Published in No Tokens Journal June 2024
The moment she hits the water, a swimming pond—cold and dark with night, Gigi sees herself. Everything she has ever done and everything she has ever known. Every moment is crystalline and perfect and whole.
There is a moon tonight. Not full, but full enough—bright. Gigi wears the white cotton nightgown she slipped over her shoulders earlier in the day, when the sky was heavy with clouds. It had rained. It was warm. The night air is still thick with this May storm. The ground beneath her feet is velvety with moisture and green life. It is 1974.
The downpour cut Gigi’s day short. A photographer had driven in, a woman, young and boyish. Her face stays with Gigi now: small, angular. That brown hair. Lips that would pout in concentration. She came to take Gigi’s picture, because the world always wants more pictures of a movie star. Gigi is an actress. She is more than an actress. She is beautiful. She is more than beautiful. She is the standard of beauty, and, though nobody is paying attention, she is sick. There is a pain inside of her that the doctors don’t understand. It is hot, and tight, and sharp, and lonely.
As she hits the water, Gigi sees her mother, whose eyes are still shining with life, the way they used to when Gigi was a girl. But that is at the end of this moment. It comes later. It is not time, yet, to think about her mother, though she is always, with every breath, between every breath, thinking of her mother.
What it is time for, now, at the beginning of the moment, before her skin makes contact with the smooth, wet glass of the pond—the pond that is, especially at this hour of the night, the darkest green of greens. A green that only the undersides of things, left the way they are for a very long time, seem to be. A fallen tree, decomposing, forgotten, with forest growing tall around it, forgetting. A penny, dropped, stepped on, its copper oxidizing for years before it is washed or kicked up, somewhere new.
At the beginning of the moment, before Gigi’s body even touches the water, she is reminded that ever since she can remember, she has always wanted to die.
To Gigi, death means something else, something full and unexpected, a ripping away of her own self to inhabit another’s self. She remembers growing up in the apartment in California, the way the carpet smelled. Cigarettes and rosewater because that is the smell of her mother.
Gigi’s mother didn’t love herself, she only loved Gigi. Now Gigi loves too much. She has tried to stop, but there is something violent about the absence of love. She prefers the softness of disappearing—from herself, from her life. Disappearing is easier than giving up on love.
The first time Gigi remembers loving her mother, she was very young—three or four years old. They were sitting on the rosewater carpet together, playing with an empty soap bottle. Her mother said see how pretty she is and pointed at the curve of the plastic. She said look at her skirt, look at her pretty hair, just like yours and Gigi could see it too, as a doll appeared before her eyes.
There is nothing so bad about this memory. Gigi has not yet hit the water but is falling from the edge of the grass into the water. The water is glass and black, but green. There is nothing so bad about a little girl playing with an empty bottle that becomes a doll.
Gigi remembers playing with the sticky residue of soap, orange like something she could lick that would taste good. She remembers licking the soft beads of dried soap from where they collected at the neck of the bottle. She remembers kissing the doll with her tongue as if it were her lover. She remembers feeling an early need for touch. She kissed and loved the bottle, and by playing with it as if it were a doll, she would embody it as a girl. Becoming the doll was her first death. She disappeared into the doll and became something else.
She talked to it and it talked back. She spoke as the doll back into herself. Hello, pretty girl she would say. You’re a pretty girl. I’m a pretty girl. You’re a pretty girl. Back and forth, until doll and girl were one. Until doll was girl and girl was doll. Life folded in. She liked that feeling as a child and she likes it now.
The ground is wet with the kind of condensation only early hours possess. It is very late, and nobody is awake. Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody. Not Gigi’s playwright husband, a man with crisp shirts, a sharp tongue, violent eyes and a fragile sense of himself. Not the gardener, who is kind and loving in a simple way, especially after he found her in the bathroom last year, vomit down the front of her dress, flooded with gin and barbiturates. He tries his best to tend the green that lives around her, and, by proxy, he is tending to her. They are not awake. The photographer left that evening, when the storm rolled in. Nobody is awake. As if they do not exist. Gigi barely exists.
There are no lights on in the house but there is this moon that is mostly full, swollen and almost red, or almost pink, or almost a color that does not seem like the moon. The moon, then, she thinks, is not the moon at all, or it is playing the moon only at night, and only in the early night when eyes are still watching it. When it is deeper into the night and nobody is looking up, that is when the moon is no longer the moon, because it is what it really is, which is not the moon. The moon wants to die, too. The moon dies every day. What would the sun or the earth be without the moon? Gigi wonders but does not have time to answer. Her body is slowly, or quickly—she cannot tell—shifting horizontal.
There is a brief moment of fear that fills her, and that, too, feels like someone else’s. She lets herself be filled with the fear, which smells like metal and tastes like blood. When the moon was full four days ago, she bled all day long. She bled out and out like a hand had reached up inside her and pulled a string. A string that slowly unraveled out of her, ripping at the seams of her body, so that she only appeared intact from the outside. On the inside she felt completely flayed, feathered, petaled, unfurled. She has been haunted by this pain for years and years. She understands now, before she hits the water, what the source is.
