Descending into the Archive

Found these digital images and also a physical bag of my own hair.

“Here’s One From The Archive’ is what internet photographers say when they post one that they took long ago. My long ago is 2024 because I only started taking still photos on a camera with a detachable lens in 2023 or 2024 or some time sort of around those periods of time which followed after the period of time called covid.

Speaking of time, I found a bag of my hair, it was slightly wavier in death than it was on my head. Four brown disembodied ponytails, held by a sturdy elastic on one end and the other end, spiraling into a sweet loose ringlet. The hair never spiraled like that when i used to wear it on my head.

I cut off this hair some time in my past, perhaps three or one years ago. I have kept the hair in the paper bag for however long its been since then, and I have moved the paper bag around from cubby to cabinet, the bag spent a good amount of time beside my muddy shoes near the door, periodically i would pick it up and wonder if it was a forgotten take-out bag, peer inside see the hair and then just put it back unsure what else to do with it. Recently the bag moved with me into a new house and finally i have it tucked in. The hair has left the losable bag and is now wrapped in a handkerchief on my alter beside my rock collection and tarot cards. The hair is resting now and not forgotten which is better than being beside the muddy shoes but still, its sort of trapped if you see what I’m saying.

Between the years 2021 and 2023 I lived in what we called Witch House. We lived there with each other, three human women and a cat grandmother. I mostly ate cheese and apples. I thought a lot about compost, made a kitchen compost pile in the garden and was proud when I saw steam rising off the pile in the morning.

The way we spent good time together in Witch House was to lose time together. In the winter on the floor beside the big heater called Heathrow. In the summer on the porch called The Dock which jutted out into the sea of lemon balm. We lost time together by speaking and speaking. We lead each other around in the timeless and found things to explain and found the things we couldn’t explain. I loved the timeless I think. We often jumped back in to time but always outside the house and usually with other people. When we were all in the house we lost time together again.

I wore long braids that I tried to make last many days. I liked the way the braids felt and looked as they wore out, they became softer and full of fly aways and butterfly bush twigs and seeds. I spent hours or weeks in the garden battling with butterfly bush and lemon balm. The sheers we had were the wide kind without a spring that you must lop in and out using your elbows. I held the shears above my head and pumped them back and forth biting the skinny canes of the butterfly bush. Last years dry grey seeds fell into my eyes, this years glowing purple flowers too. I said over over and over in my mind: the invasives do not mind being cut back, they yearn for boundaries. I am boundaries.

But I only half believed that they wanted me to cut them back, I was often in a sort of hallucination while I chopped them. During that time I dreamed often that the cat grandmother could speak and that the butterfly bush was poison.

The yard was full of bricks. The landlord had told someone, not me, not to use the bricks to make any more garden bed walls. But the garden needed walls and the bricks weren’t doing anything where he had them piled, so I snuck to and from the brick pile, one armload at a time. I worked quickly so that all my brick structures would look as though they had always been there, so that the landlord wouldn’t notice that his pile had shrunk, only that the shape of the garden had improved. Years or weeks passed, one winter or three months, and my new walls and pathways mossed over while i watched. The moss made everything seem ancient and accepted.

I pulled the lemon balm and piled the butterfly bush canes. The stick piles I made refused to soften and breakdown, they remained, piled at the side of the yard, getting only a little moldier and little more full of spiders.

What I’m wondering is this: If I go back to the house where I lived and the garden where I worked, if i gather the women who i lived with and we together dig a hole in the garden and bury the hair, will you give me back my memories? I think there were songs. I think I wrote my first songs there and learned to play a G chord without my pointer finger, I think there was sunlight and a space heater in the bathroom. I think there was a green papermache frog head with huge eyes in the rafters over the living room. Anyway I am sitting beside the hair as i write all this. Maybe i should keep it close by and question it a bit longer. The memories are actually already seeping out.