Dayna Gross
I;O
O has many selves. This is a fact. An uncomfortable fact. The sooner O accepts this fact the more balanced O will feel.
Thinking for O.
O cradles a silence and sometimes cracks to allow in the noise. When O is concerned, O will open herself up. When O doesn’t know how to seal herself up again to safety, O will eat. Eat to form an adhesive. To feel her weight. To keep her from floating away.
O speaks in O’s when she is feeling warm.
When she speaks in I’s, she can feel a pinch in her larynx and tries to clear her throat. When her voice feels pinched and high-pitched, she either feels hysterical or annoying. She mainly feels annoying rather than hysterical.
O tells herself to be silent and to stop asking questions with one-word answers. O doesn’t oppress herself but knows her silence is more sacred and sincere than her high-pitched questions.
O’s silence is nourishing. Within her silence is an entire universe. A universe of discovery and play. A creative universe whose questions are the shape of the sea.
Sometimes O doesn’t have to crack to take in the sounds. Sometimes O can feel the vibrations sprinting along her shell. Which O calls deep listening. Under such rare occasions, O can communicate without splitting herself open.
O can also be an I or a V. She communicates well when she is a V. With a grace different from O. It’s not uncommon for O to feel like a vase or a U. Like an amphora vase. Depending on the texture of her voice, she can recognize if she’s a vessel of wine, olive oil, or water. O can alchemize her flavors at will. She communicates by pouring herself into porous cups. Slowly. She measures her words. O can produce more at will. She can give without losing, or she can lose it all.
O never loses it all, but V often does and so can U.
When she loses it all, there’s no letter to describe how she feels. The page cannot hold the weight of her emptiness. Neither can her body.
O can only find herself in the sea when she is flooded with her emptiness. And floats or drowns until she can heal to an O again.
Within her circuit, she knows those who drown, drown many times.
O travels sometimes. Sometimes she travels in a box. When it rains, she feels as if she’s been heard. The sound of rain reminds O to run a bath with earthy vetiver aromas. When she is immersed in warm running water, she feels like a round W. As if the way she feels on the inside is perfectly reflected across the water’s transparency.
When O stands up, she knows she can only look like a B or an & on the outside. No matter how stirring or still she feels within.
When O tries to convince herself she knows herself, a feather of doubt brushes along her side. The tingling sensations have a domino effect, ending with guilt or confusion. O surrenders and admits she has a deep desire to know herself, but her circumference is continuously expanding or contracting.
O mostly does not feel aligned with outer expectations. Her true volition has a different form. The plethora of unidentifiable emotions swaying her in all directions does not match the words on the chart.
Worst of all is when O reads. She mostly does not find herself reacting to events like the characters she reads about. O feels proud, but deep down she feels something else.
The narrative of pregnancy and motherhood makes O feel like a small x.
O wants to be modern and an exception to the rule. Sometimes she tells herself that above all she wants her freedom. O has learned that the liberated modern ambitious creative woman does not want children and says it out loud. Better yet, her partner does, and she withholds it from him. Better yet, her partner is a woman, and she does away with the ignorance and self-denial of men.
Or O does become a mother and does not feel bliss and grace but exhausted and burnt out. Or worse, O feels lost. Suddenly the few pillars of self she felt she could always lean on have toppled over or are beyond reach. And she has no one to talk to because O has convinced herself she was the one who decided this was what she wanted. O stares at her single or childless friends advancing in their careers with envy. O romanticizes the lives of those who can wake up late to hours and hours of silence with themselves, chiseling away at their identity and perfecting their sense of selfhood. This envy makes O feel layers of ugliness.
Now that O has other symbols looking up at her, searching for security and love, demanding she release everything she’s reserved, O realizes she no longer knows how to take care of herself beyond sleep, exercise, and routine. O’s routine mostly involves their clock. And no one can give her what she needs. What O needs is a room of her own without any doors but a window looking out onto an undisturbed landscape of native trees, rugged mountains, and the ocean.
Then there is the narrative of O’s body.
O wants to be beautiful but doesn’t want to be self-absorbed or vain and avoids looking in the mirror. O knows beauty is more in confidence than lines and curves, but O finds it hard to be confident without appearing attention-seeking when she is or can be observed.
O wants to select who can see her and in which moments they are able to gaze at her sitting or standing. O often fills in the voices of what’s behind the imaginary gaze of others. Those voices torment her shape into an $ or an @.
When O shares close quarters with others, she never shits and can be constipated for days. O tells herself it’s okay, that she’ll be fine, then her skin gets worse, like raw meat, and she feels terribly uncomfortable in her own body for weeks until she fully recovers, which is an impossibility because O also experiences PMS and her period which interferes with her digestion every single month.
O farts o’s. All different volumes, octaves, and scents. O would feel terribly ashamed if her father-in-law or any male acquaintance would be exposed to the lingering smell of her farts. Or if she would accidentally fart and the sound would be distinctly and surely a fart sound without any other possibilities like the moving of a chair or the creaking of the floor. O farts freely in front of her partner. Together they happily fart.
O is confused about her age and how she should behave. O has gray hair in her bangs and in her pubic hair. In her twenties, the people she met referred to her as “still young.” As soon as O turned thirty, they stopped commenting on her youth.
O’s body is changing. Especially her breasts and stomach. O is afraid of what will happen to her skin and her nose. Older women in their sixties warn O about her upper eyelids and the crease between her brows. O sees her mother has finally aged, the skin around her cheeks gripping at youth. O calculates how much time she has left on her wall of youth.
O’s mother never drank bottles of wine or vodka, never took hard drugs that dissolved on her tongue, or frequently partied until 11 AM the next day. O’s mother never smoked a cigarette in her life. O extracts a few years from her wall.
O has hormones. Hormones which she tells herself are mind controlling. O has no choice but to give in to her hormones. Women warn her about menopause. They reveal certain gestures. One of a baker mixing a dense substance like batter before their abdomen. O thinks she understands its implications.
O has many fears but overall desires to identify her core. For all O’s have a central point. O has accepted that all life is in motion. That every cell in her body has transformed and that her perspective too is influenced by the currents of transformation. O accepts that no point within herself can remain still, pinned to one point, no matter how deep her desire for selfhood runs.
O understands why all her favorite stories end with the ocean. The ocean is a central character in her dreams, with varying colors and temperaments. O too wants her story to end with the wild sounds of the ocean.
Dayna Gross has had her poetry, short stories, and novel excerpts published in a number of publications including A) Glimpse) Of) (August 2021), Angel City Review (July 2020), and Another Chicago Magazine (June 2020). Her work has also been shortlisted for the Büro BDP Writing Prize 2020 (November 2020). After living in Berlin, Germany for the last ten years, she has recently moved to the south of Chile. She hosts an experimental poetry radio show called CRYPTOMNESIA on Cashmere Radio, which streams FM in Berlin and Brandenburg.