to be honest / may 26

 

To be honest with you,

I’ve dealt with the heat only now that It Has Passed. The warmth is back, wearing the fur of summer. The 30 degrees and lying on the floor is back. It’s making me stop moving to stop sweating and I hate it. It’s making the spots that have grown on my fingers return, and breathe, and bait me into popping them. I never do. I’m being honest with you. I was a teenager once, though many have commented that I have the looks of something that nursed herself from a breast of salt and tar at the exact age of 30. I’m being honest with you. The spots are my sign for honesty. The symbol tells me the skin has been poisoned. My body will develop its own anti-toxin. My body will not tell me what it needs, but the spots will itch. The devil’s in the nails, in the desire, in the want and never the need. 

It’s been the month of the wolf, if there’s ever been one. I’ve been trying to figure out what that means. Then, sitting in my office, preparing for the new term, the heat came. The spots returned. Small pockets of pus on my fingers, man. See, if I were born of salt and tar, as many of my enemies, past lovers, nemesis’, rivals and antagonisers have claimed, I think this bodily spite would be solvable, or even negotiable. They’ve summoned themselves anyway, without much regard for me, my own wants or priorities or whatever. My body inhabits the tenacity of the wolf, the symbol  that’s been developed in our mind whenever we begin to anthropomorphise our relationship to the animal. The wolf is the leader, but isolated. The wolf is spiritual, and thereby mystical. The wolf, to be honest with you, is another animal. It lives and breathes and fears and dies. If the wolf is another animal, then I’m just wearing the skin. 

I want to briefly unpick some of the binaries around this animal. I want to do this because the animal has made its way to my skin, and I love it, but I do not think of it as an animal, as a wolf. I think of myself as a composition of unrealistic collections or images. I am parts, glued, sellotaped, fucked and stuck together to form the symbol of myself. This is not spiritual deconstruction or ego death. This is the heat. This is the question raised by the spots. I want to know what the skin is. I want to know what the wolf is. I want to confirm what the wolf isn’t. 

    So, we look between binaries, pillars of ego intending to reflect something about the self.  There’s a need for the man of twenty-twenty-six to be the big fucker, The Guy With The Hairiest Cock, pop-science's strongest solider. Your weakness is artificial, your pain is process, your body is your weapon. This is the wolf spawned and spurned by algorithmic injections, what Pyncheon’d call tubal dosing or something. This guy thinks it’s the man’s role to be the wolf, to be the alpha. To be six-something and built like a walking vein. This guy is gripping, with duplex iron in his knuckles, the collar of the Premier Inn employee. I am the wolf, he shouts, I am the man. You must obey me. I lead the pack. I chew my zyns. Stop the scrotes. I rely upon a wide collection of nation-states to maintain a perfect hairline, set of teeth, and tan. Far right political parties have funded my podcast. I don’t care what you cook for me, what matters is that it’s air fried, pre-processed, fucked to the gums with protein. I graft. I work. My work is my sex. My work is my body. My work is photorealistic and hot to the touch. 

This fella falls asleep to the sound of a bald, retired American who tells him how to think regarding financial and interpersonal quorums. The speaker does not need the listener, but the listener can now only dream in the shape of LinkedIn posts, or to the taste of crude oil. The wolf, in the symbolic dynasty of manhood, is the unnatural production of manhood that makes me quiver in my wee breaking boots that I’m going to get clobbered. Sparked out. Called a queer and killed. He is a wolf because he believes he must be one. He is not natural. Neither am I. Our injections are weekly, both of us are driven by hormones, selected and taken as we have been told. I have tried to work out. I have tried to be attractive to him. We are separated by so much more than this small clerical issue of how we see the wolf as a symbol. He reminds me, snarling with his guys at the pub outside the bus stop, that I never wanted to be a man. This is not a path I am due to follow, either. Like his reading and reposting of the wolf, I make the call for myself. That’s what real freaks like me do, right?

As the spots begin to surface in the extra-frustrating space between my fingers, in the vacuum where friction should be, there’s the need to know the other side. Neither of these binaries are innately insidious, nor are there more than symbols I have subscribed to identifying on the world around me. That being said, I’m not a fan, and neither are you, right? Maybe it’s because of the structural framing or how the binary has been presented as a necessity of understanding rather than a consequence of gender identity being punched into us until we’re dizzy with it. Listen, guy, the only poison here is the heatwave. The only binary I subscribe to is my left fist and right fist. These are not divine symbols. These are where the spots are. 

