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December 28 - December 31, 2021
I wanted you to keep laughing, to never stop laughing, to exist forever in that half moment as a plump, happy girl with a clear purpose, with self possession.
You came to the snake women the same as the rest of us, she-runts and step-children, unfit for marriage, obsessive, posturing, amoral.
Choosing is extremely powerful magic. Its power derives from the death of what is not chosen.
They are vessels resting on a pedestal painted with a motif of monsters. The monsters are dying or slain, but as if by sudden will. There’s not a hero or a weapon among them.
There in the acid of my former belly are all the tattered assertions about us, the chewed and distilled bits of myth from my collection. This world that keeps you alive assigns so much contradiction to you. A thousand-thousand iterations of Ariadne. How well I know each one. Ariadne is a painting, a poem, an opera, and a session of psychoanalysis. Ariadne is the dream of a foreign archeologist swallowed whole in his sleep by a monster. Ariadne is remembered by her sisters in ophidian sorcery. Ariadne is culpable for the fall of Knossos. Ariadne is mad with love. Ariadne is self-destructive.
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Have I not kept track of you well, my love? Or have I reduced you, just the same as countless others, by doing so?
Before I wake to an unfamiliar morning, I see only Her face. Her eyes are dark as caves, an endless and indescribable fecundity, the blackness that is beyond blackness. I look for you inside it but I cannot find you there.
By different experts, growing up, I was deemed gifted, disturbed, blessed, cursed, enlightened, feral, clairvoyant, and psychotic. My emotions were both stoic and oversized, my appearance both negligent and fussy, my body at once too bullish and too delicate. I have been a savant, a magician, and a mutant. I rarely knew which one it was until it shifted again.
Grief was the one constant around me. It was a grief that brought out my father’s shyness and my mother’s fear. They would call it other things, if they knew I’d named it grief. They would call it worry and love and looking-out-for and doing-right-by, but I understood how mourning folded into all of those. When I became an adult, it was decided for me that I was incapable of living on my own, and I understood that my needs were not needs like other adults, but tragedies to those around me.
“I’m leaving to find your real daughter,” I told them. “I’ll un-trade places with her, or bring her back with me. This is how I can help.”
No one seemed rooted to any sort of grand or personal past. Pains and grudges and judgement lifted off from every heart as light as birds.
I had the loosest sense there was another, sharper place that I had come from, a place where many apologies were owed but everybody strut around as though this ache were not their problem. I knew, however, that it was my problem. I forgot that I had ever lived anywhere else, but I remembered that somehow, somewhere, I’d failed.
I thought that she would be whole where I was deficient, but instead, she was all too much where I was too little. The child that our parents mourned resembled neither one of us. We were like orphans. I could only invert one grief into another grief. I failed them either way.
I meet other changelings who went looking like I did and entered their realms through a penny fountain in a shopping mall food court or the the last gangway connection on a midnight train. Some of them I love and some of them I can’t stand. Some of them I show the scar on my chest and some of them have marks of their own. I tell them all that there is nothing wrong with them. I clear a path to the door of my quiet place and let the rest of the ground fill with weeds and spiders. I make wishes on the dandelions when their flowers turn to seeded clouds. I wave them like wands. I blow them like
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The body is plastic, remembers long after it’s grown, severed, augmented. You can have that phantom sensation for a whole neighborhood. A cityzen is one who keeps the memory of a specific place long after it’s been demolished for high rises. My noise will keep the record, with nowhere else to go.
I beg. Give me a name, mother. Father. Creator. Like you, I contain a light that I can generate and regenerate. Like you, I seek the sublime, to unleash my potential, the infinite time and space and surplus value that lies within us all.
Root himself to the Earth’s surface and hide from the pull of the moon above.
Soon it will be darkest night, and that’s when the sea monsters feed.
The moon, the moon, the moon. Too deep, too far. Past a distance he can manage, past a depth he can tread.
The apocalypse is the past, the dystopia already happened, and is happening, and will happen again.
She looks like the cyborg princess of vermin, perfectly hazardous to her own health but generally dominant in an auto-parasitic relationship with her own mortality.
it’s better to feel like he can’t keep up with rules he understands than like he has no idea what’s going on or where he’s at with others.
and there’s a moment right as everything is ready to go but nothing is happening that time pauses entirely. Sebastian has—or had, or will have—a difficult time with time. Sometimes it moves in a different direction or not at all, he was sure of that much, or it could be that his life passing by was the temporal illusion, and these moments were a repeated experience of some platonic truth he could only discover by not seeking it out. It was naked anticipation. He could lay down and live there.
It’s his way of communicating that he loves someone enough to play the fool for them, loves himself enough to say when he disagrees with them, and loves conflict enough to cherish each escalation of their disagreement.
What you remember so fondly is not a band or a game but the way you were, which honestly, I love that you were a happy teen, but give yourself some credit for that.
