Becoming Tecciztecatl

When we dream of snails, we are dreaming about ourselves, according to Carl Jung. Snails represent home and self spiraled into one. When I was young, I was fascinated by snails—their tiny, gelatinous bodies supporting their shells. How slowly they went, carrying all that was precious. Whenever it drizzled, I went out to look for snails. I bent down to the gravel driveway and traced their glistening trails with my fingers. Their tracks crisscrossed the driveway and I followed them until they had disappeared under the raspberry bushes. But I could never find the snails that had left the tracks.

I wanted to pick one up and pull it out of its shell. I would put them back in, I thought, I only wanted to see the inside of their shells, to see what their homes looked like. It must be some kind of magic, I thought, to make the snail's house good enough to carry with him always. I thought the point of home was to stay in one place.

When the drizzle turned into a downpour, I ran inside my house to escape the thick, cold drops of spring rain, giving up my quest to mutilate gastropods. In the kitchen, I stood at the windows and pressed my nose to the mildewed glass. Steam from my quick breaths fogged the glass while I stared at the driveway. Snails move at an average pace of 1 millimeter per second. I waited and waited for one to appear, to explain what they carried.

I don't remember the apartment I was born in and lived in until I was two, but I do remember the red Oldsmobile. Or was it a Taurus? Everything was red; the chipped paint on the outside, the upholstered seats that left static shocks in my hair, the plastic console. After my parents moved to the first house I remember, the red car disappeared.

My mother tells me that as a baby, I cried because of constant ear infections and an upset stomach. Nothing worked to comfort me—not a bottle, not a crib, not her arms folded into a cradle, not her whispered words, not her tears—I cried, still.

As a last resort, to escape the walls of the apartment, my mom carried me down to the red car and strapped me, still screaming, into my car seat, and drove in the dark. And then, I slept. Maybe the red car was my first home, the first place where I felt safe and happy enough to fall asleep.

When I moved into my first apartment, I took my bed from the home I grew up in for my boyfriend Charlie and me to share. My dad helped hoist the bed up the stairs and into the new bedroom. It was an island in the middle of the beige carpet. We didn't move the bed from that spot. The mattress was uneven, with a depression from years of my body on the right side of the bed. On the first night, Charlie rolled into the depression, his body taking up the space where mine used to lie. I didn't mind, but gravity pulled me toward him, toward my impression, and our arms and legs tangled and I didn't know what was mine and what was his.

My dad filled up the space in my old bedroom with the loveseat and a flat-screen TV mounted so high on the wall that you had to tip your head up to watch it. I never had a TV in my room. I never really decorated my room, either. My sister ripped the covers off Rolling Stone to tack up on her wall, even though the eyelined rockers' eyes scared her during the night. Maybe I was lacking, I worried. Shouldn't I have wanted to express myself with quotes cut out from magazines and books, shining celebrity bodies, poetry, and black and white photos? I wanted to, but something kept the walls blank. Maybe putting too much of myself into the room would make it harder to leave. But my room never felt empty...