letter, dated August 14th , 2009

Dear ____________ *,

You don’t know me, not really. I don’t think that you would recognize me.

But I know you. I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. I have been watching you now for twenty-four, nearly twenty-five years. Almost a quarter of a century I’ve known you.

I’ve been watching you for a long time.

I couldn’t see you clearly at first. In fact, I didn’t even know you were there. Every now and then I would catch something out of the corner of my eye – a shadow, I thought, or a bird lifting its wings in the distance, a startled cat slipping into the tall grass and under the fence. It’s nothing, I would think. A trick of the light.

I ignored you at first. Even when you started to come into focus – I ignored you. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I was sure I didn’t want to see it.

It was almost like watching a picture develop. Do you remember Polaroids? I’m sure you do. It was like watching a Polaroid picture develop, only in slow motion. It’s like I was shaking the picture, and time slowed down, and parts of you were creeping out of the picture, bleeding out of the glossy paper, and spreading to the edges. You got clearer and clearer with every shake.

The first time I really saw you, was that also the first time I cut myself? I don't think so. I think hat was later. But I suspect that the first time I thought about cutting myself, I saw you. The problem is that once I saw you, and saw you clearly, and saw the truth of you, I couldn’t stop seeing you.

So I’ve been watching you ever since. I watch you idly. I don’t usually look too closely, although the reality of you – your presence that never ever leaves me – is always there, in front of me. I can’t figure out if it’s like watching a movie, or like peeking through a window, or looking at a painting, but I know it’s like something. I know that I am watching.

Actually, when I really think about it, it’s like I’m watching a movie. The old-fashioned kind, on reel-to-reel tape, images projected onto a screen against the wall. There is even a shaky countdown - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Beep, beep, beep.

And scene.

I don’t mind watching you, not really. It’s not like smelling you, or hearing you. There is a smell, and there is a sound, and I refuse to smell it or hear it. It’s a smell that I should have never known. I don’t remember the sound of your voice, but I do remember your words. Lies and bad stories. That is not part of the movie that I watch. It’s a silent movie, just the sound of the tape spinning and the projector whirling.

There is a certain slant of light. There really is. I know the slant of light. It fell across the bedroom floor. It was draped lazily across the bed. I don’t mind looking at it. If I only look at the light, it’s not even that bad. There is nothing scary about light. Light doesn’t have a smell. That smell. Light doesn’t have a sound. Light doesn’t lie.

So I have been watching you. I’ve been watching closely lately. I’ve been peering, really. And I’ve been thinking.

I thought I would write this letter to you, and give it to in person. I have decided to stop the movie, and I can only think of one way to do it. You will have to go, and so will the film. I’m tired of watching. I’ve never been much of a voyeur, and I don’t think it suits me, so I need to make it stop. The images and the scene that I am watching cannot go on forever.

Here is what I see, and this is what I will do:

I am in a bedroom. I can tell it’s mid-afternoon because of the way the light spills across the floor and the bed. Lovely golden light, with little motes floating in it. The kind of light that you could touch if you wanted to. You are there. I won’t say what you are doing, or what you look like, or what you are going to ask me to do. That is our secret. That will always be our secret.

I am so young. There is a picture of me taken sometime after this, and I look so sad. In it, I am wearing a light blue dress and a ribbon for a headband, and my eyes are sad.

I will be prepared for this, and when I step into the scene, I will have that picture with me. It’s a weapon, in a way. So are my arms. I carry my scars with me like armor. No one can hurt me, if this is what I’ve done to myself.

I don’t notice the smell. I don’t hear your voice. I don’t hear your lies. I recognize now how absurd you are, and how pathetic. You’ve draped yourself across the bed, like you’re sunlight. What a joke. Like you have some kind of power. Like you ever had any power. Like you’ve ever meant anything.

I think that I will show you the picture of me with a ribbon for a headband, and show you my arms, and I will laugh at you. I don’t think I will say anything. I don’t have a speech planned, I don’t think I will need to speak. I think you will know exactly what I intend to do.

I found out years ago what you had done to yourself. At first I thought it was unfair. Now I wonder if I was me. I wonder if I stepped back into the scene, like I’m doing now, and put the gun to your head. Who’s to say I haven’t done it already, who’s to say I haven’t done it a thousand times before now?

It doesn’t matter, anyway. This time I am going to destroy the film entirely. I will show you the picture, and I will laugh, and then I will begin.

I think you will be surprised. You have probably forgotten me, but I have been watching you for nearly twenty-five years now. I am so tired of watching you.

Close your eyes now. I will close mine too, later, when I am done.

Sincerely,

_______________**

* Name illegible.
** Not signed.

I know two things, and two things only:

1. Always trust your instincts.
2. All things pass.

Sometimes I think I know more. Sometimes I trick myself into believing I know more. That’s when I make mistakes. Every bad choice I’ve ever made has been the result of ignoring these two things:

1. The stirring in my stomach.
2. The inevitable passing of all this.

Agatha Christie taught me to trust my instincts. Don’t laugh. Miss Marple solves crimes through the careful observation of personality types. She watches people, and listens, and she stores everything neatly away. She feels a tug of recognition when she meets the killer, because she’s met him many times before, and her body knows it. I don’t mean you should always trust your first impression. I just mean you should listen to what history has taught you, and look for patterns. And, for nearly thirty years I’ve alternated between happy and sad, and I’ve been adrift on the waves and tugged by the tides, and the only constant has been movement. All things pass. So we learn that:

1. Elderly detectives listen and watch and react.
2. Water is never still.

There is always the question, though, of how to apply these truths to one’s life. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I let the killer go. Sometimes I let the killer charm me. Sometimes I am the killer. Sometimes I forget that I am nothing more than an animal, cowering in the dark. Sometimes I fear I am stuck in one awful moment, hanging onto the tip of the second hand and never moving.

1. If you listen closely enough to your bones, they will always tell you the truth.
2. Everyone dies. Everything ends.

I can’t really make you know these two things. I only know them because I’ve made the mistake of ignoring them for years. And I can’t give you the examples that convinced me of their truth. I only know that I know, and I know two things:

1. Trust yourself. Listen to yourself.
2. Don’t worry. It won’t last forever.

This is all I know.

I haven’t been many places. It’s shameful – twenty-nine years old and I’ve barely left the country. I went to Disneyland, once, and I hope to see Europe soon. But I have been one place few people have visited – the North. The far, far, far north. The frigid, lifeless tundra. Up there. Way, way up there.

I’ve wanted to write about it for years now, but I’ve never known where to start. Do I start with the landscape? Do I mention the trees, how they get thinner and thinner the further you go? Do I mention the endless blinding white, the fields of snow and ice that go on forever, and how it burns the eyes until the world is all quiet and white? Do I mention the sky, the vast Northern sky? I don’t think there are words enough to describe the sky. In the summer the sky is blue without end, and the sun never rests. In the winter the sky is lit up every night. I can’t even describe it, the pink and blue and purple and red and green ghosts dancing across the sky, the elegant unfurling spirits bowing to the foxes and caribou and whales below. Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to the first time I saw the Northern Lights. I wish I could describe them for you. I wish I could describe the majesty of them, how I willingly stood outside for an hour in -40 degree weather just to watch them move. The ballet of color and the elegance of movement. There must be a word, in Gwich’in or Inuvialuit, that captures the dance perfectly.

Or, do I start with the people? The people who have lived there for thousands of years, people who have somehow contrived to live and thrive on seal’s blood and the fat of whales? People whose language consists of endless vowels and consonant sounds formed deep in the throat, long words only recently translated into a complex language of triangles and dots? I could tell you about the people who come to the North because they are running away from something. Bad marriages, debt, black eyes, and fat lips, drugs – all the sadness of the world, I’ve heard every story. There is so much sadness in the Arctic Circle, at the top of the world, you wouldn’t believe it. We all went there to escape our sadness, and found a different kind of madness. The kind you never shake. The tundra goes on forever, and there is only so fast or far you can run, up there at the top of the world.

The theme is forever, in the North, did you notice? The sky goes on forever, the snow and ice last forever, the sadness is forever. There is something so permanent, so lasting and final about the North. Something about the darkness in winter that you’ll never escape. You leave the North with a taste for plastic, neon signs, and fast food. There is too much weight there, too many years of unwritten history. You walk away craving something less than what you came for – something that ends. It’s no coincidence that the suicide rate is so high in the North.

