La Mer By Frankie Galvin

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La Mer

    I’m no stranger to this kind of waking absence, of slipping into the stream of time. Something happens, subtle sometimes, like a shift of light or a ringtone, and I’m fractured, flung into memories all at once. And that itself is a kind of time travel: old selves living in unrelated moments in tandem with one another. I’ll be in line at Fred Meyer or in an Uber and all of a sudden, I’m scattered. Froot Loops sogging in a bowl of warm milk as cartoons play across the room. Cap’n Crunch cutting the roof of my mouth before school. Dairy Queen soft serve dripping down my arm on a park bench by the lake. 
    I’ve been asked where I go sometimes, and I’ve never been able to explain it, have never wanted to try. I prefer that slight distance, to keep me to myself. Just in case. Mila gets  close, too close to it sometimes. Her tenderness and her gaze, like I’m another one of her butterflies to pin, at once something delicate yet still a specimen to be studied.  
    We had that fight. An hour long cataclysm before you drove back to your own apartment, where someone else will ferry you off to the airport. Before that, one long confession on the porch in the middle of the night. I sidestep booze when I can, otherwise I start to talk down hallways and drink doors open. Doors I’d rather keep sealed shut or better yet deny entirely. We were on the cusp of spring break, our exams wrapping up. Your arms wrapping around my waist as my neighbor packs a bowl. The sun sinking later than the week before, the skunk stink of the weed mixing with the fecund citrus of the douglas firs armoring the complex. Bad news was drifting in from the other coast, the news report that morning pushing against something in me. Ringing in my ears. Must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology, at every level. But in that moment, cradled by the forest, the amber halo of your hair in the setting sun, the evening and everything unspooling, I felt lulled into a cautious optimism.
    You received me so kindly. Told me about the ship of Theseus, how each part changed but it was still the same ship. That you’d love me through my becoming. The slammed door of your face when I took it back the next day.
    Nothing has ever made me feel as incompetent as love.
    Until this paper.
    I was stumped. I had wanted to root my thesis in a Dionysian feminism. Dionysus was a mercurial god always shifting. An androgyne god of social liberation, ritual madness, and fluids: water, milk, blood, sap, honey, wine. And I was hung up on how the West imagines womanhood as a wet realm, a dark sea churning, a primeval swamp. My paper was this discursive leaping around. I had the throughline at some point. Now, it was just a soggy mess, a waste of a semester. The whole thing is fucked, tbh I had started to text Mila before setting the phone back down. Because worst of all, so were we. I look down at my notes:
Mutter mother
Moder bog
Moor fen
This is where we come from and this is where we take it all back. Television and myth making remind us: borne of water, ancient salt lusts lure us back Home to Mother.
    Maybe ‘Home’ and ‘Mother’ were setting me up for failure. Nobody is free of an upbringing. But I felt rootless. Always a stranger on my way to some new town, pinging between different stripmalls across interstates. We moved around the country every few years, which meant a shedding of coats and then buying more coats. The same grocery stores with different names, some aisles listing soda then pop and back again. Dreyer’s becomes Edy’s. Some neighbors yards say Protect the Children and the next say Love Wins.
    And my mother. Dawn. A decade younger than the other moms in my class. Thin and lethal. Always carrying on about being a shotgun bride from a shotgun house, and it was like, oh here we go with the daily trauma dump. She was born with glass bones and paper skin, every morning she breaks her arms and every afternoon…I’m doing it again, with the Spongebob references. I always forget Mila was a PBS Kid, no Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. My Gen-X parents raised by the TV then transmitting that benign neglect down to me. And here I am, speaking through media code, always slanted and never quite right there. 

    Dawn was a stay-at-home-mom, technically, but she’d remind my brother and me that she was an entrepreneur first. Either of which meant most days were spent waking up at ten and then scrolling eBay for vintage Barbies to buy and resell. This was under the guise of a legitimate business. This was something she’d repeat loud enough as if it was the whole neighborhood she was trying to convince rather than just my father. My father, tearing through credit card statements and wailing as if he were Ray Liotta in Goodfellas but instead of going down for coke it was losing his American Dream to eBay fraud and garage sale Barbies. Most of the dolls found their way into her own collection. Barbie living out all of her eras and slew of careers from the shelves and witnessing Dawn’s daily rituals. She would yank the dishwasher open with a dramatic clatter, pull out her Burger King Care Bear glass that managed to survive each move, with the lead paint chipping from whoever-bear’s belly, and fill it with rum and warm Diet Coke. You know, I get why Susan Smith did what she did, she’d tell me. 
