Oh look! I'm leaking: dysmorphia into metamorphosis 

EXAMPLES OF SCORES:​

​

1- Patroclus and Achilles: I am Achilles and I am dying

 

I can’t see it yet but I can smell the sea, the smell of the spot between my mother’s neck, chest and shoulders and I can hear thousands of waves whisper: You are almost home, just a little further. 

 

I stand eyes wide open, out at the water. The thirsty waves lap at the sky, like a slobbery dog after a long walk, its jowls splash frothy saliva waves.

I stand eyes wide open, out at the water, and watch as the clouds slip down the sky like wet paint. They melt into the water and dissolve with no trace, like candy floss. Soon, the last drop of sky has drowned in the sea. And I am still standing, eyes wide open, out at the water, waiting for him to come back to me. I take off my stiff armour which has held me in this shape of unnatural hardness for far too long. On my neck, shoulders, hips and forehead are red marks from the metal digging into my skin. As my chest plate hits the sand, I can feel my body slowly slowly return to its watery state. The wind picks up. Sand litters my face and sticks to the sweaty creases of my body. It irritates my eyes and reddens the spidery veins that branch out into the white. It is as if a coral reef has grown out of my tear ducts and my salty sadness is nourishing the ecosystem all this waiting has created. All this gazing outwards has made me feel quite empty inside. My neck aches from eagerly straining forward, always forward, and, my eyes bulge with the longing. I am in pain but I can’t blink in case I miss him. The goo in the corners of my eyes hardens and I miss him so much. The wind and the sand play tricks with my tired eyes and I’m sure I see someone at the far end of the beach but when the wind subsides, there are only seagulls, cackling at my hopeless hope. I surrender. I blink and my eyelashes crunch together like shells under shoes. Tears start to leak from every opening. I let myself go liquid. 

 

I’m more watery than most bodies. My mothers are the Moon and the Sea. They made me from things found on the shore, left by the tide: shells, crab legs, anemones, barnacles, seaweed, driftwood, jelly fish and broken blue bottle glass for my eyes, softened by the Sea herself.

He always said that my shedding skin tasted like salt and that its flakes melted on his tongue. He thinks this is why dogs love liking my knees so much. He liked to sleep with his head on my chest and listen to the waves because I have a seashell heart. I told him that my hips are to hold on to, harbours for when the waves become too wicked, that my strong legs are anchors I have chosen to plant right here next to him, that all my veins run into the sea that pools in my palate underneath my tongue and he can drink from it anytime he likes. When I wrapped my arms around him he said it was like being carried by a big wave. I could feel his head slowly give into my wide rough hands. 

It is my turn to feel weightless. 

 

The Moon calms the Sea for my entering and brings the tide right up to my toes so I don’t have to walk too far at all. I fall onto my knees and let the exhaustion I’ve been fighting take over my body and hold me in its surrendering warmth. I didn’t know it could feel so good to be this weak. My fingers feel like I have just woken up and it takes everything I have left to curl them around my seashell heart. I pull it out of my coral-caged chest and raise it to my ear, I hear waves, wind and seaweed whispering: you aren’t old, when did you become so tired?

 

Slowly, I lie down on my front, turn my head and place my cheek in the thick wet sand. Water fills up my ear and makes a small rock pool where algae instantly starts to grow and within seconds a crab has already claimed my ear as its home. I can feel the sand escape from under my body then fill back up with each wave, concaving out then curving in. I stretch my hand out in front of me and let the water pool into my seashell heart. I offer its iridescence to the sea and return myself to the salt. 

The waves swallow me and spit me out again and again until I’m thousands of miles from the shore. I let the water enter my ears, mouth and nose and replace my thoughts with simpler things, like salt and sky. My body is emptied of the love that gave way to the loss and I’m not sad anymore. The water fills up all the holes. My bottom lip splits open against the rocks and I pour. 

After the sun has set but before the stars show themselves, the waves subside and the sea becomes still. I hover at the water’s surface, flat on my tummy with my face down towards the depths. I am finally drowning. My lungs give out with a violent contraction. My pupils start to dart left to right, frantically fighting to escape my dead body before I become blue, bloated, picked at by birds and bitten into by sharks. When they finally break free, they swim like excited tadpoles, overcome by the vastness of the sea. My body floats on the surface while my tadpole eyes venture down into the dark waters. They travel deeper and deeper until they find a new body to give eyes to.

