![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The skin around my eyes has always looked bruised, since I was very young. "You don't need eyeshadow," my mother would say enthusiastically, "I can see your veins." I was going to junior high dances and it was the eighties -- the shadow I would have worn was blue and purple anyway.
Michael would always tell me I looked sick because of it. I had massive bags under my eyes as well. I bought all the expensive vitamin-k cremes to put on them, and they worked on other people, but never me.
I just got out of the shower and realized none of that is there anymore. I try to hook the circles of my life together: perhaps I learnt the beauty of sadness because I was made looking sad, a long and shadowed face. Perhaps this Anubis business makes so much sense to me because I spent the first third of my life dying by the wrong increments.
By all rights, at my current age, I should be doing everything I can to maintain the status quo of my flesh. And the truth is there are all sorts of things I was once physically capable of that I am no longer. But I think, more and more, it's a matter of practice, that maybe at this age I can do more than I ever could before because I can at least give my body what it needs. I question everything now -- were my tendons always so murderously tight no matter what I did because I could not absorb suppleness? Do I look much younger than I am because my body could no more absorb the poisons I consumed than it could the nutrients? The skin on one of my hands peels off over and over again, will it stop now and pretend it was never revising?
I remember in college, people on my floor first year would mutter under their breath, "you're grey, take a shower" and again it turns out I was ill and not crazy, just dissappearing. It is very strange. Sometimes that's all I can do, say that over and over. It is very strange. Will my sinuses heal themselves next? Will I be able to breathe right? And what about my heart?
When I lived on 8th street, in my early twenties, after Greg moved out and Michael panicked the second or perhaps third time, I made sure, no matter what, that I got laid every three weeks. If it were less than that, I would get scared it would ever happen again I was certain. I'd never been pretty and thought I suddenly was when really I was just learning power and using it poorly.
I bruised easily then; I wonder if that is less true now -- celiacs also have clotting problems -- nothing severe enough to warrant medical intervention (of course), but the sort of thing where nurses drawing blood comment on the spurt, or piercers or tattoo artists worry just a little. "You really bleed," they would always say to me, puzzled. At any rate, it occured to me one day way back then, that I'd been a fool, that I should have taken a polaroid photo of every mark ever left on my body by a lover, and mounted them into great cluttered collages, thick behind plexiglass, 10' by 6' of the marks men had made on my forgettable flesh. I wasn't all that angry, I just knew it would shock, and sell. I knew I was a map; I'd just been lied to, mostly by myself, about what sort.
I feel, sometimes, like I spent the first third of my life in this hiding because I spoke too artfully, too cleverly; it meant what I observed wasn't real, the physical wrongness I sensed, that I documented in the cruelnesses of others was my imagination. It's unpleasant, the degree to which I'm supposed to be generous and forgiving now at all the things that weren't the sort of hate I thought they were.
There is a wonderful story in the back of the current edition of Swordspoint (there are three actually, but two I had read before), called "The Swordsman Whose Name is Not Death" and in it a girl dresses as a boy pretending to be a girl in an attempt to get lessons from Richard (the swordsman of the main novel). Her first ruse, dressing as a boy and buying Richard a drink and asking flat out, fails. Her second ruse, playing damsel in distress, gets her into his house. In the night, Richard and Alec wake up to find the boy who had bought Richard the drink standing over their bed with a sword drawn on them. Richard insists he does not teach, wouldn't know how, but eventually tells Alec not to move, slips from bed naked, and drills the boy over and over. The kid isn't bad, but isn't bad really isn't enough. After the lesson, Alec tends to the boy's wounds, and discovers that no, it truly is a girl, and they argue horribly about ideas of stories and promises and a book called "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death" that Alec insists is a trashy romance all the girls read about fucking and running off with the swordsman hired to kill them. The girl curses him, insists he doesn't know what the book is about at all and departs. Unlike the novel, I identify with no one in its moments (I am required to note, since we are talking about girls dressing as boys), but remain, since reading it yesterday, stunned by the girl, who I imagine as quite young -- because she spooks at the site of her own blood by Richard's hand, but never his nakedness. I couldn't have done that at 14, and truthfully, probably not even at twenty -- swords or no. It took me a long time to learn to look, not just at my lovers, but at people at all.
I know I can seem like a child to a lot of people, because I have financial drama or am not neat or my family is neither ordered nor constraining. But I think the truth of it is merely that the history of my body has allowed me to do nearly everything in the wrong order and that makes me different. And now I feel like I'm supposed to say "forced," but it's not so simple like that.
It's fucked up sometimes, what blessings look like. For the first time in my life I don't feel strange and afraid that I'm dying and no one's told me. When I push myself too hard and everything hurts, I'm not waiting for the punchline. I realize most people never know what they're capable of, but I feel like I've got both license and will now to find out, which is a lot for someone who gets shy even looking at eyes in photos, who was told her heart didn't work like other people's when she was twelve and warned forever after that most of the things she loved doing might hurt her very very badly for it. I don't even seem to faint anymore. And everyone I want to sue is dead. Angry doesn't serve much, and it's not even what I'm best at anymore. As I've been saying, it's all very strange.
