Loam
By Gemma Rosenthall
Featured art: “Nature’s Eye” by Iva Dukic
When I’m overwhelmed, I try to conjure the emotion of being small in a car during a thunderstorm. There is no visibility. My mom is as silent as she’s ever been, knuckles white pearls along the steering wheel. And yet, I’m absorbed by softness, the softness of being tenuously protected from a danger I don’t understand. It’s both scintillating and sedative. It’s what I first thought of when I heard the word “loam.” Sometimes I assign a definition to a new word before I consult the dictionary. Then, I become indignant when I’m wrong. Loam’s potential is untouched by its present identity as “a soil with roughly equal proportions of sand, silt, and clay.”
Here are my revisions: loam is a bioluminescent cave in the depths of middle earth. When you enter, you’re ensconced in a material like a dense, pastel bubble bath. You take the purest nap in its caress and emerge fresh as a tomato after the rain. I especially crave loam on days that are crowded and caustic with realism; the stabbing anxiety, the ending world. I have become a collector of imperfect antidotes: cream soda, pointillism, mealy apples, movies before HD, the outermost layer of a matzo ball tenderized by broth. I want to boil the bones of reality until they are as fuzzy and porous as they were when I was young.
An infant is born with their bones unfinished. Their skulls are soft, which is why they develop compressions on their head at the point of contact with the crib. From the onset, childhood weakly resists the concrete, acquiescing in increments. Growing up is a fight we lose, but the fight is charged with an impulse we need not abandon. We emerge into this world out of nowhere, and we love our nowhere logic in all of its capaciousness and ineffability. But the world is eager to populate our negative space with explanations and connections. It will not defer to nowhere logic.
Being that I was shy and an only child until I was twelve, I reveled in my imagination. My teachers were concerned I wasn’t properly adjusting to social expectations and told my parents I appeared confused by external stimuli. I sought refuge in Meredith’s company, my only teacher who didn’t suspect confusion. I confided in Meredith the things I knew with immovable clarity: Saturday was purple/gray and the phrase you’re welcome shared the shape of a human stomach. But the more Saturdays I accumulated and you’re welcomes I delivered, the further their syllables drifted from duality. They assumed singular, straight-spined meanings. When I try to reunite Saturday with a brooding magenta, I find them persistent strangers.
I can’t remember how old I was when I awoke from my synesthesia-imbued fever dream, but it must have been a gradual lucidity. I still find myself applying a distilled version of that anti-rationale. Childhood is the tension between what I think loam would want to mean if it could talk, and the hallowed objectivity of Merriam-Webster. To this point, childhood is not a closed experience, but a lifelong practice of troubling reality that can be called upon at will. Childhood is carving a soft, nowhere space for my own sanity. I have to protect my nowhere logic because I’m convinced the opposite will destroy me.
My fear of loss of imagination is a fear of destruction. Suddenly, I am back inside my booster seat looking out onto the storm. I know the only thing protecting me isn’t the car, but my imagination, which forbids an accurate appraisal of danger. As a child, it’s obvious from the invariable misery of adults that you have something they don’t. Whenever an adult advised me to enjoy being a kid while I could, I assured them they didn’t have to convince me. They didn’t have to tell me to safeguard my child mind from the looming threat of age.
It was with this single-minded resistance that, at thirteen, I debated my parents on the existence of the tooth fairy until, exhausted, my mom produced an envelope of my teeth from her desk. Whenever I lost a tooth, I would briefly put it back inside my mouth so it could say goodbye to its friends. I pictured a private scene unfolding in the tight-knit community of my mouth — tears were tempered by the promise of reuniting in an opulent castle over which the tooth fairy presided. Now here they were, together again as promised, but in an envelope. Not even a new one, but a hand-me-down, addressed to a relative to whom it was never mailed. I was heartbroken to behold their reduced circumstances. Ever the drama queen, I was left with the resounding question: is anything sacred?
When I recall this episode, I realize that at some point I made imagination about control. There’s no reason I should have been existentially invested in the tooth fairy as a teenager. I was afraid of what the world would look like drained of all its color, so I tried to gather up the color in my arms and hoard it there for eternity. I still find myself doing this, the rote imposition of a story onto daily life. Lately, my ears have been aching because I can’t take a walk or ride the bus without listening to music on my headphones at full volume, curating an intricate montage as I go. Otherwise, it’s the opposite; the annihilation of a story. In the throes of insomnia, I repeat the phrase nothing ever has happened, nothing ever will happen, until the moment is hermetically sealed and safe enough to sleep inside. It’s not unlike the plush denial I felt in the car during the storm. Of course, what was once developmentally appropriate has become maladaptive and, ironically, bereft of the softness I’m seeking.
I’ve always considered the outside world as being antithetical to imagination, and it can be, but softness abounds in the world and requires imagination to apprehend. Even my definition of loam sews together fibers of reality. The most ethereal dream still contains ingredients you can name when you wake up. So, I wonder if creativity requires oxygen to be organic. Imagination is not something you produce in exclusivity, but an experience you surrender to.
This summer I was taking a walk with my little brother, who’s five. He wasn’t on speaking terms with me, being that I was a tyrant who wouldn’t let him ride a bike without a helmet. He resolved to walk instead, as if this martyrdom would teach me a lesson about denying him the finer things in life. He told me how horrible I was in no uncertain terms. Dusk was falling all around us, nearly as theatrical as his tantrum. Gradually, he stopped dragging his feet and even took my hand. This weather is so impressive, he said. I was struck as usual by the way kids can give you hell and then say the most sobering thing five minutes later. What a special way to talk about the weather - the openness to what exists paired with gentle elaboration. This is the pure imagination I’m seeking.
Gemma Rosenthall is a senior at DePaul University in Chicago where she studies communications and creative writing. She’s been published in Crook & Folly (DePaul's literary magazine) and in McSweeney's.
Iva Dukic is an artist and illustrator from Croatia. She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts with a focus on the importance of picture books in children's development. You can find her at behance.net/IvaDukic and on instagram at @zmamorije_art.