The water takes over. It bathes me into being. I am nursed by its ancient amniotic undercurrents. The cold carves out my purple river veins. Under the water’s wobbles and dancing light, my skeleton becomes bendy and supple. My hipbones and teeth are weathered down, eroded into white riverbed rocks and little cream pebbles. I am swirled and slurped into swamps, cisterns and saliva. I am spilled, swallowed and spat. I am expelled and excreted. I become murky marshes and muddy ditches. I am streamed into fresh springs and fresh sweat. I flow into frothy shores. I leak milk and trickle into tides. I stretch and sprawl into lush lakes. I become rainwater, I pour and pelt. The sea drowns inside me. 

Then I am birthed once more.

 

The first thing I remember is floating on my back, in the middle of a black sea, staring up at the Moon and I am content, a new creature. ​

​

2- There’s a rave in the grass every morning 

 

I heard from the trees that there’s a rave in the grass every morning. I wake up when the sun has risen but while there are still some stubborn stars in the sky. I go outside with pillow marks and dried drool on my cheeks. I place my body on the grass. It’s wet and slimy, not itchy and dry like in the afternoon. And I can feel it getting wetter. I put my ear to the ground and I hear its heart, pulsating, pumping into me, digging its damp dirt into my fingernails. And I hear the grass tearing itself apart. The grass is eating grass and spitting itself back out. The trees lose their leaves and shudder: the grass is cannibalistic in the morning. If you look close, the grass is made out of thousands and thousands of bugs and beetles. If you look closer, the bugs and beetles are actually bodies, slimy and naked like newborns, sick-green and really really hungry. The grass is tearing itself apart. The grass is crawling over itself, chewing through itself, and digging out of itself. 

 

The grass doesn’t know which part it prefers, eating or being eaten.

 

The grass groans, screeches and yells. It sounds like tongues smacking, teeth grinding, spittle and deep pounding drums, headaches and clubs from the outside, leaf mulch and picking scabs and biting fingernails and fingers scratching through splintered wood. The trees shudder: the grass is cannibalistic in the morning. I feel the grass tease the corners of my mouth and tickle my bare knees and ankles. It kisses my eyelashes, wraps itself around my fingers and pulls me further into the ground. I writhe and wriggle my hips and push into the ground’s hardness.

The thumping enters the deepest point of my gut and fills the behind of my eyes. I open my mouth as wide as it goes and I rip at the grass. I rip and tear until my teeth are laced with green ribbons and my nose and mouth are choked with dirt. I open my mouth and rip at the grass and rip and rip and tear and I don’t realise I have started eating my fingers until I have chewed my left pinky down to the bone. I’m not sure which part I prefer, eating or being eaten.

​

I’m inspired by many writings but especially the following:​

​

“Of water.
I always look to the preposition to ground me in relation. Especially when this liquid world reminds me that relation is all that exists. So our bodies, singing with whales, dancing with dolphins, becoming part of the skin of the sea among ancient invertebrates, or even just sitting here reading these words, are of water. Not just with water, near water, into water, for water. Of. Of denotes origin. Our first place. Water. Embryonic water on the mammal scale, the ocean itself on a collective scale. Of, an archaic way to say from water. Of water as in, belonging to water. Our bodies are of water because water claims us in that can't-live- with-out-you way. Water is our constitution, our substance, we are made of water. Moving through the world as mostly water, composed of cells that need water to function. The truth we have in common with the rest of life on earth and maybe other planets. Mine is a body of water. Yours is a body of water. Which is why even if you can't hear the ocean right now, your salt water reality remains accessible, always.”

-Chapter Bodies of Water, “Reflection” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Interspecies Performance edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp

“We are literally implicated in other animal, vegetable, and planetary bodies that materially course through us, replenish us, and draw upon our own bodies as their wells: human bodies ingest reservoir bodies, while reservoir bodies are slaked by rain bodies, rain bodies absorb ocean bodies, ocean bodies aspirate fish bodies, fish bodies are consumed by whale bodies – which then sink to the seafloor to rot and be swallowed up again by the ocean’s dark belly (...). My point is that these bodies are all collaboratively worlded. (...) We can’t – and I would argue we shouldn’t – take ourselves out of the picture, but we can cultivate ways of imagining our lived experience as decentred, as always transcorporeally implicated.”

"The passage from body of water to body of water (always as body of water) is never synecdochal or metaphoric; it is radically material.”​

​

-Bodies of Water: posthuman feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis​

​

"They constantly set up desert all around themselves and then complain that there is no water. But before saying that, why not try drinking the water from a well inside your own flesh? How about setting up a step-ladder in your own bodies and descending within? I think they should try plucking and eating the darkness of their own flesh. But [instead] they all dissolve themselves further and further into the exterior world”

-Hijikata Tatsumi

​​​