Five Essays on Mold While We Wait to Be Cleaned

How Mold Wants a Home as Badly as I Do, But Finding a Home Is the Same as Losing Your Name for It

I feel sadness for the mold, a decayed reasoning, swimming pool drained and left with only the scum, but it is a living scum, scum that emanates an urge, the urge to keep living, inhabiting our lungs, not that our lungs are any sort of home for it—better the dark, unmoving corner of a ceiling and wall—but they become a home in that they recognize its spores, our lungs can feel them enter with their ungainly confidence, microscopic promise of purposes beyond our capacity to see, and to be known like that, even as an enemy, is a recognition that most people, not to mention most fungi, are unlikely to receive. To know the enemy that causes your days to waver in probabilistic hazes before your actual face. To know, finally, that your enemy is not one, because it, like you, is only trying to make a life.

Which is why I blame the landlord, the information blah-highway, the conditions of personal modularity that lead us to live in a place we have no climatic familiarity with and therefore no sense of how to manage humidity. I blame myself for not trusting my instinct, I blame my wife for gaslighting me when I could not breathe, I blame the strength I know I have but that remains inside of me as if waiting for another moment, surely not this one, in which it will be called upon to knock down everything in the way. Too stiff and brutal to be asked to shore up an unsure decision, my strength let me bend like a plastic clothes hanger until I broke, the act I was made for.

I don’t know where my body ends, and that is why I still cannot bring myself to trust myself. I feel like another on a daily basis. The air gets in me and leaves echoes, my food determines the pathway traced in my gut, and the full hard representation of the earth up through concrete pathways and raised heels tire my feet by the end of the day so my bones feel strapped to their walking. To their walked-on.

I have always taken too much of the world into myself.

So I keep taking it. I don’t know how to stop. I think maybe it is a desire for home, like the mold has, a home that would admit me to it with no betrayal and no hedging, where for a few seconds at least I could let go of the parts of myself that are sure something will come around the corner pointing and questioning, suffocating me, waking me in the middle of the night with narrowing passageways like a hand of mucus around my throat that is my own hand. I have always believed I could find home through sheer investment of myself in a place. It was too easy the first time. My home folded and curled around me.

I thought it did, at least, which accounts for my discontinuities. My mother running after me, picking up what I dropped, was a convincing illusion for someone who paid as little attention as I did that a pure land without responsibility existed, a magically vacuumed and sponged refuge where nothing was asked and everything was provided, a place where I could be myself and pursue my pursuits. This led to disappointment in every following home where I lived, as I found myself constantly coming upon messier and messier tableaus on the kitchen table, amid the dusty floor, inside the gradually mildewing drains I could never seem to clear completely just by pulling the hair and slime out with my hand. In the sink were my dishes! And I was unutterably offended by them. I still am, every night, when I see them stacked there next to the sink, and I think to myself, “How many more nights will I have to do this?” The answer, “every night,” has always sounded like far more than I was led to believe I deserved.

So now my anger toward the mold—a sadness distorted, pain unappeased by action—hinges at least in part on the fact that I never expected to share my home with an organism that was slowly killing me, even though I likely have since the beginning, given my autoimmune problems and the fact that I live in an age of nuclear, carceral, and carcinogenic longing.

So, too, has my idealistic hope for life become to simply open myself without any such harms entering me, to live as a fully authentic and vulnerable person, to reveal myself to the people and pathogens around me, not to mention the spores and unnameable particles, an act of accepting that my body does indeed have no ends, that it is a barely differentiated aspect of the universe that will in not so many years be indistinguishable from it. Imagine! If you could simply strip off your skin. I was given to believe, somehow, by a coalition of privilege and natural-born ignorance, and also, I admit, by virtue of the less heinous desire to share myself without restriction, that if I let it, the world should not harm me.

I am almost testing the world to prove to myself that I can believe in it. It always fails. Still, each time I believe.

Because it is not so much the world that betrays me each time I lay myself vulnerable to it, like the time I lay in the street in front of my home growing up and, though my friends watched for cars, I abandoned a tiny part of myself to factors I could not control, to the traffic and the breeze. No, the world has been kind to me. It is people that I fear. Their failures. Their intentions, too, which are even more terrifying for the way they obscure their actions, allowing them to ask forgiveness no matter the outcome, as well as their willingness to abide the suffering of others, since it is not their own suffering, which always perplexed me, given what I have already said about the thin border of myself, though I know at the same time that ignoring the suffering of people who are not me is the only way I could and can continue to operate. I fear people because they are like me.

In the end, I think, this is why I fear the mold which I am by now convinced has gotten inside me. Not because it is blameless. Because, instead, it is full of blame, as sinful as I was and am—sure, pull the vocabulary of my Catholic history into it—as sinful as an organism can be, full of the desire to reproduce itself for entertainment or out of habit or even boredom but not for God, certainly not for Him, He who is the only reason, there hovering over every airborne allergen with His lack of justification—because, of course, God justifies nothing, because existing is nothing but an excuse to exist—while the mold acts out its own little divine life, a species as good as a deity, a blasphemy, filling me the way religion could fill a person, and I do just feel that need to breathe.

That need to inhale something that is a given. It is always a longing.

Instead the air poisons me, just as it keeps me alive. Anger is sadness again, when I stay in it. Sadness for the mold, finding a home like me who wants to believe, but there is no need to believe in what is already inside you.

Everything I Would Do to Leave Mold, I Would Do Again to Arrive

I would excise myself for the brilliant capacity. I would throw myself headlong into the promise of day. I would unearth new earths beneath the stretch of our walking so I could reach the air that has not been attained, but the story of finding is the story of being held back from finding what is already yours and finally, after years, arriving at it as if at a paradise, having forgotten the real paradise that once hovered beyond the edge of touch, the oasis you could imagine for the second when you lived in yourself, a second you would have to spend the rest of your life fighting to re-reach.

