When I was a kid, we once visited family for New Year’s. I don’t remember much about the trip, just flashes of scenic snow-covered landscapes and the puffy pink and purple coats my cousins wore. Mostly I just remember being cold. I remember begging my parents to go back to the car as we spent way too long wandering in the park because my parents wanted to see the sequoias. I remember drinking a hot chocolate that lost its heat way too quickly because the cafe was a local hotspot and the door was open way too often for the cafe’s heater to keep up with.
I also remember hanging out in my aunt and uncle’s den with its big sliding glass doors that made it the coldest room in the house. There, my cousins, brother, and I would huddle together under a large comforter and watch movies. It wasn’t the sort of thing my brother and I would normally do; we were typically loath to touch each other. Our cousins were different. They hugged each other all the time, and even held hands. When one of them held my hand, I felt a tingling comfort crawl up my arm. I understood that she was another person with her own body that acted completely independent of mine and yet that for a moment we were connected. That if she moved, I felt it and vice versa. Every adjustment of her wrist, every squeeze her fingers sent another wave of tingles through my arm. I realized, then, what my brother and I were missing with our reluctance to touch each other. He may have realized it, too, since he was also willing to squeeze under the blanket in the den. It may only have lasted for that week-long trip, but the sensation of his body next to mine is one of my strongest memories of him.
I partially remember one of the movies we watched, too. It was a kids' film, I don’t know the title. The animation was hand-drawn, with that cutesy sort of gothic aesthetic just a few years before that style became popular. One of the characters was this zombie girl. She had green skin and tattered clothes, but wasn’t half-rotten or anything. There’s a scene where a dog rips her arm off and it leads to this goofy chase sequence where her friends try to get it back. What struck me about this scene was how unbothered by the whole situation she seemed. Sure, there’s a bit of panic to get her arm back, but once she has it she just calmly sews it back on.
She seemed simultaneously resilient and vulnerable. Resilient because her body could be taken apart and reassembled with no blood or pain. Vulnerable because her body didn’t heal itself; any damage it received was permanent. She would spend the rest of her life with stitches in her arm, and, indeed, they remained there for the rest of the film. I remember the twisting feeling this created in my stomach. I loved the movie, and yet I suddenly wanted to turn it off. I wanted to not have to think about the zombie girl and how she lived her life. I would later realize that this twisting feeling was the sensation of something about me changing. Or, perhaps more accurately, something about me being uncovered.