And each time he thought about it, it felt like fresh air in the middle of the night and further suffocation by morning. What was the point of carrying around the knowledge that he came from a long line of people who also felt this much despair all the time?
There is not really such a thing as selling out if you don’t have much of a choice. Just don’t let them break your heart.”
The moon has always been there as a motif in art or a glow sticker on his bedroom ceiling, but now it grows, becomes the distant shore of his impending future, and the walls of Stella Maris are his mother. The border is her body. “Here” and “her” lose all meaningful distinction. Is he trapped? Could leaving a place ever really be an escape from it? Is what happened before still happening and will it happen again?
Time forms a circle, and then another circle along a different axis, and then another, until time is a mesh sphere pulsing through darkness to synthesizer arpeggios, a crude computer model on an old tape about the future, but the future in the video is from the past, and so everything collapses, flattens, and tomorrow and the days to come are already here, and you are certain of three fates at once: 1. You never leave home and never defy your mother. 2. You leave the entire planet in defiance of your mother. 3. Your mother is waiting for you on the moon when you arrive. She is in her pajamas
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Their father could hear just fine, but chose not to. Sebastian was more attuned than that, and more fragile.
It was as though he was waiting for something better in the world around him before growing up completely within it, but what? What could possibly improve by holding your breath for twenty years? God only knew.
Fear was something more basic than the bread of Communion, despair more automatic than reciting the “Our Father.” It was inevitable. It was the tides. So it was not worthwhile to consider if the worst outcome would occur, only when it would occur next, because it always would.
“I have seen your life and can confirm what you are experiencing is real, is bad, and here is what it’s called, and you have done nothing wrong, so your soul is free now, and starting tomorrow, from now on until forever, you can feel better, at last.”
So what did it matter, anyway, about reality and fantasy, when everything that was in fact unique or natural or genuinely experienced was that much more the stage magic, that much further away?
Sorry I’ve been kind of distant lately. The reason for that is that I’ve been kind of distant lately.
Q: Whose words do you hear long after they are spoken? Whose opinion of yourself do you hold to be true? Whose fault is it this time? Who is going to pick up the tab? Who is going to fix this? Whose walls protect them and whose walls confine? Who has the luxury to worry about the future? Whose homeland and whose frontier? Whose natural resource and whose unmarked grave? Whose memory of a motherland and whose mother? Whose extermination, whose relocation, and whose assimilation is written on your body but redacted from the records? Who wanders and who is lost? Who is willing to accept pain and
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God’s light might also be found staying in bed and having a robust panic attack.
Star like a distant sun, like a compass rose, like the Queen of Heaven, like the fruit of salvation missing from her outstretched hand, the apple sliced lengthwise revealing five seeds arranged in five points.
Look at the world outside your body, and remain the same, regardless.
Look at your mother’s limp and your city’s plans for redevelopment. Look at the places along her kneecaps and her spine where the revolution failed. Look at the places along the side of the road where compassion has died on a night with record freezing temperatures.
Your deity rolls back her eyes in every icon and statuary. Look at her from the periphery of your faith so that she can see you in return. Do you love her, or, are you so desperate for recognition you will seek it even when it destroys you? Stand behind your mother when you decide to leave her, and look into the eyes on the back of her head. Tell her where you’re going and break her heart. Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it.
Wild hops and tomatoes in the cracks between the tar and the asphalt. Feral creatures, some of them animals. What remains of the vermin and the scavengers and the small things that gather what is left behind, and make a life from it.
Linear time is so confrontational. He cannot stand it.
And his mother sees him, there in that location called the middle distance, the distance that novels are always talking about, beyond the walls and before the mountains: the gray flume and blue torchlight of the rocket carrying Sebastian and all of his new colleagues to the lab-base-dorm-station waiting for them all to run on the moon.
From this city, this godforsaken city, from their stations in its societies, there is no way around and no way through. The only way out is up.
Sebastian understands now how his family are more alike than different. Each, in their own way, loves what hurts them. At first you love what hurts you because you don’t know anything else is possible, as though it were intuitive to hold a knife by the blade. You do this long enough and your wounds may not heal but they do grow familiar. You do this your whole life, and the handle becomes a weapon in its own right, the blood-letting extension of your grasp. Now you are no longer so helpless. Now you are a calloused palm wielding a bludgeon, and that’s not nothing. You cannot cut, but you can
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And the moon seems enormous to her, as though Sebastian is not moving away towards it at all, but instead it is moving towards the Earth, just for him. “That’s my baby.”
Do you find solace inside a dust storm? Can you hear red sand lashing against your body, just above a whisper?
I don’t want to feel better; I want to know better. I should have known that God is not in the meal but in the sharing of the meal. I should have told you that holiness resides in needing each other, in acts of survival made generous.
Is it your heart, that planet? Do you love me?