The divine symbols belongs to a feminine idea of the wolf that I am excluded from, or cannot wholly know. When I was eighteen, I was a part of a circle-ritual about roots, about understanding oneself. I needed to have that grounding, I was eighteen. I was the youngest there, and the only woman with a penis. I participated. I drew up the images the leader asked, as she sounded the drum, as she called us to the circle, to the power of the divine feminine. The wolf, in this context, adopts a colonised spiritualism from aboriginal Canadian and native American folklore. The image of the wolf in history is wide-ranging, but the thealogic, imagistic embodiment about connectivity through biological or sexual mythology will never let me stand in your circle. Fuck it, dude, you guys don’t seem all that jazzed about women like me anyway, so let’s leave it be. I’ll find somewhere else to kick rocks. I’m sorry I thought I would be welcome at this all inclusive rock-kicking event.

 The divine feminine, and her totalising ideas of the wolf as they relate to her, her period and her mothering, is a wolf I cannot be. The relativism shifts from recognising what I wish to never become, and into a duopoly of what I cannot be known to. The transsexual wolf seeks to understand her own definition. There are blood in my gums and spots on my hands. There are drawings of me on inaccessible, and irretrievable cave walls. There are so many needles in the rooms I call comfortable. Plastic containers separate me from the wolf, from the real symbol, from the actualised self that I think My Skin is telling me to become. If there is blood between my teeth, then I’ll protest innocence. I won’t be allowed to know how it got there, or for how long I’ve sought to feel something beyond just my hands, my skin, my comfort. 

This month has left me with a feeling that these symbols, signs and signifiers will be burnt up. I’ve learned that these frameworks, or ideas we inhabit through our language, is made of skin, and can burn, and will peel, and will die, and will grow over, and will heal, or at least try to. Maybe, says the girl with the wolf tattoo and nose ring, the language we have grown up in is our self-inflicted wound. It has bound us to these bodies we sweat and scratch. Maybe, says the grown woman at the mercy of her notes, speeding downhill without a helmet, these signs and signifiers mean what we ascribe them to mean from within our own language. The wound tells us what to do. The ache reminds us how to care for it, when to change the bandages. I burn my fingertips with hand sanitizer. The spots run the sides of my fingers, and over the creases of my knuckles. I’ve skimmed Wikipedia articles and called it research. I’m being honest with you. In the month of May, all honesty leads to Rome, or in the case of this body, to a collection of rashes, spots and patches across in my hands. I spend a great deal of time trying to figure out where these things have come from. I struggle to accept that the answer is as dull as ‘within my own skin’.

It’s my blog. I get the total freedom to be as relentingly pretentious as I like. Heaven forbid a woman tries to find her own voice. What are you going to do about it? Call the textual authority police? Like some sort of literary fascist? Ohhh boo hoo i don’t like it when a writer backs themselves but let me tell you about how everybody should read this book from tiktok where the boy and the girl kiss but also there’s a whole magic thing too or something. I don’t care, and I do very much care. If you have a genuine issue with my cadence or voice, I’d ask you, sincerely and kindly, to smoke a cigarette and put it out on the inside of your thigh. If that doesn’t make you get off your wee phone, just Do Something Other than make me the outlet of your weird relationship to my weird relationship to signs and symbols

    The wolf is the wolf is the wolf and I do not know her. The woman is the woman is the woman is the woman and here she is, representing herself through a speckled mirror. Do you see what I see? Is this the total image? 

    I’m in my own head. I’m not apologising, nor am I editing. The wheel turns. The bike breaks. This is just the speaker in the church, before the long walk to the graveyard. The sound system will play a version of Deacon Blues about being a winner. You’re walking that way now in the warm arms of your Grandfather. Only one wheel can turn now. The other is stuck in the axels, or the inner tyre, or the metal frame, or the forgiving breaks. It is not broken. Nothing is irreparable. But you see the open grave, and the sun shrouds itself behind unthreatening clouds. The wolves will howl. You will know their song. You bought the second album, but you forget all the lyrics, except those which have changed you. There’s no rhyme nor reason for your grief. Your body tells you to cry, so you follow its command. You know the signs, you know the symbols, even if you don’t like the language.

