Untitled

The insidious thing about not belonging is that you might not notice.

I am a boy raised by wolves. I am a mute raised by a radiator, until they unchained me.

I did not belong to the dogs or to the clacking hissing metal pipes. I only noticed when, older, I was suddenly acquainted with the people that were supposed to be mine.

-----

Whenever I'm alone, I give myself privacy with the mirror. Slide the frosted glass window shut, wind down the blinds, shut out the daylight. Turn on my fluorescent yellow bulbs. It's dark in every other room, and bright here near the mirror, and I shed my clothes. I slide off the loose button-down, rip off my jeans, and unhook my bra in a sigh of relief.

There I am, naked, alone with my mirror.

I page through the days in my life where I would have spent every minute reimagining my stomach fat, my thighs, my flat and round face, as something closer to all the images that flooded my mind in every other waking moment without my mirror: thin, smooth, pale; slight, flat, sleek; long, elegant, crystalline.

Then I would only see a yellowed smudge of a person before me.

Today I see a barely formed woman, small teardrop breasts, slightly protruding hip bones, stocky thighs, short hair. A soft, slightly rounded stomach. She is not long, thin, or sleek. Naked, she is pretty in the way that Pocahantas is pretty, in that you could hardly imagine she existed until you saw her standing there without her clothes.

I am comfortable naked. I leave the bathroom mirror and stroll to my bedroom mirror. There I sit on the carpet with my arms wrapped around the front of my knees, so you can't see my breasts. My hips bow out behind my shins, always shorter than I remember. I try to accept the rounded, sad form before me. Somehow I always acquire a sad expression sitting in front of this mirror.

-----

When I see him with her, their blonde Aryan wolf features blending into intertwined hands, they look so right together.

-----

I want to be a wolf. I want to be a boy. I want to be vicious. I want to greet my friends with a tackle and a wet bite of the neck and a shove in the belly. I want a mane of white gray silver fur framing my yellow eyes. I want big hands and big feet that look good in big oxfords, big sneakers. I want to greet my friends with a nod and not a hug and I want it to be okay to hold a woman at her waist as we stroll through the park. I want huge fangs.

I want to be welcomed into the brotherhood. The pack. I want to worship the alpha knowing that I could be him one day. I want to be blindly obedient.

I want to be, to be, to be.

-----

I have noticed that I do not belong. This is not insidious, but plain knowledge for everyone to see.

I often find myself thinking fondly of my radiator, and the countless wordless days we spent together, the clang of metal punctuating the silence.

Awakenings

I am awake.

When I open my mouth, it is dry and musty, and I find spots of black mold at the corner of my lips. My clothes are creased where I have slept--hibernated? fallen? lain, comatose?--and they crackle as I sit up. There are blooms of my own recrystallized sweat on the fabric, a fat dent under the weight of me. It appears that I was lying, unconscious, in a puddle of myself.

A few memories are not blank: the hot haze of summer nights spent watching television until I had traversed enough imaginary distance to let myself cry, crisp quiet mornings spent counting my breaths heaving old steel barbells above me, a current of wine and cat fur, fleeting moments of distant empathy upon recognizing a person who also returns to their own puddle of self at night.

The strange thing about being awake after a night of vivid dreams is the sudden change in the landscape everywhere: the sky, the air, the colors, the people, your teeth and legs, your desires, your history, your relationships, the houses you've lived in, and the houses you've been in. In a slamming blank instant every detailed dimension crashes back into order. As you unravel your uncanny otherworld, you find that it only ends in dust, fluff, walls of undefined variables and faces.

The stranger thing about being awake after a few years of aimlessly being alive is that it does not appear to be a dream. Following the thread of your memories leads only to neat resolve. And yet your teeth and legs and desires and history and sky never quite feel the same. Did we really break up? Did I really drive to church on Sunday and hold hands with racist strangers? Did my cat really still love me then, too?

