The Writer Writes the Same Damn Thing [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]

I thought I was writing fiction, when all along I was writing memoir after memoir, wrapping them in language built to obscure me from my own truth. The idea of the protagonist who wears a suit of skin to protect herself isn’t a new one. It appears in my stories repeatedly. There’s always an intersection I’m trying to cross, escaping the body, the tangible fortress/prison, into some kind of revelation that can pass me into a new way of processing the world. It’s obvious from my stories I haven’t figured out how to do this yet. Let’s look at a few examples.

From “He Is Becoming Unhinged”

I leave the room while I still have control of my feet. A portal, my psychiatrist says, I am a portal, and as I leave the apartment and nearly fall down the concrete steps to the parking garage, I can only think it's about goddamn time. I leave the parking garage and stumble into the city. The burning city. I'm falling. No, this body is falling, unsticking from the bone, becoming boneless, I am becoming boneless, losing beat, pace, structure, carcinogen, medulla. The stars make the skyscrapers shimmer before impact. No, not stars. Not stars anymore. Ships.

From “Unerkannten”

The Horned God blew more smoke in my face. I tore and tore at the skin. The fire died but the skins were still dancing, shimmering on the ground with their dust scales, piles and piles of skins. The skins of things I used to be. Things I never really was. I felt the panic rising up in me, growing claws and teeth, but still I did not stop. When I looked at the Horned God his eyes were gentle.

“Who are you?” I asked, “Who are you really?”
“The one who catches you when you fall.”

The Horned God bent in shape, seemed to stretch and warp, and I saw Femie beside him, so fragile in her nightgown. I watched her head transform into the branches of a tree.

“Stop, Thomas,” Femie said, “Stop. It’s not a suit anymore. It’s just skin and more skin and you’re going to kill yourself. Please stop.”

“But it is a suit,” I said, “It’s just like you said. About the world being what it is. And even if there is nothing underneath, that’s something right? That’s better than the nothing we think is something.”

“What are you expecting to find?” The Horned God asked, “Do you really think you’re any more real down there than you are up here?”

From “The Bad Baby Meniscus”

I was becoming a butterfly. My butterfly claws emerged from the cocoon of my skin. My shoulders split and slimy, newly formed butterfly wings emerged from my back. I floated off the earth. I couldn’t set my feet. Couldn’t stop the inevitable dissolution of everything that ever existed.

I hoped that the butterfly that took my skin prepared herself in the labyrinth. That she knew what was coming as I fade. As I fade.

Oftentimes this process isn’t voluntary, but violently forced upon the protagonist by an archetypal blend of the monster/mentor figure, the terrifying “demon” that forces the authoress, sorry, the protagonist, to confront the inner mechanics of her thought process and stimuli processing.

From “Effervescence”

You remembered for the briefest moment, with the cool pressure of darkness on your eyes, that secret language of ghosts, but there was no need to speak, you are mine, because you knew as I grasped the cuff of your sleeves and tugged on your bottom lip that it was truth. Your last breath escaped your mouth in small, almost incandescent bubbles that rose to the surface and the light never to be seen again, and we were sinking, sinking, sinking to the place where balance and light no longer mattered.
At one point you almost drowned, but we reached the other side: the place where breath is no longer needed. I whispered, “Open your eyes,” and you saw the world I’d hidden from you for so long, my world of dust and crystal motes, submerged castles, foreign teeth and foreign skin, those antistars dancing in our hair. I lay you down in dark matter and sucked your heart through your mouth. Afterwards we danced through the structures formed of bones and spirit, my hand in yours, your arm about my waist.

From “Glowbodies”

He took out my heart, that dead bird thing, its surface the color of crow's feathers, and he threw it into the waters where it sank and was swallowed up by lantanas that split their petals and grew ivory teeth. He cracked open my body from navel to sternum, with the sickening crunch of bones, and hollowed me out until I was nothing but skin and emptiness inside.

From “Letter to the Girl Who Ate My Skin”

You pressed your mouth to shoulder and bit down. My body shook and threatened to collapse, the soft parts dissolving. I screamed when you tore the skin from bone and swallowed it whole. I’d never screamed like that before, you know, that kind of screaming was only for the movies until now. Until you made me scream for you.
I struggled and tried to pull away, but then you bent down with your black hair winding its way through my head, and you whispered:
“It’s kind of fun to be damaged, don’t you think?”