So, I could start with the landscape, or I could talk about the people, or I could try to describe for you the inherent sadness Up There, or the futility of tundra. I could. Or I could give you specifics – why I went, and where exactly I went, and what I did, and who I met, and how I got there, and all that. I could tell you that I met some of my best friends up there, and I fell in love, and I went back, years later, even though I thought I never would. The first time I went there, I was running away from a broken heart. The second time – well, I suppose it was for the same reason. I’ve spent at least five years of my life living near the tundra, under the flayed and bloody sky. One of those years I was drunk nearly every day. My friend who killed himself, I met him Up There.

I could describe all of these things for you, but you would never really understand. I could talk about the cold, which so far I’ve hardly mentioned. You never use the word ‘minus’ in the North. From October to May, it’s twenty or forty degrees out – it’s never minus, it just is. I could mention the cabs you take everywhere (five dollars flat fee anywhere in town), or the prices (four dollars for a kiwi, fifteen dollars for a pack of tampons), the Post Office (mail isn’t delivered; you will see everyone you know at the Post Office), the buildings on stilts (it’s the permafrost, you can’t dig into the ground), utilidors (above-ground sewers; permafrost, again), the smell of muktuk hanging out the window to freeze (whale skin and blubber, a delicacy, although the worst delicacy I’ve ever smelled), and ravens the size of cats. I could describe all of these things, but something would still be missing.

Have you ever felt your eyelashes and nose hairs freeze? Have you ever seen the sun at midnight? Have you seen the sun peeking timidly over the horizon at three in the afternoon? Have you heard arctic wolves howling across a frozen river? Have you taken a cab for three blocks simply because it hurt to breathe? Can you pronounce the word Tsiigehtchic?

I could tell you so many things. There are so many things I’ve left out. There are so many things I can’t describe. I haven’t told you about the ugliness of the North, the
desperation and degradation and violence of it. I saw too many black eyes and bloody faces in the North. I saw too many filthy, sad-eyed children. I saw too many people passed out drunk in the snow, and I saw too many people walk past them and laugh.

I prefer to remember the lights though. There is no violence in the lights, just the never-ending dance of the ancestors. Sometimes I think that if I step outside in the evening – and the moment is just right – and it’s cold enough, and dark enough, and magical enough – I will see them again.

When I was a fish I was beautiful. My scales shone bright, as if they were polished. And so they were, if you looked closely. I polished my body on the smooth sides of rocks, against the hands of seaweed, in the salt of the sea. My gills were elegant, like wings. I breathed the air through waves and water, and I was graceful.

When I was a fish I was strong.

When I was a fish I shimmered. When I was a fish I rode the waves and I was weightless. When I was a fish I could never be ugly. You would never guess what I’ve become, now.

When I was a fish, I was beautiful.

***

Once upon a time there was a cat.

(Over the vast expanse of time, there have been many, many cats. But I will tell you a secret – they are all the same cat. This cat has thousands of lives, and will never ever die.)

The cat lived in a castle, in a land far away. The land was green, and the trees were full of birds that twittered and sang and chirped, and flashed like bright jewels. The hills were full of fast clever rabbits and slow silly moles. Life in the land was grand. Life in the land was majestic.

(Cats have always lived in castles. Don’t kid yourself into believing your cat spends all her time in your one-bedroom apartment. She has a home, and it is hers only. You will never be invited.)

The cat took his tea every day at noon, just after his morning nap, and just before his afternoon nap. The cat’s tea consisted of one pot of Earl Grey, mostly milk and some sugar to taste. When he asked for it – and he often did - his tea included a small dry biscuit and a large grey mouse, not quite dead and not quite alive.

The cat yawned, and stretched luxuriously. He arched his back and flexed his claws. The mouse watched blearily with small black eyes as the cat opened his jaws and tore into its fat belly.

The cat enjoyed his tea.

(It’s not a pretty story, I know. The fish story was so sweet. You only get pretty once. Look your cat in the eye and tell me she isn’t a killer.)

The cat was engaged to marry the moon. Long the province of werewolves and unicorns, the moon was a valuable bride. When the cat had finally claimed her as his own, he sat tall and haughty on his cat-throne in his cat-palace and licked his paws in that cat-way. Nighttime was the cat’s time, and the moon was a boon and a prize to own.

When the cat stalked his land in the night, the moon watched him with one wide staring eye. The moon sighed down at him and her breath pulled the ocean up and down, back and forth. The fish glinted as they were tossed from wave to wave.

(I suppose the story of the moon and the cat has been done before. What is it meant to illustrate, really? The tides, the eternal relationship between animal and moon, strange sexual rites of the Druidic cults, who knows. It’s all stories, isn’t it? The story of your cat is the story of my cat is the story of the world is the story of creation is the story of the King of Cats is the story of the cat and the moon, who were engaged to be married. Don’t believe in fairy tales, but don’t ignore them either. Read them for the sex and the gore, but also read for the unwritten, secret words beneath them – read them for the truth.)

The cat stretched his long limbs in the sun. He had found a perfect spot, in the tall green grass. He closed his eyes and purred. He was waiting for nighttime, for the careful eye of his lover, the moon. He would sleep until she opened her eye and the fur bristled on his back.

(You didn’t expect the cat’s story to end, did you? The cat and the moon have been living this story through countless nighttimes now. A cat’s story is a cat chasing a mouse – round and round and round, tail and nose and whiskers and paws. There is no end to it, a circle of tails and whiskers and hisses. A thousand lives, once upon a time. There is no moral to this story. Only the nighttime. )

***

There is, however, a moral to this story: a princess will always break your heart. Girls who wear pink taffeta cannot be trusted. Right now, there is a girl gazing in a mirror, with blonde hair (like spun straw, of course) and wide innocent eyes (like a field of bluebells, obviously), wearing a shiny pink dress (Don’t you dare touch it! Your hands are filthy!) and glass slippers so clear (don’t make her mad, she will hurt you), with forest animals all around her (shitting on the floor, screeching like mad), smiling like a doll (vacuous and empty) at herself, and herself only.

When you meet her, you will love her. You will love her like a thunderstorm, like a heart attack, like a virus – love in the feverish moment of meeting. She will smile her wide white smile and turn her bright eye towards you, until you are a fish on a hook, dangling. She will consume you and devour you and you will love her. She is unattainable, like a cat, like the moon.

Girls who wear crinoline ought never to be trusted. They are so sweet and so kind. They hide their blood-stained hands behind their backs - out, damn spot!

You will love her, when you meet her, like a fever, like a poem. She is pretty (like a thread on a loom) and kind (like her dead mother). She will kiss you (like a snake, tongue lolling); she will offer you an apple (you will take it, tongue lolling). You will bite (always knowing) and she will laugh (a lilting giggle). You will love it (and you will die in the end, quite willingly).

Never trust girls who wear tiaras. Jewels and beauty and charm and charisma are never free.

***

When I was a fish, I was beautiful.

I was everything a fish should be.

I was a fairy tale swimmer, so graceful and quiet and free.

When I was a fish I leapt across rivers, teased my lovers in waterfalls.

I was beautiful; goddess of the ocean, of the sea.

I never wanted to be a girl, or a doll,

Or a cat purring from bird-ripe tree to tree.

When I was a fish I was beautiful.

I was everything a fish ought to be.

I will not write about it. I promise I will not write about it.

I will not talk about it. I will never talk about it.

I will refer to it in passing, I will refer to it obliquely. Have I mentioned it? I will not repeat it.

I will not be destroyed by it. I will not be scarred by it. I will not think about it.

I will not. I have not. I cannot.

I will not let you touch me. I will not touch you. I will not do this. I will not let you do this. I will not be led. I will not be tricked.

fuck you! fuck you and your lies and your words and your orders! fuck you with your smell and the light draped across the floor so leisurely and the story you told me and the way my stomach my stomach drops so heavily and the light being eaten by the dark and the blackness in my head and the way i feel right now all weightless and floating in this memory. fuck you! you walked away from it and the gun in your hand i hope you felt it the darkness and i’ve spent my entire life in it and i’ve never ever escaped it

This time, I will not do it. I will not be spoiled by it.

This time.

I am not prey.

This time, I will walk into the room. I will walk into the room myself. I will walk into the room, I will walk into the room with the gun and I will tell the story. The story ends in darkness.

I will never, ever talk about it. I haven’t written about it. I cannot. I will not. I have not.

So what do you want to know? You wanna know something about me, ok, here goes.

I like to fuck. I like to fuck, I like to get fucked, I like fucking, I fuck up sometimes. Start counting now – let's see how many times I can say it, right? I would venture I make it into the double digits pretty fucking soon, just keep listening.

