Sometimes, Farts Are Love
Sometimes, Farts Are Love
Some thoughts and a poem about bodies.
A few weeks ago I told Seth that I hoped when we died, our cells would disperse out into the universe together, energy and matter mingling for eternity. His response was immediate.
“OK, we’ll put in the will that when one of us dies, the body needs to be frozen and then when the other one dies too, the kids need to take us up to the top of an active volcano and drop us in right as it’s about to explode.” That way, his reasoning goes, our flesh will be sublimated into gas that has a chance of rocketing out into space.
Sounds like a lot paperwork and research for our boys to have to deal with when they’re in mourning, but c’est la vie.
I tweeted about this conversation, but to make it funnier on Twitter I said that Seth yelled that request to the boys across the room, which would honestly have been a very cruel thing to do to a 7 and a 3 year old who we constantly have to assure don’t need to worry about their parents death. But no one on Twitter seemed to notice the child cruelty inherent in my fib and instead tweeted things at me like, “THIS IS THE MOST ROMANTIC THING I’VE EVER HEARD.”
Seth and I will have been in love 20 years this year. In those 20 years we’ve been entwined in all the ways two humans can be, you know, stuff like: we puked into buckets the other held, we called each other collect from across the world only to have nothing really to say, we endured each other’s favorite films, we gave each other very different but equally inappropriate presents for our 21st birthdays, we helped each other write hard emails, we learned to set up auto-payments, we huddled under covers in rainstorms, we learned how to be kind and how to listen and we learned that we can each be cruel, we signed documents and held elbows and yelled in the street, we went on adventures and made big plans and implemented some of them, we divided our cells in two and made two new humans in our image, and learned how to keep them alive and tell them jokes.
I don’t believe in life after death, but I do believe in compost. I do believe that nothing comes from nothing so something comes from something and that when I’m dead and gone my tissues and cells will become part of the great fucking mystery of life again, recycled into soil and breath for wind and maggots and butterflies. And my particles have grown accustomed to his particles. And his to mine. His particles would be so lonesome without my particular off-gassing to keep them company as they rejoin the fucking cosmos! So it is romantic, I think, to hope after we ourselves are long gone, the bits of us that keep on going keep on going together.
In our family I am the smelliest one. Seth and the boys laugh and laugh when I fart, and whenever there’s a pun to be made about gas, they make it. “What’s a gas station” Asa asked once from the back seat of the car. Huxley and Seth replied in unison, “MOMMY!”
The other month when I was traveling for the book, Seth called to say they’d had the following conversation at the dinner table.
Asa: “I miss Mommy.”
Seth: “Me too.”
Huxley: “Me too. I even miss Mommy’s farts.”
Asa: “Me too. Because farts are love.”
FARTS ARE LOVE!!! LOL. FOR YEARS I have been jokingly telling Seth that he’ll miss my farts when I’m dead, and then our kids just…came up with that joke on their own!! File that as Reason Number 72 to have kids: THEY HAVE THE SAME SENSE OF HUMOR AS YOU. No one gets your jokes? Have a kid. They’ll get you.
Being a human is so amazing and absurd. And one day, poof, we’ll be gone, so we better sniff all those farts while we can, my loves.
Anyway, here’s a poem this train of thought reminded me of, which I wrote a few months ago, and which isn’t about me and Seth because I find writing love poems almost impossible because nothing is ever quite right to convey love, so this is about me and our cat, but, you know, similar.
Let the Birds Come For Us I hear a raptor circling overhead He isn’t here for me A moment ago Marlow - the orange fat cat who was born on the snow-browned Berlin Turnpike - was puking up bile right next to the canvas I was stretching in flip flops in winter in my filthy sanctuary where Marlow and I benevolently rule together over a kingdom of concrete and dirt and palm trees and voles Don’t eat my Marlow, I yell to the bird in a whisper in my mind or out loud I'm serious An owl ate my kitty Fluffy She was white and filled the sink with her fur when she slept on the Mediterranean-tiled divot in my parents grand bathroom I’ve seen photos All I remember clearly is her stark bright coat all pecked of its flesh on the paving stones in our front courtyard Lipstick red staining her perfect snowball puff Her brains must have been devoured, but I didn’t notice them and probably, in my diaper and bare feet, I wouldn’t have recognized a cat brain if I squished it between my toes Would the owl come for me? I was sure I could fend it off I listened for the flapping wings for years I hope the birds come for Marlow When it’s time I hope they show up so he doesn’t skulk off to die someplace to disintegrate in his favorite spot, like the crawlspace under the kids’ room or my side of the bed Even if no bird exists big enough to carry me away from here I hope the vultures save him from that but not yet