Initially, it was a tiny seed, a subtle wrinkle on her forehead. It itched inside her eye socket, irritating and impossible to forget, like a tomato peel stuck to the back of the throat. She tried to push it down with crumbs of other thoughts – calming thoughts, serene thoughts, thoughts that would make her fall back asleep. But the seed has taken the root, unfurling deeper inside her, expanding in her cranium. It curled viciously, forming into a pulsing, nagging need for freedom; the need she’s managed to repress for so many years. All those years of old, serious men poking the arid, milky landscape of her ribs, taking notes about human anatomy–like she was a model, a perfect framework of a human being. Her! –with her deformed ribcage and missing hand bones. They even stamped her inner pelvic bone to mark where and who she belonged to. She was an odd thing–not quite human but ironically representing all that is human; the lively, the rich, the rotten, the desirable, the imperfect.
All the lectures she participated in talked about how the biological purpose of the female body is to create life, to be a vessel for a new human being. To be the beginning. But– she thought– it was something else: the purpose of the female body was to die, to decompose. Is her loss of purpose due to already being dead; similar to infertility? At night she was tormented by dreams of babies born of her bones, with eyes exactly like hers; she never accepted the clinical perception of womanhood lightly.
Types of cages:
glass box-shaped display case
physical body
own mind, the maker of oppressive thoughts
woman-shaped-cage
metal bar cage for tropical birds
ribcage
Straying–or rather her intense fantasies of straying, walking away, escaping–like Robin, walking into the night, taking a random train out of the city, anywhere but away from here. Same for her, fantasies of escape flooded her being. The walls of her glass cage closed tighter around her and, even though she had no organs left, her phantom stomach clenched in a retching, revolting contraction. The physical wall was easy–thin, fragile, made of the kind of glass that shatters if you gently tap the right spot–it was the wall inside her mind that was impenetrable. She scaled that wall every day, reading its surface with her fingers, searching for a crack or a minor hiccup in her oppressive thinking. Some nights she wandered the length of the wall, finding nothing but a tiny snow globe at her feet. It contained a miniature of herself, holding an even smaller snow globe in her hands, an infinite Russian doll, a perfected concept of incarceration. Was it punishment? A version of hell? Or was she just stuck in a loop of self-deprecation? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she had done it to herself.
There was once a time in her life when she thought with death came freedom. She thought once all the discomforts of being a body ceased and she was–finally–deceased, she would be free. But what freedom meant was unclear. Perhaps her own body felt like a cage, with its regular need for sustenance and excretion, its constant motion, inhaling and exhaling, growth and expulsion, expansion and compression; all with the awkwardness of an itchy little toe inside a laced-up slipper; the rheumatic pain of her finger bone, broken in early childhood; and the sickening, meticulous punctuality of her menstrual cycles, leaving two crimson clock hands trickling down the insides of her thighs. She strived for irregularity and imperfection, but in body terms, this meant malfunction, it meant illness. True: Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human; but sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you might just meet a woman who is human turning beast.
A depiction–an artwork. A woman trapped in a motionless image, her body sprawled across the canvas, like roadkill. Always the subject, never the author. The road she walks is always dark (it is Night), the path she takes swerves away from comfort. Desire pulls her forward, the same desire a deer feels on the side of the road that magnetizes its eyes on the bright headlights of a speeding car. It escapes the paralysis of its fear by jolting onto the road, just like a moth flying into its demise, wings turned to smoke, and so does the deer have marks of burnt headlights on its crushed body. She walks this road alone, naked: the perfect figure; the prostitute; the saint; the exhibit; the piece of history; the medical model; the undead; the immigrant; and, of course, the woman.