I'm pretty adventurous, I guess. When I say I like to fuck, I mean, I like to fuck a whole goddamn variety of people. Boys, girls, trannies, post-up, pre-op, leather daddies, business bitches, twelve year old boy whores from Singapore, whatever. The best fuck I ever had was a tranny named Samantha. The most beautiful girl I've ever met – tits out to here, heart-shaped lips, and the softest skin you'll ever touch - but with a dick like you wouldn't believe. I mean, this girl was hung. It was pretty extravagant.

Have I ever been in love? Fuck that. Who needs it? I've had feelings before, I guess. But what are feelings, anyway? Near as I can tell, feelings just complicate things, and complication leads to pain, always, always, always. And then, sometimes there's blood, and you're left with scars that you can't help but see whenever you accidentally turn your head...anyway, whatever. Let's move the fuck on, shall we?

I've been running around since I was pretty young, I guess. I think I started when I was about thirteen. As for when I lost my virginity, well that's a joke – was it when I was four and my uncle wanted to have some fun with me, or when I was nine and dear old mom's new boyfriend figured I needed to be broken, like I was a goddamn horse? Doesn't matter. All I know is, I got a taste of real sex when my first boyfriend slipped three fingers in my cunt and made me suck on them afterwards. That's when I knew what I wanted – something raw, something real. Pure fucking sex.

Yeah, there's more to me than that, but you asked the question. You see me, right? I'm wearing fishnets – well, there's your first clue, Sherlock - and hooker boots up to my ass, so you had to know what I was about. Stop drooling, bitch. Your hands are shaking, I can see them from here. You may as well come into the shadows, with me.

If you want me, here I am.

Hi! It's so nice to meet you. I love meeting new people, it's so interesting. Oh, look! No, up at the sky, do you see that? That cloud looks like...something, I can't quite catch it...it's almost like this teddy I had, when I was a little girl, it was a lovely white teddy named Norman with these little black buttons for eyes. Except the buttons kept falling off, and they were sewed back on so many times his little face was covered in all these funny holes with stuffing poking out. Norman was made of that fabric, do you know what it's called, terry-something? The stuff towels are made of. He was my best teddy, I think. Except I also had this elephant, she was purple with green dots and a corduroy trunk, I can't remember her name, what was it? I really like the feeling of corduroy, do you know what I mean? It's an interesting fabric, such soft lines, and swooshy when you walk so it doesn't last long at all. Although of course my elephant's truck – what was her name? - didn't go for walks, that doesn't make sense, but I still wore it out fast running my hands along it, I like textures a lot, if you can't already tell. This dress that I'm wearing is made of silk, it feels so nice. I feel like a grown-up, a bit, when I wear this dress.

What? Oh, sorry. What was the question again? Oh, Lilith, yeah, I've met her. She's a nice girl. I don't think she realizes how lovely she is, really; she tries to cover up those magical eyes with silly masks and that pirate look she loves so much, but she's like a little pixie to me. I don't think she likes me much, but that's okay. I think she's sweet.

Oh look what I found! Would you like a candy? It's a peppermint swirl candycane twirly candy. It's really delicious, here, try one. It reminds me of Christmas, don't you think? It smells like Christmas, all minty and red and green swirly sweet...I think Christmas is my favourite holiday all of, how about you? Halloween? You sound like Lilith. I love holidays, they are all so wonderful, there's such a sense of possibility in the air during holidays! On Valentines day everything is pink and red and so soft, the air smells like cinnamon, and Easter tastes like chocolate eggs and half-bitten chocolate bunny ears and fluffy clouds. Of course, I don't know what clouds really taste like, but don't you imagine they are made of pink sweethearts and marshmallows? Oh, clouds, right...I think my elephant's name was Lilly. Or maybe Eve.

Sorry. What was the question again?

Your life is a sitcom. A single camera watches you, and you live in three-quarters of a house. Every day begins the way it has always begun, bouncing along on the heels of a sixty-second song. Your song is catchy in a sickening way, and tells in rhyming couplets your struggles, your fears, and your hopes. It ends on a crashing major chord and the clamor of cymbals.

Your life opens, every day, on a familiar scene, in a familiar room, with familiar faces. Your friends come and go; the wackier ones enter with a flourish and a quip, to cheers and applause. Extras chatter wordlessly in the background. You are the straight-man to the insanity around you. Set-up, punchline, reaction – you know your lines, you know where to pause and when to mug for the camera - your life is a comedy of delightful and deliberately plotted errors.

Claps and laughter, always claps and laughter. The laughter of a desperate audience now fifty years’ dead.

Your life happens in twenty-two minute intervals, with enough time left over for Verizon ads and movie trailers. Enough time for the applause, the forced laughter of your studio audience. Promotional consideration provided by every product you’ve ever owned.

***

My life is a 19-century epistolary novel. I begin and end with formality. I am altogether giddy in my solemnity. To my dear. I am your faithful servant, and I remain, as always, devoted. To you.

I describe in detail the days that pass without you, and you reply in kind. I can recall entire conversations verbatim and I transcribe them for you. Read between my lines and I tell a different story. I use words like ‘vex’. When someone makes love to me, my virtue has not been compromised; I am being courted, I am being wooed.

My plot is a labyrinth of twists and leaps and turns, of strange logic and unexplained coincidence. I am surrounded by aunts and wards, governesses and footmen. Sometimes I am an orphan, sent to work in a desolate country home. I hear noises at night that no one else hears; only I suspect the dark truth, the mad wife in the attic, the ghostly children on the moors. Sometimes I am a young girl of means searching for a suitable husband. I am always plucky and resourceful, though I will often fling myself to the floor dramatically. Often I am overwhelmed, and always overwrought. If I give in to the demands of my mysterious, dark-coated employer I will come to a bad end, as all weak heroines must. If I am pure of heart and loins I will marry in the end, to a man who smiles sweetly at my wild mind.

I live on the moors and I live in the city. If I am good my ending is happy.

***

Their life is a Shakespearian tragedy. His father the King has gone mad. She is a girl glimpsed once and rhapsodized forever. She sings to herself in meadows when she thinks no one is listening. In iambic pentameter they fall in love, and what follows is always the same: blood, song, the awful truth of jesters. His father the King is not really mad. His mother the Queen schemes, and the plot moves forward.

The first act is over.

They speak together in rhyming couplets, harmonizing like singers. They swoon. They are lovers. They meet in forests and the Queen sends her ladies-in-waiting to watch and to listen. The Queen poisons her husband the King, and the Court thinks he has gone mad. The ladies-in-waiting like a Greek chorus echo back what they have heard; the Queen schemes, and the plot moves forward.

So ends the second and third acts. In the fourth the lovers return home. It storms, they are in Iove, they are oblivious. His father the King mutters in the storm. The mad King wishes them well. The ladies-in-waiting die slowly, one by one. ‘Alas and alack!’, they cry, one by one. ‘She will betray!’ The lovers flee in the storm. His father the King wishes them a good morrow. His mother the Queen sharpens her nails and teeth and daggers, and prepares her poisons.

In the fifth act they die. This is the only ending.

***

The stories are always the same. The difference is in their form. I chose a happier form for mine. So long as I am good, my story will end triumphantly. ‘Reader, I married him.’

But – and here is the part where I tell the truth, outside of narrative and form - when the story ends, my life continues. The only constant is death, and though I am the heroine of my story, I will die one day, like every character before me. I don’t want to die like Emma Bovary; I want to die like Elizabeth Bennett, far from my story. I want an unrecorded death. I don’t want to be form without context.

Think about your story. Think about the form that shapes your narrative. This will determine the lines you say, the actions you take. In the end, every life – sitcom, novel, cartoon, silent movie – ends in the formula of tragedy, in death. Life is a Shakespearian tragedy, punctuated by moments of sitcom absurdity. Find your own story between those moments.

If chivalry is dead, let it stay dead. One less dragon to roam the hillside.

This is not the time to resurrect the dead. There are too many other enemies to worry about. These new enemies are cunning, and wear our friend’s smiles. Miss America, elderly neo-Nazis, senators with wily eyes; watch the nightly news, for there is a pageant on display, a rogue’s gallery of misfits and dark magicians. If we are to fight, this insidious enemy – this thing called ‘chivalry’ - must remain dead.

I am not a princess, nor do I want to be treated like one. I am the queen of my own fucking castle, and I am surrounded by dirty rascals, men and women alike. I don’t want to be treated differently, not for a second, because of my breasts. Fuck you! Fuck you world! Fuck you peons and serfs and commoners, with your cries of ‘Chivalry!’

