My Body Blurs: First Installment
This work is my own. Please do not share without crediting me and linking to this substack publication.
The fog curled its fingers gently through the field, then melted in like smoke across the small pond. I was on my way to the gas station to get cigarettes, and routinely found myself staring at this strange interjection to the suburban sprawl. Small plump birds flitted over the surface of the water, so fast and intent. A conflicting mixture of emotions filled me when I found myself here, gazing at this stark contrast between asphalt and organic matter. Bitter, because life is walled in; and so sweet, because it’s still here.
Ambling up to the Mobil, kicking rocks along the way, I resumed my quest. Thankfully, not many people had arrived en route from their evening commute, and I could get smokes without hassle. I didn’t regularly partake anymore, but occasionally found a nihilism in myself that necessitated some kind of danger.
The door to my apartment seemed to wink at me as I walked home–I had placed several magnetic lights on my door so that I could find it in the dark. I had found myself with a key stuck in some foreign door too many times in recent memory in a haze of thought or cannabis, and felt the need to differentiate.
Before going inside, the idea of a short communion with the night sky made me flip out the pack and lightly tap it against the heel of my hand. Flip one, that’s your lucky–a hyper-local tradition. Dig around for some kind of lighter, feel your fingers trail over forgotten wrappers and balled up tissue before you find one. Balance it on your lips, ignite, inhale. Crane to look up at the first whispers of the evening’s stars as the smoke unfurls from your nostrils. Fight the vertigo that comes from smoking a cigarette after quitting for two years. Shamefully swivel until you’re staring at the ground.
After unearthed debris had cleared from my throat, I headed back inside to make dinner. Reaching into the cabinets blindly like some kind of desperate forager, I collided with a microwave meal. The inside of my apartment was too stark for the amount of time I had been living there. Blank, pale walls, thrifted furniture that smelled like other people and their cooking. I don’t know if I would ever really feel like nesting. I had company–Sam, my cat, who trilled happily at the sight of me and threaded her wiry body through my legs as I stumbled to my couch, having popped a bowl in the microwave.
“Hey, sweetie. Hey there. How was your day?” I felt my voice feathering into the silly lightness that only a cat could produce as I ran my hand over her fur, feeling her purr rumble against me as the microwave joined in humming harmony. This was the moment where I could feel my inertia begin to wane, the weariness settling into my limbs. I felt this every day as the sun set. Sometimes I kept feeling it for days.
I reached for the remote, cold plastic somewhat jolting me awake. Sam muttered unhappily as I stretched my legs and scooched across the couch to reach. As the TV blinked on, a warm, convivial feeling filled the room. Sounds of people, laughing, discussing. So often the TV filled some unspoken void for me, in my quiet little apartment. Time passed around me as I ate glorified slop out of tupperware containers and avoided the endless void of dishes piled up in my sink. Observing people on television allowed a sense of removed safety while still feeling like I was participating in some kind of social event. I couldn’t stop long at the root of that sensation though. If I poked at it, I’d realize I was drinking up a facsimile of human interaction.
I got up only once to get my food when it chirped at me, again to Sam’s protests. Despite this interruption, I was again enveloped in the glow of some program or other. Sitcoms, canned laughs, then switch to the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, back to the shopping channel. No destination, just novel distraction. Popping a couple of edible gummies, the feeling was complete. Safe, predictable, not lonely but definitely alone. I wove in and out of focus. I could feel the stale air of the room float over my eyes, congealed pools in their sockets. My senses were simultaneously too much and too little–I couldn’t distinguish the thread of voices coming from the monitor, but jumped when a small piece of lint scraped against my thigh. Perception paradox.
My mind started tripping over itself, and I fell into fitful sleep. Sleep and I were not on good terms. She came to me lightly sometimes, and heavily others. I would find myself oscillating between fitful rest and the kind of bear-like slumber that would get me fired from several jobs for no-showing. It felt like I was constantly dreaming. I had read somewhere that REM sleep wasn’t actually nourishing. If that was the case, I was malnourished.
If I felt out of control in my waking life, sleep was an opposite experience to an uncomfortable extreme. I had always been able to dream lucidly. In good times, I would fly around happily on the breeze and commune with gentle furry beasts in their own language, enlisting their help in a quest to find shimmering treasure. Sometimes I would experiment and coyly tell people in my dreams that we were dreaming, watch them gaze around with confused looks on their faces before shrugging and smiling blankly. In bad times, I would be chased screaming through craggy cliffs before turning my back to the faceless monsters and flinging myself off of a precipice to jolt myself awake. When I told people this, I could feel the energy of the room change. “No, it’s not like I’m trying to die, it’s that I know this is the only way to get myself to wake up!” I’d weakly exclaim before changing the subject.