In those years I could hardly remember how to be alive, let alone imagine a future where I would ever return to sin in the mimosa grove. Yet here we are: pink and trembling and about to sin.

All Hallow's Eve

Do I always have to feel like this at this time of year?

I like getting dressed up. I enjoy the idea that I can theoretically be whomever I want on Halloween, and I've specifically chosen to dress as women that I admire in previous years. Leela from Futurama is stronger and smarter than anybody else on the show, and still has her human pitfalls--she can't help but fall in love, she accidentally slept with the worst person ever, and she isn't sure how to love her mutant sewer parents who don't understand anything about her life. It's not that hard to see how I relate to her.

Rogue from the X-Men series has a complicated relationship with her own bare skin--it simultaneously gives her enormous power and prevents her from being close to anyone. She cannot control it at first: the moment she touches someone she absorbs their strength and their memories. In the early storylines Rogue can't even kiss her love interest, Gambit (coincidentally a huge comic book crush of mine), for fear of draining him of everything she loves about him. I've always found her suit and gloves to be especially powerful symbols--they are a second skin that she removes, at will, to wreak havoc.

Secretly this was one of the reasons I dressed as Rogue for Halloween. The idea that you can't touch her. That was an ultimately ironic motivation, as you all know how that night ended. I didn't tell anyone that's why I chose her, and I'm sure most people never gave it a second thought. Plus you couldn't easily tell me from Jean Grey because I didn't finish my costume.

But how crushing is it to feel that you have no control or ownership over your body? I guess by a sad analogy Rogue didn't really have complete control over her body, and I found out that night that although I have a theoretical right to my own, it doesn't mean that I have complete control over it.

For the past couple years my costume idea has been Medusa. You may already see ahead of me to the reasoning: men who look upon her turn into stone. There is a little more. In one version, Medusa is originally a ravishing beauty--but her face becomes grisly and her hair full of snakes as a punishment for being raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple.

Even more interesting is how Medusa has been re-imagined in modern times. Apparently Freud calls her "the supreme talisman who provides the image of castration -- associated in the child's mind with the discovery of maternal sexuality -- and its denial." (Thanks Wikipedia.) Maybe he thinks all the snakes on her head are just many-fanged penises waiting to rip a child to shreds. Truthfully it would be kind of amazing to dress as a Greek monster with multifarious phalluses swinging from my head.

Then I'm just going to quote you the feminism section on Medusa.

In the 20th century, feminists reassessed Medusa's appearances in literature and in modern culture, including the use of Medusa as a logo by fashion company Versace.^[11][12][13] The name "Medusa" itself is often used in ways not directly connected to the mythological figure but to suggest the gorgon's abilities or to connote malevolence; despite her origins as a beauty, the name in common usage "came to mean monster."^[14] The book Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power by Mary Valentis and Anne Devane notes that "When we asked women what female rage looks like to them, it was always Medusa, the snaky-haired monster of myth, who came to mind ... In one interview after another we were told that Medusa is 'the most horrific woman in the world' ... [though] none of the women we interviewed could remember the details of the myth."^[15] 

Medusa's visage has since been adopted by many women as a symbol of female rage; one of the first publications to express this idea was a 1978 issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation. The cover featured the image of a Gorgon, which the editors explained "can be a map to guide us through our terrors, through the depths of our anger into the sources of our power as women."^[15] In a 1986 article for Women of Power magazine called "Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage," Emily Erwin Culpepper wrote that "The Amazon Gorgon face is female fury personified. The Gorgon/Medusa image has been rapidly adopted by large numbers of feminists who recognize her as one face of our own rage."^[15] 

This is self-explanatory, right? Medusa is rage; Medusa is fear; Medusa is a grisly yonis face surrounded by phallic snakes.

Despite this internally satisfying and hilarious idea for a Halloween costume, I can't help but feel that it's a pursuit made in vain. I tried out putting some rubber snakes on my head and I looked really stupid. It would take a significant investment of money and time to even look close to terrifying--and I don't have either of those things in the next six days before a Halloween party this weekend. Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a terrifying symbol of castration. You can't just show up to someone's house as a half-assed Gorgon--it's go in or go home.