Knock me off my pedestal, I dare you. Throw your stones, and kick me when I’m down. I don’t mind the bruises; to bruise is to be human, and alive. I am the queen of all that lives, and grows, and dies. I am the queen of my own patch of dry land, nothing else.

Close the castle doors when you see me. Don’t you dare hold them open for me. Pass the mead, leave me last, I dare you. I am nothing more, or less, than you. I have gone thirsty before. My breasts do not determine my ability.

These cries of ‘Chivalry!’, they surround me. These princesses at my feet, these girls with lipstick smudges and raccoon black eyes – these creatures of habit have been told how to think, and who to be. Fucking princesses. Give them time – close your castle doors, tears the petals from their roses – and they will soon be queens like me.

Blood runs through my veins, and the same sticky stuff runs through yours. It runs in the valleys and it runs down the backs of the dragons we have slain. It runs down my thighs every month and I am not afraid to tell you. So don’t be afraid to let me fall and scrape my knee.

These enemies I speak of: they are everywhere. These are not the dragons of our youth, this is no job for a princess. These enemies are crafty, and they wear the faces of preachers, politicians, and schoolteachers. If we are to fight, we have to fight together. There are no pedestals in battle.

If you want to be a queen like me, and if you want to walk beside me, say it with me, jubilantly – ‘Fuck you chivalry!’

Addicted

I emerge from a three-day nightmare of fever and aching flesh. I am still reeling from it, I think. I've been staring at the computer screen, looking at words, listening to the murmur and nonsense noise of the TV, wave after wave of words and sounds crashing, breaking, swelling. I am exhausted. There is so much noise around me.

Riding a fever-wave for too long will destroy you. The swelling heat of it, the ache of it. I spent three days staring at the wall, trying to ignore the noise around me. Schizophrenics are helpless, surrounded by the noise; autistic children, too, are battered by the noise around them.

(I am addicted to the noise.)

I would like silence. A few seconds of silence. Not the silence of sleep. Not the silence of an empty room; rooms are too full of time and memory, the tick-tock march of clocks. Maybe the silence of a forest is what I need. Maybe the silence of water.

Sleep

I have a complicated relationship with sleep. I want it; I want it to want me, but it so rarely does. I don't trust sleep, not for a second; pity, then, the irony that to sleep, one must close one's eyes. Prey should never surrender so willingly to such a dangerous creature. I fight it daily, and have the purple bruises under my eyes to prove it. I wake up, always thrashing, desperate to remain in the predatory teeth of such a monster. And there are the times, the sweet succulent flesh ripping times, when I offer myself up to its carnivore mouth and it opens hungrily. Those moments I am fully in love with sleep, and lacking desperation, I slide down the throat of it.

Clutter

I like to read what I would call high-end pop culture writing. This is writing that attempts - often delightfully, usually foolishly – to find great meaning in static. Writing that will equate, say, the Jonas Brothers with the Marx brothers, finding some parallel to the Kennedy clan, and from there a Camelot allusion or three. It's all very busy, which I think is the best word to describe it – busy. Sometimes I aspire to this style of writing – I too can reference Jessica Simpson and Simone de Beauvoir in the same paragraph, to chuckles and nods all around! - but it's all so very fleeting. Where is the worth in it? It's all just more noise. TV noise, word noise, picture noise. It's all just more noise.

Lucidity

I am scared that if I turn off the TV, I will find out that the static is in me. No – I know that when I turn off the TV, I will be reminded that the static is me. I have taken to smoking more and more. The nicotine soothes my nerves and quiets the static – when I smoke, the static is almost like waves breaking, and that is a noise I can trust. I can’t trust the static - that noise between radio stations, the hint and swell of human voices. Though the voices, when they settle and a station is tuned, sing only the desperate, whispered come-ons of pop stars.

Who listens to the radio anyway? In the static it doesn’t matter. These words are more of too many, and you weren’t even listening.

Turn on the TV. Take a moment to flip through the channels. It’s okay. This is just another channel. This is me writing ad copy to fill the empty spaces between sitcoms. This is me writing sitcoms to fill the empty spaces between ads. This is static, this is your intermission.

Sleep Part Two

I have taken my pills, the ones that quiet me. I take a lot of pills. Some are colorful. Wonderful little things, magical little things. It is very nice to be Alice sometimes, and not to struggle against the swelling and the shrinking around me.

We medicate ourselves against imaginary diseases. I medicate myself against the tyranny of consciousness. I take one pill for my brain, another for my uterus, and several more for the fun of it. The fun pill is green and round like a little glass pillow. It floats in my palm like a dinghy, and I float on it down the river. At the end of the river is a waterfall. I stretch my throat out taut and swallow the waterfall. The waterfall is a dream. The dream is what I am.

I can still hear the white noise. It is not quiet down the rabbit hole, but Alice assures me it is a lovely place to be, regardless.

This is the end, beautiful friend…this is the end, my only friend…the end of our elaborate plans…

This is it, my friends. I have spent too many evenings staring at this screen. I’ve given you some pretty words, but does it count when the words are coaxed out of me, painfully? Word for word, I’ve been swallowing razor blades. This is not magic. This is studying the entrails. This is several metaphors too many.

Is there anything more boring than writing about not writing? It’s masturbation, and I don’t get my kicks watching other people get off. There is supposed to be something delightfully meta about it, writing about not writing as writing and breaking the fourth wall and the labyrinth and Borges and all kinds of fancy deconstructionist theory and ivory tower philosophy, and on and on. My favorite word sums all this up: Fuck.

It’s all noise and static. There is no meaning to be found in this.

Ask yourself: Why are you reading this? What were you hoping to find? I’ve already told you about the Body. I’ve already told you about the Heart, and about Love. I gave you three different ways of looking at love, in fact. Pretty fucking generous, I think. Now and then I mention Art - how refined of me! I’ve given you mourning and I’ve given you suicide and I’ve given you my bloody arms. I’ve given you dreams and quotations and I’ve given you delight.

What more, then? What is left, except for the noise and the static?

If I knew what you wanted from me, I wonder if the words would find me.

This is the end, beautiful friends.

Find a word. Adjective, verb, noun, adverb, preposition, participle. The dictionary is yours to steal – so take a word.

Maybe it’s etched into your skin already. There are words on my arm, although they are letterless. I’ve chosen something different this time.

Perhaps it’s chosen me.

(If you prefer, and if it suits you, let a word find you.)

Linger over the sound of your word. Is it a love-sick cat, wailing and keening against the wind? Is it the grumble of a distant bass-line? Is it a heartbeat, a wave, a siren, a seagull?

I have my word, although it isn’t mine to keep. Have you found your word?

Is it anything like what it’s meant to be?

This word - pull the sticky tendons of letters from the muscle of it. Dig into the marrow of your word and taste it.

(I might change metaphors without warning. Follow the words closely)

My word is two syllables. My word starts with a flick of my tongue against the roof of my mouth. My lips form an O and my tongue curls. A hiss, and another flick of my tongue shapes a thud at the end of it.

My word is water, both in the taste and sound of it. My word is also glass. It is sharp and the edges of it cut me.

(This is a metaphor. A word cannot cut me. Neither can a word be held in my hand like a sliver of mirror.)

I hold my word in my hand, like a sliver of mirror. I look in the mirror and read my word, backwards. I say my word backwards. It is filthy.

Think about your word. Taste the sound, and hear the color of it. Roll the word on your tongue and swallow it. I don’t need to know your word, I only need the texture of it.

My word is cold. My word is tundra. My word is breath. You can see right through it. I sigh and my word escapes me. My word is everything but what it was meant to be.

Tell me about your word. What is the truth of it?

(There is no truth to it. It is everything but what it was meant to be.)

What do you want it to be?

Part One - The Body as Advertisement

I went bra shopping today. It’s always a hassle. Nothing ever fits, the girls who work there are bitchy, I hate getting dressed and undressed countless times just to find one lousy bra that will cost me at least fifty dollars. I start to sweat. I get grumpy after looking at myself in unflattering light for so long. Not my favorite activity.

It got me thinking about body image. In truth, it doesn’t take much to get me thinking about body image – it’s on my mind all the time, but after thirty minutes in La Senza, surrounded by perfect breasts (or the dream of perfect breasts) and slinky soft clingy lingerie, it’s all I could think about.

