LJ Idol, Topic 9: My Scars - Strange Cities

[rm]

I don't scar, not particularly, and mostly that feels less like a blessing or a curse than a sin. I live a life essentially designed to leave marks, that of swords now and whips once, and there is nearly nothing, although the observant might notice a fine divot on me here or there if they got close enough. Chances are, though, they probably wouldn't. I really dislike being touched, at least casually and with unclear or unnecessary agenda.

Part of this is the simple legacy of being an awkward child who preferred not to be presented with cues she might respond to erroneously. Certainly, it isn't a result of childhood sexual abuse (ah, the desire amongst, it seems, nearly everyone for all creative girls to come by their art through damage) or more general mental illness (as a vague acquaintance once started telling everyone when I declined politely to hug her in greeting and departure since I barely knew her). Mostly, it's just how I am.

It is also something I view as a necessarily pragmatic choice, but then I come with an austere and ascetic heart. Yes, I know, I went to Australia because Baz Luhrmann was once a whore and so was I, but that was that story and this is this.

The problem, of course, is that I like being touched, and I waver to it easily; I was proud of it, only briefly, in my early twenties. Then it became inconvenient. Now it is just something I navigate like celiac disease or strange cities.

Kiss a girl like that, I've said to more than one lover who took my face in his hands like a goblet, and she might think you're in love with her. They took me as young and fishing, but I was just warning about languages I understood and they, apparently, did not.

Above all things, I am a physical person. I tell stories far more with the cant of my face, the jut of my chin and the sorrow of my slightly down-turned eyes than I ever will with words. I am grace and loss. And when I choose to sit on the floor, I skim one leg along behind me, crossing it under the front to sit in a single motion that folds me into a triangle, well designed for peering up curiously and looking away thoughtfully. It is in my mind as if I speak a formal pantomime language of some lost court that never existed.

In a life of this, I have learned things not the hard way, but often the foolish way. I have discovered I do better in the world if I can contrive to spend five minutes a day on my knees whether that be in the churches of faiths I don't share or in the guise of stretching my back in the salle. I wonder sometimes, if this is true of most people, and if they are as uncomfortable about it as I am; I wonder if this is what has made God so rampant and angry and dishonestly eroticized a thing in our culture; I wonder if it means most people are sheep and most leaders tired, or if there is merely some part of me that must always be reminded of subjugation to remember that in truth I have no taste for it.

What I do know is that I've rarely done things by half, and I always want to demand others share in my narrative or aesthetic when I'm busy being completist. My life in the fetish scene was no different -- I had to be good, thorough, and exceptional as surely as I had to be grace and sorrow. But mostly, I did outrageous things largely in place of beautiful things, which were hard to come by with tops parroting scripts about my being a stupid little whore -- I've never been stupid and certainly, I was never little in the way they wished. I spent a long time hiding from the knowledge that the world I wanted to be sharp and clever was largely merely crass.

Which is why I spent the better part of a year running around New York City clubs performing with what could have been a fetish circus had someone let me put the brains to their ego instead of presuming that my class origins and proclivities meant I knew nothing at all, and it's why, in the course of that, I let a woman involved with all of it single-tail me in the midst of a club -- three parallel stripes of literally blinding pain down the middle of my back. They scarred like burns and lasted six months.

I wore them, and a nearly backless black cocktail dress, to my ten year high school reunion, and even people who didn't know what they were, knew what they were, and what I remember about that night -- other than chite sitting on my lap and us flirting with a guy I had barely known in high school, chatting with Meg, and the same people from back then who were always vaguely appalled by me looking self-righteous about their finally having been correct -- what I remember is the way people looked at me, like I was fire and I was awe. As if I was powerful and fearless.

And maybe I was.

And maybe it was the first time.

I miss nothing about that life. I am embarrassed by much of it, particularly moments where I devalued myself or lacked honor or discretion. But sometimes I miss those scars, all the scars, really, that I never had, even if I always walk now still as if my back is bare.

People who have known me a long time say I am different now. That I move a certain way because I fight, that I am strong or healthy. And it is easy to suppose that all of that is because of what I've left behind. But the truth, of course, is that it's because of what I took with me and the marks my flesh still carries in memory of itself, no matter how much my knees have always wanted to rebel in churches and dance studios, against wood and leather in my silent language of graces and sorrows.

