Walking Practice

by Dolki Min

Right now, I’m heading there on the subway. You have no idea how relieved I am to be here, sitting pretty. So overjoyed, I could burst into tears. No matter how you couch it, riding the subway feels disgusting: you dangle like ripe fruit from a hanging vine, squeezed in among humans swarming like bees.

The high degree of concentration required to maintain my humanlike form was in tatters; my eyeballs drifted in opposite directions; my arms and legs contorted; and my abdomen swelled up like a balloon.

hand. I don’t remember how I managed to get home after that. It was as if someone had extracted the splinters of memory from inside my head like you would pluck a thorn from your skin.

You. You, dear reader, must be curious about my gender. Perhaps you are even feeling a little anxious. Or you might have scraped together clues from what I’ve said and how I’ve said it, constructing my gender to your own design. Regardless as to whether you are right or wrong, you will have come to your own conclusions.

I also get the impression that it is only after a gender has been assigned that you are seen as human.

You grow anxious when, wherever you may be, you encounter someone who you cannot immediately classify as male or female—or, to put it another way, when the “evidence” for your gender judgment is conflicted. This is because, according to your narrow system of understanding, it is difficult to decide how to interact—for example, what honorific should you use—with someone whose body you simply cannot decipher. You, dear reader, are an old hand at the gender-matching game. No doubt about it! From a tender age you have guessed the gender of countless humans whose bodies are covered by clothes, coming to conclusions based on the gender you believe corresponds to the shape of genitals you believe match up with the remaining exposed parts of their bodies, and you have lived your lives in certainty, believing the result of your deductions to be true. The problem is, however, that you do not acknowledge the mistakes you have made and will continue to make. No one knows that the game itself is a mistake.

What does it mean to be a woman? Among other things, it means that you have to decorate yourself and act like a woman.

My body is a filthy jerk that is constantly keeping its eyes peeled for any chance to betray me.

My body cannot endure more than half a day in human form. It’s impossible to spend a whole day with my lover, even on a day as lovely as this. My body is like a rubber band. As soon as I step foot outside my house, I stretch it taut. But the more time passes, the more my arms grow weak, and because of its elasticity, the rubber band keeps trying to spring back to its original shape. My strength has bottomed out. I can no longer perform my duty as his girlfriend. That is to say, the rubber band has snapped my arm.

It would be better for his mental health if he were dating a cherry tree instead. I can’t have an ordinary romance with him. Being just friends wouldn’t be easy either. To be frank, it’s difficult for me to maintain a relationship with any human. There’s nothing more troublesome than having to keep disappearing and reappearing.

If yesterday, then today; if today, then tomorrow—I want to hear those words. Even if they are empty lies. Sometimes words, regardless of the sincerity with which they are said, can be a source of ecstatic pleasure in and of themselves.

reason. It’s a bit awkward to keep calling this body a “he.” “It” is more suitable, don’t you think, since it’s lost the critical elements that it used to form biological bonds and differentiate itself from other humans? It’s only human in shape.

All I can do is throw myself, heart and soul, into mimesis.

I am a being that always requires f r i e n d l y explanation. If I d o n o t e x p l a i n, no one understands me. Only beings l i k e m y s e l f must p r o v i d e e x p l a n a t i o n . The demanding you; the demanded of me. You are the d e f a u l t l i f e - f o r m . You are the c e n t e r o f the universe. It must be s o 0 O 0 o 0 O 0 o 0 O 0 o nice.

T h e p a s t is a discarded thread of s p i d e r silk. If I am not careful, I could s p e n d m y w h o l e l i f e unknowingly w r a p p e d u p in it. But the more a w a r e I become of the spider silk, the more tightly it will bind me. Then I see a v i s i o n of a spider c h a r g i n g down the thread straight at me. What I have just seen is a h a l l u c i n a t i o n . But y o u h a v e t o k n o w it is a hallucination in order to i d e n t i f y i t as a hallucination. That’s why these visions are often m o r e t e r r i f y i n g than reality.

