cw: repeatedly draws on experiences of rape; suicidal ideation mentions
To see my NYU-appointed therapist one day, eighteen and freshly twice-raped and passively suicidal, I wore a lavender-and-periwinkle plaid shirt, lavender sneakers, a holographic nail polish called “Virtual Violet.” Tying myself together in a pale purple bow. A gay gift, a weak wine, perfect for me to go and whine, weakly, from my dis-used throat. My sole memory, eight and a half years later, of this therapist, is her noting, “Your nail polish matches your shoes.” How seen I felt, and therefore solidified. No longer the almost-ghost haunting my narrow dorm room, one purple-sneakered foot out the door as I contemplated downing the contents of my Tylenol bottle. My primary understanding of why I was in therapy was to have some—any!—social connection, any excuse besides class to leave my bed. My understanding at that moment, in a sudden tectonic shift, of why I was in therapy: so someone would mention that my nail polish matched my shoes. So I could feel like a Barbie—pink lips, nails, heels—something consistent, coordinated, whole. Something you can hold and say, “Oh all of this belongs together. It is not inevitable that this body before me will fall apart.”
Around this time, I learned the term, “blason,” referring to a form of poetry originating in sixteenth-century France that pieced women apart into their various bodily aspects. A flattering, lyrical dissection, with metaphors as knives. I mis-assumed it as blazon with a z, as blazing, as burning, and all together, these concepts of fire and corporeal disassemblage wormed their way into my brain as my primary paradigm for understanding my own relationship to my body, which often felt on fire, the neuropathy in my muscled legs (which my brain record-skip-stuck on comparing, in poems, alternately to geese or swans) a roaring work of arson. How could I not want to take a gleaming blade of metaphor and saw these two blazing geese free of the rest of me, the rest of me free of them? Swim away into the river, geese; douse those crawling flames. But the best I could do, when my nerves woke and sang—discordant and candle-lit—was run up and down the hallway, trying to burn the burning out. Fighting fire with fire, essentially.
Record-skip-stuck, I thought regularly, I blazon me.
A blazon with a zippy z, really, is a description of a coat of arms. To blazon, verb-wise, is to write this description. In a way, it is the opposite of a blason, as in a poem; it is a summing up of representation, bringing disparate threads together. Zipping an identity into little bundle after bundle, little .zip files on the computer, virtual as violet, rather than violent. But the word originates from the French blason, not as in poem, but as in shield. So working back around, to dissect is to protect. Remove my legs to protect me from the burning. Remove my cunt to protect me from its rape. Remove my arms and hands and how they shake. Remove my neck, around which he wrapped his hand.
Eighteen and twice-raped and passively suicidal and so drunk I’d been vomiting into the gutter not long before, I crouched down to tie my shoe, and a man came to stand over me, and said, “I’m just looking. I’m just looking,” when my best friend and I demanded he move. So I did the most obvious thing I could think of: stood upright and began to splash him with the water from the bottle someone had handed me post-vomit, chasing him down the bar-crowded night-bright Manhattan sidewalk, screaming at him on a roller-coaster loop, “I’m going to cut your neck off!” until he lunged forward, grabbing the lapels of my leather jacket, and I was saved by a bar bouncer yanking him off, and then I disappeared into an IHOP, where I snacked on onion rings and used no knives.
I am going to cut your neck off. Words said in outrage to a strange man; words said in sweet care to myself. I am going to remove the part of you he cradled like his Barbie. Nineteen and just as drunk, heading up the subway steps at three-ish in the morning, my path was cut off by a massive, bald-patched rat. I screamed and ran back down the stairs, only for another rat to appear in my path. All I could do was run in circles, yelling pleadingly, “They’re trying to eat my teeth!” The alcohol-soaked brain has an absolutely sideways understanding of anatomical threat. Necks become separable rather than sandwiched; teeth lose their stoniness, granting a mouthful of marshmallows.
It is drinking that woke the bleeding back up. Three days after he was inside my pink-lace-bandaged body, his hand around my pulsing neck, the blood loss had finally stopped. I needed to wear pads no more. Then I drank a pink-lemonade Smirnoff Ice until I passed out on the filthy couch in my friend’s Pratt dorm building lounge, and when I woke up, blood trickled from me once again, as though a door had been cracked. As though drinking opened a portal into my insides, giving me a fantastical view of how they might be pieced apart but also causing fluids to seep. Everything became more fluid, boundaries and states blurring. I took a selfie in the mirror of the lounge’s bathroom, and later drew a colored-pencil portrait of the moment, the discovery of fresh/familiar blood. Red-lipped, one boob visible with a deep purple shadow, drowning in a slouchy beige cardigan, and in the corner, in pale blue, I wrote the caption, “Leftoverz.” Again the inappropriate z. The implication of a burn, and of an end: to singing, to speaking. This is the very last letter we have. Use it anyway. No need to savor/to be its savior.