    We were conceived as a way to pass the time but incapable of filling it.
    The other part of the thesis threatening to ruin me was the “physicality” of it. Something I’d spent much of my life steeling myself against. Camille Paglia wrote equally outrageous is gender, which we have not chosen but which nature has imposed upon us. Our physicality is torment, our body the tree of nature on which Blake sees us crucified. She was real for that, because, how else to phrase it but torment? The contractions as if my guts are one fist clenching, unclenching. The uterine jellies like something unalive and writhing. The ectoplasm of a skipped life cycle leaking from me. I always felt hijacked by some chthonian force when it happened, like Perseophone being dragged down to the underworld. I never got used to it.
    So I was taking a bath. Midmorning pale spring sun seeping through the door, the ember glow of candles flickering shadows on the wall. I felt like I could be in a cave somewhere, just outside of time itself, if not for the YouTube ads every few minutes yanking my awareness back to the room, to the smell of the candles along the toothpaste spackled counter. I was finally using one of the thirty dollar candles Mila brought over, the ones made of soy wax with vague names that all smelled like gardenias grown in ash trays. Faucet roaring, I pour salt into the water, stirring with my fingers until the crystals dissolve. When I lower my body into the tub, I imagine the surface of water as a threshold I’m passing through, like flesh, like passing through my own flesh. I imagine I’m immersed in my own body. Too many parts of myself had stepped back and it was time to integrate them back, to live in one timeline again and explain me to myself.
    You taught me how to do it.
    I was leaning against the table we rescued from Value Village and crammed into your breakfast nook, wobbling it back and forth as I described the rabbit hole I fell down. I told you about the Maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, the ones who, across centuries, had seduced me into this now barely coherent thesis. Well, their cults pursued ecstasis, or standing outside of yourself. A kind of trance-like shamanistic thing. And with that, your eyes lit up. A swish of your velvet skirt and you vanished down the hall, past the snake plants and sun catchers, returning with a copy of Dreams of the Otherworld: Celtic Shamanism and Seership. You toy with the silver charms of your bracelet as you thread the ideas together for me. How through meditation, someone could travel between different layers of their being, reuniting misaligned or missing parts. Like soul retrieval. To embark on a journey to reintegrate what parts of consciousness had fled when it all became too much.
    And it was. All too much. I’d been a coward, peeling unwanted parts of myself from my being like leeches and flinging them behind in the murky depths of the past. Afraid to look down on the little wounds, afraid of the blood. But like Sylvia Plath notes in “Kindness”, the blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it.
    There is no stopping it.
     I’m scattered.
    The looming deadline.
    The crack in my foundation.
    The cyclical betrayal of my body. 
Begrudging love has lended me the courage to slip into the liminal. I swear I will return to this world, fresh and wet again. I press my palms against my eyes and I’m greeted by darkness. Less a bolt of black but more the violet and gray pinpricks that make up static. Static giving way to bright zig-zags of lights, like constellations or bowling alley carpets. Shifting in and out of focus, the lights swirling, then pulsing. As the tinny drums drone on from my wireless speaker, I whirl deep within myself. The bathwater goes lukewarm to just above frigid.
    I’m journeying. 
    I am eight, already more witch than child. It’s gray and it’s raining, the same sky-static sawing through me each day. Something is pressing down on me already. Any fever in me has been starved out, the vitamin D like light in my bones now leeched. I’m lying on the staircase and I’m singing. I’m wailing the words to Ghost of You by My Chemical Romance into my voice recorder. When I sing the words, it’s like a ritual, drawing something towards me. This is a rehearsal for the love that’ll ruin me, the love that will gut me like a fish. It’s not here yet but my heart knows it’s on its way. I’m a child with a thinning veil, all tragic stories feel like a premonition.
   It’s raining. I meet my next door neighbor, Ash, a girl with dark eyes and dark hair just my age. We sit fully clothed in the master room’s bathtub, the sound of rain outside, the lights off, and we tell each other ghost stories. Each freakier than the last, not sure which part is more fun, the thrill of the fear or how we squeeze each other's hands when a shampoo bottle topples over and we’re half convinced it’s a spirit there to scold us. When we sit there in the dark, it’s like an initiation into a world we create, just the two of us. Dawn gets agitated. Tells me to stop talking about the occult, alright? When I ask what that even is, she lights a cigarette, ignoring my question. She blows some smoke out, giving me a warning look. The more you talk about it, the more you let it in. 
