“Naked in Meat Space” by Erin Waugh, March 2022

I met Kelly only once. It was a long once, and far, and plenty of awkward, but oh so comfort. In the way that a loud thing can be soothing. The blast of an air horn for the team you’re cheering. The pop of a cork, an explosion of glitter, the slam of a coffin lid.

Or when you rage at the trees. Not AT the trees, but toward them. Trees didn’t do anything wrong, but someone did, and you scream at the trees about your injustice. Trees can take it. That’s what trees have taught you.

“Come at me, bro.” – Trees

You might beat a tree about its trunk with a stick. “Why?!”

Trees don’t flinch. “Yeah, WHY?!?”

Bash it again. “Why me!?”

Trees will ramp up your buzz. “Yeah, fucker. Why you!!!”

You focus all of your impotence into one foot and stomp the ground. “What did I do to deserve this?!?”

And you kick that tree, that soldier of the earth. You blast that tree with the sole of your scarred and muddy boot.

“What, indeed.” – Trees

And then you crumple. It is only after you close your eyes that you can hear anything. You sit, you lean against your tree hero and you cry. Snot is everywhere, and tears, and a bit of blood where apparently you bit your tongue, although not enough to keep the swear words in. Everything is hot and salty, including the bits of tree bark in your eyes. Crying is ugly and thirsty. You reach into your left pocket for the last clean tissue, and blow out so much misery liquid that if you bottled it up and stuck it in your suitcase, it would not make it through airport security.

“People are gross.” – The TSA

You wad up the tissue, now bloated with gallons of mystery fluid. “At least my sinuses are losing weight!” you think, with an inappropriate burst of hope. And you toss it on the ground (the tissue, not the hope, although you’re still making up your mind about that.). As it thumps, the tissue blooms open, pretty in the way that an origami crane might be if it were hatching out of a puddle of puke.   

“People are gross.” – Trees

But so is cancer.

~~~

I don’t HAVE to tell a ricochet, collaterally damaged story, but I will.  

“Naked” is what we dubbed our small group of digital women. Digital women are the playful avatars that front for the healing underneath. Digital women are coarse, brilliant, damaged, and hungry. Until she was real, Kelly was a digital woman. So was I. We met in “Naked.” We didn’t start out naked; we got that way later. (Shees, we’re not hoors.)

Naked was a Facebook group of female-only acquaintances. Politically incorrect, I’m sure, but only a bleeder knows what a tampon feels like. (Sorry, penises. The fluids that fall out of men’s bodies are plenty gross too, but menstruation is a sacred kind of disgusting.) Naked was a safe space to discuss (online) the multi-hued gradations of shit that women live with. Air, water, blood, pain, cars, cash flow, anger, disappointment, weight loss from mystery fluid, cheese, donuts, and meat.

And “Meat Space” is where you finally get up off your ass and go meet people. In the space of their meat. Crying and bitching in the ether, behind a screen spattered with cereal milk and sneeze juice, where no one is fat or broken, even playful avatars can forget that humans are frail, flawed, damp creatures who often smell bad but make a delicious pie. Humans are skin mittens stuffed with burger, gloves of gristle sausage, condoms of cabbage rolls. Meat Space is acne, bad hair, jowls, crooked teeth, hunched backs, and neck bacon. Would you like some ice cream on that pie? Meat Space is kitchens and coffee cans full of cigarette butts. Meat space is hugs. Meat Space is trees.

~~~

Kelly was a regular person, in the way that you are a regular person. (Right?)  Whether you leap out of bed with goofy glee waggling your Sword of Accomplishment: “Out of the way, dragons!!” Or if, when your alarm goes off, you snort lines of dread inside your fort of blankets and cats and simmering dark thoughts and curse the pre-existing condition that is waking up ALIVE, again, just like the day before, and the day before that… You’re a regular person. Normal.

The Naked women were regular people. We lived all over the country. In Facebook’s infancy, grass root groups grew (or in our case, dark roots) from the languid musings of bored people. We stared at our screens in dirty pajamas eating Cheez-Its, wondering whether other people had orange stains on their fingers. It was the decade of the 2010s and the internet was young and strong and not fully psychotic yet. Britney before the shearing. Kanye before the Kim. Zuckerberg before the Borg. Normal, regular.

Kelly was 40-something, married, slim, pretty, mother of three: an older daughter who was out on her own, and twins in high school, a boy and a girl. (“Were they identical?”) The twins ran track and made art. The twins graduated from high school and went off to college. Twin Son found a girlfriend. Twin Daughter painted and sang on the internet. Mama Kelly was rightfully proud and effervescent. She posted their pics and their race times, their art and their music, their smiles and their triumphs. Normal, regular. Like we all do.

When Twin Daughter was 20 she killed herself.

And Kelly got cancer.

Normal, regular. Like we all do.

~~~

There are moments that obligate us to action. There are circumstances that mandate that we put on pants. As Kelly’s cancer wriggled and fizzed inside her, digital space became a dick tease, straight longing, a hooker mannequin in a window. It was time for Naked women to point and laugh at each other in Meat Space. I mean, porn is great and all, but it is no substitute for an actual firefighter holding a puppy. Facebook was a kind of Friend Porn, where human adults could post up victories and highlight reels and memes of ejaculating lava cakes. But as the relentless tributaries of grief began drowning Kelly and her family, it was time for a brief island vacation in Meat Space.

It was time to GO PLAY OUTSIDE. Where the trees are.