I compare myself to every woman I see. Every ass, every thigh, every flat stomach and every set of perky tits – I see them all. I see a fat woman, and I think, ‘Thank god that’s not me, not quite yet’. I see a woman with thick ankles and a lumpy ass, and think, ‘At least I’ve learned to hide my flaws, as best I can’. I see a woman with long tanned legs and perfect, stiletto-defined calves, and I think, ‘Never me, that will never be me’.

This sounds like self-pity, like the worst kind of self-indulgence. I am aware of it, and I am aware of the futility of it. I get that it’s unhealthy, and I try not to do it - but this kind of thinking is a habit, and I’ve broken very few habits in my life. I am still trying to figure out how to charm and disarm the snake of envy that coils itself at my feet. I still apply chapstick every ten minutes. I still haven’t quit smoking.

Part Two - The Body as Currency

I am comfortable in my habits.

To whit - sometimes I worry that I’m the fat girl who people keep around so they won’t be the fattest or ugliest girl in the room. Luckily there is almost always someone else in the room, someone to unwittingly play that role for me. That poor girl.

Right now, that poor girl’s name is Susan Boyle.

That poor ugly fat girl with the shockingly, miraculously lovely voice. Who would ever expect such a poor specimen of womanhood – a unibrowed, mustached, graying, and lumpy excuse for a woman – to have talent, to beguile with her voice? Who would ever expect a siren song to issue forth from that mouth, those lips, that throat? What a hideous spectacle, a middle-aged woman who’s never been kissed, what nerve she had to walk onto the stage at a televised talent contest, to emerge with so much confidence, such hip-shaking insouciance! The faces of everyone in the room at her audition, I’ll never forget or forgive the one expression they [we] all shared: Disgust. Then she sang. The first note rose to the roof of the auditorium; all those terrible people in the audience, and all of the people [us] watching at home looked up in disbelief. Disgust became disbelief, disbelief became shock, shock became wonder, and with this realization, a kind of weird bliss filled the room.

I felt sick for watching. I could feel the vultures [me] circling her, this poor sad excuse for a woman – and I knew it was only a matter of time before this creature was picked clean.

It’s unspoken but insinuated – a woman like that should never leave the house.

Susan came along at just the right time for me. She is everywhere, and so I always feel a bit better about myself for it. Sorry Susan. I hope you never forgive me [us].

Part Three - The Body as Noun

There is such a disconnect between the me inside my head, and the me outside my head. The me that is defined by thought, and the me that is defined by skin. Am I mistaken, or does everyone feel this way? What percentage of yourself is defined by your body?

My body is: a temple, a vessel, an oak. My body has been: ravaged, sliced, worshiped. My body will be: burnt, dissected, invaded.

My body is not me. My body is a landmine.

I am blood and bowels and bones, and miles of skin, unraveled. I am meat. I consume myself, daily. I am biology. [I celebrate myself, and sing myself] I am legs and arms and torso, I am a skeleton mounted on an iron rod, I wear a mask and a filthy pink dress. [I am large, I contain multitudes] Study anatomy and you will know everything you need to know about me. My bones are labeled clearly, I am Latin words, I am a graverobber’s delight.

My body is me. My body is a textbook.

Part Four - The Body as Argument

Answer the questions below as truthfully as possible. There are no right answers, but there are plenty of wrong answers. You have an entire lifetime to answer, but you will be graded based on speed. Grammar and spelling always count.

1) What percentage of your body is water? What percentage of your body is mineral? What percentage of your body is desire? What percentage of your desire consumes you? What percentage would you spare for a little more beauty?

2) Complete this sentence: “My body is ____________”

a. For sale to the highest bidder.
b. A weapon.
c. The enemy that you know.

3) Read this sentence: “Beautiful people will never experience pain as I know it. Beautiful people never chafe. Beautiful people and what they achieve are the measure of success.” Do you:

a. Strongly agree.
b. Agree.
c. Disagree.
d. Strongly disagree.
e. Secretly envy the truth of it.

4) Which parts of your body do you love the most? Is it possible to love a length of bone wrapped in muscle and skin? Do you think that your body loves you?

5) Write an essay about someone else’s body. In it, compare their body to a ship, using nautical terminology; you are encouraged to compare yourself to a mermaid or the sea.

6) Reach out to the person next to you and brush the hair from their cheek. Admire the rise of their cheekbones, and pay special attention to stray hairs and chicken pox scars. Remark upon the richness and strangeness of their eyes. Extra marks will be awarded to those who use the words ‘enchanting’, ‘dusk’, and ‘sentient’.

Part Five - The Body as Self

The me that is me, and the me that is my body – one day I hope to reconcile the two selves. Right now one is a doppelganger, although I’m not sure which. One of these follows me from room to room. Sometimes I feel like I’m dragging a ghost behind me. Is it a corporeal ghost, or a ghost that is the voice behind my eyes?

My doppelganger is always me, in some way, or I would never recognize it. Otherwise, it would just be another shadow.

I am using the me behind my eyes to write this, but I feel the air around the other me while I write. The eyes of the other me are reading this as I type. The me behind those eyes is dictating every word. My doppelganger is changing places and becoming the other as I write.

One day I will learn to reconcile the pieces and parts and selves of me.

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume […]

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and
never will be measured […]

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

from Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman (square brackets in 'The Body as Noun' taken from the same)

Addendum:

I ended up buying two bras. They fit really well, and when I wear them I feel - dare I say it? dare I even think it? – ‘sexy.’ I surround that word with quotes because it strikes me as untrue. But I found a few shirts with flattering necklines, so the combination of bra and shirt has given me a small measure of confidence that will carry me through the week.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my sexuality. I’m not sure when it happened. Was it the last time I actually had sex? If so, that’s…what? Four and a half years ago? Was it when I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, and gained pound after pound after pound? Was it when I first thought I was unworthy, when I first called myself fat – ugly – monster – pig? Was it when I realized that I was single, and had been single for many years, and would likely be single for many more years?

Not sure. Doesn’t really matter.

What matters is I have forgotten what it means to be female. To be a woman, a woman who is worthy of love and sex and desire. A woman who not only desires, but is desirable. A woman who inspires poetry and passion in a man, not to mention a hard-on. A woman who is worthy of the loaded, voluptuous, ravenous label ‘woman’.

A few years ago I was visiting my parents and decided to dye my hair. I borrowed some old clothes from my mom. My mother is not the snappiest dresser, and she’s much thinner and a bit taller than me, so her clothes were not exactly flattering. The brown linen shorts were tight, and to make them more comfortable I pulled them up over my hips. The blue cotton shirt was high-collared, with lacy edging at the arms. I was shapeless and sexless in my middle-aged outfit. It felt wrong at first; I felt old and lumpy and colorless. Something changed, though, and I felt my sexuality leaving me. I felt like I was shedding my pupal skin and emerging as something new, something different and free and light. I felt like I could walk the streets and never worry what people thought of me. I wasn’t trying anymore. I was no longer a woman, I was faceless and bodiless and sexless. I wondered if this was what every woman feels, when she stops being desired, when she stops desiring desire.

I felt free, for those thirty minutes. Something was missing, though, and when I stepped back into my own clothes, with my shiny new hair, I felt like a woman again – heavy with hips and breasts and expectations. Heavy with a desire for desire.

I have lost myself again, and this time it does not feel like freedom. It does not feel like a divine choice. This time it feels like a prison. I’m locked in a body I hate and mistrust; a body that is designed to bring me pleasure and has the potential to bring me to ecstasy, but I have lost the trick of it. I have forgotten the shiver and sweat of sex, and I have lost the sway in my hips.

I wrote a piece to accompany one of Kazha’s drawings of her character Lilith. I surprised myself by writing a lusty piece that was all sex, all swagger and sway. Lilith – after describing her first positive sexual experience in detail, says ‘That's when I knew what I wanted – something raw, something real. Pure fucking sex.’ The words found themselves – I felt like nothing more than a conduit, a thing of heat, and for twenty minutes I translated all the wild energy hidden somewhere inside me into words. So perhaps not all is lost. I’ve retained some of the ecstasy, or I remember it well enough to write about it.

According to biology, I’m supposed to hit my sexual prime in a few years. By then, I hope to have found again the way to my body, and the way to desire. I want to be heavy with it again – heavy with the desire for desire.

I fear I may be a closet Marxist.

And that makes me a hypocrite.

I’m not poor. I’ve never been poor. I like to talk about the corporate enslavement of the masses and the tyranny of the upper class, but I don’t really feel it. How could I? I’ve always had a home, I’ve never run out of food; once or twice I’ve had to choose between dinner and cigarettes, but that was my choice. My middle-class choice. My parents never took me to Disneyland as a child, but we did travel across the country many times. Poor people don’t do that, do they? Poor people live in ghettos, poor people live in peeling run-down rented houses, poor people don’t have cupboards stocked with enough food to feed an entire post-apocalyptic town, as we did.

