A Collection of Impossibilities

I was born without a voice. Without a voice and without a history. No-one can tell me anything about the circumstances of my birth. There are names on my birth certificate, but they sound too convenient, too common. The people who abandoned me could be anyone. The doctor who presided over my birth is the same. So I can’t tell you that I came out of my mother’s womb silent, not for certain, though I like to imagine it that way: a pale infant, sucking in air and pushing it back out, without sound. What I can tell you is that my medical records, everything I have to my name, state I was born without vocal cords. There is nothing to create sound inside me. No instrument to strike, no fold to rake over and tear out cries of terror or sadness or surprise or happiness, nothing to power my laughter or my tears. I am only air. Only silence.

Blindfold

Click to enlarge. In the middle of the quarter, I took some photos which played with the idea of erasure, especially in terms of the erasure of one's voice. If I were to turn my observations into a physical chapbook to be abandoned in various locations, this is what one of the included images would look like.

Original photos taken by R.N. Jones. Photoshopping done by me.

Observation #4, 10/9: Disappear

(Theme: Erasure)

We used to go down to the river all the time, the bend where the water goes still and quiet but the current is too fast to breed mosquitoes. To the low and crooked tree, the one that spills its branches out over the water, the motion of it shivering the leaves like mute windchimes.  The bank is populated only with smooth, round stones ground down by thousands of years of lazy water. Nestled against those cool stones, in the shadow of the crooked tree, used to be our Kingdom.

You departed for other shores, and I grew a full foot and a half, and you only came back when your hair was long and wild again, like before your mother lopped it off with kitchen shears.

You came back and I went to the river, knowing I would find you there. I waited for hours. Only when the light turned October orange against the river and set the crooked tree on fire did you appear.

“Still down by the water?”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“After all this time?”

“I knew you would come.”

It was easy, talking to you again. You were smiling the way I remembered, but something was strange in it. You had the same freckles, the same glass-colored eyes, the same unkempt mane. You were barefoot, and you set your toes just at the edge of the water. Your difference eluded me.

“It’s different,” you tell me, watching the water move by your feet. “The city.”

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Yes.” You pluck a yellowing leaf from our tree and turn it back and forth over your long fingers.

“You like going to School.”

“Yes,” you smile then. “But School isn’t the City. The City never sleeps. The noise and grit of it works under your skin and lodges there.”

You have destroyed the yellow leaf by accident and it slips through your hands, landing on the surface of the river and vanishing downstream. And that is the difference. I say your name.

“You’re disappearing.”

“Yes,” you hold up a hand, an arm, in front of your face and I can see the bend in the river through its transparency. “Yes,” you turn it slowly, a piece of glass distorting the world. But then you raise your arms over your head and the October sun hits you and you are –

“But I am full of light.”

Observation #3, 10/4:

Catcher

(Theme: Erasure)

Sometimes I think that I can erase myself. That by burying me the space that is me will cease to be but no one will notice that they are only seeing an echo, remembering the places where I once was and the things that I once did.

Sometimes I bury myself in sound. I plug my headphones into my skull so hard that my ears pop and develop impact wax to deaden the blows of electric instruments and sweet noxious noise, or I turn up my car stereo so loud the speakers rattle their casings and by the time the engine turns over all I feel is the ringing in my head where the sound just was.

Sometimes I bury myself in clothes. I make layers of armor or exoskeleton – I am a moth, but I look like an owl! – and I change that exoskeleton daily, male to female, fem to butch, androgynous, delicate flower to badass motherfucker, my favorite shirt says ‘Fictional Character’ across the back for a reason.

Sometimes I bury myself in stories. They are all of them places and times which have never existed and will never exist and they are more wonderful and narcotic for their impossibility because of it I am more invested in their lives than I will ever be in mine.

Sometimes, when I go to cross the street, I get to thinking I will disappear.