There’s a hole in my foot and I see straight through it. I see my husband peering at me through the hole in my foot, because he’s as curious as I am and wants to figure out how to help me fix it. The hole is in the shape of a coronavirus cut-out and the cut-out is hovering above the hole in my foot.
I stopped on the cross country meet golf course in 1994 because my foot hurt and a stranger came from the woods with a reflexology chart. He knelt down to tell me why I couldn’t run and how it was my foot’s fault. I remember nothing more than this strange man and his laminated chart of colorful feet. I haven’t thought of this in a quarter of a century but now I’m dreaming about a hole in my foot and I must know what it means.
The hole is the size of my grandmother’s brain tumor. Her tumor is in there and so are all the letters and pictures I never sent when she was in the hospital because I was too afraid I’d send them and she’d die and the letters would come back saying RETURN TO SENDER because she had deceased before they arrived. The tumor is in the hole in my foot and the envelopes with the pictures in them and the airplane I never got on because I didn’t go see her when she was sick. And now she’s gone and I’ve got it all in the hole in my foot.
I’ve put her and all the past women from my family in the hole now and no one seems to mind. They’re in there as I know them right now and they’re in there as babies and they’re in there wearing bikinis and going to prom and growing old. They’re in there cooking dinners for ungrateful people and their hair is all tangling up together with strands of hope and despair. They want out of their stories but they don’t want to leave the hole in my foot. I want to pull them out of my foot and out of the cold ice and hug them one-by-one but I can’t and I’ll just have to, at some point, put my foot down and choose to walk on them or with them.
I put my childhood home in the hole in my foot because I can mostly only remember the good things until the end and I put my current neighbors’ house in there because I love them and always want them across the street. I put our house in there because I don’t want to move but I also don’t want to stay so it will be safe in there until I can figure it out. All the pets from all the houses are in there which means there’s so much fur that the hole in my foot feels warm like a fur coat. I can’t walk because the roofs of the houses are pointy so I lay down and cover myself with the blanket of animal fur. It feels good to rest.
The dead fiddle leaf fig tree is in there and so is the live one. I’m trying to water them both but the water runs right through the hole and provides nourishment to nothing and no one. I’m so tired and dehydrated but I can’t get to the water.
My son is in there and so is my daughter. Because the hole in my foot is a perfect circle, they fit by wrapping their arms around one another. They’re so happy and they play Ring Around The Rosie but without the words because they don’t know them. They never fall down at the end of the rhyme because I keep my foot raised to keep them from falling and because they don’t know the words that would tell them they should fall.
The TV antennae is in there and the unread copies of The New York Times and the old cell phones in the junk drawer. The unbroken wishbones of past Thanksgiving turkeys are in there and so are the pairs of broken chopsticks. The brown spider I kept in a paper bag in my closet when I was six or seven, the sticker book that disappeared and the dresser that fell on me. My dad’s bandana, my first saxophone and the lemonade stand from 1990 are all in the hole in my foot, too. A five-stick pack of Big Red is in there from basketball game concessions and so is a basket of onion rings. Popcorn and cigarettes have gathered in the hole along with french toast and venison.
My bad choices and my good choices all cram in there and they’re swirling around in a confusing cosmic soup. It’s hard to know which are the good ones and which are the bad ones so I have to just label them all choices and be okay with the space they’re holding inside the hole in my foot and I think this would make my therapist nod with approval.
I close my eyes to remember which foot had the hole in it when I dreamt that it did but I don’t remember. I continue to open my eyes to peer at the tab open on my computer with the color foot charts, like the stranger’s from the non-existent woods on the golf course, because I need to figure out what it means. The hole in my foot correlates to the area of the solar plexus and esophagus and perhaps the bronchial area but because I don’t know which foot, I don’t know if it also correlates to the right or left lung and breast and if it also reaches my heart. And then I wonder if my heart hurts because there’s a hole in my foot or because my heart hurts.
I close my eyes to fill in the hole but I don’t want to lose it all so quickly open them again. And this has gone on for days and maybe weeks and it might go on for the rest of my life. I’ll keep closing my eyes to remember and I’ll keep opening them to not forget. And all the while I’ll feel tired and so thirsty, missing my homes and my family and the filtered water from the fiddle leaf fig and wishing I had a fur blanket.