Comments

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

You've always written well. I read this, and I went back and read old entries from a long time ago in another journal. You grow ever more multifaceted and wondrous.

[rm.livejournal.com]

God, I am _so_ embarrassed by some of that. I was very young then. But thank you.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you wrote this.

[rm.livejournal.com]

In a "this was good for you" way, a "this is the sort of thing that needs to be said" way or a "this was the one I wanted to read" way?

Thank you.

[lilmissmagic71.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly the best I've read of you so far, dear one. Seriously well-written, which is not unexpected... I will say that you pegged the word 'grace'... I see grace and style in your writing...

Excellent post...

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Grace is a word that really interests me. I think we think of it as having multiple meanings -- a way of moving, a spiritual state, an act of thanks -- but to me those are all the same.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Three paragraphs in, "I dislike being touched"?

Nice.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's not a typo at least. I talk about how I dislike being touched and switch to talking about how I like being touched, which is why I hate strangers touching me.

And thank you!

[graene.livejournal.com]

Kiss a girl like that, I've said to more than one lover who took my face in his hands like a goblet, and she might think you're in love with her.

So damn true, and if I didn't think more hormonal teens would abuse it than not, I would say we should include that in sex ed courses, to save many hearts from pain.

Beautiful, as always.

[kill.livejournal.com]

I loved this part too. I've only ever had one man do that to me, and it did exactly that. Even my current lover doesn't do that, and it's my favorite way to be kissed, so much so that I worry because he doesn't do it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The world as run by you would be a very interesting place.

Thank you.

[supremegoddess1.livejournal.com]

very well-written. would you mind if i cross posted it to readers_list?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

And go ahead, it's fine.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

The simple legacy of being an awkward child who preferred not to be presented with cues she might respond to erroneously.

How I understand that feeling.

As ever, it's beautifully written, and well.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

You'd think it would be more common. It's something I almost never hear people speak about.

[j-v-lynch.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of the physical language that no one else speaks. Fencing can be like that, especially when you are fencing someone new.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so, or just fencing someone who you automatically grok on some way that isn't intellectual (or for that matter, someone you totally don't grok -- it's really interesting to me, the way fighting can have chemistry).

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

This is a beautifully intense breath-taking thought-inspiring post.

Thank you for writing it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It always seems weird to return to previous themes, as it were.

[don-negro.livejournal.com]

Kiss a girl like that, I've said to more than one lover who took my face in his hands like a goblet, and she might think you're in love with her.

Have I read that in another one of your posts, or is my deja vu fucking with me again?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I may have mentioned it before. I know I used it as a line in a piece of fanfiction that I sort of have to assume you haven't read.

[chite.livejournal.com]

This was an amazing entry, maybe the best you've written so far. The language is so lyrical, I'd have loved to hear you read it out loud.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I really do always design these things around sound -- the trick is getting it to translate, and I never ever know if it does, so this is good to hear.

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

And when I choose to sit on the floor....

So many times I've had that supple, mysterious grace in my head. Unfortunately, it doesn't often make it out of my head to the rest of me!

But seriously, your own grace, mental and physical, shine through this like a pearlescent laser -- I'm lacking a better way to describe how I see it. Again, amazingly done.

For the record...

[citruscommando.livejournal.com]

I never saw the marks on your back. Not that I wouldn't have noticed, but it happened that you didn't have your back to me during the evening. I imagine that it was probably intentional, or at the very least instinctual.

[anamacha.livejournal.com]

nicely done. thanks for sharing, as always.

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

...against wood and leather in my silent language of graces and sorrows.

What a lovely, poetic line.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[elva-undine.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of so many reasons I wish my high school reunion would happen. Loved it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, thank you! I have to confess that I had a lot of fun that night, and few of them were as vengeful as this post perhaps make it sound. I'm actually looking forward to my next one, but it's a couple of years off (20th! cripes!)

[sircaliban.livejournal.com]

Kiss a girl like that, I've said to more than one lover who took my face in his hands like a goblet, and she might think you're in love with her.

I wish I had known that piece of wisdom when I was a teenager.

[apocalypticbob.livejournal.com]

Kiss a girl like that, I've said to more than one lover who took my face in his hands like a goblet, and she might think you're in love with her.

My love is the first man to have ever done this to me, and I was the first girl he ever kissed. You've described it perfectly...as if he wanted to drink from my lips. Intoxicating.

Well written. Beautiful.