Des Monstres et Prodiges

Scarcely a week ago, I was walking alone in another strange city. Frozen constellations glanced against the Seine, and I knew them all. Of course I did. My tongue had traced their meanings long before my mind took form. Somehow, surely, I named them myself. And so I thought of where I was on that day last year, when every waking hour wrenched fresh sinew from my loss—when a lover, a liar, and a seven-stage suicide made me the thing that I am. I will always recall, with sorrow and some tenderness, how it felt and what it meant to press my aching heart to hers. In evasive keys of longing, sweet crescendos of her nightly scores, she tore rhapsodic silver from my tongue. I knew my own name as I never had before, when it fell burning from her lips like a prayer. I left her in the end, but I was altered and inscribed. Long before those last bitter days, she carved our eulogy into my skin.

Even now, I feel phantasms of that lovely madness. I learned to want it slowly and then I could not stop. God knows if I could have stayed, without corroding the thread of her fingers or the amber edges of her eyes, I would have. At least I would have tried. But she was far-off and fading when I was just starting to burn. She was a lost constellation; I was the still-rising sun.

Now I move softly, all words and wounds and solitude, towards new Stygian shorelines and frost-bitten forms. I knew I would: I always eventually do. I never stay long. But in sweet tendrils of smoke and tangled limbs, if only for an instant, I understand what I am, how I have come to be. In a nameless nexus of fingers and flesh, there is more to me than this slowly dying body. I know that I must still exist—that I am warm and real, solid and slipping, moving around my knuckles and sketching strange patterns of bone. But my yearnings scatter so far beyond cicatrices: they are woven in the nerves and the needs of a living world. Fresh blood dries like a cipher between my thighs. Sensation breaks my solitude as a cry would silence: language-less, meaningless, unrestrained. Now and always, blazing solace crawls between my teeth. It feels like a miracle; I wear it like a vice.

So whatever I need, to communicate or survive, I must find in this body. If I tear it to pieces I will have nothing left. I need to find a world that can make and unmake me: where my decisions, desires, and gods are the right ones.

I think my story was written before I knew what form it would take. Tiresian by nature and Orphean by craft, my language prophesied it all—the starving womb, the feigned crucifixion, the ashen spectacle, the fathomless absence. It is isolating, frightening, mortifying at times, to live like a vein that some blunt knife uncovered. But if I am to live it all, if I am to endure him, her, them, you—then surely, I must endure myself. I do not love what I have become, but I do not deny it either. Etherized, anesthetized, lobotomized, laid bare: even a scalpel could not carve it away. On the periphery of my quickened pulse, I am enervated and fantastically alive. Something beautiful and terrible breathes in me: time and again I have tried to exhale it. But it is rooted too deeply. It is not coming out.

For 21 years, I have kept the refrain. “Mine is the dream of a normal death, not caused by these hands that I use to write, to paint, to play music, to make love.” Having always needed a new beginning, I will never get one. But that does not matter, it cannot matter, because I am here. Less like a lover and more like a knife’s edge, the image of me lingers and scalds, then scars over. A garland of bruises fades on my throat, hard-won health drips like ichor in my veins: ceaselessly I reckon with this sycophantic skin.

Let me put my mind at ease, in these words, if nowhere else. No body, not even my own, can shelter me. A cyanide soul burns on beneath the bare flesh. I love it and loathe it for precisely what it is—prodigious, improbable, monstrous, mine.