~~~

The other four Naked women lived in Wisconsin, and I lived in Michigan. Despite the travel limitations of Covid, five Naked ladies met in September 2020 at Kelly’s house in Winneconne. I still don’t know how to pronounce it. (I mean “Winneconne.” I can pronounce “2020.” It rhymes with “Fucking Hell.”)

Kelly and her husband lived in a farmhouse on five acres of… Wisconsin. I don’t know what you call it. The land was arable, but not worked. They didn’t farm, but they lived on land that gave farmers erections. Her husband drove a truck and Kelly worked in an office, but they lived on a flat rural county road. As I drove down the dune-y side of Lake Michigan, past the violence of Chicago (“Duck!”), and up into the woody oxygen of the North Country, I dodged deer, coons, fox, even a bobcat. The only thing I hit were mosquitoes and deer flies, because fuck deer flies. Deer flies are how you train terrorists.

I gave each of the Naked ladies a NAKED 2020 t-shirt that barely concealed our Collective Covid Corpulence. (For anyone still alive in the future, the Covid Dumpster Fire of 2020 shut down gyms at the same time it opened up home delivery of hot wings and ice cream. “Covid 15” referred not just to how much weight we each gained, but also how many dates we didn’t go on. Uber Cheese Thighs.)

We hugged, we ate, we spit coffee out our nose. We dripped sloppy joes and salad on our boobs, spilled canned wine and health tea on our sandals, and stuffed our chirpy maws with cupcakes and penis suckers that we luridly tongue-lashed for Instagram. (Middle-aged white women cackling as they leer into the camera and deep-throat hard candy on a stick is about as erotic as potato salad, but we cannot deprive ourselves, and therefore the world, of this oral indignity.) We giggled, we stained our shirts, belched, picked spinach out of our teeth, and then had seconds. And fourths. It was a mild evening in late September, so we ate on the front porch and swatted the terrorists (deer flies).

The sun set around us, the trees leaned in. As the conversation grew quiet, we could hear leaves rustle, a coyote howl, Kelly’s dogs barking their (not very) believable warning to predators: “We’re safe on this couch!” We breathed in the trees. Somebody smoked, but not hard. Just enough to keep the mosquitoes from becoming athletes. One Naked lady ground her butt out in a coffee can. The mosquitoes sniffed her surrender and bee-lined to the old country buffet that is my ankles. I almost started smoking.  

Kelly believed in trees. She was not a whack-job tree-hugger. She was a regular tree-hugger. Sit. Pray. Scream. You might ask a tree what to do about life, about pain, about waking up alive. Or what to do if you don’t. Wake up alive, that is. Tree confessors are mystics. They see inside us. Okay, they don’t really see inside us. What they do is be still and wait for US to tell THEM the truth. A tree will listen all day, waiting for your truth. A tree recognizes your truth at the same time you do. What a coincidence. (It is not.)

Kelly believed in afterlife. She believed she was visited by people gone before her, especially Twin Daughter, who, as Kelly taught us, “died of depression. You don’t commit suicide any more than you COMMIT cancer.” You GET cancer. You GET depression. And sometimes it kills you. Twice.  

Twin Daughter had a favorite tree. It was a real tree, an uncomplicated tree. The tree was in their yard, a sentinel protecting their five acres of Wisconsin. A big sunshiny child’s drawing of a tree. Tall branching stem, noble mushroom head. Kelly and Twin Daughter talked to that tree, sat under that tree, drew it, wrote poetry about it. And the tree beamed. Trees do that. Trees wait and listen and they never charge you. Therapists of the forest. After Twin Daughter caught the depression, Kelly spread some of Twin Daughter’s ashes under that tree listener. And sobbed. And cursed. The tree was cool.  

“I know.” – Trees

And then Kelly caught the cancer.

“Why her??” – The husband

“Why her??” – The children

“Come ’ere.” – Trees  

Trees are a canvas. A sponge. A quiet jury of immutable warriors who never judge. Mr. Rogers told us to “Look for the helpers.” You can pray near a tree, to it, even for it. You can paint a tree. A target on its trunk, or a sketch out of charcoal. You can trace its symmetry, or its off-kilter shape, a crooked combatant, a fat marionette. A pretty tree is a cool tree. An even better tree is an ugly one.

“Can’t we all just get along?” – Trees

In tree society, perfect trees link arms with flawed trees. There are no stuck-up cheerleader trees. Even that willow that whips its hair back and forth is there for you to talk to. Or beg.

“What did I do to deserve this?!?”

Trees can sing. Or hold their tongue. And stand. That’s what trees do. They stand. They witness. They take it.

“Fuck you, tree.”

“I don’t think you will like it much, but okay.” – Trees

~~~

Kelly did not survive her cancer. One day she did not wake up alive. Just a few months after the Naked Ladies brought laughter and hugs and penis candy to their fragile friend, Kelly went back to the trees. All the way back. She was 47.

The sunshiny child’s drawing of a tree is still standing. That’s what trees do. And we are still questioning, because that’s what Naked ladies do. We quiz, we cry, we curse. Not just in front of our computers, not just behind a screen. People are Meat Space. Trees are Meat Space. Trees don’t cure anything, but they almost do. People rarely cure anything, but they sometimes plant trees. And maybe that’s the same thing.

“I don’t know why. I only know how. Talk to me.” – Trees

~~~

“Naked in Meat Space” by Erin Waugh, from “True Stories Told in the Key of E-flat.”

Published 24 March 2022 at ErinWaughWorld.com