how to survive in a holy body
Acquire a variety of clothes for a variety of occasions. Monochromes are your best friend. Loose clothing is your best friend. Anything you can easily blend and hide away in. The further from the drawing lines you stray, the harder it becomes to go inconspicuous. Sometimes your flesh yearns for its existence to be acknowledged, but sometimes your flesh can’t decide what shape it wants to take or how it wants to be perceived. And sometimes — this, you’ve learned the hard way — being noticed for what you are can be the most masochistic form of visibility. Attention doesn’t go unpunished for bodies like yours.
Pick and snip at your disobedient body parts. Slice up your skin into neat, packable little pieces, then stitch them back the wrong way. Mismatched jigsaw puzzle. Frankenstein’s monster reinventing himself. Grab those hands before they reach for the pen that will produce doctrines in hopes of terminating your existence in all your wretched splendor. Grab those hands and make them bleed. Their blood will remind you of your stubborn survival. Their blood will keep you sane in a world that insists on seeing yours spill, that insists on seeing you dead because that’s the only position it ever wants to see you in, and even then, those hands will insist on burying you under a fraud’s name.
And then? Keep yourself afloat the bloodshed. Tear up their records and write down all the unabridged history. Write about the blood, write about the grit, write also about the joy and the laughter. But most importantly, write about the salty-sweet evenings of worship in which your body did more than just exist as a pulsing reminder of your suffering. In which your body blossomed under the touch of tender lovers who relished in its incongruous harmony and devoured its transcendent glory. In which your body didn’t shrink to keep itself safe or small or unassuming. It flourished and swallowed up so much space, the whole room shrunk instead to close around it like a glowing halo.
Your body, made new, made rigid, made dazzling, made divine. A holy rebirth. That’s how you survive. How you become inviolable.
