claire-mcculleyWhisper
20 / Cisgender Female
5 times I was in love and didn't know it1. That thing she did. It was so innocuous, so accidental, so minor, yet it awakened you. It consumes your headspace. Follows you through hours and days. Makes appearances in your dreams, kissing the edges of your mind. Because of it, you know what it feels like to want someone so much you grow a second heart. Such a gesture should be easily forgotten, but you can’t forget the belly-rolling starburst of it, the oh. That thing she did, it told you who you are. In one split-second act. It grabbed you by the collar, looked you in the eye, and said her. It’s her. Are you brave enough to listen? / 2. You want to feign your own fall just so she will lean over you, blocking the sky, beautiful and concentrated. So she will hold your wrist and feel for your rabbit pulse. So you can blink up at her with an excuse for not looking away. / 3. She’s sitting there sketching a tree in the margin of her notebook, and she is a miracle. You would die for her. The thought startles you. You want to kiss her, want it savagely, which startles you, too. Your hands stay balled in your lap, half-clenched and trembling.
[Summer of] MetamorphosisSummer. / Summer of losing control. Summer of giving up words because my foggy despair has been too much for thinking or writing about the bursting maple leaves or flush of clouds overhead or the thunder of loving and being loved. Summer of hunger. Summer of scrutiny in front of every mirror, deadened while simultaneously feeling like a stripped nerve held to flame. Summer of running from. Summer of going in circles and circles, looking for the unlocked door and finding none, just stoic plaster and echoing vibrations of sadness. Summer of playing both puppet master and marionette, dominating my own strings with an unforgiving hand [we control microcosms when we cannot control larger things; we count and obsess and ritualize because the reality we can't face will devour us if we don’t, and this reality is that life can be as unexpected and gut-wrenching as a small child stepping innocently onto a minefield while We the spectators look on, aghast]. Summer of doubt. Summer of wondering whether or not anyone has any love left for me, and if so, why? Why such an infinite reserve for my struggling tangle of inelegance and repeated failure? Summer of breaking the surface not for myself but for anybody who has ever felt like this, for anyone who has woken up with a hook through their gills and a throat twisted airless by invisible fists, for anybody who’s flexed their jaws in spite of it and let their tongues dance, for anyone brave. Summer of tremendous beauty witnessed from the wrong side of the glass. Summer of sunset and moonrise and daisies, daisies, daisies, so exquisite yet so far away from where I’ve been living; this morgue of nuclear silence and absent pulse. Summer of polarity. Summer of numbness swooping into ecstasy then dipping into bottomless rage with no middle ground, just explosions of zeal and explosions of ache, but always, always explosions. Summer of lightning. Summer of determination. Summer of humidity between two hands holding. Summer of finality and chin lift and aftermath, of rubble as my foundation and destruction as my momentum, and I, rising like a balloon, unstoppable. Summer of transformation. Summer of trying on selves like vintage gowns, rejecting one after the next with the growing panic that accompanies the fact that this is who I am—endlessly, inexorably, relentlessly—that I can try to run from her or shape her into someone else, but she will always return, this girl of hardness and softness, this woman of perseverant fire, this funny little garden of mishap and epiphany, that there is nowhere left to hide, just this room where I stand cornered, forced finally to turn and embrace myself with a fury of welcome.
on learning how to take up space without apologyListen: / You cannot give back what you stole from yourself. You can’t feed your body the things you denied it while it was quivering beneath the whip of your merciless, perfectionist dysmorphia, or erase the scars you’ve carved into it, or stroke it tenderly all those times you wished you could jump out of your flesh and become somebody else—a goddess-girl, a radiant impossibility, angelic fire with taut skin over crystal cheekbones and a torso so trim it could snap in a storm. / But you can start again. You can make vows to yourself that you will spend the rest of your life fulfilling, because to hell with comparison. To hell with the wars waged on magazine racks. To hell with GET SKINNY IN 3 WEEKS and HOW TO TIGHTEN YOUR ABS and 10 TIPS THAT WILL MAKE HIM WANT YOU. To hell with the mythology of thin—this vile word, this grotesque title, this dismissal of your vibrant heart and humming brain, this slaughtering of your entirety. To hell with the numbers that made you ill. To hell with calories/ scales/ grams/ portions, the formulas that stabbed you and wrecked you and violated you in ways so wicked you still cannot breathe them aloud. To hell with it all.
6 weeksi. the 1st week is the rapid hemostasis. the fabric of your body clutching itself together, rushing to staunch the bleeding. you breathe and oxygen settles in your chest like needles. you are so tired. you, in your continent of pain, will never be enough of anything for anyone. you burn softly as your cells scuttle to repair the damage. you burn in silence. / ii. the 2nd week is the inflammation. the itching and swelling of flesh. the fingers you move over your own body, holding your hips quiet. your gash is no longer a gash, but a rumpled and puffy city, a strange piece of art, a crime scene after the police have left where everyone is sweeping up shattered glass. someone’s murmuring a poem of soul and death over the radio. it might be you. everyone is shouting and the radio is getting louder and the crime scene is turning into an emergency room and the doctors are flying around in their yellow haste and there is no oasis, no peace, no open window, until the automatic hospital doors part with a groan and she is there, and you realize you are about to be saved. / iii. the 3rd week is the proliferation and migration. she tells you to remove the gravel from your body before you grow a new skin. so you do, you pull it out with black tweezers and it makes you scream until you are raw and humble. you watch as you mend yourself, sped up, like a tiger lily caught on long-form camera, bursting to life. someone says the words love and breaking and heal. someone says i will take you and i will carry you. is it you or her? does it matter? your skin is rearranging itself. you are pangea, splitting and reattaching to new places. it should be violent, but it isn’t. she’s calling you in from the cold and you go to her, scabbed up and scabbed over, unable to close your eyes. she takes up your whole field of vision. her lips, her nose. her irises, where you find god and every angel. the only sin here is the distance between the two of you. which you are closing. by the minute. by the second. by the breath.