This particular night’s dreams were vivid, and at times I could feel my physical body helplessly jerking in parallel with my dream movements. I was lying on a hospital table, peering down at my body draped in a robin’s egg blue gown. This was a new dream. I rolled my head to the side and looked at the confounding mess of wires draped over the side of my bed. Which ones were attached to me, I couldn’t tell. Beeps and blinks set each other off in some kind of strange chorus. I heard a voice float towards me in the way people speaking in dreams sometimes did, like the air was made of different elements. Softly, I could hear: “...don’t worry about those, they’re monitoring you to make sure that you’re safe and comfortable for the duration of the procedure. We have a brain scan set up for both bodies so we’ll know when the transfer occurs.”
At this the hair on the back of my neck bristled and I swiveled my head to try and see who was talking. This form standing over me, medical mask over swirling features…familiar? Stranger? I coughed slightly to get the feeling of dense cotton out of my throat and asked, my words twirling out in front of me into the ether: “What kind of transfer?”
“Ah, you’re responding well to the anesthesia, that’s good. You’ll be through this in no time. You’re about to make history.”
I saw more figures crowd into the room, the edges of their forms blending together. I cleared my throat again, tried to speak, the words hit a wall. Damn, it would be this kind of dream. I felt my pulse rising as the corners of my vision started to approach each other in some kind of desperate race to embrace. Everything was replaced by a soft, warm hum. I felt my fear smooth out into unknowing.
For a few moments I felt my consciousness skip a step. Not necessarily perceptible, but I felt it. Like a record skipping over a track, crackling back into the groove. Just a part of the music. Visions of a watercolor, green, trees. And then the dream restarted.
I was now in a different corner of the same room. I could hear hushed whispers, barely containing excitement. “No setbacks, nothing to worry about…” “...did great, several hours but…” “...can’t be better.” As my sensation returned slowly, I started to feel confused. Something didn’t feel right about my body. There was a delay between my mind and my movements–it felt like my inner monologue would utter “blink” and then my eyelids would flutter down on a delay, like two identical songs played over each other, milliseconds apart. I inwardly chastised myself for eating too much cheese in my dinner and taking too many edibles, this dream was starting to fuck with me in ways that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while…maybe ever.
“Brrwherrre..?” Shit. I meant to say “Where am I?” or…I wasn’t sure what the correct question was. The feeling of delay and discombobulation was still heavy in my head. I heard a voice call out to me: “Can you hear me?” I nodded my head, nodded my head, nodded…was I nodding? “Good. Don’t worry…normal to feel…wear off soon. …All went well. Congratulations.” The bits I could pick up were interesting. Congratulations?
I slipped off to the side of my mind and drifted out of focus again. I could hear more words: “Complete transfer according to scans…” “....Will have to test functionality.” I opened my eyes, and saw a hazy imprint of a face looking at me from the thick mottled material of the hospital window. Who was that? I blinked, and the face blinked. Signals staggered, overlapping. I squinted, trying to piece together a familiar image of myself. My heartbeat picked up as the face came more into focus. This face was a face that I had seen in dreams before–a desired one, one that I often sought in my waking mirror. There was something off, though…the features felt adult and child-like at the same time…my skin was fresh and soft like an infant’s. I tried to focus harder and gasped, feeling the air rip into my lungs like a tidal wave. My eyes…the eyes…they were completely white as far as I could tell. No pupils, no irises. I heard a tired moan flood out of my mouth, hardly belaying the fear I felt.
Wake up. Wake up now. I shut my eyes hard, as I heard voices say “They’ll form soon…” “No problem…rest now.”
I felt my consciousness separate from the dream and tumble in a familiar beeline towards my body in the waking world. For a moment, I could see myself slack-jawed on the couch. Sam had curled up happily around my midsection. My features were the same as they always were. I could feel some kind of frayed relief flood over me as I settled in, momentarily opening my eyes. The world seemed to have righted itself, so the frenzied ripples of my thoughts slowed to a calm glacial pool, and I drifted off into a surprisingly dreamless night.
The narrative of my life, in retrospect, cleaves neatly around the first time I had that dream.
From then on, that starkly disturbing story played repeatedly night after night for several months. I would wake up in various states of distress and stages of physical turmoil, depending on my level of cognition in the dream. Sometimes I couldn’t cleanly feel the edges of the dream’s fabric, and felt myself drop into a pool of unknown thought before screaming out and wrenching my head off its resting place to face the walls of my room as I woke. Other times, I could rationalize with this alien form, stare deeply into those blank eyes and will myself through the moment’s passage until I roused slowly. Those controlled moments felt strangely exhilarating, like I was commanding some wild and as yet untameable portion of my soul.