    It’s summertime, and the rain has started to thin out for weeks now, but the days are still bloated with gray. I’m rolling my eyes as I shut the complete illustrated children’s bible, having read it cover to cover over the course of four hours. Dawn says, lose the attitude and take it from the top, chop chop. 
    It’s raining, it’s gray, it’s raining, I am lying on my stairs, I am singing, I am wailing the words to Ghost of You like a performance. Something is on its way to me, there is a grief I am barely outpacing. Valentine’s Day rolls around, and on the packet of Fun Dip she puts into my backpack special, Ash writes i like-like you and doodles a little heart. You’d think it was the Unabomber Manifesto scrawled on there with how Dawn reacts. We leave that March.
    I am eleven and omnipotent. I know maybe every word for boobs. It’s a cicada summer, everything shrill, heavy, humid. My shoulders heaving with street hockey aggression, heart clanging in unison with my stick against stick, against the black top, the goalpost, a shin or two but not on purpose. My neighbors Jake, Mike, Nate and I have formed a pack, cemented at the top of the local kid hierarchy. I won my way there through feats of strength at recess and being able to destroy anyone who has ever lived at Thing-Thing Arena 2 on Crazymonkeygames.com. We dogpile into Jake’s computer room’s peeling office chair. We watch every Weird Al music video and Newsground flash animation we can find. Our mouths test new syllables, each more jagged than the last until his mom threatens to wash our mouths out with soap. At Mike’s we play GameCube, and we take turns pausing Super Smash Bros. just in time to tilt the camera up Peach’s dress. 
    Then Mike and Nate start going to the rich kid Catholic school up in Raleigh, because according to Dawn, their family thinks they're better than everyone else on the block. But really their mom is just a slightly bigger bible thumper than she is. One weekend we’re biking around the dirt lot where they started building a new house then stopped ‘cause the news said the real estate bubble has burst which mostly means everyone’s dads are swearing at the TV every night and listening to Alex Jones the way some of our neighbors tune in to televangelists. At least mine is. Well, We dump our bikes, but we’re middle schoolers now, which means it’s kinda gay to play in the half built house like we used to. Overnight, nothing is allowed to be like it used to. Mike tells me to go back home. Says no girls allowed. I’m blindsided. I protest. He shoves me, and I lose my footing and fall down. He says, you’re a girl and it’s time you start acting like it. From the dirt I tell him that I’m going to kick his fucking ass, and when Jake and Nate just look down, I tell them I’m going to kick their asses too. Did you hear that? She’s not just gonna  kick our asses, she’s gonna kick our fucking asses. They all laugh. You’re not gonna do shit. I want to remind them that my brother Trevor goes to alternative school and he’ll kick their asses into 2009. But that’d just prove their point. No one takes me seriously. I walk my bike back home with my chin up, refusing to cry, even though I feel the Chef Boyardee from lunch in my throat burning, and the world feels like it’s tilting under my torn Converse. I ignore the red ants that made their way through the holes and grit my teeth as they sting.
    It’s not hard to find myself. I can spot that awful shag haircut either two decades too late or too soon to be cool from across the quad. There I am, in the oversized hoodie swiped from my brother’s hamper. An idiotic choice, as it’s eighty degrees in October because where we moved that year seasons don’t exist; the sun sears through the canyon all year until everything withers or else goes up in flames. And even though I was xenomorph flat all through school, no amount of fabric was enough of a buffer between me and that particular reality. There are the girls that had taken me in since the novelty of a student transferring into the armpit of East County had yet to wane. They’re all strewn about the dead grass in their Hollister t-shirts and capri shorts, a length nobody likes but has to compromise with lest they get struck down by a dress code violation. Fanned out with their trays, my paper bag crumpled beside me at the edge of their circle. We’re all talking about something, but I see my mouth moving, asking something. I can’t remember any of the words exchanged but even now I remember, as I’m watching, how their faces scrunched as they said it. The anxiety mottling my cheeks all pink I backpedal, hard and fast the second they disagree. And I’m silent the rest of the period, the panic pulling me out from my own body. 
