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Seeking Oneself Through Echoes: ‘Exit the Body’

Heather Bartel’s essay collection on emptiness and absence

2 min readMay 4, 2024

Cover for Exit the Body: Essays by Heather Bartel. It has a circle divided into unequal parts. — Exit the Body (Split/Lip Press)

Heather Bartel’s Exit the Body is a slim essay collection with — as the book description explains — “a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath through a mirror, and letters to a living ghost.” It will be released May 14 by Split/Lip Press.

Everything an exit. Look how “I want to spend my life with you” becomes “I want to die.”

I press my forehead against hers and feel the fever, see the fog spread with my breath, I touch the glass with the tip of my tongue and she receives it. She gives me her ear and I take, share the message through our secret game of telephone: *I want to spend my life with you* becomes I want to spin my life with you I want to spin my life untrue I want to spin a web or two I want to be a spider I want to spy on her I want to lie beside her I want to die beside her I want to die.

You are born because “the wind decides when it’s time to come out to play,” and it “moves” and “pulls,” and it “destroys and terrifies and reminds.” Will you win?

these are the conditions under which she grew arms and legs and hair and teeth and tits and fingernails. Her heart began beating in a part of the world that wrestles the wind, and the wind decides when it’s time to come out to play, the wind moves on its own terms, the wind pulls the clouds into its rage and restlessness and need to move faster and larger and in a way that destroys and terrifies and reminds. The wind wins.

You are an “echo of a self,” but “the self does not echo itself.” Something you’ve heard before? You’re “burning sometimes the day’s candle from both ends.” Another exit.

still have a heart when the body within its walls is dead? The echo of a self does not tap on the door, does not run the water, does not leave a dent or a muss in the bed. The self does not echo itself, she does believe in herself, does not know herself to be a self in this new house, burning sometimes the day’s candle from both ends. She wanted to be luminescent, to glow from the inside, wanted to be bright enough to light the room for herself in the dark when he’s sleeping…

“Today could be any season and if there is no reason,” then why are we in pain and crumpled and so familiar with every day, and “where does it end”?

I assert every day is familiar, all days are each other until the day that is the end. I crumple up a piece of paper, the sound like cicadas or snowfall, any day is every day and today could be any season and if there is no reason then why am I hurting what am I hurting why are we hurting and where does it end?

Before you exit, check out Exit the Body.

Seeking Oneself Through Echoes: ‘Exit the Body’

Heather Bartel’s essay collection on emptiness and absence

Written by Tucker Lieberman

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