From “I’ve Had This Dream Before”

We landed in a valley where the stars were milk and the grass lush beneath us. We ran our fingers through each other's hair. You said, "rest a while here." The stars were rushing into my mouth. Into my skin. I was swallowing them off your tongue. My fingers were blowing away. I was becoming a silhouette in the grass and you folded into my warm skin.

I know that soon this dream will end. Maybe I will wake back in the Cold City, with nothing to remind me of you but the crystal in my pocket. Maybe I won't even have that. I could awaken back in that orphanage with my back bloodied, my drawings of the labyrinth spattered with little broken pieces of me. And when I scratch at the slats you won't come to thrust your hand through the dirt.

From “Swan and the Minotaur”

I'm in love with a troubled man, but the darkness is so cool, and the morning black twists night flowers into the prettiest shapes. The hush place breaks you in gently. It dissolves you so that you are, for a few moments every night before going to bed, molecules, dissolution. I take his wrist. He kisses my mouth.

From “Sunshine, Sunshine”

After I was dead he took me in his arms and away from the swamp, down stairwells that reached the gutted out bottom of the world, past lockers of frozen women pinned up like butterflies. Their bones glittered in blue and red and monarch melanin scales and their eyes filled with dry crystal sugar. He laid me on an operating table in the dark. The only light came from the one he unraveled from my organs, a dully glowing bezoar, and I watched as he slit his skin apart with a fingernail and tucked it inside his ribcage cavity.

He found my wings I thought lost. He reached underneath me and spread them out from my shoulder blades, tattered and cold on the operating table, pressed my skin against needles until it stopped hurting. He turned me into a monster with his breath, his coat enveloping my face, his touch sterile, dry, clean, nothing like smoke in velvet blackness, the blood drying between my fingers, a crumbling tongue.

From my unfinished memoir

In my first memory I am being eaten alive by a hippo. I looked over the railing at the Oklahoma City zoo at these oblong, gray beasts stirring in the water below and Mom told me about a kid who fell off the railing once into the hippo's yawning mouth. I didn't know what death meant, but I understand what it meant to be a something who became a nothing at all. I knew what it meant to fall.

Occasionally, the protagonist herself inflicts this kind of transformation on another creature. This is often more malicious and damaging than the damage inflicted on the protagonist by the monster/mentor figure, as it’s often in response to continual abuse.

From “Crystalmouth”

Maybe our mother would find us in the morning on the floor, melted into the hips of a demon. Three instead of two. Or she’d find us worn down to the bone with the light burning a hole through our ends. Either way we’d be laughing. Laughing.

I didn’t know where I ended and she began. I touched her hips and wondered why I’d gone numb. My head ached in the back, my skull trying to reach around and escape.

I don’t know if we’ll stay together forever like this, torn-fused Kali monster, or if we’ll tear each other apart.

Can’t you see how fucking ridiculous this is getting?

The sheer volume of stories that end in peaceful dissolution, a loss of identity? And here, we’re getting another example of my literary cowardice, my inability to see beyond the collapse of the self. For years I’ve been trying to write myself into a space that I could see beyond blowing myself apart into molecules. Was there a rearrangement waiting for me, or only the peaceful non-existence, which, if we’re going to be honest, isn’t really a fucking ending to a story at all, only an eventual inevitability of all things - story or not. Yes, cowardice. It’s literary cowardice, and it’s weakness of the highest order.

I’m going to write a story in which I reconstruct myself from that point. Maybe I didn’t know how to before, and maybe I don’t know how to now, but I’m going to try and probably die trying. If you see a foot by the side of the highway, it’s probably mine, after I cut mys.self into pieces and tried to sew myself back together.

Needle and thread, glowing skin, build myself, build myself, sew it together, this time try not to create the foundation on a bed of knives and plastic explosives. I take my shell and bury her in rich, fertile dirt. Maye one day she’ll grow into something more suitable to wear.

Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.

You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.

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