    My second bath in two days. Cradled in the warm water, I wonder if this must be how babies experience a prenatal yoga class from the other side of the womb when mothers stretch to New Age music. I wonder if my mom could feel something gone wayward in the waters of her womb. If something was slanted about me from the start. I think about the onslaught of information and we would have to wade through for our own kids. I think of you at the children’s boutique downtown, the midmorning sun in your hair as you consider which books you’d put on their shelf, which ones you’d read to them every night. Mila handing me a knit bear hat small enough to fit my palm. The heirloom cotton rompers. The frog boots. Your squeal of delight at all the different language block sets, the ones in Russian and French, too, so they can be a true citizen of the world the second they sprout into it. 
    And I think of your ex-boyfriend’s DM, telling me to go play house with someone else. My Chick-Fil-A loving cross country teammate at the slumber party calling out from her sleeping bag what those people do shouldn’t be called marriage. Would our children be left to deal with the consequences? Is there a timeline where they could be whisked off by the state if they call me Dad? And God, I know you’ll be subjected to competing voices, from doctors to bloggers. Telling you to eat wild caught fish, drink chlorophyll lemonade, no processed foods, blah blah blah, if you so much as look at plastic, your endocrine system will screech to a halt. Et cetera. I don’t know how to open myself to so much uncertainty without spilling out. 
    My second bath in two days. Cradled in the warm water, I wonder if this must be how babies experience a prenatal yoga class from the other side of the womb when mothers stretch to New Age music. I wonder if my mom could feel something gone wayward in the waters of her womb. I think of being amphibian small and still a half formed thing. When I’m six and sinking after jumping into the wrong end of the pool, all I’m thinking is they’re gonna think I’m so stupid. So I’m too embarrassed to cry out for help, because I think I’d rather die than prove I really was that dumb, after all. My lungs feel stretched thin and I’m fighting to keep my head above the surface, like the world’s most self-conscious and desperate game of bobbing for apples. My limbs are burning, everything slows, and all my brain says is stupid, stupid! Someone’s mom jumps in and pulls me out. But not mine.
     Trevor taught me how to play Resident Evil. How to hawk a loogie. How to throw a punch. How to pour isopropyl on pavement shredded knees without crying. How to smoke weed from an apple. How to mosh in the pit without looking like a bitch. He taught me the shortcut home through the woods and how to be in this world without anyone knowing how scared I actually am. Tell me, how the Hell could I make it as a guy without his tuition? 
     Dawn couldn’t teach me how to be a person in the world either. All she had to show me of womanhood was how to discard bloody linens with steady hands, to play life as rigged game or grief lesson. But she did sign me up for swimming lessons. With hawk eyes at the pool she’d snap, let go of the edge of the pool, come on. Don’t be a wimp! 
     When I told my dad that our friend was starting T, he gave me a sidelong glance before asking if I’ve ever looked up Cultural Marxism. Before I could respond, he went on ranting. Gender ideology was how the global elites were going to destroy the family, and from there, American life. He was a big believer in the family, as if we were some noble mission bestowed upon him and not just the consequences of not pulling out fast enough on prom night. As if he hadn’t spent most of his free time listening to InfoWars and playing Elder Scrolls, veins throbbing each time we pierced his solitude with requests for rides or reminders that we exist.  
But he taught me how to boil down beets to make sugar, how to find water in the woods when the power grid fails in my lifetime (which it will, he swears!) how to start a fire, how to preserve fruits and vegetables in mason jars.
    Trevor jabs his finger into my chest. Use your fucking head. They’re fighting because of you. 
    Ankle deep in the estuary off campus, salt in the air. My hand still warm from holding yours. Your voice syrupy with wine: my love for you is like an open door. Why don’t you ever come inside?
    My first real girlfriend leans in during the surf punk set, her eyeliner melting from the body heat of the pit around us, orange juice and vodka breath shouting I just don’t get it! Nobody’s ever gonna look at you and believe you’re a guy!
    In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil wrote men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
    The world we were born into no longer exists. Nobody is ever what they intend to be. 
    I guess I am as prepared to face whatever this life is as anyone can be.
    But not yet.
    My third bath in three days. No candles, no music. Just tepid water, my luteal jellyfish around me. I feel like an embryo. A birth in reverse. Watered down iced coffee from my last time in the outside world, some stale Goldfish crackers. I close my eyes and breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. The waves of nausea as I get closer to that old house, smell her cigarettes out on the patio. Because the closer the moon, the rougher the sea. Radiohead blaring from my iDog propped on my windowsill. 