Still though, I like to think I’m different. That somehow I am in a lower class, as if this makes me special and strong and defiant. That I am fighting, heroically and without fear, against the ruling class, like I am some kind of reformer battling a faceless tyrant, the savior of my blue-collar people.

Bullshit.

For the first time in my life, I have a job where I don’t have to take out the garbage. This has long been a dream of mine. It’s a dream that began with an endless series of jobs – in stores, kitchens, gas stations, and hotels – and was finally realized when I started my current job, two years ago. In my current job, I never have to think about garbage. I throw out my wrappers, my used plastic, my rinds, and I never have to think about where they go. There are, after all, people who take care of such things. I don’t even know where the dumpster is, I have no idea how garbage makes its way out of my office and into a dumpster. I have no interest in knowing these things. I sit in front of a computer all day. It’s a nice computer. It’s new. I’m the only one who uses it. I have a little desk space, for my pictures and my coffee cup. It’s nice.

I live in – dare I say it, can I admit it? – middle-class comfort. I went out for dinner three times this week. I bought a new bed last month. I’m planning a vacation this summer. I like the idea of being lower-class, of living a life of quiet monetary desperation; I love seeing rich people with their designer handbags and expensive highlights, and laughing softly to myself. Pity they’ve never known my life, I think. Pity they’ve never struggled like I have. Although when asked how, exactly, I’ve struggled against the corporate bully, the rigid system of class, I won’t have an answer.

I am writing this on a nice MacBook, given to me for free by my work. I am watching Jeopardy on a nice flatscreen TV. I could check my bank account on this computer; it wouldn’t upset me. I use high-speed wireless Internet. It’s nice.

I am not poor and I have never been poor. I may be a closet Marxist, but I am an undeniable hypocrite.

‘I’m haunted by the lies that wove the web inside my haunted head…’

Imagine a house. Any house you wish – your childhood home; a mansion, stately and brick, ivy-clung; a suburban two-storey, pink as frosting; any house will do. Now walk up to the front door, across the wrap-around porch, sun-blistered and peeling, grey from the ravages of time, heat, rain.

(My house has a porch, but if yours doesn’t, that’s fine; simply cross the lawn; walk the three steps; follow the stones; any path will do.)

Open the door, step inside. Breathe. My house smells of nothing. Yours may smell of dust, or lilacs left in a vase by the kitchen, or bleach. My house, though, smells of nothing. Walk the rooms of your house. What do you see? I see a middle-class living room, shabby if I look close enough, the arms of the couches worn thin, I see a dining room with a bare table, shining in the sunlight as though it’s just been polished, and the polisher stepped from the room only seconds before. I see a kitchen empty of food. I don’t think this kitchen has ever seen food. I turn down a hallway and it narrows. The house is a trailer now, all shag carpet, sunken living room, and ersatz bay window; I turn down another corridor, follow the stairs up, and I am standing on a gorgeous cherry hardwood floor, and every side table is kissed by a doily, and the armchairs are stiff and tall like proper Victorian ladies.

The house is empty of people.

Curiously, there are no bedrooms.

Do you see, now, why the house you’ve chosen doesn’t matter? It’s all the same; we are together, in the same house; it’s every house that has ever been built.

Let’s go down the stairs now. Follow them down, down, down. Until. Until the end, until the bottom. Follow me, take my hand. It’s okay; I’ve done this before. I do this every night, every night for half my life. This is the basement, this is the end, this is the bottom. We see different things. I can tell, I see something unfamiliar reflected in your shiny eyes, your curious cat eyes, but it’s okay. Here is what I see. A room, vast and tall as an airplane hangar. The ground is grey, it’s dirt. This room is wrong. Something about the geometry of it. Something about the taste of it.

There is a door at the end of the room. I know you see it, I know you don’t want to see it. There is something about the angles of this room. Something about the way the door rushes towards me, and the way the room gets smaller and smaller, and goes on forever. Try not to look away, okay? Something awful is behind the door. Something cold, something enormous, something insubstantial. Something snorting its hot breath into the grey air. Something I can see through. Something that is waiting. It’s been waiting for fifteen years.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s very cold here, at the bottom, while we wait. While it waits for me. And now, while it waits for you.

‘I can hear myself; I’m somewhere in there…’

***

References: House of Leaves (novel by Mark Danielewski), Haunted (album by Poe), the Minotaur (self-actualization), recurring dream (fifteen years)

The tyranny of the blank page. The white computer screen. The emptiness behind one’s eyes when the words refuse to form. False starts and fragments. Half-formed sentences, and paragraphs that go nowhere.

You can’t see it, but according to Word, the five sentences above have been flagged ‘incomplete’, underlined in tell-tale wavy green. This makes me laugh.

How do writers do it? Writers are my heroes and my heroines, have been since I was five. My bookshelves are full of words and stories, thousands of pages of sentences and paragraphs and chapters, characters and plotlines and ideas and themes and climax and conclusion. Writers are magicians, pulling rabbits from hats, cutting women in two, vanishing a cage of doves before your eyes.

Sometimes I think I glimpse the truth of what they do. Sometimes I think I catch the sleight of hand, or see the assistant behind the curtain. I have learned a few of the simplest card tricks. I can even convince an audience, at a distance, that I have sawed my lovely assistant in two. I can dazzle with pyrotechnics, I know the ways of smoke and mirrors, but I fear I lack true skill. Up close, my illusions are revealed to be nothing more than simple tricks.

Maybe all of the words have been used up. Maybe that’s why I can’t write, why I can’t find the plot.

While I’m writing this, or attempting to write this, the TV is on, and I’m watching Oprah out of the corner of my eye. A woman whose 11-year-old son committed suicide is describing the moment she walked into her son’s room and found him hanging from an electrical cord.

An awful part of me is hoping I can steal that terrible moment - the pain of the mother and her son that I have never met, but have now cried for – and pull some inspiration from it.

Good writers are magicians. The rest of us are scavengers. We pick at the scraps, we pull flesh from bone, we study the entrails for the truths left behind. When I cannot find the words I’ve been searching for, I go to The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Patti Smith, all the carcasses I’ve picked nearly clean over the last fifteen years. I’m not sure I want to scavenge anymore, though. I want to tell truths with my magic. I want to create illusions that cannot be seen through. No more simple tricks.

The awful, endless tyranny of the blank page. Stare too long into the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you. False starts and fragments.

Fill the page with words.

I was ten the first time I saw them.

It’s like a lot of things; like being in a pit and desperately trying to claw your way out; like being on the edge of a cliff and struggling against the wind; but to me, it will always be most like the slow, steady pursuit of the black dogs. The slavering beasts always on the edge of vision. I think it’s the way they move that scares me the most – how casually they circle me, how predatory their indifference.

I first saw them, out of the corner of my eye, when I was ten. They scared me so much I decided - for the first time, but not the last - that I would rather die than see them again. I cried for weeks, and spoke of blood and death and knives, and made my mother cry. But I was ten, and I soon forgot what I had seen, as ten-year-olds will. The dogs went away.

But they changed something in me. Just a glimpse of their strong jaws, just a taste of their animal scent on the air; I was watched by their awful yellow eyes, and I was changed.

Once the black dogs have spotted you, and tasted your fear, you are never free.

When I was twelve they returned – no doubt attracted by the heady perfume of adolescence – and they gave me instructions this time. ‘Cut yourself’, they said, although the black dogs do not speak in a language you would ever understand. ‘Make yourself bleed,’ they barked, they whispered, they hissed, ‘Do this and we will leave you alone’. I appreciated this, and I learned to keep them at bay, simply by drawing a thin line of blood across my wrist. They taught me this trick, though I don’t think they did so out of sympathy; they simply weren’t ready to take me.

The black dogs returned, again and again –at the edge of my vision I would catch their bright eyes watching me hungrily.

The black dogs are nothing if not patient.

When I was fifteen they were closer than ever, so close I could smell their meaty breath. I drew lines across my wrist and my arm faster and faster, until there was no skin left to cut. I dragged my useless arm behind me, leaving a bloody trail for the dogs to lap with their rough tongues. I think the smell of blood became too much for them, and soon they had me circled. I swallowed pill after chalky white pill, and as my eyes closed, the black dogs slowly receded. Their lips pulled back, and I swear they were smiling.

