaking off into microplastics, until there is no skirt and the water is left stark naked. The not-skirt spirals down that slinky silver pipe at the back of the machine and disappears from the world of humans forever. I think you catch my drift: in the moment my soul leaves my body, I am the skirt.

The reassembly process of my soul comes with no particular sensations. I only know that my form is in continuous flux. Without my skin in place, I flow like liquid from physical state to physical state and borrow the shapes of my containers. I possess scrap metal and wood pulp. I pigment a basin of ink, then am rolled onto a flat surface by a printer larger than any I’ve seen before. A conveyor belt whisks me along. The doors at the factory’s loading dock dilate and birth me anew. 

After some time, my senses return one by one. I won’t recount that progression here. What matters is that, at the end of it, I find myself fixed in a spot that’s filled with the calls of seagulls. Their cries ring me, as does the stench of their excrement. Fine, salt-scented mist gusts into me and irritates my pores. Even without an inner ear, I have the spatial sense of being somewhere high up, where the air thins out and the sun jabs its rays into me. When I picture myself, I see only a brightly-lit blur suspended in midair. So. I try not to picture myself.

Time passes — or at least, I think it does. My face (if I have a face. Do I have a face?) aches. It begins to blister and flake with a sunburn, though I have no skin (that is something I do know). The burn of shame hurts even more than the blemishes. My bathroom counter never went empty, graced with the clutter of bottles and tubes. I always prided myself on my skincare routine: toner, eye cream, essence, moisturizer, and, most importantly, SPF. I would never, ever forget my sunscreen. Now, here I am — wherever and whatever I am — getting pummelled by pollutants. Each morning, the sour air assembles and attacks once more. 

And I don’t even have skin. Who am I without skin? 

Eventually, I acclimate to my position, if not to this new self. The clouds begin to break more often, and the clear skies gift me with a view of the shrunken world below. At my feet, a great gray river teems with colored specks. The specks merge into lines and crawl toward a city’s jagged silhouette. Beyond them lies a softer gray smear of ocean.

The ocean. The highway. I know this place. The hills and cliffs that I’ve been stuck to shift into perspective. I tower over the highest of the hilltops. Dizziness takes hold of me. The view becomes foreshortened, the city so tiny and gleaming like a dish frying beneath the sun in a pan. Its brilliance tugs at my memory, and I recall the instant of my death in a flash, a literal flash because there were so many cameras and lights bleaching that moment white. 

That brightness was so different from the needling sunshine I’ve now gotten used to. It was colder in tone, flaring and flooding the room in the precise way only human-made filaments can do. This memory overlays the scent of brine with a new one, a smell equal parts fruity and chemical. It was my own scent, and a sign that my hair had absorbed a generous spritz of hairspray and hardened with it. 

And then — movement. A corridor. No: a runway.

It was the last time my body had ever been filled with such momentum. I pulled my shoulder blades downward, away from my neck, which lengthened to catch the cameras’ attention as I stepped toward the runway. My feet buzzed with numbness, but not unpleasantly. I would rather they feel nothing at all than those high heels’ pinched toes. The music crescendoed, and I burst forth from the backstage. I placed each foot carefully in time to the beat. Hot air hit my legs as my skirt flared around me; an assistant yanked on its train to straighten it just before the entire dress swished onto the stage. From my vantage point in death, this strikes me as the obvious moment of my doom. At the time, though, I only felt the skirt tug a little too hard, heard my shoes stumble backward in an ungainly staccato rhythm. 

Metal clanged behind me. Kept clanging. Someone in the audience shouted something about a light fixture. I felt like a light fixture. My head sparked like a firecracker. Blackened tendrils of hair cascaded from me. I was shedding hair, I was shedding light, I was screaming or I must have been because my ears ached or maybe it was just all of me that ached, and the smell reached as-yet untouched corners of my sinus cavities. Death was an olfactory disintegration on the cellular level. 

I think, in the end, it was the smell that did me in. I tell myself this, at least. I can’t think too hard about the flames and the cables, because the memory of the pain makes me want to die. Again.