    Thirteen. The year I half believed I had the devil inside me but really it was just hormones detonating slow, foreclosing the future. Bodysnatchers looping on repeat through my green iPod shuffle, I stole my dad’s clippers and started shaving my head. Filling the sink with pale rust locks, the same shade as Dawn’s. Our slate eyes locking in the mirror as she stood in the doorway for a moment that seemed to ripple through eternity before she opened her mouth. I shut my eyes. The crack of her open dry palm quick and fast across my face. Dread cements me in place as she keeps going, raining blows and shrieking. Your grandfather would roll over in his grave if he could see this! My headphones knocked out of my ears. This world is going to eat you alive! Don’t you get it? This world is going to eat you up!  
     Where I had only ever heard repulsion and rage then sounds more fearful around the edges now. With her laptop open to some Barbie listing on eBay and a lit cigarette dangling from her lips, I notice, for the first time, the lines stretched around her wan face. The slight tremor. The exhaustion radiating from her, the weight of failure on her sloped shoulders.
     My empathy dissolves my rage, threatens to dissolve me down to sea foam.  There’s no metabolizing the past without letting it maul you. I want to tell her that I understand. In her own white trash girl grit way,  she was only ever trying to keep me safe. I’m in love with a world that has only ever tried to chew me down. I am in the bowels of it. I am being digested.
    And that was the worst part of the next morning was realizing she was right. The shame flaring through me as I stepped onto the bus and Matt cupped his hands around his mouth and in his best Mr. Garrison impression shouted, Oh, scissor me timbers! The guys on the bus clung to that the whole rest of the school year, thanks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone and my stupid haircut and my refusal to heed my mom’s sixth sense for impending social ruin. Scissor me timbers!  
I read off the Slavoj Žižek interview, Masturbathon is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered subject. You rolled your eyes and threw your hands up. You’d rather listen to Žižek than what I have to say, fine. Whatever. But If you’re just going to sit there and make me feel stupid because I won’t co-sign your self-loathing, I don’t know what to tell you.
    
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Snow stifled the world outside. The atmosphere in your cluttered but tidy apartment was
one of drowsiness. The warm glow of mismatched table lamps arranged on the end table. A large print of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an enormous, ornate frame that we found during our thrift store dates leaned against one wall, waiting to be hung. Stacks of books lined the other yet to be shelved since a bookshelf had yet to be found. A succulent from our trip to San Diego was clinging to life in a porcelain clown car planter on the windowsill, crisped brown at the tips.
    I rise from her sea with a brine haloed mouth.
    Her eyes roll back.
    My ancestors roll in their graves.
    Later on the screen, one light house keeper asks the other, "You feel shame when you 
lie  with a woman?”
    There had been moments through our childhood where it was as if Trevor and I had melted down to become one, one ideal alchemical child, a perfect balance of opposites. One
breathed out and the other in. Hours passed playing Playstation 2 together, The Simpsons Road
Rage and Crash Bandicoot. Building blanket forts and reading Captain Underpants and Calvin
and Hobbes by flashlight. And all the pizza nights, eating the other’s crust. We shared a womb,
shared a bunk bed, shared a favorite color. Now either of us could be dead and the other wouldn’t know it. 
     How do you write about Home when it’s spat you out? 
   We’re in your dorm room again, back in undergrad, that Klimt poster from the campus bookstore taped somewhat askew. You’re unbuttoning your floral dress, and I press my lips against the shell of your ear again, only this time, I tell you. I tell you as if love is enough to open a new door, to dream something new into being.
    In the tub, I say to no one, my voice clear in the narrow room, I want to wring me out of myself and flow back into the world. Something in me softens, and my lungs expand. Whatever skin I’m outgrowing begins to dissolve. The sea foam circles the drain. I think of being a hushed pearl tucked away in my mother’s ovaries again and a dream she won’t regret yet. 

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Frankie Galvin (he/him) is a transgender poet weaving weird stories in Portland, OR. He is the author of the chapbook Spider Rodeo (Bottlecap Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Driftwood Press, Sunday Mornings at he River Press, Oyster River Pages, Same Faces Collective, Angel Rust Magazine, among others.
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