It did make me hate them – not all the time – but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.
You deciphered me and now I am plain to read.
Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away.
Just as they were driving off on his horrible Iron Curtain motor bike, he patted my arm, told me he knew, and forgave us both. There was only one thing I could do; mustering all my spit, I did it.
I became my own ladder and trapdoor to other worlds. I was my own disguise. The sight of a figure, far off, on some journey of his own, was enough to spark my imagination towards a tragedy or a miracle.
She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn’t exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.
The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.’ I thought to myself, ‘Too late for what?
No man believes what he does not feel to be true. I should like to unbelieve myself. I sleep at night and wake in the morning hoping to be gone. it never happens. One knee forward, one knee bent, I bear the world.
Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?
I don’t want eternal life, I said. This life is trouble enough.
I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.
Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It’s in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means ‘the long suffering one’.
Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces – sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.
I’m trans, and that means a lifetime of hormones. My life will likely be shorter and it’s likely I will be sicker as I get older. I keep my maleness intact with testosterone because my body knows it wasn’t born the way I want it to be. I can change my body but I can’t change my body’s reading of my body. The paradox is that I felt in the wrong body but for my body it was the right body. What I have done calms my mind and agitates my chemistry. Few people know what it’s like to live in this way.
Melanie,’ I plucked up courage to ask at last, ‘why do you have such a funny name?’ She blushed. ‘When I was born I looked like a melon.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her, ’you don’t any more.
For now, I had to be hard and white. In the frosty days, in the winter, the ground is white, then the sun rises,, and the frosts melt...
I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught.
Xeno couldn’t manage too much nearness. He was solitary and introverted, with an enthusiasm that people mistook for sociability. He was interested in everything, attentive to people, genuinely kind, and entirely present when he was present. But he was never sorry to close the door at night or to be alone.
I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
I became obsessed with anatomy. If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.