I decided to buy him a pumpkin because it would be something living that we could both share and shape. Well, I wanted to believe that fuzzy feeling rather than dwell on the mutilation. Because I believe that the mutilation inspired me too. I wanted to run my fingers through its guts. I wanted to explore the cool secrets of the mush and seeds, disturbing them slowly and methodically to the rhythm of my own jubilant whim. They are mine now. I have forced open the head with a blade. The treasure is now mine. It is mine in a way that few things ever will be.
He can never be mine. At least not in this way. Please, don’t think that I’m insane. I would never want to possess him that way. I love him. Differently, and yet, I still want to experience him in the way I can experience a pumpkin, by cracking it open, invading it, and making it mine.
The wild part of me longs for the smooth inner shell of the gutted pumpkin. With the seeds gone, how can I guarantee that it will remain mine? Now, I feel the need to urinate in this pumpkin. Please hear me out. I know you’ll understand.
I think back to a child who guiltlessly wriggles a finger up his nose, only to, moments later, greedily grasp at his mother’s hand. Yes, I want that. The child has no sick satisfaction in her dirtiness. She has a blissful oblivion from stigma. I want to share in the pumpkin’s oblivion. Just as I felt the secret of the pumpkin’s seeds squirm through my fingers. The only uneasiness was inside myself. I want to alleviate my body from my repugnant liquids: a restriction on my mind, a restriction of my higher self, a restriction on something I don’t want to understand, but at least I’ll pretend. By giving this pumpkin an unwanted piece of myself, I am forcing it to love and accept me. To hold and carry me in its newly Christened womb. The pumpkin does not know, does not mind. My body fills the pumpkin’s head with my own fluids, but I am drawn further away from what the pumpkin initially meant and am buried further into the chasms of myself.
Never mind. Did I not mention a young child before? What is purer than a child’s love? A child loves with a ferocity dependent on his ignorance. An ignorance and apathy towards the things which I have later learned to detest. A child does not abhor his boogers, her pee, her poop. If anything, she is proud of these things. They prove her health. Oh, the strength of a body which has fought the bacterial battle and won!
Yes, I want to urinate in the pumpkin while simultaneously living the ignorance of the pumpkin. I want to become the pumpkin, claim the pumpkin. Now I will give the pumpkin something it can never be rid of. I will mutilate its chemical interior, strip it once more of something belonging to itself so that I may at last consume.
Never could I consume a person in this way. Could I? I would not. My love of people must be more balanced than this all-consuming obsession and greed.
Maybe this pumpkin could be mine. Maybe this I will own in a way that I never could with “any other else”. I glance at it, straining the corners of my eyes. I turn on my plastic heels. The pumpkin is not right. Of course! It is not right because it is the pumpkin! Not mine at all, I thought. And I thought some more. Right. The pumpkin will only be mine when it is me. And if the pumpkin is me, then it must no longer be the pumpkin. That seemed sensible. I could only have become part of the pumpkin for it to still sit before me, outwardly unchanged. How could I stare at something that was supposedly mine? How could it be mine if I did not possess it in every way? True belonging meant consistent belonging. Would this still be my pumpkin a year from now once it withered and rot? I would have to discard it. Relinquish it from the assigned role as mine since it had betrayed itself. It had only played a part. When it failed to convince me of its sameness, it automatically ceased to be mine. I scream that it never really was.
Can anything be yours across the temporality of yourself except yourself?
Therefore, I had to do it. First, the pumpkin was in my hands. Then, its pieces were on the ground. My fists smashed through the pieces. My knees knocked and nodded against the plastic floor. My flat-bottom shoes quashed and slid through the semi-solid organic goo. Everything smeared about in a divine painting of chaos. This is what the Abrahamic God must have felt when she sent the flood. I wanted to dive underwater and see the dancing, purple-faced sinners as their lungs gorged and their bloated faces swell[ed] with the waves of the crashing wrath of the God, or any and all beings claiming power and CONTROL.
No. No matter. The pumpkin. No longer a pumpkin. The organic smear. All known to me now. Omnipotent. What a jubilant goo! How much I love it. I am filled with awe for the mysteries which are now mine.
The door opens. He is home.
“Gosh, what a long day.” A pause.
“Pumpkin,” I reply.
But don’t worry. Of course he was not.
Sam Landmesser is a dual-enrolled Junior and first-year Masters student in Comparative Literature. She also studies Philosophy and French, Italian, and Arabic languages. In her free time, she like to go for walks, especially to the Penn State Arboretum. She also really likes to travel, and hopes to study abroad in Morocco this summer.