transmute my flannel into lead (i am heavy)

i've been thinking about alchemy again, which is a problem because i'd really hoped to become the kind of person who thinks about taxes or protein intake or whether the bins go out on tuesday. instead i'm here at 2am, reading about isaac newton, who apparently wrote over a million words about alchemy. a million. this is the man who invented calculus. he also spent decades trying to figure out how to turn lead into gold, convinced the universe was hiding a recipe from him, some backdoor into matter itself.

i find this comforting in a way i can't fully explain. the smartest motherfucker in history was also a delusional weirdo who believed in magic. that's the human condition. we're all one bad week away from trying to transmute our laundry into heavy metals.^*1

the alchemists wanted gold. everyone wants gold. gold is the basic bitch of elements. shiny, valuable, responsible for at least forty percent of all historical atrocities. gold wants to be admired. gold has a publicist. gold shows up in wedding rings and central banks and those insufferable captions about being "golden."

i don't want gold.

i want lead.

specifically, i want my flannel transmuted into lead.

not as a metaphor. metaphors have had enough airtime. metaphors are the emotional equivalent of a guy who says "i'm not good with words" and then uses ten thousand of them poorly. i want actual chemical transformation. i want to hand this sad, faded piece of fabric to some ancient man in a basement who smells like sulfur and regret and say, quite politely, "could you make this denser."

he'd ask why.

i'd rather not say.

some questions become actively worse when answered. "why do you still have this" is one. "why does it matter" is another. "have you considered therapy" is a third, and the answer is yes, i have, and therapy costs money and doesn't turn flannel into lead, so here we are.

the flannel is hanging behind my door right now. it's objectively terrible. faded in a way that suggests it was once a different color, maybe blue, maybe green, who the fuck knows. misshapen in the shoulders. soft in the elbows from too many years of leaning on things. it has survived at least four winters and one extended period where i decided wearing the same three items of clothing was a personality.

it still smells like them. faintly. not in a way anyone else would notice. just enough that sometimes i catch it when i walk past and my chest does something i haven't authorized.

it weighs almost nothing.

this bothers me more than it should.

there's something genuinely offensive about how little certain things weigh. a letter can be three pages of devastating prose and weigh less than a spoon. a photograph weighs basically nothing. a name, once spoken, weighs zero grams. someone can walk out of a room and the room stays exactly where it was. the chair doesn't scream. the floorboards don't sag. the air doesn't part. matter just continues being matter. the universe doesn't take attendance.

we have instruments for everything now. temperature, pressure, distance, blood sugar, atmospheric carbon, the mass of stars we'll never touch. we can tell you the composition of a planet nobody's visited. we can measure the decay of particles that existed for a fraction of a nanosecond after the big bang.

but there's no instrument for measuring what stays behind when someone stops being part of your daily life.

this seems like a design flaw.^*2

i want to know the weight of a voicemail you can't delete. i want to know how many kilograms a song carries after you've heard it in someone else's car for the last time. i want a unit of measurement for the specific gravity of a hallway you no longer walk down. there should be a scale for this. there should be a number. instead everything stays suspiciously light. you can carry all of it in one hand. you can walk around with the weight of someone's absence in your pocket and nobody would know. nobody would stop you. nobody would say "sir, i think your pockets are sagging."

lead doesn't have this problem.

lead is what happens when matter stops trying to impress you.

it's dense. it sinks. it sits at the bottom of things. the romans used it for plumbing and then went about their business, because they were a civilization that hadn't yet met the consequences of its own decisions. lead doesn't care about your aesthetic. lead doesn't want to be photographed. lead has no interest in being interpreted. gold invites interpretation, it begs for it, it's practically screaming for someone to explain what it all means. lead just sits there. heavy. unbothered. done.

there's something soothing about that. not wisdom, not transcendence, not resilience, which is just corporate speak for "we're not going to fix anything but please keep functioning." just density. the ability to remain where something has been placed. to not float away at the first sign of wind.

the flannel, by contrast, is designed to do the exact opposite.

it bends. it folds. it takes the shape of whatever is underneath it. it accommodates the body without asking questions. it's polite in a way that's starting to feel like cowardice.

softness is praised constantly because we've confused it with virtue. be gentle. be understanding. be flexible. give people grace. communicate. make room. all excellent instructions. i've followed enough of them to become somewhat suspicious of the entire enterprise.

