My Slice of Life Plan

A little over a decade ago, my adult daughters and I went to the Bodies exhibit at Atlantic Station in Atlanta, Georgia. We drove the short distance from our rural farmland into the city and spent the day examining every part of a human body, all preserved behind clear plexiglass cases to show how bones, muscles and organs function as parts of systems, all packed into the skin-covered suitcase of a lifetime. 

We entered one room where an entire body had been cross-sectioned, sliced in horizontal sections from head to toe the way one might casually slice a carrot coin-style while preparing dinner. Knowing the bodies had all been donated to Science and were real people at one point in time, I was in the rabbit hole of endless wondering: when was this person born? What was her name? what did she do for work? did she have children? did she ever, for one second of her life, have any inkling that millions of people would study every inch of her dead body, parts she herself had never seen, all preserved and on display in such an arrangement as this? I wanted to scan a QR code and see a video of what she’d looked like on the playground when she was 5 years old, her mother pushing a swing from behind as her dress sash rippled in the wind, little Mary Jane shoes and lacy socks pumping to keep momentum. And after wondering all these things about how she’d lived, I wondered how she’d died, ruling out the obvious impossibilities: she wasn’t eaten by a shark or crushed by a falling rock. 

The dark, shadowy fascination of that day has stayed with me for all these years, and I often find my mind transferring the concept of cross-sectioning things that I never would have considered cross-sectionable: a bird, a plane, a castle, a car, or even time itself, like some Stephen Biesty book that my son used to enjoy when he was young. I have even wondered what the waking hours of my day would look like cross-sectioned here in my little corner of rural Georgia.  Perhaps, even what those same exact cross-sections of time would look like cross-sectioned across our country by fellow bloggers from points across the map – or even the world. Throughout March, that’s my plan as I participate in the Slice of Life Writing Challenge at www.twowritingteachers.com. I’ve created 31 equal increments of time from 5:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., and I’ll write a poem for a blip of living during each sliced segment of a part of my day throughout the month- emotions, senses, mundane or fascinating work or home tasks, and maybe even a daydream or two.