Now that I remember the death itself, my post-death surroundings take on a glossier, hazier light. I look to the gulls for companionship, and they oblige. They rest on my upper surface and stack branches into nests atop me. My flaking surface irritates me less; it’s not a true burn, after all. I’ve felt real fire before, and a sunburn seems a small price to pay for an oceanside view. I even come to enjoy my gargantuan height. In the modeling world, height was a prerequisite for the job. Knowing this, I started wearing the tallest heels I could find at age fourteen. That young girl might be proud if she could see me now. 

It occurs to me that I might still be beautiful. I might, in fact, be more gorgeous than I  ever was as a human. 

As a human. I am not human now. This truth strikes me with painful finality.

So. I know what I’m not. But how can I know what I am in this secondary life? I shuffle through the possibilities. Animal, mineral, or vegetable? Larger or smaller than a breadbox? What species or phylum, what class or kingdom of being have I become? I cannot pretend that this is heaven. This is I-5, and as a living person, I traveled its lanes countless times. If I were now an angel or a ghost, or one of the damned, death would surely not have fastened me to this spot. 

In my inability to identify myself, I fixate on the initial question: am I a beautiful thing? It always comes back to beauty. I never did anything in my life without first gauging how I’d look doing it. Memories continue to inundate me. In high school, a friend tugged me along to rugby tryouts with the bribe of dinner afterward. She knew what I’d failed to acknowledge: that I lived for the adrenaline of competition, of tackling someone to the ground and smelling fear in their sweat. The fresh sod sprang beneath my cleats. I fell into the rhythm and companionship of the game right away. 

But I fled from the pitch a half hour early. Rugby came with cracked noses and bruised ribs. I wouldn’t mind the pain, but I couldn’t live with a permanently broken face for the rest of my life. 

My hair, too, had always been a liability. It darkened and grew coarser as I aged out of my teen years. I oiled it twice a week and trained it not to need much shampooing, and still, it remained ungainly. Tendrils of it stuck to my face in the California humidity and ruined my auditions with agency after agency. I resisted braces as an adolescent, so the gaps between my teeth continued to widen. I slathered my skin in products, but I also picked at it nightly. My legs constantly stung with razor burn. It was all about burning, wasn’t it? Everything. Setting my whole body on fire in the hopes that it would shimmer like an opal.

No. I’m not a beautiful thing. I am just a thing.

The world around me has always been more lovely than I. I throw off its equilibrium just by existing. I can’t kid myself any longer. The people in the cars below outshine me. The ocean ripples and waves in perfect intervals. In life, when I shifted my car in and out of gear to keep up with this stop-and-go traffic, I peered upward from my little window to watch the seagulls swirl like dandelion fluff. How could I find them beautiful, when they didn’t even try? When they made such a mess of the shrubs, jacaranda trees, and billboards? They were beautiful, though. Effortlessly angelic.

Even the billboards twined jealousy, stiff as fishing wire, through my stomach. My tiny face in my tiny car window could not compare to the beauty who graced the perfume ad I drove past each day. Her face loomed larger than life, poreless as porcelain. Her hair levitated in voluminous waves around her shoulders. She fixed her eyes on the vial of perfume in dark-lashed rapture. On particularly congestive days, I imagined myself off of the freeway and into her. How comfortable it would be, to have such smooth skin and rosy cheeks. To have been paid to sell people perfume, only to end up with them wanting you. 

I still remember how it felt to look upward at her face. Now I, in turn, look downward – down at the Honda Civics and Subaru Outbacks that have once again reached a standstill. The passengers and drivers remain in motion, though; they fidget and argue and nod their heads to radio music. Hundreds of traffic-trapped actors, enclosed in fiberglass stages.

Amid this frenzy, I notice a single stagnant face. Her eyes pierce into me with the steadiness of a beam. Her hair is coarse but unburnt, her skin shiny with sunscreen. With a jolt, I realize I know her. I have never seen her in the flesh, but I know her; I was her.

A hawk picks at the peeling corner of my frame. Something shifts in the flow of traffic, and the woman turns back to her steering wheel. The car picks up speed and vanishes toward the city.