"A Life Androgynous"
By Emily Mills, 3/5/03
for h.l.m.
There is no sex, no touching—unless it is her own hands. She is very familiar with her own flesh. This selfishness stems mostly from lack of foreign subject matter. She looks, but doesn't dare touch the other. There are no fumbled kisses, tongues licking inner lips—she can touch her tongue to her own nose, own lips, own teeth. It will have to do.
Once she touched a boy, they touched each other in a prepubescent curiosity that led to her sexual isolation and his flowering homosexuality. She didn't mind. He didn't mind. His lovers certainly didn't mind, because, though she never knew, she taught him some things in those early innocuous days. How to touch. Not the tentative pinch or poke, but a lingering sliding palm-against-breast reverent kind of touch.
She learned so much about boys that she forgot about being a girl. Did it matter what was between her legs? Nothing was there. Not compared to them with their strange extra skin and blood rushing erect. She could feel things there, down at the nexus, the apex, or whatever eloquent words one could find to describe the vagina. A meeting, a crossroads, a delta. Something interesting like that. But more it was an annoyance, something that never left her alone but would never bother to explain what exactly it wanted from her. Whatwhatwhat?
Once, in their frantic rubbing, her nexusapexdelta exploded like a river released from a dam, just like water only more fragrant in a strange earthy way. He didn't notice. She kept her face a mask of concentration. It took her by surprise. It scared her a little. It felt damn good.
He told her once about ejaculation: at night alone in bed dreaming, laying still next to a friend, into the mouth of a lover. Fascinating and foreign, but it made sense. But she was not sated like that. Not as the friend, the girlboy crossover success. Small breasts at puberty, a knack for sports and fistfights will do that, she believes, leave you behind in the dust of heightened hormones and lip gloss and socks-down-pants. She thinks it's all silly and some people call her mature for her age.
This goes on for years.
But then they start catching up and she's still running, out of breath, out of shape, breathing in dust and sex and identity like air tainted by smog.
In the present, which she knows will become the past before she's had time to understand it as the future, she's staring at a girl and a boy in the mirror. They are at war. The war is not physical, not the fistfights she used to get in over trivial things on the playground. The war is words, actions, emotions, clothing, mannerisms, and most assuredly the war is sex.
(what does it mean, she wonders, "sex"? what does it mean is it intercourse or penetration or rubbing or licking or is it gender and genitalia and that social construction thing her professor talks about so much?)
The woman, the man. Symbolic, semiotic. Her mind is feminine, non-linear, non-sequitur. Her body has curves, strange planes and muscles rippling under flesh in waves of strength not ever touched. Her body pulsates with rage, frustration, confusion, longing, and anxiousness—the things her mind has shirked off and sent to the physical realm for fear of overload.
She's staring at another woman and another man. They are both appealing, arousing, in different ways of course but no less intriguing. She reaches out to touch them but pulls back as though she's been stung even before making contact. The electricity is there in the air that surrounds them, forbidden things, strange unknown things.
She touches herself; is it the same electricity or just dead space and nerve endings? No, it's still alive, waiting, quite impatient, but still refusing to let on to the mystery.
In the mirror there is duality. Warring factions.
It's tying knots in her stomach, throwing Molotov cocktails in her brain, lighting bonfires in her groin. She can't extinguish it. She can't distinguish it from pain anymore. And when a new face comes into her line of sight, someone who only serves to stoke the fire, she is in agony over her inability to move to bring the fire to slow burning coals. To put it out entirely might serve just as well.
Today she met someone. She's trying to find the right words, with friendliness lest they not return her interest, with an edge of that elusive flirting quality just in case. But the case isn't ever just, and she begins to wonder if she's wasting her time. If time were hers to waste. It moves on without her. That's the problem, she says.
She says "I love you" in her head over and over until it loses all sense, becomes only sound and syllables. "Eye luvv yew." Pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal her professor would insist. Before words and meaning there was only the sound, the sneeze, the itch, the orgasm (oh how she wants to cum), the barbaric yawp! Before being squeezed down the birth canal and shot out into the cold, antiseptic air to be spanked by rubber gloves.
(that's good, she thinks, I should get some rubber gloves, because you never know when you might find your hand up a cunt and lord knows you can't do that unprotected it's dirty and unknown)
Once, thrice, tens or maybe even a hundred times growing up other people, children, adults, mistook her for a boy. No, she would say/think obstinately, I don't have that extra flesh, only the nexusapexdelta down there. No, she would say/think sincerely, my hair is short and my limbs are climbing trees but I don't pee standing up. They'd insist, always insist, call her "boy" or "sir" (because it went on well into her teens) and try to lift her shirt, lift her baggy-covering-insecurities jeans to prove their point and blush, embarrassed, turn away when the truth was uncovered. She was touched then, intrusively and rudely fondled and prodded like brisket on the cutting block. One fate leads to the dogs, the other to the richly set table and thick, spicy BBQ sauce. She's still waiting for the latter and dodging the formers' vicious mouths.
She has whined and pleaded her case before the court of her peers. She has spent nights in longing, teenaged angst and melodramatic diary entries. She's hashed it all out in her scattered brain. Weighed the pros and cons, looked at it from all angles, wondered why nothing was happening. She imagined herself standing naked in a dark room, a film projector playing scenes of other people kissing or hugging or fucking across her heated, empty flesh. The images flashing there on her own body but she not feeling a thing, she the removed thing, she the lone thing.
These tactics bore no fruit, only deep anxiety and frustration (a theme! a theme!), she knows it is stupid to blame and pine and hit herself with her own fists otherwise employed in auto-erotic-exhilaration.
So what's left?
A story, she insists, has to be told, else any potential audience will lose interest quickly, demand a plot, character development, and a resolution for crying out loud. Who is your target audience? another teacher asks her pointedly. She ponders, stoic, if these sounds will fall on any other ears besides her own. What does it matter if they don't? What does it matter if they do? In the end, there is only one member of her target audience, and their description is so vague as to be nearly useless. A person, preferably at least eighteen years of age, gender a non-issue, race a non-issue, economic status a non-issue (she considers herself struggling). Must have a beating heart, and about two hundred various and sundry qualifications of temperament and mind and passion and it would be nice if they liked her, too. Love seems like such a long shot. Marriage is completely beside the point. Children she could have, if she wanted, without the personal touch from anyone else but the doctor.
No, this is different, unrelated to procreation or propagation or cultural standards and expectations. This is her life, dammit, lived in such fierce independence that she forgot or never learned or repressed the ability to touch someone else. To be touched by someone else. Without fear of losing herself in the process.
You see, she says, there is no plot, no character development, no resolution. Like life, no rehearsal or stunt man or script or 20/20 foresight. She refuses to gift you with any of these things for the fact that they are not real. No, she'd rather you looked her in the face and took it at more than face value. She'd rather know what you meant when you once asked her, in that snide voice we all save for special occasions, "are you a boy or a girl?" Because, she screams, she has no answer for you.
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