cw: graphic descriptions of gore
At 6:00 A.M., the cry of the common loon sounds from our kitchen bird clock, its high notes entwining faintly and fittingly with Kelly Clarkson belting out “Breakaway” inside my headphones. “Breakaway” is newly the finale of my playlist for tarot’s Death card. When it ends, the playlist loops back around to Miranda Lambert cutting her bangs with some rusty kitchen scissors.
This is the thirteenth morning in a row that I have woken up early to study a tarot card, flipping to the next chapter in Michelle Tea’s Modern Tarot, taking notes in a giant hardbound journal, and then carefully constructing a thematically evocative Spotify compilation. Unlucky baker’s dozen, though what’s ever unlucky about extra eggs for placing in a secondary basket? What’s ever unlucky about such seamless habit-formation, something with which I have always struggled?
The bird clock is activated by light and motion; the loon cries only because I am awake. Courtney Love sings “Violet” only because I am awake, begging the listener to go on, take everything. I first heard this song as a teenager, in a Supernatural fanvid entitled “Women’s Work,” curating a collection of the show’s vividly objectifying violent misogyny, and which I believe meant to imply a larger critique of horror, though a crucial horror element lacking in Supernatural is any final girls, triumphant with blood in their mouths and guts in their hair.
I have been thinking all the time lately of Sarah Connor, in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode in which she has been kidnapped, drugged, and tricked into believing that she is imprisoned in a sleep study facility. Featured: a cigarette-sneaking roommate who burns up in her sleep; a janitor with a coyote tattooed on the back of his neck because his girl thinks it’s sexy; a real coyote in the road at the witching hour, but no, now I have skipped over the most important part.
When she realizes that the world in which she is restrained and sedated in the back of a van is the real world, not a dream, Sarah bites her own wrists open to escape. To slick the handcuffs with blood as she performs Houdini dislocations. In my bedroom hangs a miniature painting of her bloodstained teeth. In my kitchen hangs a clock that sounds the pleated woodpecker’s call at the witching hour.
Earlier this week, I read a tweet in which someone briefly said that they were going to the dentist, and my senses were instantly flooded. I have never feared the dentist like many, can even find the erotics in the situation, if we’re being too honest, and I try to be. Yet one “dentist” mention and all day, I was unable to stop envisioning that my teeth were being yanked out with pliers by a disembodied hand. I felt the high-pressure pop of something coming loose, the resultant slickness of my empty gums. I smelled and tasted a menstrual tang. It was vaguely interesting until it wasn’t, until it was everything. I buried myself beneath a weighted blanket. My boyfriend waved incense over me to cleanse my brain and drive out the overpowering odor of blood.
At one point, my wrists joined my mouth in vulnerability, subject to phantom knives, and I wrapped my hands around them, and belatedly regretted not asking my boyfriend to outfit me in leather cuffs as armor.
My therapist’s response to this story was, “Ooh, that’s spooky!” She wasn’t wrong. Her second response was to inquire about my relationship with horror movies. She wasn’t wrong to ask.
I adore body horror. I cannot handle body horror. Hannibal walked the most uncomfortable line for me, tapping into the parts of me vibrantly terrified of my own meatiness, much the same as Fast Food Nation, which I read in one night at seventeen, rocking back and forth on my bedroom floor and keening, high, a common loon. Yet I seek out with a fervent delight the grotesque penetrabilities of Cronenberg aesthetics, dwell over the eruptive transfiguration in Ginger Snaps as if over beloved scrapbook photos, contemplate often the Nightmare on Elm Street phone that grows Freddy’s unwelcome tongue. I love mutation. I love transformation. I am a transsexual; what do we want from me, here?
Death, Michelle Tea tells me, “deals primarily with change, transitions, and transformations, [though] it is largely the primal fear of death at our core that makes these and so many other endings excruciating for humans.” To transition then, must be to face the primal fear of death and walk on by its shadowy, blood-spurting bulk. To brush up against it, inviting mortal contamination.
And this is, in a way, the explanation I offered up to my therapist of why I no longer deal on the same scale, with the same frequency, with all-consuming intrusive thoughts of being cut open. Why this tooth catastrophe came as such a shock. After my appendectomy at nineteen, I struggled to focus on anything but how the surgeon had knifed into my soft abdomen, how I was not the seamless whole I had hoped. I could be penetrated anywhere, not just the orifices I knew to closely guard.
Then almost a year ago I offered myself, my tits, up for the knife. I begged and worked and paid an obscene amount of money to be opened and scraped clean as a pumpkin becoming something scarier. To be left with thick amethyst scars that will not fade. I looked the concept of gory penetrability in the eye and said, “Please.”
Now, no tits on my body. No tits on the bird clock either, though a white-breasted nuthatch perches at eleven, with slate-and-sea pigeon coloration and a neck bent curiously. In fifteen minutes, the flame-bodied Baltimore oriole will call out to me. Mirah sings through my headphones, “Migration high up / above my head / you know the way / you’ve got some kind of way / it comes so natural / but seasons change.”