Scarlet Ibis
I fell into heat when I turned thirty. I was sitting on an Island called Los Roques— it was an archipelago off the coast of Venezuela. The ocean was alive and my heart was in the midst of dying. The juxtaposition of flying fish and sinking dreams was poignant. So poignant I could smell it at mid-day when the sun was at its peak. It smelled like rotting peonies, sweat and the freshness of salt air. It sounded dramatic—sinking dreams—but dramatics was a farce, and a version of my dreams did sink that weekend. I lay in the water half naked, sunned, physically healthy, in the most beautiful place I’d seen, smiling up at a life that was supposed to be while it looked down at me with guilt, hate and fear. I remember wanting the guilt, hate and fear to penetrate me—wanting to touch it between its legs and wait for it to come. That’s what we do, we reach for the parts that won’t take us until we don’t anymore. Sometimes it’s because there is an invisible ladder to climb and we’ve seen other people move up its rungs with ease. Sometimes it’s because we are lonely and the parts we seek, the parts that don’t want us, keep us company. Sometimes it’s because there is a spice we can taste and smell but we can’t identify it and so we stay, waiting for it to come to us, to reveal itself, to waft in through a window or splatter at the edge of a wave—to be clearer than just intuition.
I tend to be immensely attracted to the unknown. To the secrets people keep inside of themselves—to the world beneath the skin. Sometimes the unknown, the inner abyss, is uglier than we imagined and sometimes it is beyond the kind of beauty we could fathom. Betting on the inside isn’t for the sane of mind.
As I sat there, on that island, ribs and breasts resting in the sand, water moving up my legs and back down again, I let the nature tell me. Its whispers went in my nose and out my ears but for the tiny moment they whirled inside of me I knew what I was searching for didn’t exist in the person sitting above me both literally and figuratively. There was no person that could bring me the vastness of inner worlds because the deepest, most intricate, most creative, most fantastical, most honest, most intelligent, most intuitive, most raw and undone world was the world beneath my skin, and it would never look down at me with guilt and fear and hate. It would radiate from within me and all I had to do to feel it was say yes.
Transmissions Circa 2012
