Rewind
Now there is nothing but a mixtape left behind. The sonic echo of everyone you've ever been. Proof of the healing that's still needed, revealed in the songs that refuse to die: Pretty Piece of Flesh, I Alone, Derroche. Who else would you be if you were a song, truly seen? That's not the shape of my heart? You?
Be honest, you'd be a Viennese Waltz if anyone ever saw you, always oriented to the other person. A trembling body performing for others, every single hair-like highway and dead-end road of your nervous system inside tingling, tingling. Disconcerting, growing louder by the year. The invisible sadness of miss you when you're gone. It's the same girl who sings Zombie but all her anger gone. She couldn't sustain it anymore in her body. She burned herself out trying to express the truth of how she felt – like me. To Candlebox's You. Another frantic Viennese Waltz – too dark and dangerous to ever be embraced by the masses. Again, like me. Too honest to make sense to anyone. Suzanne Vega still sings Luca in my right elbow, wrist and fingertips. Gimme One Reason and Fastlove echo in the nerves of my teeth. As my estrogen wanes, as the full-body version of who I was and thought I would always be sloughs away like dead snakeskin from me, only my core wounds remain. Teeth sensitivity from a lifetime of clenching that you started. Teeth splintering off and falling away in there. You're not even a pretty girl anymore. Now there's nothing but a mixtape left behind. Don't try to talk normal – it doesn't work anyway. Just write. Meet yourself there, where they say you still have bones in there, but as they fall away you feel it more and more: there's nothing but a mixtape left behind. Rewind. Desperately Wanting. Melodies with no title, like you're a person without concrete insides. Your job now is to make friends with this empty. This cavernous space. What if it wasn't scary? Or only scary like those songs that make you feel something?
This came out when I gave my body a voice inside Body Writers, my somatic writing and healing circle. Learn to give your body a voice here.
