In middle school, I found a Pokémon watch in an antique store. “I am not an antique yet!” I said to no one in particular. In an antique store, every aisle is a funeral for what no longer is. Another word for funeral is nostalgia, is obsolete hill. Every day in middle school, I held a funeral for my childhood, collecting photos, friend’s signatures and Pokémon wrappers (even as a girl, I longed to be a girl). It was the early 2000s, and the whole world was in puberty together— irrevocably changing, discovering its new, digital body. There’s grief in the forever-sealed toys, the family photos in discount bins I shamelessly rifle through, looking for another life. Nothing sets out to live in an antique store. No one sets out to become an antique. Now at thirty, I’ve become an expert in holding funerals. my midlife crisis is ebaying for vintage Lisa Frank goods. My friend says, some people do heroin, so you’re doing pretty good. Like any of us know what it means, to be doing good. The present, like a fruit, is quick to fill with bugs and rot.
In Japanese aquariums, eels were forgetting
what humans looked like. Aquarium staff urged us
to Zoom the eels so they could remember,
so we could continue to exist in the eels’ memory.
We were so long in quarantine, I didn’t realize
how much I couldn’t remember: what it felt like
to know what you’re doing tomorrow, the names
of favorite restaurants (until I drove by
and found them boarded up), how to swim
in a room full of people. What else
have I lost without knowing it? My mother says
she is losing her strong emotional memories, good
and bad. When I tell her about the Checker’s burgers
she used to stock in our fridge
when she couldn’t get out of bed,
she says that doesn’t make sense. If I was in bed,
how would I have cooked or cleaned? How
would we have eaten? (In my mother’s mind,
fast food no longer exists.) When she makes
a pie from scratch, I tell her, I didn’t know you
knew how to make pies, unable to remember her
baking a single pie in my childhood. Of course
I can make pies, she says. She also says she boated
on the River Danube with my father. It was the best
day of her life, but she can’t remember
what it was like. What else does my mother
not remember? How conceited we were, convinced
the eels must remember us. The eels, tired of living
in tanks, erased their memory of us, imagined
they were still at the bottom of the ocean.
All the bodies underneath me, like dolls boxed in God’s basement, lined up and waiting for what’s to come. A few graves have gifts, one a faux ivy wreath with plastic leaves & plaid like Christmas 1998. Someone remembered, once. Once, I was not the only visitor here. How long does it take to forget those buried? (How long, for me to be forgotten?) But so many more are washed away or buried in black mold. Some are written only in German. A few tiny gravestones— like teeth—share the same birth & death date. How many secret griefs live here—unnamed, unnamable, beneath the bare stones, in silent tombs we carry inside us, wherever we go?
at Mr. Ed’s Elephant Museum
Surrounded by elephant silverware, a decapitated woman, bald with three elephants hatching out of her head. I assume it’s a woman: those Frida Kahlo eyebrows & bubblegum lips not unlike my own. Glossy like a kitschy cookie jar, her forehead peels—like mine— only her dead skin is plaster. Half-bust, chopped at the neck, reminiscent of Ganesh’s cut-off head, discarded as his mother ordered a new (elephant) head be found to save him. And who was it that saved this elephant woman? What was she—and why was she made? Someone thought to form her, to bring her here & pedestal her bust. Strange, how much I love her for her ugliness, admire her campy painted eyes that stare so calmly ahead, even as her head cracks open like an egg and explodes with wildness. Not all of us carry on so well in the midst of a mental health crisis. (Look, how she doesn’t bother to mask!) Not all of us would accept with such stoic grace this life as a museum piece— a spectacle—a life asylumed behind glass.
Meg Eden teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World. Her children’s novel, Good Different, was a JLG Gold Standard selection.
Stills from Godland (Icelandic: Volaða land, Danish: Vanskabte Land, ’Malformed Land’) is a 2022 drama film written and directed by Hlynur Pálmason. Set in the late 19th century, the film stars Elliott Crosset Hove as Lucas, a Lutheran priest from Denmark who is sent to Iceland to oversee the establishment of a new parish church.