To be honest with you,

I thought I could get ahead of writing this without needing to worry too much about the end of the day. I was looking forward to football, the kickabout showing up in my dreams to taunt me, to tell me I’ve come too late. I’ve been looking forward to the future, but the future’s in need of change, the future doesn’t work the way I need it to. The back wheel gave out after I rolled my ankle at football. My body and the frame become these simultaneous injuries, a needless inquest into my structure, standing, wellbeing, body. I’m in pain. The bike I bought back in September frees itself of the fragmented barrier between carrying on and walking off. Despite how much I’d love the transmutable body, I can’t buy a new ankle.

I spent two and a half hours on the doorstep of a guy I met last week. I thank him for his generosity. I darken my hands with dried grease and WD40. I try to sit, and reroll my ankle again. I try to detach the back wheel. She won’t give. I switch tools. I switch strategy. Somewhere behind me, a fella is undergoing the first and most beautiful metal ritual. I hear a commentary on the needle as I use pliers to shift the bolt. Nothing gives. I unpeel the wheel. The surgery isn’t pretty, and the sun sets. I can see the bridge from here. I give myself another half hour. They light it up like it’s Christmas. I’m sweating, if only for the fear of getting home safe. There’s an untangling, a pressurising, hoping, a need for much greater dexterity, a loss of air, another go with shaking hands. This will do. This will hold. Please god, just for a while.

 I knew this was coming. I’ve known this is how you’re going to go out since I got you for a good deal last year. Thanks for that, by the way. But 10 months later, by the time I get through to the city centre, it tells me in no uncertain terms, hey, i love you, and I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry. I love you

And I walk her home. And I try my best. And I forgive her. She groans. She’s made of metal and I’m as alone as I’ll ever be walking somewhere between the city and home on a long, dark path. It’s flat, and I’m low on sugar, and she’s doing her best. 

It takes a day to recover from the journey home. I’m brought to an underworld for dead machinery. The back wheel slips out of place, and as I commentate to my virgilian companion, there’s no way to do this. I hold you with both hands. I try to hold you over my shoulder. I lift the back wheel with my fingertips. I let the callouses come. I will wear the rust if I need to. My body will recover. The horse has brought me to water. Let me walk her back to her stable, just for the warmth, just for the night. Rest is a privilege. I know that, and so does she. It’d been a long, wet winter, and neither of us had come out of it looking particularly fresh faced. The rust and the mud are indifferent to each other. 

  I gave the bike a day at home, and let it spend the night outside. There was a full moon last night. I put it on its back, and let it turn upwards, beneath the fairy lights, it’s dull wheel resting on the frame. I want to try, but my body hurts in new, changing angles. 

It turns into our last evening together. The bike takes the air in, but she can’t hold it forever, and lets it go again, back to the night, back beneath the moon. I won’t put her back into the shed now. You’ve brought me so far. I didn’t know if I would see you so far into the future, that you could bring me this great distance. I don’t have the numbers, nor do I care for them. You’re on your back and you’re trying to find the stars around the night. The frame weighs it down, but for the first time in my hands, you feel the air move through you. Your body is not your failing. You can’t help the fact you break or that you cry. I want to ask you the questions of where you’d been, of where’d you want to go. Where did you like the most of all the places we went together? How’d you find it? I’m sorry that the road was chewed and I'm sorry that I thought a friction drive could work. I’m sorry that the tools I had to repair you were cheap and made of plastic. I’m sorry that my laces slipped into your chains. I want to apologise because I've passed you on now. The life you let me have is over, or ending, and I’m never going to see you again. 

 I really loved you. You were made of metal. You were rusted and fraught. How could I not love you? Your life had taken an impossible odyssey to end up here. You were a make and model from the seventies and eighties, continental and revered. Every repairman spoke about you with a tentative admiration. You don’t see lives like this anymore. You could not be stopped. You philosophised with the pavement in a language I tried to understand, listening for any shock, any bad news, anything. You offered me a freedom I didn't think I could have again, like a light that illuminates my spine, loosening the joints. You let me have a body that could move, that could displace itself with a decided volition. I hope, I really fucking hope I could give you joy. A fresh feeling. A year of riding on, riding through, of pushing, of careening the turn from survival to living. You won’t mind hearing, and I probably already told you, but my fiancée is going to start learning soon. Your life expands beyond this metal, these parts, this living shiver that I drawl, slowly, across the pavement to where we first knew each other. 

Did you see the moon last night? Did the angels find you? Are you safer now? Did I make you happy? Will you remember me? Thanks for loving me. Thanks for loving me. Keep those wheels turning, and ride on, you sick pervert.