There is a part of her that would like to go back, would like to tell her doctor that she knows what the pain must be. That the pain is the fear that belongs to everyone else. It is not hers, but it has filled her up. She knows it now, and she knows that no one else will ever know, will never get to understand that this is what it looks like. The thought of it thrills her, knowing this last secret, because it is hers. Right before she hits the water, she is trying to let herself be whole. To let the fear go, because it is not hers. To let everything but who she is rush out of her. Because then, when who she is belongs to only her, she will sink, she will die.
The grass is wet because it is still the same moment and the cold is in the air around her. Gigi is still wearing the white cotton nightgown, in the same moment, and her legs can feel the cold in the air around her. Barely a second has passed. She can feel every part of herself, the insides and the outsides, and she likes the way the air has slipped under her gown to play with the way inside and outside meet.
The water feels charged from the sun, warm and wet, and she senses the heat and the life that is radiating from it. Gigi wants to become the water. She is water. She will be water. Just one more moment. For now, she is air. She sees the beauty in this. She understands that air, like water, is essential; both are needed for life. But to be one or the other is the difference between life and death. She wishes she felt sorrow for the ending of her life, but the thought of it ending brings her something greater than joy and greater than love. It brings her comfort. She has never been comfortable as she is. She has never wanted to be her own self alone, and now, right in this moment, she feels whole just as she is, and she has never understood what that might feel like, and she wants to dive into it in a way that makes her feel only this way and nothing else ever again.
Just before she hits the water, it is easy to retrace her steps. She walks, backwards, backwards, in her mind, she walks backwards to the house, the long way, the grass becoming unrumpled as her steps become before her steps. Other steps. Earlier steps. She traces her way back to the house, to the side door, which hardly ever is used but for which she has always felt a love. An affinity. An appreciation for the humble side door. She uses it this one last time, as a way to show her gratitude for all of the years she admired it and hoped that it felt useful.
She cuts the back of her foot on the side door as she steps outside, but in retracing her steps she traces them to before metal on flesh. But before she exits through the side door, she circles every room in the house except for the one her husband sleeps in. The house is empty, it is dark, it is old and it is musty and unwelcoming. There is a sadness in this house of which Gigi does not know the source. She will die not knowing.
She believes the sadness sprouted the day she married her husband, the day she moved into this house. It is her own, but it is also the house’s sadness that has made Gigi feel so heavy, so far away from herself. It is both. She thinks, maybe, she felt this sadness in her husband. She thinks, maybe, she recognized it as her own. She thinks, maybe, she felt that he belonged to her. She thinks, maybe, she felt that she belonged to him. She knows, now, that she was not his. She would never be his. She punished herself by believing she was.
Before she walks through her house, Gigi is awake in bed and the moon that is not quite full is shining through the curtain which had been drawn by the photographer, the sweet boyish girl who loved her and saw her and reminded Gigi what it felt like to be seen as herself. To be seen. To be seen like that—she had forgotten that it was possible. The girl opened the curtains and took her photograph. A photograph of Gigi as herself, not as anyone else. Herself. It was too much. Herself. It was everything. Herself. It needed to be nothing. Herself could no longer exist.
She sits up in bed and thinks of the girl who took her photograph. She wonders what the girl is doing right now, if she is asleep, if she is awake, if she is working, if she is playing. She thinks of her lips, her small face, how soft she was to kiss. They shared a kiss, yes, in secret. A kiss. The kiss. The only kiss she had ever felt inside her body. Flayed, feathered, petaled, unfurled.
She wishes she had known sooner how pure a kiss exchanged between two soft, small faces could be. She wishes she could keep the kiss with her after death. This is the one thing that she wants as much as death itself. She is comforted by the thought of the sweet small boyish girl keeping the kiss close to her always. She is comforted by the fact that pieces of her will remain in other people, even strangers, even people she does not know at all, even people she does not want to have pieces of her. This is the nature of giving herself over and over, again and again. Pieces start to come off, break away, taken by whoever reaches out their hand.
She feels relief alone in the bed with the moonlight and the thoughts of the girl with a piece of her. She is alone when she is only ever not alone. She craves closeness out of fear for what she will do when she is alone, and now she knows there is nothing to be afraid of. She says to herself, or rather she doesn’t say anything, but the knowing seeps through her: this is the night I will die. Her husband usually sleeps next to her. He is not here. If the girl had slept next to her, she might’ve been satisfied.
Alone, Gigi asks herself if she loves the girl. She loves with her whole being, or rather, she loves beyond her whole being because she leaves it behind again and again. When Gigi is in love, she steps out of herself and into someone else and looks back behind her to see the hollow that she is. This is why she is hard to love. She knows this. Nobody has ever loved her the way she loves others. Nobody loves this much. Too much. Except, now, perhaps, the girl who took her photograph. She thinks, perhaps, she loves the girl in a different way. A way that is not too much. Less a giving up of self and more a coming into self. But no matter. She is starting to die. She is disappearing before she can experience this kind of love.