The toll on my health was undeniable, and I felt the border between my waking and sleeping world become more permeable. Socially, dreaming and thinking you were experiencing reality is acceptable; the opposite, decidedly not. The first morning after the dream, I stared at myself in the mirror for some time.
I initially sidled up, taking in the white velvet flowers adorning the bathroom’s wallpaper and then moving to hurriedly wiping milky streaks on the mirror’s surface with a piece of toilet paper. Finally, my eyes found their match in the reflection–my irises were industrial, clouded gray, tinged with green flecks like moss growing on a ridged stone. I used the pads of my fingers to pull the flesh down beneath them, imagining my blood delicately pooling. Before the dream, staring at myself in the mirror had become something of a battle ground. I jumped wildly between wanting nothing to do with my reflection and being unable to tear myself away. The mirror in my tiny bathroom was easy to swivel, and so I would thoughtlessly flip the hinge back and forth and my bathroom would waver and distort, its perceived size growing and shrinking randomly as the mirror wiggled.
Initially, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why this was so tumultuous. After the dream, things swam into focus. My mind and body would sometimes sync disjointedly in real life, just like they did quite viscerally on that hospital table. This feeling had never felt so real, so material as when I was blurrily blinking up at my dream surgeon, but the feeling was unmistakable from that point on. Some kind of chasm existed between the entity wearing my flesh and my reflection. Some depth that I needed to explore.
This feeling, in hindsight, had existed throughout my life. I found some level of camaraderie in queer spaces, because many people in those groups had experienced dysphoria that seemed similar when they described it. I felt unable to form words around the way I felt for several years, the truth clinging to the back of my throat like cloying corn syrup. The feeling of sticking out, misaligning, was pungent.
This disjointedness had shown up to varying degrees in most aspects of my day-to-day life. School always felt less like an institution of learning and more like a meat grinder, and so my strained relationship with education ended with a ghosted PhD supervisor. I pretended to be invested in getting a doctorate in microbiology for all of three years, slowly starting to show up to class with my shirt buttons off by one, or a can of refried beans for lunch with no can opener. The waves of futility overtook me, as they had countless other peers lost to history. There’s only so far you can go down the academic rabbit hole before it all starts to feel like abstract nothingness, and your success depends on your ability to push past that sour gut feeling, that tiny voice that says, “Why the fuck does this matter?”.
Since that unceremonious self-booting from the program, I had attained a level of tenuous peace. I had a quiet library clerk job on campus as the result of pained pleading to a friend of a friend. The pay wasn’t good, but the distinct lack of human interaction and the emotional cushion of the stacks left my cup pretty full at the end of the day. I could flip through whatever my heart desired, watching the sun track a jog across the sky as I scanned line after line of prose and whittled away the hours to lunch. Recently however, getting to work was stressful–I started calling in sick more, falling deeper into some kind of trance.
Friends? Lovers? A chosen few wove their path in and out of my orbit. I thought about my relationships like stray cats–I felt a piece of my heart connected to each one of them, but I let them be. I tried not to worry too much when they dropped off for a few weeks or months at a time. I had one steadfast friend, Mona. She worked at the cafe that I often rolled into early in the morning before work, on maybe one of the only quaint little corners of our town. Rustic, English ivy, brick. I soon associated ivy with Mona’s hair, emerald green complimenting the deep blazing orange–unruly to the extreme. At the end of the day, little bundles of her hair would wrestle away from the hair tie in rebellion. Sometimes I would draw little sketches of Mona’s particularly good hairdos in shy pencil lines and throw them at her while she worked. I got really good at distracting her.
One day after Mona got off work, we sat listening to the birds and peepers melodizing outside of Mona’s screen porch as a joint bounced between our hands. I, having played hooky from the library for the second time that week, felt the quiet restlessness of someone who knew they had other engagements they weren’t attending to. To distract myself from this feeling, I had started to tell Mona about the dream, and had watched as the thin skin between her eyebrows accordioned in worry. She had a habit of telling me what I already knew, but making it feel like a revelation.
“It sounds like something is trying to…like, unbury itself. Have you ever thought about going to a psychic?”
I watched a thin sheet of smoke dematerialize and flit through the gaps in the screen. My eyes caught Mona’s, and found myself lingering on the freckles splayed across the bridge of her nose. I’d be lying if I hadn’t considered laying a tentative kiss on those freckles and seeing what she’d do.
