{content warning: alcoholism, death, disassociation, self-pity, self-deprecation, and some things related; religion, obituaries, and generational trauma}
When I stopped dancing, my body tensed for forfeit. It forgot where it was going. It edged me – herded energy to its unknown parts. Important cavities forced havoc; shimmered down in the absence of self-understanding.
A kind of chaos was born.
A prisoner of war I became; angsty in Ayurveda.
Arbitrary of my own will.
Writing obituaries would be seamless; slathering in religious accusations of my father. But that would be too easy in the midst of all my suffering.
Had I done this
all to myself?
Eventually, I was amused by the stifling. The choke slit of
gender diluted
me, and I allowed it to take hold of the clutch — aggravating a slow release. It comforted me to distill in a barrel of self-pity, where oak and yeast intertwine. Felt more like a Maker’s Mark hallucination. Back and forth and back and forth, it rolled; moistening amid the limestone. Mocking white cistems, drudging my own reflection when I looked into mirrors.
Most times I avoided seeing the auburn in my eyes, burning. I’d smiled incessantly to avoid making contact with my feelings. Seeing how long I could go faking it within a binary I had no idea how to claim. My knuckles were bloodied – wrists fractured, brambled like twigs.
So many walls I’d punched, thinking I could come here to this place (this universe) as something other than what it is that I am. All the lonely secrets I snickered, became more apparent to the world. There was no turning back from the comfort that lay me – spawned and speckled in the thick thorns of terror.
Terror of self.
Terror of successors.
Torture.
There was nothing I could use to run from myself.
A tumultuous truth to forget where I came from, and I wanted to forget. Some see the beauty of it, but I see denial. How I die and come back to face the absence of familial unconditionality. How the river stops at the bend of the stream, and it continues on to some other forage. But under one, I’m reminded by a baptismal, that I should never lead anyone astray – or move for that matter, without God’s permission. Then I lose myself in the absence of my own, again. My heart drops; gulping doesn’t bring me back to see clearer in the rock salt. A numbness approaches me, and I’m penetrated by cigarettes and shots of the Botanist.
I tripped on the idea of psychotherapy and hoped there were answers of how to move my feet as I base in becoming. The seams were at their holiest, in retrograde – where all my hemispheres stitched, as I curled in the fleece blanket I bought back in winter 15’.
Too cold, I said.
The truth: there was no heat because I hadn’t paid the bill.
More energy exchanges down the drain of capitalism.
My bones ached the more I stiffed in the warlocks of other people’s anxieties, depression, anger, and addictions. The more I avoided myself, the more I’m amused by the slander against my own. It is rooted in fear of my brilliance. But, what is more brilliant than suckling in the backstage of someone else?
My wits; the realness of relying on the dance of dirty waters, streamed in the culminations of plutonic snares. A lonely boy or girl or human or animal or nothing or empty, of me – sorted in categories I couldn’t swallow. The horizon hoarded, sheeted my everlasting – catcalled the demons I created in my mind. And they only appeared in the mirrors of my lovers.
I’d settle through a blank page:
What is it that I want to become?
Who is it that I am delivered here from?
And what belief do I entrust?
And what belief do I keep?
And what of this body to me?
A sick kind of death about the ordinates of living, so much in grief. So much in sterilization. Sickled and trickled in a sea of snorting dependence.
I found solace in detaching as I regaled in mortification. A seamstress, I could become; weaving, wandering, whispering secrets of affirmations to dance the dance of a million-billion-trillion-infinite completes.
Time couldn’t be my enemy. I would remember how to move, without anyone telling me. Once my ancestors told me – even in the dimmest of rooms, there is free space.
I have to
M
O
V
E
like a fool.
No one to judge, even in a rectangle full of folk – I know; I don’t know. Who cares? Feel foolish. Be foolish. Do foolishness.
Maybe, I would tap my feet again, in the holler of fervor.
Maybe, I’d leave no space for the tricks of my oppressors, or abusers, or manipulators.
Maybe I’ll push, move, dip, dance, do as the body will attest.
Bio:
Mo (they/them) is a non-binary writer, expressionist, freelancer, medium, and traveler. They were born in Lebanon, KY, and recently moved from Covington, KY to Louisville, KY. Their work focuses on the abstractions of life and death. They often find themself exploring what it means to live, universally, in detachment in a multitude of realities.
They are the founder of Trans for Thought, LLC; an ever-changing online platform, where their personal blog resides and would like to begin a literary magazine for bipoc nonbinary writers/visual artists/expressionists. They utilize laughter and the occasional cupcake as medicine, hoping to make the world a more sustainable/loving place to live.
If you’d like to see more of their work, visit www.mo-bell.com, follow them on Instagram @transforthought, or subscribe on patreon.
Queer Kentucky 