It’s as simple as the hum of unconditional love over a body that is still living.

Hard as it is to come by, I believe this place we must fight to arrive at is a natural state, natural in the way death is natural, but the frightening thing about it is that it is instead life. It is a state, I think, of having what you have, knowing it, and needing in its favor no violent display. I do not want to need to start a small war, even in language, to be allowed to suffer audibly. Peace is when your pain is not feared but received.

And so I will not stop arguing for the parade, mold can join us, wave at the crowds who are too afraid to top the floats but bask in their audacity, mold can be the feature float, decked in feathers, absurd and sporing over the train of us, everyone coughing, but out of solidarity, because we will not die of it, I refuse to die of it, I refuse to make of anyone an enemy, but I refuse too to settle for less than what I already have, to take it as a gift from those who could crush me, those who deem not doing so a generosity, no, I refuse to stop longing for a horizon from which I refuse to retreat. Even if I am taking no step, I can hold horizon with my hand. This is called doing more than getting up in the morning. Hoping to, at least. Wanting to. Being allowed this minor thing, something as simple as a possibility, instead of a wave of empty assurances suffocating you as soon as you sit upright—hell, as soon as you lie down to try to sleep.

Those spores are not the spores I want in me.

I want spores blaring with the calmsong of forest I don’t need to visit, I want spores with tiny versions of my lungs imprinted in their cellular data, I want spores who want me in them, shrunken and shining and glorying in disease, I want spores who disaggregate the chaos of wood and insulation that we call our house and allow each material not a name but a meaning. I want spores that hide in books because they are simply not finished reading, or they are but they want to stay in that hollow fullness, that full hollowness, of the moment after the last sentence ends. I want spores whose cross-hatched chthonic organs tell a story of the world that I certainly do not understand but could maybe breathe. I want spores that are shared freely, because if there are walls they are not, at least, “walls,” because the cubing of space can act, given the spores, less as a separation than an opening.

I am hearing voices because I am infected.

I am hearing voices that I do not want to leave me.

In this little paradise—the ability to imagine it, the seed of it that illuminates—I find the inversion where the skin turns to the heart of a being, where the outside I long for is trapped so deeply inside. I grasp it. It hides within me.

If I could only think hard enough, I could sip from its cellular head.

I want to believe we are already here, I am already here, in the place where I am going. I want to believe it so badly, but the furthest distance is locked up inside. Stop then, stop then, start. And allow me.

If I Love Everything That Is Not the Mold, That Would Not Be the Same as Loving Everything

Old with the hum of it, I am old with the hum of it, the decay of an improper movement into proper over the course of the day, I take my inspiration from those who contained words but could not delimit them, could only arrange them as they spilled out impossibly onto the page and gave a hint of bodily substance, pus or blood spelled out in a wave, because when the body is filled with an item that gains nothing from the body but its evacuation, the substance that emerges is like a translation, two languages wrapped in one awful day, those languages pulled from the groans and fluid capacities of an inward turmoil that has no ultimate or primeval meaning, just the spores that took root and caused rejection, which causes creation, which is the gross and unnameable substance reduced to an easy syllable. Spores. They want, they want. Spores will not stop at filling me.

They will not stop at night, at the trees that dangle outside our windows, they will not stop at the darkened bedroom where we cannot help but breathe, they will not stop at hiding themselves, becoming more pervasive for their very avoidance of discovery, they will not stop at the gentle love I ask of them, and still they are not an enemy. I will not let them be. I will not let the organism ungrip from my body.

My lungs are tired, they are shredded. What am I but the potential to be undone. I am only a body, only a boundary. I am an invitation to dissolution. I disintegrate when I enter the world, and I never even entered it, technically. I was always stormed. The house must be wet to maintain its growing colony.

We keep it wet with our breathing. We keep it wet by staying clean. Mine is skin I am embarrassed of, which is why it is always falling from me.

Distinction, distinction, I am employed to protect it. What has it ever done to protect me? The otherworldly hum sounds ancient because no one can imagine a suffusion after the curdle of prehistory.

You can hear the tender in a body raging, quieting, raging, seeking. This is my body, circling. Circling, spores in the cells of the lungs, finding, coughing, pulsing to leave and stay, circling.

Two Options for Living through the Mold and a Third, Because the Sharp Edge of a Binary Is Its Undoing

The way a line clings to the southernmost part of the body: how a planet traces us coldly. Projections of the living in the post-living, an astral scene we have been assigned by birth to remember with the aid of our technological reasoning. You can only ask robots to assume so much, and after that you’re officially a being. I’m a being in the vacuum of organisms. No spore can find me.

No: find me, please, clinging to the vacuum of my own making. I disassemble the robot self. Telescope pointed inward, projecting vision, playing a scene in my belly and lungs. If you have seen it, you are living in me. You have a shape already. The shape clings to no name, it settles warmly, it buzzes, never settles down, there is no exit to the body.

The spore arrives to enter its own pores, sporing. The spore wavers in a disappearing, generative trance. The present is a waterfall, grows, reflects. The spore gets its material from somewhere. The spore rides the wet until it stands.

Only at Night, When I Had Left the Mold, Could the Mold Live in Me

Goodnight! The mold is dreaming. The mold dreams of me. I dream of standing and breathing without mold in me, but really I dream of a world in which the mold is welcome in my body, I can unfold over the soft wooden steps, I can eat my own disease, I dream of a world where I do not have to fear life that is not mine, and the night is gentle with its soft spread, we are moving together, there is even a “we,” and my spores are with us, they are swallowing, I am wet, liquid, no one can see what paths of fervent stillness, of breath and mucus, of patchy feeling we hum in.