Bogwoman

My mother always says, “we came into this world vulnerable and needy, we will leave this world vulnerable and needy”. I think about this often. I come into the world without hair, without teeth, without speech and functionality. I leave this world in the same manner, a hairless freak who’s cunt no longer works. I find comfort in this, it terrifies and taunts the soul.

Hair turns grey, uterus sheds in clumps, regenerates. Bruises and scabs, salted wounds and hickeys are momentarily admired for a short time and then one day they are gone. The sutures that stitch up our open flesh dissolve, and the art is gone. The scar remains but not the pain, not the blood, not the sludge of it all. So, our sex is fugacious, our identity ephemeral, like the vapour steaming off the backs of water buffalo. In short: some art is better living a short life. A slim existence is more attainable sometimes. But not always.

When they found the Bogwoman, she was black and cystic.

All over her ovaries and kidneys were bubbles of ever-expanding puss and fluid. Inside these orbs, they found the remains of human hair, teeth, fingernails. And the rest of her, although still intact, was almost entirely black. Her mouth was black, her eye sockets were black, her cunt, deep red black with a rosy hue. But her heart was the blackest organ of all, that deep spike black you only see when you’re in the black spike realm. some even believe her heart had always been like that, even before she was sucked under.

All these things about the human body, a woman’s body, supposedly transient in life, had surpassed, had stood entirely still, had stayed, even in death. And if they had never found her, excavated her out of that black spike bog, it would have stood still until the end of time.

They found her curled in the foetal position, clutching her putrid upper arms, contorting the backs of her shins into her forehead. Ten thousand years of wet mosses clinging to her skin, ten thousand years of sexuality and identity, no longer fugacious, no longer ephemeral. Stood still. The worlds longest lasting woman. I wonder if she ever imagined that her body would be such an ideal and fertile place for growth and restoration? I never thought mine would be, not until the bog sucked me under too.