Prose For Helena

I sit alone after dinner in a velvet dress and a silver locket and four blue ribbons. The hotel room is on the top floor so I have to crouch to look out the window but I’ve got it open all the way. There is a big leafy tree and fairy-lit fountain at a cross point of a childhood dream – turrets and cobblestone streets. I gaze out serenely. I only get this moment secretly, since I’m leaning forwards on my knees in a position which for observers inspires perversions of raw dogging and if someone did it hard enough I’d tip right over the edge and plummet face first to my death. I wish I had a cigarette to smoke pensively and ash onto the grey heads of all the little men strolling in a world far beneath me but it’s not worth buying a pack for just one or two or three and I am a master of discipline with these things. 

Disciplining from beyond, like God and boyfriends and fathers, unless they’re absentee (which is after all the natural state of things), girls know that beauty. The external is erotic for its utter inadequacy, even grand reckonings require complacency. One day you realize that you consented to everything.

We learn many lessons on womanhood but when it comes down to it, they’re all ultimately neuroticism which is what we learn secondarily. I’ve proven this time and time again in my life to be the true source of charm and femininity. It’s not exactly likeable but, then again, being a woman is not exactly a likeable thing. A necessary precondition of the expression of femininity is a quasi-psychotic hyperobservationality. Tik Tok warmed up quickly to the idea of Autists as hot girls since those are the same things. 

It’s easy these days to think ourselves more like our fathers as we age, maybe since we follow their trajectories now in some ways but mostly since we know all our own depravities. This is not a reiteration of how we cannot escape our mothers’ fates. This is saying that we create ourselves in the image of our mothers’ fates. For a woman the process of living is a transformation into a desperate and finicky thing by the simple fact of her existence as unreality.

I catch myself all the time thinking that I have discovered some hidden masculine side when I have in reality stumbled upon my own unrecognizable humanity. The problem is language, like everything, not as in stupid herstory but that the thoughts, feelings, and grandiosity of humanity are overwhelmingly masculine expressions. When I have suddenly materialized and am expected then to reaffirm through subsequent consciousness driven actions, I can’t be expected to achieve anything. Can I be blamed for self-aggrandizing, for seeping nude past midnight into a dirty tile floor while some kohl rimmed girl shakes down the door when I’ve been set up for failure with tools which do not fit me? Existence is unbearable when you’re gagged and mute and lacking any avenue for actualization, for conversationality. 

And then of course all eyes are watching. I walk miserably down the back streets of a city where the sun is blacked out by forty-foot office buildings and the streets are filled with hipsters who hate me and if I stood in a corner to cry someone might jerk off to my red rimmed eyes and worst of all that would probably improve me. There are girls in this world who are jealous of their friends that were cat-called when they were thirteen. 

This is how I find my discipline expertise. If I am constantly under siege I can armour my body and give it up to something greater than me. 

I got caught up in that game since it’s exhilarating and it would surprise you how long you can run on spite and if you wanna play at all you’ve gotta go high stakes. We make millions mostly on the right combo of looks and personality and you gotta be a strategist to achieve it. That’s what glamour is, what winning means. When you’re the hottest it pretty much means you’re the coolest and probably also the smartest, kinda at least.

About three times every few weeks I wear baggy pants and a T instead of short skirts and jewelry. I looked at myself in the mirror accidentally, in a shitty apartment building hallway with rough knotted patterning and realized no one was playing the game with me. My face broke apart into shapes and features which belonged to no one, certainly not me, and I couldn’t help but notice absentmindedly that she was pretty. Why does everyone else get to take pleasure in surveilling that while I’m trapped inside, never knowing it but constantly aware abstractly. 

There are girls in this world who are jealous of their friends that survived sexual assaulting. 

See me, I don’t have to worry about that coz I run on spite and I cracked the code, figured out this whole reclaiming thing. I rack up likes on tinder and take nudes to stare at after I cry or sext random men online, they’re not real and can’t touch me plus they’re gross pathetic incels who I know I’m better than if you really put me up to it. Oh fuck baby I’m so wet. Idiots! They don’t know how bad I got them. I’m stealing all that pleasure back, I’m taking it for me! I’m reclaiming my life and body!

And then I remember I’m playing the game with myself. 

I know a girl who got tits at twelve and was the most popular eighth grader in the city. She ended worse off than she started. I know a girl who started modelling when she was 14. She ended worse off than she started. I know a girl who got a scholarship at 17 to be a star on Broadway. She ended worse off than she started.

Something about our own humanity burns us out before we’ve done anything. 

Something about our form prevents true intimacy from any sources except shared between. In men’s language this might be a Hyacinth Sea Nymph Giggling. I’d never believe anyone might love me if they also might want to fuck me, but I know they’ll act in an approximation of it if they want to fuck me, which means I’ll act in an approximation of the porn they watch.

I’m playing the game with myself.

The thing is all my friends who keep coming back happy have their hair shorn short and their skirts all burned and they’re saying you’ve gotta try this, I finally, I finally feel free! And I’m happy for them but if you did it to me you’d have to pin me down like torture and I wouldn’t know how to walk or act, I’d spit on that freedom. What do I do when a woman isn’t real and a man isn’t me?

There is a voice deep inside of me which is dense and immobile and untouched by all these things and I know from Rumi that it is my soul which goes beyond this world but it is also the thing driving disheartenment watching four turquoise ribbons find their way into my braids for no reason. That is the level of idiocy it takes to assume the artifice of femininity. But are these not my feeble attempts at living? Why don’t they turn out human like everyone else’s?

Even writing now I am distracted by how my hair falls in the opposite mirror.

I realized I was a person, for the first time I think, around my 22nd birthday between waves of panic about losing naivety. There is nothing so dreadful as the thought that I might have some sort of wisdom to convey. Two years ago I focused every thought on my palatability – not likeability which we have established as an especially unfeminine thing – but my consumability to the right types of people.  This is what it means to be a woman and this is what it means to be online, which is why we are so good at it naturally.

I’d say that though we are united by fear and tragedy most commonly the worst sin is to lose our bodies and become a tacit technical being trapped in a thing, which is how we’ve trained ourselves to be. Any other perspective is a cartoonish disavowal of autonomy- and we might have learned by now that you can blame yourself while still admitting that you responded rationally. And if the current state of being is a desperate rendering of a masculine schematism isn’t the invention of a new mythology a sufficient beginning?

As in:

I was born to a domain with sunshine, raw air, and willow trees. In ancient tales I am gifted to a prince or king amidst bowls of incense and I might not mind that if we realize that by proxy of shape and layout those heaven-scents will always be inhaled first and always most intensely by nude and passive me. 

I find hope and hopelessness in the twin edge of beauty and suffering. But I see at least that the pain is born from beauty and that beauty from pain is the false image which initiates most of the pain when we come right down to it. Or that the prison was made in the model of the pure and true, which cannot be reached through the first. I know at least on the earthly realm I am the ultimate judge of all men who encounter me. I am thus without trying; the trying is an ill-fated attempt to meet them on their wretched level and I‘m playing the game with myself.