The house spits me out onto the hardened earth.

Happiness is an incredibly rare and dangerous emotion. I’m someone who can’t bear the fall from happiness to despair. I need a safety net to prepare for it since the higher I climb, the greater my injuries will be when I fall. That’s what’s so frightening. You never know when an iron mace will beat you out of your drunken happiness, casting you into hell. Am I incapable of fully enjoying even the smallest moments of happiness? As soon as I’m happy, I start having ominous thoughts of ruining that happiness.

For them, life is so boring that if someone doesn’t walk with ease, taking steady steps on two healthy legs of the same length, they violently overreact as if they were waiting for it. I think their bar for reactions is pretty low. They can’t wait to ogle a monster. Without monsters, how would they withstand the unrelenting futility of their days?

Of course, she was mostly taking care of herself. I’m nothing more than a plaything stuck between the two sides of her. It’s the same for her. She, too, is stuck between me and myself. We are two interlocking circular saw blades.

I wasn’t raised as a life-form of limited imagination. But truthfully, on my home planet, no one could have imagined that there is something that walks around on two legs swinging its two arms. The idea of it must have been tossed around at some point, but we would be hard pressed to believe that bipedalism was really possible and that there really is a whole group of life-forms out there somewhere living on two legs. On my planet, we have no trouble balancing on four legs, or on three legs with one arm. After getting a leg cut off in an accident, just a few days’ rest will restore their number back to what it was before. While trying to live in this place, it feels like I am forced to amputate a leg and have a transplant surgery to make it into an arm.

If they were the same as me, I couldn’t eat them. And even if they were like me, if I were to believe that I am fundamentally on a different level, I could devour them without a second thought. The moment that belief breaks . . . I have trouble eating, or I throw up. I’m thinking of them: my meals, the humans I owe my life to, the life-forms typically made with two arms and two legs, the beings that are capable of throwing themselves out of windows in order to live.

I’ll be playing the part of a woman in her late twenties. Acting as a woman is far more intricate than acting as a man. Men can walk however they like, but a woman must walk like a woman. “However they like” means walking with their legs splayed and their shoulders shaking. “Like a woman” means turning your knees inward and jiggling your ass.

Those who know, know and execute it with their bodies. They put effort into the execution. They will often fail. They’ll be scared of failure. They’ll give up too. It’s actually hard to tell walking styles apart by gender. Because it’s all in your head. That’s why, when I was first learning to walk like a human, I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out the difference between men and women. In my eyes, all humans looked exactly the same. I thought that things that look alike move alike. To put it a different way, I wondered how it was even possible to divide something with so many visible variants into just two groups.

In the subway, in the street, in restaurants, in shopping malls, in parks . . . their expressions and words that question my humanity irrespective of where I am made me tear myself apart and rebuild myself piece by piece. I’ve invested close to ten years of my time figuring out what exactly their criteria are. My conclusion is that there are no such criteria. So, I just learned h...

Two trends with blurred and fluid boundaries. I’ve picked up how to pretend they can be explained when they are inexplicable. Criteria are like glass. As long as they are respected and held without dropping them, they’ll stay solid and won’t break. I made myself c...

There are dark shadows cast in my house. The world as I perceive it is mostly shrouded in darkness. Do I exist in the same physical space as other people? Can I really seek joy and pleasure together with them? Why does the path become narrower the further I walk down it? Why is every place I go to a cliff?

He’s a real fucking dog. Ah, forgive me. I’ve accidentally lumped dogs in with the likes of him. I would like to give a sincere apology to all the dogs of Earth. I can almost hear their complaints now. Bow wow! Woof woof! Bark as much as you like. Fight back against the humans who have used your good name as a curse.

Can you understand the agony of hating humans so much but shoving that hatred aside to look just like one? The desire to become a member of society always overpowers the shame of being embraced by their system.