The very last words of the flamboyant robot Gigolo Joe in A.I. Artificial Intelligence stick to my guts when I hear them. “I am,” declares Joe, as he’s carted magnetically up into the sky. “I was.” This is his z, his end-note, his swan song; he goes out in a blaze of asserting his real-hood—whether or not he has personhood is irrelevant. He is and was.
On testosterone and not raped for years, I no longer bleed that way (I am filled with the sudden urge toward tact, toward tiptoeing around biological specifics). And now I seek to blason beyond metaphor, to have my breasts separated from my chest at knifepoint. Is it subversive to blason myself if I am no longer a woman? To turn my transmasculine body into simply parts, no tidy .zip files, no coordinating nail polish and shirt and shoes? Or would it be more so were I a boy Barbie, all matching, a plastic whole? Of course, I’ve brought a fallacy into the room, because Barbie’s head can pop off the round nub of her neck. Her heads are interchangeable. Her wholeness is a trick. None of us are all one piece, absent edible teeth, absent sliceable, cradle-able necks. Sing-them-a-lullaby-like-a-horror-movie-murderer necks.
In the Simpsons episode “Bart of Darkness,” Bart thinks that Ned Flanders has murdered his wife, Maude. Potential but ultimately false evidence: the shrill, supposedly feminine scream, interpreted as Maude’s own, “I was” swan song; the head in the fridge that is actually a head of lettuce; how he carries an axe up the steps of his home, ominously murmuring the lyrics to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” As he does so, Lisa, in her coordinating red dress and shoes (and bloody insides), investigates the home, and Bart, watching through his telescope, becomes terrified that Ned will kill Lisa too. Leg weighty with a cast, practically an object separate from him but indelibly attached, he makes his troublesome way over to the house just next door, and along the way, his cast picks up massive debris—trashcan, basketball hoop, lawn hose, a snarling dog. New body parts pile on, as if magnetically attracted like Joe to the sky, but he is undeterred.
The scream, of course, came from the throat of Ned himself, not from his wife. His girlish shrillness reappears in a later episode, when Marge sells the Flanders family a mansion where another family was murdered, and we hear him shriek, raising the blue hairs on the back of Marge’s anxious neck, and it turns out he is simply exclaiming over the mansion’s purple drapes. He says that all his life he’s wanted purple drapes. Who doesn’t long to be draped in purple? Who doesn’t have a voice that does not quite match their outsides? My favorite part of this episode is when the Flanders children re-enact the murder and one of them exclaims happily, “I’m a torso!” Yes, me too, I am. I am a torso with breasts that I am attempting to dislodge. I am two stout, sing-swanny legs. I am my shaking noodle arms, and the neck that he held in his hand. I am a head of lettuce in the fridge. I am a leg in a cast with the name, “Milpool,” scrawled across it distractedly, a chimera-ing of self and desire.
Does that all belong together like Virtual Violets and Payless CitySneaks? Or is it full of dotted, “cut here” lines, and openings from which blood might ooze? Menstruation might have ceased, but my hormonal acne does love to spurt red at the drop of a hat (or, more accurately, scrape of a nail). Can we hold me in one hand as a polished, approved-of product, or do I even want us to be able to? Maybe it’s fine to inevitably fall apart, to be ramshackle, built on stilts over a yawning lake like Aunt Josephine’s house in the third Series of Unfortunate Events book. A wide wash of water to fight the blazing, no fire with fire anymore, and this is a book series full of fire. Comma death by, comma escape by. Bright and tragic and everywhere and fought.
Leftoverz. The word implies a Frankensteinian creation. Like the old, run-down, woods-dwelling robots of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, who come out at night to scavenge for new parts from the bodily odds and ends dumped by a garbage truck of sorts. I could be that. I could love that. I could take the blasoned bits and form from them a final thing. A Final (not) Girl. An improvisational survival, a scream that keeps on going, past the point where there is no lullaby, no cradling, no sharpened blades for knives or axes. A scream scrawling outside of normatively gendered lines, the scream I did not let out when he was inside of me.
I cut off my neck. I present, a fleshy tunnel in my dollish hands, my angered voice to the world, saying, “I was. I am,” and then saying more.