Because everything has fallen into place. Because the girl took her photograph and the curtains were open and the moon spilled through and her husband slept in another bed and the side door is sharp enough to slice her heel and the pond is still and black-green like glass. Because it is all exactly as it is, Gigi hits the water.
Cold. Dark. Wet. Sharp. She can’t breathe. Her body is suspended on the surface. Her face has hit glass. Her face is stinging. Her face is swelling. She has been hit. The water is hard. It doesn’t break. Her skin breaks. Her body breaks. She feels the hardness of the world here and now. It is so hard. It is so hard. It is too hard. She cannot breathe. Time has not passed. It is the same moment as it once was. She hits the water before time passes. Now that she has hit the water, she knows she will die. There is no turning back from this. The hardness has taken her. The hardness has bruised her. Her body is frozen. Her mind is frozen. She can only witness her own death. She knows that the moment she is no longer a witness, can no longer see herself, she will be dead.
Gigi begins to sink. It is barely perceptible from not sinking. The moment between hitting the water and sinking is less than a moment at all. It is between two moments, the way death is between two lives. But time is beginning to stretch and pull and sink and slow. As Gigi begins to sink, she remembers all of the times in her life when she was suspended in a body of water, which is not as many as she would have hoped for, because she didn’t learn how to swim until she was older, a woman, not a child, and it would be years more before she swims in a natural body of water much like this pond or the ocean or a river or a spring, because as a child her mother told her she belonged indoors, and nobody had ever told her that she could exist wherever she wanted to exist, or not exist at all.
Gigi took many baths with her mother, in the small apartment in Los Angeles where she learned that her father didn’t love her, but her mother loved her and her mother loved to bathe her and wash her hair and brush it out and twist it into curls with her long, sure fingers, the kind that only mothers have, which possess a kind of magic, even if Gigi’s mother, specifically, was not the type of mother who had much more to offer. She still offered that magic, and her absolute love, and this was Gigi’s first experience with it. Love. There in the bathtub, where her mother would wash her hair and brush it out and twist it into curls with her long, sure fingers so that it would dry into perfect curls that made her hair look a lot like her mother’s fingers in the end.
What Gigi learns of love as a child becomes her identity. She becomes a perfect example of love, obsessive and absolute, like her mother’s love for her. The color of this love is the color green. It is the color of life and the color of love, because life is love and death is what love becomes in the end. Her mother named her Genevieve, and Green is another name she was named, when she was older, by her mother, to make money off of her. Green is her name, but it never belonged to her. She has always been Gigi. Gigi, her mother said to her. Gigi is the name of someone who I love. Gigi is the one I love. Genevieve Green is not real. Genevieve Green was made up, stacked together, a body, a smile, a voice, a list of roles. Gigi is who she is. Gigi is who she has always ever been.
Gigi is sinking still, slowly. She can see the light of the moon through the surface of the water, which she is now under. Her body has gently turned; she is looking up. Her face is soothed by the cool water which first hurt her. Gigi can feel the heat of a cut from the splitting of her bottom lip. She is sinking still, slowly, and she is thinking about the kiss. It is, perhaps, the only thing she has ever wanted. The only thing she wishes she could keep.
She is folding, the way she always does. The way she transforms herself. The way she has tried to die again and again, as if she were a piece of paper to be folded again and again into new shapes and other shapes and shapes that did not seem to be made of paper at all. She cannot be paper because she is sinking, and paper rarely sinks. She is twisting, now, like her mother’s fingers, making perfect wet curls. Her mother, who loved her, obsessive and absolute. Her hair is tangled now, it wraps around her neck, her face. She is a mess of limbs and pain, so much pain, more pain than she could ever explain, which is why she has stopped explaining, which is why she wants death, because death will be the only explanation.
She is sinking. She is sinking. It is slow and it is fast. It happens at the end of the moment.
She is sinking and she is thinking about green. Green. The water is no longer cold. Green. She can’t feel the water. Green. She can’t feel anything. Green. She hasn’t been breathing. Green. She wants to try and breathe, because being alive is all she knows. Green. Breathing is all she knows. Green. She was born to live, wasn’t she? Green. Born to love. Green. Then why, since the beginning, has she wanted to die? Green. Why did her mother name her green? Green. What was it about her that is green? Green. What is green at all?
Green is the color of life. Green is the color of love. Love is green. Love is green. It is green. Gigi is green. They are the same. She is green. Of course, yes, green is who she is, and she is alive. She is Gigi, and she is green. The perfect example of love. A vessel for it. She is a vessel for green. She is alive for now, and after the moment ends, she will not be alive. She is still green. Right now. Green. Still green. If she had been loved, maybe if she had been loved, she would still be alive after now, this moment, less than a moment at all. She’s still between two moments. Now, another color.
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© ALYSSA NATOCI