I almost don't even want to try. (If you're still following along, Medusa is also nihilism.) Maybe I can just put on some cat ears and give up. Three Halloween's ago I wasn't just repeatedly groped; I was violated while I was simultaneously trying to explore and understand my bisexuality. It's no different now, so much later. A girl made out with me at a party and I enjoyed it for a few moments before I remembered who she was, and where I was--in public, surrounded by my peers and colleagues, being kissed by someone who is kind of a bitch. And I didn't have the presence of mind to realize that the kiss was not the warm embrace of being accepted for who I am--it was just a bad idea.

Halloween is all of the above: a confusing punishment for my sexuality, rage, fear, a bad idea in retrospect, a poor costume--one that neither hides who I am, because it is poorly constructed, nor shows who I am, because it is just a maze of symbols--and it is a sinkhole for painful memories, the event horizon of anxiety, an endless psychological abyss where my rational, well-defined self ends and where the wiggling sea of psychotherapy begins.

Being a cat for Halloween: thematic, simple, and has the advantage that I can pretend I am a vacant domestic predator that eats bugs and jumps in boxes all day long. A life that is a lot easier than trying to subvert the fucking patriarchy.

The fear of blankness

Sometimes when I close my eyes I feel nothing.

It is not a warm shade of black. It is not asphalt shimmering with heat, laced and glistening with motor oil. It is not rich like the feathers of a crow, or a dark swan, or the beady side-facing eye of a gape-mouthed fish. It evokes nothing, and that is why it has its name.

Sometimes when I stare into this void I shake myself awake and find it terrifying. To feel small would be a wonder. Instead I feel huge, huger than ever: my whole mind is a sheet of plastic pressed up against the rest of the universe, and I am lying with my cheek pressed into the plastic as if I did not know I could fall into a void beyond my mind.

Why do I spend time at this border? At the clear and invisible line between myself and all the emptiness that has come before me and all the emptiness that will come after. If I wake up enough times at the edge, it feels as if I will somehow understand what divides me from the rest of the universe. Why can I feel warmth, imagine love, witness death? Do I need it? For weeks at a time I'll run and run and run, feeling the air abrade my cheeks and forgetting there is anything else but the full and rich life I have constructed.

But then I stop and close my eyes and there is nothing. I feel plastic. My construction has fallen apart.

My cat, a neutral black, stalks by me, blinking slow, and I pull him close and remember how to feel.

green eyes

They are kind, sharp, observant, and oh so beautiful when they fill to the brim with joy.

My darling green eyes slip beneath the lids of heavy, drug-drawn sleep into the swimming unconsciousness that buoys him to life, that bubbles with disappointments and gurgles toxic, pretty dreams back into consciousness.

I wipe the wet salt from your still and breathing face and watch your eyes jerk back and forth, as if they are following some small swarming invisible horde of flies. What, green eyes, are you watching? I feel the pull of the world behind your eyelids and I want to dip my toes in that swimming unconsciousness, playing with the ripples of your dream world.

My love, my love, I want to draw myself into your dreams and find myself in the chaotic or wondrous worlds you inhabit at night without me. And, feeling rather brave and clever as my dream self usually feels, I flit back and forth across the rolling aqua hills and tinge your waters with the colors of peace and delight. I find the shadows that haunt you and conquer them. I clothe you when you dream yourself publicly naked; I catch your teeth when they fall; I remind you how to fly when you keep falling, forever down and down. And when you dream yourself alone, I am forever by your side.