“I don’t know what I feel. And life feels too heavy to figure it out. It’s endless–you know that too, probably.”
She nodded, splaying her fingers out across the fabric between us on the couch like a probe, worrying fibers and assessing terrain. “I understand how that feels. I think I just recently started climbing out of my own depression.”
I felt her eyes searching for mine but turned my head to face the ceiling. I felt hot tears slide into the corners of my eyes–smoking weed always blasted apart my defenses and made it impossible to contain sadness.
“My body hurts. I’m solidly poor. I feel my brain grind into gear every day, over and over–the world doesn’t make sense to me, Mo. I feel like I’m thinking about my life in a different way.”
At this point, the joint was limply forgotten between my fingers. I fiddled little flecks of bud out through the end of the stem, semi-aware of the soft sour smell. I could feel all of the weight of the last months pushing at my sternum, desperate for some kind of exit.
Mona squinted her eyes at me. “How are you thinking about life differently?”
“I just feel like my world is getting smaller every day. Nothing feels doable. If I don’t figure out how to live better, I’m going to snap. My job is fine, I eat, I sleep, I work out, I take vitamins...and what? For what? Stasis that’s tenuous at best?”
I felt her body move closer, the delicate sunlit border of her shadow merging with mine on the concrete floor in front of us.
“I think a lot of people are feeling that way right now. You’re brave for talking about it…I think that I relate more to people who don’t pretend that everything is okay.”
I chuckled a bit, casting my head back onto the couch fabric’s embroidered olive-green parrots, then inwardly cringed as their texture collided with my hair. “Well I guess that’s a win, then. I’m just fucked up enough that Mona likes me.”
She poked me, jabbing those deft fingers softly into my sides. “You know what I mean.”
As the sun set and the crickets’ throaty tones loudened into a meditative drone, we seemed to freeze in space and time. Our bodies were at once static and in motion, shivering with energy towards one another. We could feel the desire to speak, to touch, move through the air like brewing lightning only to fizzle out before materialization. I liked looking at her, more than I liked looking at most things. I could trace the outline of her face delicately over and over again, like I was walking a maze to learn it. Even though I felt my own life moving ever closer towards dishevelment, our time together felt anchoring. I was moored to the soft bridge of her nose and the way that her lips curled up when she got lost in thought.
I don’t know how I left her that night. It didn’t feel like I could, although the warmth of my bed and Sam’s desperate need for food exactly at 8pm and no later existed lazily in the back of my head. Still, I was and still am a helpless devotee to routine, and as such found myself ambling lazily down Mona’s gravel road to the bus stop. A small creek ran happily in a ditch next to the road; I followed it for a bit, stepping carefully from stone to stone meditatively while using my phone as a flashlight. Would I go to work tomorrow? Where would I find myself in the morning? Everything felt amorphous, mist or flashes of morning light in a cloudy sky.
The bus ride felt ceremonious, somehow. I couldn't place why, but the trip was moving me somewhere different. I could feel the world shifting around me as this haphazard assortment of humans rolled on dirty asphalt, stop-starting here and there. I found myself wondering where people were going. Were they going to hold the faces of their lovers, or wrap themselves in soft blankets as their loneliness faded into sleep? Did they think about death at night, like I did? I felt a pull to each face I saw, wanting to know about them but not feeling like I would be well-received if I pried. As I exited the bus, I knew that I had pushed myself through a portal. I was now in a new place.
I knew that I wasn't going back to work the next day. The feeling flapped around in my stomach, a newly hatched bird. I whipped out my phone and texted my supervisor, apologizing profusely for my absence and explaining as much as I felt I needed to. It's not you. I'm floundering. Life isn't right. I understand this isn't how I'm supposed to do it but I can't do it anymore. The words tumbled out like some strange half-baked confessional. Derek wouldn't care, I told myself. He knew how this felt.
The next steps I took were obscured in strangeness. Rain had started to glisten on top of the concrete as I stared into the sidewalk cracks. I could see the world reflected. A fever dream, a multi-colored menagerie. I followed the road I needed to in order to get home. My feet were accomplishing what they needed to, like automatons of their own making. My brain was left floating above me, thin tendrils of thought flying out on their own accord to grasp onto whispers on the breeze. There wasn't any cohesion to the way that I thought about things now. I was new, born fresh. I couldn't explain why. Maybe my conversation with Mona had stirred something loose in me. I knew it had already been there, like a small animal creeping around in the shadows of my brain. Maybe she knew how to coax the most unaware parts of me to the surface. I might be in love with her.