The Most Excruciating of All
My transition is inconsistent even though I’m hypervigilant. I slide out of my skin for a moment, I need rest. What image of myself do I have control of and what belongs to others? I’m not sure I know anymore, there’s no definitive way for me to know how I am perceived. It makes me vitriolic, so much of me below the dermis where moisturiser can’t reach is eviscerated by contemplation. If I can’t poke and prod my exterior, my innards are strangled by thoughts that lattice around each blood cell until I’m choked out, exhausted. This fugue I’m in I must endure, but at least I feel it looks impressive.
What I mean is that what I bemoan in me also becomes iridescent. I stretch across great expanses with a single breath, liquified and evaporating, transposed across surfaces with the delicacy of a wave crashing into stone. The mist of me, self-prophetic, endearing, magnetic, a devil with biblical aura—drawn from recollections of what others have poeticised of me—I can’t toughen around, so I slacken into absurdity. Boisterous, a source of energy to be syphoned, I resolve into weakening as a way of survival; because, if I am what you want me to be, will you love me no matter what happens?
There’s plenty of times I’ve danced and dawdled and disappeared into this great divide, the image of desire until an anger festers within me alongside inexplicable ecstasy. I eradicate myself and so too with it, I destroy an ever imaginable imagining of us. I’m not sure if this is the tectonic caressing of the androgen with the oestrogen, I’m not sure if it’s a pattern of rebellion. However, I’ve learned to fluctuate. I’ve become so morphic I feel I am the most mutable person I know until I meet myself again and detest myself away from her with tsks and ughs. The most fastidious to endure is the me I think of as unlovable.
I slink into a new pill bottle, breaking each into quarters to suppress the breakable first biological me as endorsement to the second engineered (still breakable) biological me, whilst my skin airs out. I walk over to her and take an oestrogen patch from my pocket and smooth it across her left arm, regarding the reddened and coarse skin, pimply and irritated from all this work. That’s what it is, vindictively tireless. But, I suppose that’s what all monsters are.
I catch a glimpse of where my eyes used to be, of how beautiful these almond voids are. I hardly remember how to make myself fit into them, but as I pull myself together again, my beams find their vantage. The first thing I think is, how much strife are you willing to cause today? Almost always, without deviation, the answer is: the most. It’s subtle, it glitters with diffraction, and is bendable. Not the rarest of material but enough to feel its loss whilst it’s smudged into the palm of your hand. We pause to begin again and time folds over in this petty pace until grief becomes more than occupational; it’s habitual.
I habit you, you habit me; forcibly. I’d do anything for you, but you know nothing and I crave better, but you’re all I’ve got. So, what do we do with one another? Energy regains and I spark to life, the slapstick joke is me and time my enemy. I feel such sincerity in seeing people grow into their beauty, but I feel so opposed by my own sequential destiny. Have you ever diarised your body’s fallibility years in advance? I’m twenty-something now but crude rhetoric says I’m a youth, harmful to my wisdom.
I’m with a friend and she says to me, you’re great but you’re just messed up and I divulge into a universe of perfectionism where she happens to be god. It’s a frenetic type of anxiety that makes you stagnant, each breath laboured, pulled against, where your most simple cravings are impalpably pathetic. Sometimes I think the only rigour I’ve felt is when I’ve hated myself; struck down by an aimlessness, hopelessness, that anyone for a certain amount of time can fill before I shrivel into nothingness. This discipline to change is only alleviated at the sacrifice of my gut’s autonomy to the pharmaceutical man that’s finally approved my access to health; it’s unavoidable and terrifying. I depend on a system to manage me that could refuse synergetic responsibility and leave me to die.
I approve of this at the cost of more loneliness. I have a language already to resist, plea, ruffle and tatter, that falls and stumbles and rises again, but I’m never restored, just more frayed. I look into archives and see lovers of another time with complicated expressions and an oeuvre of nasty that seems effortlessly natural. I suppose sometimes people feel such trepidation around me that instead of saying what they think they suckle at my breast for absolution. I can’t offer anything but selfish withholdings, I’m too afraid of being scathed.
I start to stop again at the hands of a general practice that wants to see me suffer. I’ve lived along the margins, I can’t be responsible anymore to find a centre. One of my greatest fears, having never known inner stability, is that it will never emerge. I might never say core again unless speaking of an apple. Barnacles leech but are harmonious with life, and so I suppose that’s what I’m trying to focus on; being present with how—of my features—I might be for the time being hard to decipher; misconstrued and sharp; something to stay clear of…
I feel faulted without a start and yet I’m moving. I’m no longer transient in my corporeal, I want to be affixed so greatly to something that I provoke refusal. I’ve asked my lovers to, hold tight baby but through a sense of fear that everything will release at some point and move beyond my reach. I’m unable to be rhythmic, leave me be, I’ve ebbed and flowed against all else for decades and now I can’t stand it.
I once wrote about attachment to everything, how I’m universally nothing, but when in confluence, the I and we become something greater. I’ve since smoked those thoughts out, all that’s corrupt. Nothing is nothing and forever, we get it, but right now I need to be something that becomes nothing to regain some sense of devotion. Transcendental like, the absolution of a complete void. It’s not puberty, that’s too sweet a space, like the sacristy full of hypocrisy. I just can’t see myself right now. I can’t deepen the somatic because what is grown is now growing again but away from my current existence and forever just moving beyond, goodbye, see you later.
My skin ripples into a new shape. My flesh broadens at my waist, stretches across my chest to make room for new buds. Have you ever demolished everything you are to become something new again? I’m vigilant, repetitive, a concoction of misunderstandings; I just need some rest because this, all of this, is the most excruciating of all.
Blood spills.
The End.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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Well now I’m depressed