I spend too much time thinking about the filth intrinsic to being a person, how we are trailing it behind us in our wake all the time without even realizing it. It is abnormal how much I think about it. Everywhere I go I am aware that others have been there before and that they have left traces of their filth. Hairs, bits of skin, boogers, eyelashes. Saliva. Urine. Semen. Fecal matter. You cannot escape from it. The best you can do is confine yourself to a world of filth that is your own and no one else’s. Never share food. Never share clothes. Never share a bed. And if someone has been there before you, scrub. Scrub them away and sanitize the traces they have left behind. Make it so they were never there.
Oddly, nature has never bothered me. Animals have their own kind of filth, different from that of humans. It is a wide open filth whereas for us it is a confined filth. Animals shit where they eat, but it also rains where they shit, and the rain washes the shit away into the rivers which carry it out into the estuaries where it fertilizes the swamp grass and keeps our ecosystem alive. And plants, plants are the cleanest of all organisms. There is no filth in a plant.
In the winter, there are not many plants. The woods are barren as if scorched. When you look up, you can see the sky, a glossy winter purple, a quiet sunset, carrion birds somewhere in the distance. And the branches of the trees like cracks in the lavender sky. To one, a single leaf clings. My breath a thick cloud of fog.
Even in the frigid cold of January, I would rather sleep here in the woods off the highway than in a warm motel room covered in human filth. Better to be among the hibernating plants, breathing in the clean air.
But then, sometimes even the woods are contaminated. There among a dormant thicket of twigs lies a plastic beach chair, overturned at the edge of the stream. Signs of life. Signs of filth.
It is spreading as the woods grow smaller each year, the land around them further developed, further encroached upon.
A psychiatrist once asked me if my aversion to sleeping in foreign beds had a sexual element to it, if that’s what I was thinking about that made me so squeamish. I told him yes when he asked, but the longer I thought about it on my own, the less true it seemed. Sex is filthy only incidentally, only because it is a human act and humans are filthy. In and of itself, it is only natural. There is nothing worse about imagining other people fucking in my bed than imagining other people sleeping there fully clothed.
I used to hesitate to talk about these things with others because I would worry that my own neuroses might be contagious, that by telling them, I might bring them a new awareness of the unsanitary nature of people. I might destroy the world this way, destroy society.
What is a cult but a set of shared delusions? One person saying these are the neuroses I have held onto throughout my life, and others, seeing this, saying oh. That actually makes sense.
Once, as I was walking through these woods on a different winter evening many years ago, I came across three deer lying peacefully in the shape of a triangle. They remained still as I approached, and I couldn’t tell if they were dead or just in a deep hibernation. I thought of how in the 90’s they used to find deer corpses in strange arrangements around the outskirts of the woods, and how they suspected it was some kind of Satanic ritual. But isn’t it possible that the deer arranged themselves like that? Maybe they just got tired on a cold night and happened to lie down in the shape of an inverted pentagram, resting in the snow. Even humans are known to do odd things when they get cold.
But it is not the 90’s anymore, and there are no dead deer on the ground, and I am here for a Satanic ritual, in some desperate hope that maybe I will run into you. It is a long shot, I will admit. There is no one even here yet, although I am a bit early. I like to get to these things early, so I can scope out what they might be like and sneak out if need be. No, this is not my first time.
The drone of the highway makes it difficult to hear the sounds of the woods. The few dud birds left behind from the winter migration. Fox paws crunching through long-dead leaves and broken glass bottles. The trickle of the small stream.
It is odd to be here now, with how sparse the woods have become. They are no longer really a good location for something like this. Less than a mile away there is a luxury home development. Anyone could stumble upon our ritual, especially with the trees stripped of their leaves. But perhaps this is how you would like it. You always had a taste for imminent danger.
Idly, I think I should write a thank you note to the producers of that stupid movie, for spreading awareness of your existence. It used to be much harder to find these sorts of meetings.
In the distance, I can see a human figure now, coming out from the highway side of the woods as if wandering off the shoulder after a disorienting accident. The figure is dressed in all black robes with a hood pulled up over their face. Overkill. And what do I say to them when we converge? Are you here for the ritual? Have you been to one of these things before?
As a child, my worst fear was that I was actively dying. That my parents were aware of this fact but wanted me to have a good childhood and so didn’t tell me. Everywhere I would see evidence of this. My father let me have an extra scoop of ice cream because he knew I was going to die soon anyway. My mother bought me another Barbie because she wanted what little time I had left to be fun-filled and joyful. Nothing was ever as benign as it seemed. When I went to the pediatrician and they talked to my parents alone, left me cold and naked under my gown on the exam table, I would imagine they were receiving terrible news about my impending death.
After, we would go to Friendly’s for dinner. This did nothing to assuage my worry.
If only they knew, I thought, that their daughter was aware already! That she knew she was dying! Would they be relieved or horrified? After all, they had gone to such trouble to keep it a secret from me for so long, and it was so kind of them to consider how I would feel about it. And so I had to indulge them by playing my role, the role of the ignorant child.
I would clap my little hands as the waitress presented my cheeseburger and fries. I would say let’s go see a movie after this. My parents would look at each other, that knowing glance. And they would say of course, sweetheart. We can do anything you want to do.
The figure in the woods pauses when it catches sight of me. Awkward and uncomfortable, to be the first two here when no one else has arrived yet. But reluctantly, the figure continues forward.
I scrape at the bark on a tree trunk, suddenly regretting ever leaving my house to begin with, and for something so ridiculous. Of course there will be no real ritual, no real summoning. It will just be a bunch of teenagers playing Orphan Demon. You would never show yourself at a function so overdone, so cliché. There was no consideration given for the mundane, the quotidian! And so, before it even begins, I leave.