there are things that become softer with use and things that simply lose their structure. from a distance, these look identical. from up close, they're not even in the same galaxy. one is a well-worn jacket. the other is a pile of fibers that used to be a jacket and now just sits there, accepting everything, resisting nothing.

i don't want to be that.

so yes. transmute the flannel. make it heavy. not because heaviness is superior. that would be another tedious moral lesson, and i've sat through enough of those. i don't want a fable. i want a chemical reaction. i want to put my arms through sleeves and discover that the sleeves have no particular interest in my arms. i want to button something that's become indifferent to the architecture of the human body. i want to wear something that refuses to accommodate me.

maybe then i'd understand why everyone keeps telling us to let go of things.

that phrase has always seemed suspiciously incomplete. let go of what. and where exactly does it go. into the air. onto someone else's afternoon. into the general municipal waste of the universe. matter doesn't disappear just because we've become embarrassed by our inability to carry it. that's one of the less convenient things about physics. nothing leaves. it just changes shape. it becomes incorporated. it shows up in preferences you can't explain, foods you suddenly can't eat, the hour at which you stop checking your phone, the streets that become inconvenient for no reason, the objects you continue to own for reasons you'd struggle to defend in court.

the flannel is one of those objects.

i could throw it away. it would be easy. put it in a bag, take it downstairs, someone collects it, the city processes it, some anonymous system performs its anonymous functions, nothing happens. which is precisely the problem. there are times when i want the universe to object. not dramatically. i'm not asking for thunder. just a small administrative refusal. something like:

item cannot be discarded at this time.

reason: insufficiently resolved.^*3

i think that's what alchemy was actually about, underneath all the gold and the mercury and the men in robes who probably died of heavy metal poisoning. not making matter magical. making the invisible negotiable. if you could change one substance into another, then maybe nothing was fixed. maybe the world could still be persuaded. maybe the right temperature, the right pressure, the right sequence of chemicals could turn one thing into something else. maybe grief could be processed. maybe absence could be weighed. maybe the past could be made to sit still.

i read somewhere that when you lose something, the brain doesn't just forget it. it keeps the map. it keeps the neural pathways that were built around that person, that object, that version of your life. and those pathways stay lit for a while, firing into empty space, waiting for a response that isn't coming. that's why grief feels like reaching for something that isn't there. because neurologically, it is. your brain is still looking for something the world has already taken away.

no wonder everything feels light. we're carrying maps to places that don't exist anymore.

sometimes i think the worst part isn't the missing. it's the forgetting. it's the way the face gets blurry. the way you can't remember the exact pitch of the laugh anymore, just that it existed, just that it used to fill a room and now the room is quiet and you're supposed to be fine with that. it's the way you catch yourself not thinking about them for a whole day and then feel guilty, like you've betrayed some unspoken contract, like you've let them die a second time, smaller and quieter and further away.

the flannel doesn't forget. it just hangs there. holding a shape that used to mean something. holding the ghost of shoulders that aren't coming back. and every time i look at it i think, this is what's left. this is the residue. a piece of fabric that weighs nothing and everything all at once.

so transmute it. make it heavy. heavy enough that i have to put it down with both hands. heavy enough that a chair notices. heavy enough to leave a dent somewhere, in the floor, in the air, in the part of my brain that keeps insisting i should be over this by now.

then i'll hang it behind the door again. i'll walk past it. i'll occasionally forget it's there. someone will eventually ask why i keep such a ridiculous thing. i'll say i don't know. and that will be almost true. and maybe that's the closest thing to an alchemical result i can reasonably expect. not transformation. not gold. not wisdom. just a substance becoming difficult to move.^*4

i used to think the goal was to get lighter. to shed things. to become the kind of person who could pack their entire life into a single bag and walk out the door without looking back. that seemed like freedom. that seemed like health.

now i think that's just another kind of disappearing.

and i've done enough of that. i've spent years trying to be weightless, trying to be easy, trying to be the kind of person who doesn't leave marks on anything. and all it got me was this: a hollow feeling in the middle of the night and a flannel that won't stop existing.

the flannel stays. it stays because it's heavy. it stays because i've decided to let it be heavy. it stays because some things don't get resolved, they just get carried. and maybe that's not failure. maybe that's just the shape of a life. you accumulate weight. you learn to lift it. you put it down sometimes, but you always pick it back up. not because you have to. because it's yours.

transmute my flannel into lead.

i am heavy.

i am still here.

and some nights, that's the only thing i know how to be.