Talons
There are little pieces of you clutched tight in my talons
I carry them close in flight, tucked into the feathers under my belly on the way
home, to weave them in between the thick veins and seams of twigs and stuffing
nestled into leaves and bright things
You turn this night warm.
Who are all of these labels for, anyway? They must surely be a product of the straight white man, the way that they cause us so much grief. The way that they attempt to produce division and disruption. Disharmony, even. It does not make sense at all. There is always the argument that labels assist in making someone feel secure and affirmed in their identity, which June can acknowledge. We are the products of the society that surrounds us, after all.
But to June, she sees these words as broad strokes, boxing paint and colour within a canvas. She wants to draw on the wall: the floors: paint the door: the outside of her house. Hell, she wants to drip paint down the roof, push colour into the grass in her front garden: dig it into the earth, coat her body in the stuff. She is not some defined thing. She did not subsume her identity at birth. She only, really, became a person within, like, the last month or two.
Or rather, she assumed a new personhood within the last month or two. Like tectonic plates crashing into one another, grinding, she is collapsing in and upon and at the hands of the person she formerly had been into the person she is now. What word could possibly entail all of that change, endlessly? Or, more importantly, even, enable it? Personhood is processual: a multitude of adjustments and characters. Who you meet: what you ingest: what comes into you: what lets you go. Seven years ago, she watched a TV show with a character she liked, started talking like and dressing like them. She became a bitch, harsh and bitter. Then it was an artist, a novelist, a lesbian, a woman, a man, the devil’s advocate, the listener, the bump in the night. Two weeks ago, she read a book about a place she had never been to, and the process started all over again. Becoming better, soft as sand and the caress of waves against your toes.
You are ascribed certain statuses and their subsequent social views from the minute you start breathing: you are your age, your sex, your gender, your sexuality, your race, your economic status, etcetera and etcetera, endlessly. These labels inflicted upon your identity confine and re-establish that identity as a certain: some fixed state, rather than a free-flowing body. You are to be nothing more than what the world ascribes to you. That is your great calling. And that is all you are able to be because that is all that you see yourself as, and the only lens through which the world has the capacity to view you. That’s how they get you. That’s how they twist your body up into metallic teeth: another cog gnashing against the furious ticking of the great capitalist machine. Worker, woman, wife, whore.
But June is more, and ever-becoming, just as the earth is, too. The wind in the trees, the decay, the growth, the endless crashing of the sea against craggy rocks at the base of a cliff.
It is such a shame to exist in a world that demands of you the categorisation of your own body. It is world-defining in that way. You see yourself as your sex because the world tells you that you are your sex, and because the world demands that you cut away at yourself until you are nothing more than a string of words that can be ticked off on a form. Some demographic quantity. You hollow out the potential that your selfhood had for a random word someone believes belongs to you. Bestows it upon you: hands it to you as if it is something that you fell out of your pocket when you try to leave it behind on the seat at the back of a bus. It is going to take you twenty years to build up the courage to say fuck that, and probably another twenty to do something about it. To stop assuming that they were just being kind, were trying to help you out, or otherwise didn’t understand. To smack away the hands that offer those labels back to you.
To June, her selfhood is a personal imaginary, an introspective scale- not some biological or social fact. It slides and scatters daily, subject to the whims of the wind and the pull of the tide.
She has laboured over this body for years. Her bones have stretched to accommodate all of that growth and shrinking and subsequent re-growth: her skin is riddled with scars and tiny tiger streaks across all of her fleshiest parts. She has died many times. She has been a little boy, an old woman, a businessman, a pervert, a freak. She has been deeply sad. She has been trying hard not to be for longer. She desires the capacity and freedom to experience love and not feel like it is some great betrayal to whichever person she formerly embodied. These labels cause every action against them to feel sinful: as though they are treasonous to your very identity. Your inner self. But that can’t be true. Because it is the labels themselves that are the treason to your identity. It is the labels themselves that are the root cause of all of your internal upheaval. It is the labels themselves that won’t let you go. You’ve got to set yourself free. Step into the water, keep walking.