When I was in the hospital I saw them in the corridors, I saw their yellow eyes every time a door opened, I saw them crouched at the end of my bed. There were people there like me, and I know they saw them too. It’s why the hallways echoed with our cries every night, it’s why we never slept and our eyes were wild in the morning.

The doctors called us crazy. They called me ‘depressed’, and gave me pills, and the pills worked. After a month in the hospital, I stopped seeing the dogs, and I went home. They weren’t waiting for me there, and they weren’t waiting for me at school, and I know longer saw them waiting, crouched and taut, at the end of my bed. My arm healed. I learned to sleep again.

I thought I was safe. I forgot that the black dogs are nothing if not patient.

When I was nineteen I saw them in my dreams. They stalked me at night, and the only way I knew to quiet them was to cut. My blood made them hungry, but the smell seemed to satisfy them, though I knew it wouldn’t for long. They circled me again. This time they sunk their jaws into my neck, and I knew that I needed to die, again. I took pill after pill, again. The dogs receded, again. The story repeats itself. I left the hospital, again. My arm healed, again.

It’s now been nearly ten years since I’ve seen the dogs, nearly twenty years since I first saw them. I am terrified they will return. I know them; they know me. It doesn’t matter how far I run, they will always know where to find me. I know their awful yellow eyes, and I know their hot breath, and I know what they want. They know the irresistible pull that blood and razors have over me, and they know that when they find me, I will do what they ask me to; they know, and I know, that the blood will only satisfy them for so long. They know, and I know, that the next time they circle me will be the very last.

The black dogs are waiting.

1.

A poor fisherman was walking home along the river one evening when he came across an injured crane. The bird was slowly pulling itself along the road, an arrow having crippled its wing. The fisherman took pity on the creature, and gently eased the arrow from its wing. The bird shook itself, turned, and without a look back, rose into the darkening sky, and disappeared.

A single drop of blood glistened on the man’s finger. He examined it, then wiped his hands on his pants. It was time to go home, to his shack on the river.

Days later a woman approached the fisherman’s shack and knocked on the door. He answered; they spoke; time passed, and they fell in love, as these things happen. They married and had children, and soon the poor fisherman grew weary of his old shack and of the hours he spent on the riverbank, and all the work of feeding a family. He noticed that his children were clothed in the finest fabrics, and when he asked his wife about this, she agreed to weave for him and the village the finest clothes she could tailor, but only if he agreed to never watch her work.

The poor fisherman agreed to this, and soon he grew rich. The neighboring villages heard tell of the wondrous fabrics created by the fisherman’s wife, and so she wove more and more, faster and faster. The fisherman built a bigger home for his family, and ate only the finest food, and soon quit visiting the river. He did not notice that his wife grew ill, and thin, and sad, as his only thought was of more – more food, more rooms, more fine fabric.

One day the man walked past his wife’s work-room, and thought ‘What harm can come of looking? After all, the labor inside this room has made me rich!’, and he opened the door.

Inside, he saw at the loom a crane, feverishly plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into silk. Startled at this intrusion, the crane turned from the man, shook the loose feathers from her back, rose through the open window, and disappeared.

The man held one soft feather in his hand as he watched. A single drop of blood dripped to the floor.

2.

Salmacis saw the boy, and she ached for him, the son of Lust. She would have ripped her chest open for him, and let him dine on her heart, if that’s what he wanted. She wanted to rip his chest open and sink her hands in to the wrist. She wanted to pull out his heart and feed it to him, for the joy of watching him bleed and cry. She watched him and her skin rippled for the ache of wanting every inch of him, his eyes and mouth and ass and thighs. But when she came for him he resisted. Though she ran her tongue along the length of him, he resisted more, the son of Pride; and when she wrapped her slim nymph arms and legs around him, he cried. At this she cried out to the gods to give him to her. Her limbs wrapped around his, and she melted into him leg to leg, arm to arm, sex to sex. Violently they both shuddered and long slow orgasm of their entwine began. The boy called out for his mother, but Salmacis covered her mouth with his; soon their tongues tangled into one, and finally, he was quiet.

3.

Once upon a time, I was in bed with a boy. His name is not important. Trust me, I’ve learned this; the more time passes, the less the details matter. I was in a bed, with a boy. I was in love with this boy, in a desperate kind of way.

He never loved me back. I suppose that’s why I was so desperate.

This is one of my favorite memories, simply being in bed with this boy, this one morning. It is the first time I can clearly recall thinking to myself, ‘Do not forget this moment. This will mean something to you, years from now.’

Although he never really loved me, on this morning he pulled me to him and whispered sleepily in my ear, ‘I love you Leah’.

He never really loved me, although he said he did that morning, in my bed. He said my name, and I think that is when I knew to remember this moment.

He never loved me back, although I was desperate for it. Somehow, this doesn’t cheapen my memory. I no longer care that the word ‘love’ was a lie. It is a pretty enough memory that only the sweetness of the moment remains.

Once upon a time.

The creature stops, tilts his head, and breathes deeply the fetid air of his home. There is something there, something coppery and raw, something slippery, something racing like a rat through the maze. Something alive.

It must be time.

He has no way of tracing the minutes and hours of his life, let alone the long, long days. The ceiling above him is black, no sun, no stars, nothing but the timbers and crossbeams of his home. He never knows, beforehand, when the time has come. He no longer knows minutes or hours or days; it is all one, the long black night that he paces beneath, endlessly. He never knows when the time has come, until he smells the air of his home, and it changes. Becomes red and slick – the unmistakable smell of sacrifice.

My last piece – 'On Mirrors and Photographs and Self' – was pure self-indulgence. It was all melancholy and self-loathing. It wasn't even particularly well-written, which bothers me more than anything.

One word haunted me after I wrote 'On Mirrors and Photographs and Self': Narcissus. Narcissism, and the boundless pool of reflection. It got me thinking about my favourite myth, the story of Echo and Narcissus.

***

'Don't fuck with the gods'

Echo was a lovely wisp of a girl, a wood nymph who was a particular favourite of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt. But, like all things beautiful and dangerous, she loved to speak. She knew the awful power of words and tales and stories, and like all things proud, had to have the last word. Once day when Zeus was entertaining three infamously lithe and nimble nymphs, Echo used the power of her words to distract Zeus's wife, the jealous Hera, from his infidelity. When Hera learned of Echo's deception, she doomed her to a life of response only. 'You shall not lose that enchanting voice, nor that silver tongue,' Hera pronounced, 'but you shall never speak first! From this day forth, you will repeat everything you hear.'

'Love will always destroy you'

Narcissus was pure beauty. His blonde curls and delicate cheekbones were the rival of Apollo himself, and he inspired devotion in everyone he met. But Narcissus was cruel; secure in his beauty, he turned away with a wicked smile all those who would court him. We are all stupid in the face of beauty, and Echo fell in love with Narcissus the moment he wandered into her forest. Chasing after him, she longed to cry out, but her curse stopped her voice even as she choked on the words of love.

After days of this, chasing and circling the woods in what had become a delightful game for the cruel boy, Narcissus stopped, turned, and cried out 'Come here!' 'Here!' Echo said. 'Please!' he said. 'Please,' she answered. 'Let us be together!' he said, and wildly she replied, 'Together!', and came forth from the trees, her lovely arms held aloft. But Narcissus, being cruel, drew back, and his delicate lips curled into a snarl. 'Away!' he shouted, and she answered 'Away?' 'I would rather die than you should have me', he said, and Echo replied, softly, 'Have me', and retreated into the woods. Soon she faded away into the shadows of the trees and moss and stones, her bones became wood and her lovely face the subtle whirl of a knotted pine. Only her voice remained, and it can be heard today, still echoing on and on and on.

'The vengeance of water'

Narcissus continued to hurt the wood nymphs with his dangerous beauty, and one day a wailing nymph asked the goddess Diana for help. The goddess heard her lamentation and waited.

Narcissus wandered into the forest further and further, and came across a pool, deep and silver and silent. This pool was known by those who listened to be sacred, but Narcissus did not concern himself with this. He laid himself next to the water, and saw a vision of beauty so pure he had no choice but to stare. The vision before him was so lovely he mistook if for a water-spirit. He fell in love with this vision of himself at once, and spent his days pining for the watery, wavering boy before him. He leaned in to kiss the perfect lips; the vision rippled and disappeared, but as he drew back, it returned, closing in on itself and smiling.

