The Smell of Eucalyptus (#1), 2006

Photo by Greg Weaver on Unsplash

I can’t read Louise Bourgeois’s handwriting, but I can
see the way the leaves slope downward, against

admiration, against subject matter. Bourgeois said, But it
is difficult to be a woman and to be likeable and be

yourself. I imagine her gently tapping eucalyptus oil on
her sick mother’s thirsty face. I wonder if they hated

her for talking about her father’s infidelities. I wore
spectacles so I wouldn’t recognize my mother’s face in

the mirror. But I still wrote about her. I always thought I
couldn’t be hated if I had children. But then I forgot

about the children. Bourgeois said, Art is a guarantee of
sanity, and I think art is a guarantee of insanity. To

run down the same childhood hallway again and again,
to look out the same north-facing windows, be the

same height, wear the same blue dress with scratchy
lace, make the same footsteps. Could the coordinates

of ourselves not be our childhoods, but the present.
Bourgeois’s eucalyptus leaves droop downward like

thoughts that have passed through childhood too many
times. We’re all abandoned or will abandon. We

all borrow the deaths of others to be stunned. Maybe
after all the trauma is sorted and re-sorted, all the

parents dead, all the hormones retrofitted, there’s
nothing left but an outline. And the desire to live.