Instead I find myself on the outside, grazing the warm raspberry of your lips, tousling your straw bronze hair, hoping that part of you remains with me so that you can feel my touch into your dreams. Your face, ever bright, frowns in the faint light of our dark room, and turns from me. I clutch your hands and fall into my unconscious oblivion beside you.

on pride and threats

I am the unfortunate owner of a premier unit of insufferable pride. I am not sure how it became so defective, or when I even acquired it. As far as I know, the tiny five-year-old girl in my past who suddenly acquired theory of mind became self-conscious in the same instant. And slowly the pride developed as a defense mechanism to protect me from the judgment of others.

It is not my friend. Pride has often left me feeling very alone, and very foolish.

I escaped to college partly as a way to escape my own pride, which I found to be growing powerfully and uncontrollably. Those four years were a comfortably and beautifully humbling experience, partly because I felt little need to defend myself with wanton pride. I found few threats, open arms, and friends who shared and supported me in what felt like my most ridiculous, alienating, and private thoughts. Defense mechanisms...unnecessary. It was freeing.

As I have quoted several times before--

"A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to make up more room in a room."

Here I find myself disappointingly shrinking in a room, as if every cell in my body has tensed up and turned away from the world, hoping to escape scrutiny and judgment. I hate this hiding. I hate feeling as if my sexual orientation should be masked, to refrain from making others feel uncomfortable. I hate biting my tongue when my political beliefs are challenged, though they are neither complex nor extensive--simply important to my everyday life. I hate living in fear of being myself. I feel a coward. I feel small, threatened, cold, and proud.

I know this is a dangerous combination of feelings. Before I am aware it has even happened, I might find myself stewing it all in bitterness and vengeance and feeling the noxious fumes of hatred suffocate the open air of free joy from my life.

All I know to do is meditate, breathe, and focus. I hope I will find the balance I am seeking.

A slightly different depression

I have been depressed enough times in my life to know its every waking, dull pain. Suddenly your shadow has weight, which drags along with you into every room, every breath, and every thought. When you breathe, it feels as if you are suffocating for lack of air, that the world is slowed and that your breath is slow, and you refuse to gasp or yelp or inhale deeply because suffocation feels best. Social interactions are half-forced, half-earnest, and mostly confusing. So being alone feels more comfortable than being with anyone, and the sharp sting of loneliness is dampened by the weights that press and press and press and never leave you. Yet at the heart of things you know you do not want to be alone. Time passes, like molasses and like thin oil, and feels a burden.

The most peaceful hour comes when you are able to lie down and fall into seamless blank dreams. And when morning light streams onto your bed, bright, far past dawn and sunrise and reaching into the afternoon, your shadow returns, and drags you out of peace.

This bout of depression is slightly different. In those hours when my shadow wrestles me back into the darkness, I see light peeking from the corners, and I understand that there is an end. I can see the depression as clearly and starkly as any other, like it has visited some other body that is not mine. And I feel this so deeply that the depression seems almost incidental to the events that have brought me here. I lie in bed, waiting for peace, thinking, Of course depression has set in. What else would I expect after so many months of endless, hyperventilating anxiety, stress, and worry?

So in the morning, when the hot light and drowsiness brings me to an aching awake, I lie there and want to let the depression pass over me like a droning month-long rainstorm, a rain that will dissipate and evaporate like all other waters and all other storms. And in those few lucid moments I feel at peace.

Yet I am confused, because lying still in peace is almost indistinguishable from lying still in depression, and the two swap and mingle until I do not know what I am feeling except emptiness. Peace, like darkness, is empty, and to me has always represented the absence of something rather than the presence of another. I have long suspected this was a silly way to define peace.

I guess that I must be more thankful for peace, grateful for its presence, reverent of the factors that allow me to experience it so easily and gracefully. Peace, what I have sought after for so long, has finally come to me, and I want to drink it in. But you cannot greedily consume peace, you cannot rush it, and you cannot make more when you run out. You simply have to let it be.

I have a hard time with this, but I can learn. I have learnt so much about peace from Brandon already, from my dearest friends and from the ethereal drugs which wrest it from you and return it later.

Peace, I will find and keep you. From there, the rest of life will follow.