Narcissus spent years by the pool, and he wasted slowly away, and the colour left his apple cheeks, and his lips became cracked and dry, and slowly, slowly, he fell into his final sleep. 'Alas, alas, my love!' he cried out before closing his eyes, and Echo (still there, always there, a voice in the trees) repeated this word, once – 'Love!'

***

Beautiful, isn't it? I love the symmetry of the story, the themes of love and destruction and beauty and vanity that - yes - echo through the tale of Echo and Narcissus. I love how it simultaneously anthropomorphizes a natural phenomenon and deftly, simply, illustrates a psychological disorder. I love how it explains so much, so elegantly, about love. I love that it recognizes the cruelty inherent in beauty. I love it so much that I keep coming back to it - in my dreams, my daydreams, my nightmares, and my fantasies – again and again, echoing down through the years, and I am certain I will be forever, always, staring, reaching and pulling back, from the pool of silver water.

The End

***

For those who are curious, although I wrote the myth above using my own words, I borrowed heavily from 'The Age of Fable' by Thomas Bulfinch. Along with 'The Golden Bough' by James Frazer, this is my favourite book of mythology, and the source of many recurring dreams and nightmares.

I have never felt comfortable in my skin. I've always felt like I was wearing an ill-fitting dress, some strange fabric that slips and bulges and billows in all the wrong places, something I have to tug and adjust every time I move. Something separate from the core of me. I don't like photographs, unless they are carefully staged and my expression is just right. I think I've perfected the expression that works, and you'll recognize it in my self-portraits: eyes looking up (this feels angelic and lovely), head tilted slightly upward (to avoid those horrid extra chins), hair finger-tousled and wind-swept (this seems romantic and dangerous), and shoulders back (thus defining the collarbone, waifish). This feels safe, gives me the illusion of control.

But of course there are the times when I lose this control, and I catch a brief glimpse of myself in an unfamiliar mirror, a car window, the reflection in a shop door. These moments are by definition fleeting, and while they leave me shaken and unsteady, I can stumble onwards. The brief vertigo of being confronted by a reality one has, through years of conditioning, refused to acknowledge is sickening, but it goes away. Those years of conditioning have served me well. But an actual photograph – that destroys me.

Talk about sickening. I look like a monster in candid photographs. Sickening. I wonder how people can even stand to look at me. How do they not turn to stone, how do I not petrify every unfortunate creature who is unlucky enough to meet my stare? I wonder about other people. Do they feel this too, do they see a monster in the mirror?

I wish I could unzip my skin, and strip myself down to flesh and sinew and bone. I wish I could rebuild myself from there, slowly adding shape and curve and colour, adding layers of skin and connective tissue, shaping cheekbones and nose and chin perfectly, until I am a pretty, living doll, the creature I want to be. The girl everyone wants, the girl everyone wants to be, the girl I suspect I might be, the girl who isn't afraid to look in the mirror or smile for the camera.

The girl who doesn't sicken me, who doesn't sicken you.

So it's almost Valentine's Day, and I am feeling more and more alone with every passing day. I'm not feeling the lack of a partner as much as I'm suffering from the lack of affection. Real physical affection, the kind that is only found in relationships. Intimacy. You might think I'm talking about sex exclusively, but I'm not. Sex is easy; sex is affection with a clear end goal, sex is something everyone can have, and everyone can get. We all have the tools of seduction at our disposal.

What I'm missing is the casual language of gesture and touch that exists in a relationship. The lingering tap on the shoulder, the slow lazy swing of hands and fingers that refuse to untwine, the way two bodies fit together in sleep. You become a fraction of the larger whole when you're in a relationship. The dance of your bodies never rests. You are like two planets in motion, circling the sun at a predetermined speed, like a planet and its moon tugging, pulling each other back and forth, an ellipse curling into itself.

Please. Isn't it just too poetic? Isn't it just too fucking precious for words?

Lust and love, they bring out the best and worst in me, sometimes.

What I would give to feel – to even remember, with real clarity – the touch of a person who desires me.

It doesn't matter how ugly I think I am on the outside, how little I suspect I deserve the affection of a man; I need love, and I need comfort, like anyone else.

I have sat in front of my computer for hours looking for a way to end this piece, something pithy, something that justifies my writing this. After staring at the screen waiting for the words to form themselves, I have decided to end with this.

You're not the only one feeling alone, and lonely, and lost, without a comforting touch on Valentine's day. I am alone too. If our fingers touch, briefly, if you happen to brush your hand across my leg or catch a strand of my hair on your lips – know that I feel it too, and my heart snags a bit at the memory of love, and lust sated.

Last night I finally saw 'I'm Not There', Todd Hayne's twisted, surreal, labyrinth of a Bob Dylan biopic. It was like nothing I've ever seen before. I say that with awe – how often does one encounter a piece of art that transcends genre and not only reaches for the sublime, but ensnares it so effortlessly? Well, Dylan did just that every time he wrote a song, so I suppose it's only fitting that a movie about his life would seek to embody that level of artistry.

This isn't a move review, though. You can find plenty of those elsewhere, written by people smarter than myself, people who understand the particular art and technique of movie-making, something I cannot begin to understand, and truth be told, do not especially wish to learn.

This is an appreciation of Bob Dylan, whose music has been with me since I was a child. Along with Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, Dylan's music surrounded me from an early age; from the protest songs of 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan', to the Chelsea hotel confessions of 'Blonde on Blonde', to the surreal circus sound of 'Highway '61 Revisited', and to (my personal favourite), the raw, scraped-to-the-bone pain of 'Blood on the Tracks', Bob has always been with me. This is one of the things that I thank my parents for; they gave me music, early on, and they gave me the best of the '60s and '70s.

There is something about the way Dylan wrote (I say wrote, although he is still writing; I will admit I have not listened to 'Love and Theft' or 'Time out of Mind') that shivers my spine. I have used that phrase before, in 'A Short Note Concerning Art', and I don't mind recycling it here. It is nothing I can define, easily; something about the way the words and voice and guitar combine to create a moment of ecstasy and purity.

And then there is 'Like a Rolling Stone', perhaps his most famous song. I can pull this one apart, sinew by sinew and bone from flesh, because it is the best kind of Art, the kind of Art I love the most. It is layered with meaning, idea upon theme upon allusion, it is at once high art and pop artifact. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that for a song or album to be great it must contain three things; sex, humour, and the sense that everything could fall apart upon a moment. By those standards, 'Like a Rolling Stone' is the greatest song ever written. It rambles, gambols, strolls, and almost topples; and above it all, that voice, singing about the mystery tramp, Napoleon in rags, and Edie Sedgewick stumbling down the sidewalk in kitten heels.

How does it feel? Pretty fucking great, actually.

***

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge.

from 'Tombstone Blues', by Bob Dylan

My attempt to find happiness – or at least cling to the brief moments of bliss that one encounters every day – has proven to be much harder than I had anticipated. I suppose that, after twenty eight years of making a habit of melancholy, I cannot be expected to change with ease. But damn – being happy is not easy.

I have become acutely aware of my every emotion, each turn of the tide and tug of the moon, the way the waves crash and break almost soundlessly and I'm sad again, angry again, seething again. That's the worst part, I think, the anger. I did not realize how angry I am. I catch myself grinding my teeth, every day. If I keep this up and there will be nothing left of me. The seething, the wrath. My muscles will seize for the pain of clenching; my teeth will be ground to powder; my heart will stop beating for the ache of it.

I catch myself feeling the anger, and I tell myself to stop. Most of my anger is directed at the distance – customers at work, people on the bus, commercials and TV shows, magazines, the person ahead of me in line at Starbucks. None of this matters, and when I remind myself of this, the anger falls back, like the tide receding. I know it will surge forward soon, but I have learned the ways of water and waves, and I have learned how to control this, only this.

I am exhausted every day.

But the envy is always with me. This I have tried to escape, but I don't know how, yet. There are moments when it feels like I have nothing, and the world owes me everything, but I will never, ever have anything. It seems like everyone I speak to has the thing I want, although if you ask me to define this thing, it is nothing, it nothing but a nebulous sense of what's owed to me. Although I am owed nothing.

Some mornings while I wait for the bus, I try to list five things that I am grateful for. Some mornings this comes naturally, and I find five things that matter, five things that give my life purpose and truth beyond envy. Some mornings, though, that girl who lives across the street from the bus stop sits with me, and she is beautiful and thin and has an adorable pink phone, and I cannot think for the hot red envy rushing through me.

But this is something I'm working on, something I am striving towards – the letting go of envy. If you've figured out how to do it, let me know. Or don't – after all, it will probably just piss me off that you got there first.