meat and human and body. a love for gore, a squick for words.
i no longer resonate with sentiments about not being a body; not having a body that fits; not being recognizable
this is hard-won. this body. i have carved and moulded it with too many imperfect employments of others’ hands. i’ve paid in debt and in trauma, in experience and in having indelible imprints instilled alongside what i requested.
it’s mine. i wouldn’t be just as happy in any other body. i’d, in fact, feel dysphoric wouldn’t i? would feel despairing at needing to repeat all these modifications that make up me.
sure, to have started with some other body. sure. but do not take my mods away from me. they are what constitute my self. and i am not sure i could survive implementing them a second time.
this body, customized, mine.
—
and am i, then, flesh and tendon and meat and vein? the jump of scar at line of wrist upon bending. the line of blue i still itch to pluck out pull like string.
much less often, the too-awake of keypoints, the vibrating detaching.
still, it is difficult to determine how much is due to separating words, erecting careful linguistic barriers, frames that provide containment and safety.
—
i do not think myself made of meat.
certainly, i shall be, on death. certainly, this body… could easily be framed as meat. is, under many a lens. is not exceptional in how it is not.
but now that i am body and body is me
and no, i am not quite – something else, am i. i am not synthetic or robotic or android, though i am cousin that is… that is not my story.
but i am not human, no. no. uneasy as it makes me to claim i am not when i have more access to it than others
nor am i code, exactly, more –
universe code, i suppose
jagged and bright primary colors and distorted shapes, fragments composing a whole
it is nice to think myself an accident and even though i’ve built hammered integrated my way into this body crafted a home call it mine and me, it was never intended so
—
i still think at times about the successive overtaking of selves, consuming and being consumed, old history buried down so layered and perhaps never fully digested
it’s tempting to pin the emergence of new selves to old deaths, to write: and then (i) died.
comforting, and more and more i see nothing wrong with comfort.
—
not to impose, coopt – never, never.
but humanity is no home for me.
epochryphal 
cor, it’s connie. i’m writing this right before going to sleep so please forgive me if it’s not the clearest.
lately I have been thinking of myself as – not a garden – a plot of land. there are seasons to it, cycles. fallow, planting, flowering, harvest – and also disaster. a lightning strike, a flood, a wildfire, an earthquake. the things that grew are broken or destroyed and i have to work to bury them or wait for them to break down. only then can the seeds that are left sprout again. and they might be the same genus but they’re not the exact same plants – continuity but discontinuity of self. and the old selves nourish or poison the earth and i only find out which long after they are gone.
and the seeds can come from all over: some i specially plant and cultivate, some are blown in on the wind, some might be dropped by passing birds or left by others traveling through. but they’re all mine eventually i guess. it’s too big to manage every part of it so I have to just look to maintain a healthy ecosystem and not let anything, even ivy or kudzu, crowd anything else out.
anyway, this is just my longwinded and kind of confusing way of saying… similar hat! not the same, but similar. and i’m glad your body is a hard-fought home even if it wasn’t always, even if humanity isn’t. ❤
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I recognize this sort of feeling. I tend to feel that I’m missing so much of myself…and that who I am and things I do now are illegitimate in the absence of all that I’ve lost. And that in fact the building up of myself is to get in the way of the return of a real self.
But…I’ve been this way for so long. And I’ve made decisions. I’ve done things. And I have to admit to myself there are things that are worthwhile. I may feel mostly fake but there are hard won bits here, bits that I had to work a lot on and that I do like.
I just love all these words here.
Uh, I think I had more to say here but my brain is running out of resources. Used them up just rereading all this here lol. I do like it; you have made a good piece of writing.
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