The columns, immense and marble. Nicole talks to me about her favorite source of drama— “then her head smashed against a rock, he was sad about it, plus she was pregnant” so on and so forth. I refresh my red lipstick before bed, in case vampires come to bite me in the night. “Like a movie star,” my temporary non-aunt Angela says. I can’t envision a future beyond where I am—too “emotional” to focus on school, too frustrated to draw clean lines. I’ve begun performing summoning spells, asking Hecate to take me like Jennifer Connely praying to the Goblin King. A knotted piece of metal sits in the dip of my throat, a sigil of protection. Against what? In moments of silence, I find my heart racing for no reason.
We are in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. Some family thing, a chance to mingle with older men I don’t recognize who remark on how I’ve blossomed, pretending they aren’t talking directly to my breasts. The topiary in front of the double doors—balls on thin stems— makes me giddy. It isn’t hard to make me giddy—I want to hug them, so I do, and Angela seems delighted rather than embarrassed.
I don’t remember how we get to anywhere we go, what happens between stops. It’s spring, which fills me with visceral hate covering for sadness—I start to pick at myself more, shield the sun from my eyes, take long baths in the dark. We sit on the balcony of a double-decker bus, Nicole playing with the beaded rings Angela made us buy. “I tell people at school I’m a bat”, she says. She only eats meat—her plates at holiday dinners look eerily like the dog’s bowl.
She comes down the stairs one year dressed in white, looking waifish. We have both just been diagnosed as Bipolar, which is actually BPD (which is actually CPTSD, which, in my case, was again deemed rapid-cycling Bipolar for a time). There are scabs on her lips, and she looks as if she’s having trouble staying awake. In photos we stand near each other—if only to get farther away from everyone else. I have nothing to say when my gut lurches, nobody to point the feeling at—so it melts back into my bones, staining them like toxic residue.
We enter the Hirshhorn museum, which is entirely devoid of corners. Walking through the bent halls feels like being trapped in a roundabout traffic tunnel. Nicole and Angela fade away into the side rooms and before I know it—I’m alone. I take myself down the stairs to the museum’s special exhibit, where a large nude baby-man sits, folding in upon himself.
To the left is the sexiest thing I have ever seen. “Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”, wrote Marilyn Hacker. Her face is bathed in chartreuse light, rendering her black lips violet by comparison. In the upper right corner, a soft shoe is being pulled over the heel. The hand hard at work, the slipper—I spin a tale about Elphaba, Rachel Roth, gearing up for battle. Her hair curls invisibly into the moldavite, alien background. The light that surrounds her seems to encroach from the wall into my 3-dimensional form, pulling me out.
When good things happen to me, my insides inflate uncontrollably like an airbag full of carpet static. I float millimeters above the ground—long, stretched out movements. I don’t hear voices per se—but I feel connected to so many beings beyond my field of vision. They hide in liminal spaces, like doorways. The little people in nooks and crannies let out a low hum, which seeps into my bones.
Then it lets up. When the brightness stops, I feel like I’ve run a mile. Angela appears behind me, asking if I’ve seen the man-baby's dick and offering to shield my eyes. I part ways with Rosenquist’s green, maligned heroine, after securing the camera. She doesn’t quite look the same on photo, of course. Later I will image-search her and find a number of prints that flatten her background into ugly swatches of green and black, eliminating the gentle curl of smoke-hair.
The split-screen becomes less two sides of the same coin and more a misplaced copper rectangle, the heroine’s face flattened into paleness.
I begin to wear the feeling of her slippers, her skin on my hand. Whenever someone talks to me, my response comes in two voices: the chirp of a teenager and the deep, languid voice of someone grown into confidence. We take a final look around the special exhibit. A spare leg juts out from the wall, clothed in business attire. A curious, headless model sits at a writing desk filled with glass wonders—their body thriving in dislocation. Two pairs of breasts looking down the barrel of the painter’s eye, belly buttons mouthing shock. Everybody, every body in its wholeness. I slide my finger against the rough stone wall to simulate the buzz.
We are in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. Some family thing, a chance to mingle with older men I don’t recognize who remark on how I’ve blossomed, pretending they aren’t talking directly to my breasts. The topiary in front of the double doors—balls on thin stems— makes me giddy. It isn’t hard to make me giddy—I want to hug them, so I do, and Angela seems delighted rather than embarrassed.
I don’t remember how we get to anywhere we go, what happens between stops. It’s spring, which fills me with visceral hate covering for sadness—I start to pick at myself more, shield the sun from my eyes, take long baths in the dark. We sit on the balcony of a double-decker bus, Nicole playing with the beaded rings Angela made us buy. “I tell people at school I’m a bat”, she says. She only eats meat—her plates at holiday dinners look eerily like the dog’s bowl.
She comes down the stairs one year dressed in white, looking waifish. We have both just been diagnosed as Bipolar, which is actually BPD (which is actually CPTSD, which, in my case, was again deemed rapid-cycling Bipolar for a time). There are scabs on her lips, and she looks as if she’s having trouble staying awake. In photos we stand near each other—if only to get farther away from everyone else. I have nothing to say when my gut lurches, nobody to point the feeling at—so it melts back into my bones, staining them like toxic residue.
We enter the Hirshhorn museum, which is entirely devoid of corners. Walking through the bent halls feels like being trapped in a roundabout traffic tunnel. Nicole and Angela fade away into the side rooms and before I know it—I’m alone. I take myself down the stairs to the museum’s special exhibit, where a large nude baby-man sits, folding in upon himself.
To the left is the sexiest thing I have ever seen. “Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?”, wrote Marilyn Hacker. Her face is bathed in chartreuse light, rendering her black lips violet by comparison. In the upper right corner, a soft shoe is being pulled over the heel. The hand hard at work, the slipper—I spin a tale about Elphaba, Rachel Roth, gearing up for battle. Her hair curls invisibly into the moldavite, alien background. The light that surrounds her seems to encroach from the wall into my 3-dimensional form, pulling me out.
When good things happen to me, my insides inflate uncontrollably like an airbag full of carpet static. I float millimeters above the ground—long, stretched out movements. I don’t hear voices per se—but I feel connected to so many beings beyond my field of vision. They hide in liminal spaces, like doorways. The little people in nooks and crannies let out a low hum, which seeps into my bones.
Then it lets up. When the brightness stops, I feel like I’ve run a mile. Angela appears behind me, asking if I’ve seen the man-baby's dick and offering to shield my eyes. I part ways with Rosenquist’s green, maligned heroine, after securing the camera. She doesn’t quite look the same on photo, of course. Later I will image-search her and find a number of prints that flatten her background into ugly swatches of green and black, eliminating the gentle curl of smoke-hair.
The split-screen becomes less two sides of the same coin and more a misplaced copper rectangle, the heroine’s face flattened into paleness.
I begin to wear the feeling of her slippers, her skin on my hand. Whenever someone talks to me, my response comes in two voices: the chirp of a teenager and the deep, languid voice of someone grown into confidence. We take a final look around the special exhibit. A spare leg juts out from the wall, clothed in business attire. A curious, headless model sits at a writing desk filled with glass wonders—their body thriving in dislocation. Two pairs of breasts looking down the barrel of the painter’s eye, belly buttons mouthing shock. Everybody, every body in its wholeness. I slide my finger against the rough stone wall to simulate the buzz.