Michael would always tell me I looked sick because of it. I had massive bags under my eyes as well. I bought all the expensive vitamin-k cremes to put on them, and they worked on other people, but never me.
I just got out of the shower and realized none of that is there anymore. I try to hook the circles of my life together: perhaps I learnt the beauty of sadness because I was made looking sad, a long and shadowed face. Perhaps this Anubis business makes so much sense to me because I spent the first third of my life dying by the wrong increments.
By all rights, at my current age, I should be doing everything I can to maintain the status quo of my flesh. And the truth is there are all sorts of things I was once physically capable of that I am no longer. But I think, more and more, it's a matter of practice, that maybe at this age I can do more than I ever could before because I can at least give my body what it needs. I question everything now -- were my tendons always so murderously tight no matter what I did because I could not absorb suppleness? Do I look much younger than I am because my body could no more absorb the poisons I consumed than it could the nutrients? The skin on one of my hands peels off over and over again, will it stop now and pretend it was never revising?
I remember in college, people on my floor first year would mutter under their breath, "you're grey, take a shower" and again it turns out I was ill and not crazy, just dissappearing. It is very strange. Sometimes that's all I can do, say that over and over. It is very strange. Will my sinuses heal themselves next? Will I be able to breathe right? And what about my heart?
When I lived on 8th street, in my early twenties, after Greg moved out and Michael panicked the second or perhaps third time, I made sure, no matter what, that I got laid every three weeks. If it were less than that, I would get scared it would ever happen again I was certain. I'd never been pretty and thought I suddenly was when really I was just learning power and using it poorly.
I bruised easily then; I wonder if that is less true now -- celiacs also have clotting problems -- nothing severe enough to warrant medical intervention (of course), but the sort of thing where nurses drawing blood comment on the spurt, or piercers or tattoo artists worry just a little. "You really bleed," they would always say to me, puzzled. At any rate, it occured to me one day way back then, that I'd been a fool, that I should have taken a polaroid photo of every mark ever left on my body by a lover, and mounted them into great cluttered collages, thick behind plexiglass, 10' by 6' of the marks men had made on my forgettable flesh. I wasn't all that angry, I just knew it would shock, and sell. I knew I was a map; I'd just been lied to, mostly by myself, about what sort.
I feel, sometimes, like I spent the first third of my life in this hiding because I spoke too artfully, too cleverly; it meant what I observed wasn't real, the physical wrongness I sensed, that I documented in the cruelnesses of others was my imagination. It's unpleasant, the degree to which I'm supposed to be generous and forgiving now at all the things that weren't the sort of hate I thought they were.
There is a wonderful story in the back of the current edition of Swordspoint (there are three actually, but two I had read before), called "The Swordsman Whose Name is Not Death" and in it a girl dresses as a boy pretending to be a girl in an attempt to get lessons from Richard (the swordsman of the main novel). Her first ruse, dressing as a boy and buying Richard a drink and asking flat out, fails. Her second ruse, playing damsel in distress, gets her into his house. In the night, Richard and Alec wake up to find the boy who had bought Richard the drink standing over their bed with a sword drawn on them. Richard insists he does not teach, wouldn't know how, but eventually tells Alec not to move, slips from bed naked, and drills the boy over and over. The kid isn't bad, but isn't bad really isn't enough. After the lesson, Alec tends to the boy's wounds, and discovers that no, it truly is a girl, and they argue horribly about ideas of stories and promises and a book called "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death" that Alec insists is a trashy romance all the girls read about fucking and running off with the swordsman hired to kill them. The girl curses him, insists he doesn't know what the book is about at all and departs. Unlike the novel, I identify with no one in its moments (I am required to note, since we are talking about girls dressing as boys), but remain, since reading it yesterday, stunned by the girl, who I imagine as quite young -- because she spooks at the site of her own blood by Richard's hand, but never his nakedness. I couldn't have done that at 14, and truthfully, probably not even at twenty -- swords or no. It took me a long time to learn to look, not just at my lovers, but at people at all.
I know I can seem like a child to a lot of people, because I have financial drama or am not neat or my family is neither ordered nor constraining. But I think the truth of it is merely that the history of my body has allowed me to do nearly everything in the wrong order and that makes me different. And now I feel like I'm supposed to say "forced," but it's not so simple like that.
It's fucked up sometimes, what blessings look like. For the first time in my life I don't feel strange and afraid that I'm dying and no one's told me. When I push myself too hard and everything hurts, I'm not waiting for the punchline. I realize most people never know what they're capable of, but I feel like I've got both license and will now to find out, which is a lot for someone who gets shy even looking at eyes in photos, who was told her heart didn't work like other people's when she was twelve and warned forever after that most of the things she loved doing might hurt her very very badly for it. I don't even seem to faint anymore. And everyone I want to sue is dead. Angry doesn't serve much, and it's not even what I'm best at anymore. As I've been saying, it's all very strange.
