A History of My Brief Body

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

For now, you move in and out of my books as though wind in a photograph.

for we can never adequately anticipate how our relation to a love object might shift or morph over time. Love has a tendency to shatter; it is prone to weakening and to running amok without notice. Perhaps, ironically, this is how it anchors us to a world, how it makes us want to give everything to the project of living well with others.

you’ll sense the affection bubbling up inside each word. That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere.

With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.

“Who is it for me to bring all this unfolding into being?”1 Perhaps the philosophical basis for their children’s lives was that they no longer wanted to exhale smoke.

There are cavernous gaps in my memory in which people I love with fortitude today, those without whom being in the world would be a taxing affair, don’t exist, as though my brain has been surgically hampered. Rather than let those gaps swallow me up, I plant flowers of all sorts there.

It matters what I call this now, so I hesitate to call it anything. Perhaps if it were a performance art piece I could call it My Subjectivity

I made myself exist less. I lost more weight, shrunk myself. I ate less and spoke quieter. I deflated everything I could. As such, I internalized the ugliness of colonialism. I pitted the world against myself.

I was non-existent, yet to come, and alive in a hypothetical tomorrow. I wished to assassinate history’s version of me, put him to rest, let him soar into the clouds like a floating lantern.

As a teen, I devoured dystopian and queer novels to put to use the existential deferral that narrative elicits.

Teens don’t read for beauty, but to practice the art of disappearance. Today, I read and write for beauty, and live so as to disappear.

If I’m a writer, it’s because to be queer is to worship loss—and what is a book but a losing game?

we shouldn’t raise boys to become men overcome with animalistic rage. As Simone de Beauvoir might have it, one isn’t born a beast but rather becomes one.

Am I fucked up because I believe beauty is in short supply?

I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun?

I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life.

poetry is the act of “hearing beyond what we are able to hear.”

I dream in English and it is foul play.

How much devastation can a word unleash? How much subtext can I hide under my armpits in a laboratory for excited speech?

Sometimes I live not in an apartment but in a glass cube, as though exhibited in a museum of political depression.

To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world.

A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization. No one will look at me adoringly and because of this I will be freed from the sovereign’s clenched fist.

To be a bad girl is to be alive against the odds, a screeching question. Let me be a bad girl.

Since I can remember, the world hasn’t lasted longer than a single day

I cry about other matters: that so much of being alive in the Americas is about playing dead.

I have to at least marginally play dead to white anger and white sovereignty and white hunger and white forgiveness and white innocence.

Ocean Vuong: “A safe moment is a moment where we are in control of our pleasure, of our own joy.”

Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,

we need to keep watch of our own pleasures.

So many world-shattering things can happen in the schism between an event and our ability to comprehend it. I pitch a tent there. It is years before I relocate, before I’m evicted.

I write about him all the time, even when I’m not writing about him.

“I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life.”

he gives me a cheap-and-dirty response from the bargain bin of capitalist feeling—I love you because you do so much for me.

“That our eyes stopped / believing in what was in front of us / was the closest we got to killing ourselves.”

ruminating on the difficulties of interracial care, how it demanded us to be larger than we were and shrank us all at once.

Maggie Nelson: “And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”

Has anyone ever managed not to mold the body into an archive of their own degradation?

What empowers them to look at us with the fury of history?

From nowhere but the graveyard of history could someone marshal the cruelty of denying someone the solidity of everyday life.

I take on a liberal savior complex. I commit to the idea that my body can be the conduit through which they learn to love their own. I think I owe them my flesh because they find me desirable

What is chronic loneliness if not the desire to exist less and less, to deplete little by little?

I don’t think about sex for weeks without a wave of anxiety overpowering my libido.

When I leave, I kiss him on the lips as though they’re a country to which I have pledged, as though I’ll return. I won’t.

There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it,

sex is one of few social interactions I choose that reminds me of my unending penetrability.

Even your precarious psyche isn’t yours to mother!

But I was an idea in love with an idea— where else was I supposed to shelter this form of love?

iawîyak kanihtâ mihtâtahk = a body made of regret.

Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai defines “stuplimity” as an experience of boredom that is overwhelming, excessive, against calm.

“It’s so quiet before a book begins. / So quiet that when my nervous system hurts, so does the sentence, because that’s all we have: each other. The sentence and I. We cope.”