INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

I am being pulled apart. My limbs ache as if I’m growing taller overnight. Yet my eyes hit everything at the same level they did before. 

I don’t recognise myself in mirrors or photographs. There is something alien about my face, about my body, perhaps I’ve stared at it for too long. If I say Bloody Mary thirteen times as I stare at my reflection will she come and show me a person I finally recognise?

A part of me is jealous of the creature; there is something cathartic in observing its dismemberment, its limbs floating eerily in the darkened atmosphere of the gallery space. Everyone else is unsettled by this, questioning what monster has come and torn it apart. I know this monster. It doesn’t come from some distant planet, but lives deep inside the alien’s torso, rotting it from the inside out. It is the smell of food left out too long that lingers in the kitchen. It is the black mould in the corner of my shower, refusing to leave, no matter how much bleach I scrub into the tiles. It is that question gnawing at me: what if?

I stand under this piece of uncanny anatomy, shaded, as if under a large drooping leaf. Even in its shadow, I am exposed. It’s difficult to move around, to not collide with the tendrils protruding towards me. There are far too many people, more than the space probably intends. There are always people clashing and weaving past one another. I’m far too aware of this audience, phones being clicked and tapped to capture a cropped image of this, thing. I cover my face or move away when there is a gap in my path. I am not here to be perceived. 

I park myself between the doorway and the label implanted on the wall. Lee Bul, Untitled. Usually, a title like that, or lack thereof, would annoy me. But here it is not a cop-out. Rather, it is incredibly fitting. This thing cannot be categorised for it is just that: a thing. No other words seem to suffice. I find solace in this. I’m also just this thing, floating around in space, not quite sure what I’m doing here. If you asked me to describe myself, I wouldn’t; not because I can’t, but because I refuse to. I’m still looking for the right words to explain myself. Whether I owe it to anyone, or not, I have to learn to be okay with that. 

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That night I ended up in a dingy pub in Fitzroy. Everyone at the bar downstairs knew each other including the cavoodle pawing at my ankles. I ordered a vodka cranberry while my friend sipped on her mulled wine and the guy serving us failed to ask for our IDs. In the beer garden upstairs, we parked ourselves opposite our friend who’s leaving for the United States the next day. Their exchange is only meant to go for six months, but I know they will be there as long as possible, and my heart aches a little. I slip in and out of conversations with strangers that I’ve heard stories about. Each voice around the table bleeds into one cacophony that I can’t decipher. No one tries to talk to me, but isn’t that my fault, for looking unapproachable, for staring off into space?

Later, a couple hundred metres down the road, I sit down in a cubicle in the back of Worker’s Club. The toilet seat is unnervingly warm. I lean over my lap as alcohol rushes to my head. My brain fizzes like a nasty multivitamin sinking to the bottom of a glass as it slowly dissolves. When I flush the toilet and swing open the door there’s a guy washing his hands. A girl sneaks past me closing the door I just came out of. There's no soap, so I hold my hands under the water until they turn red. I want to be as effortlessly cool as each stranger I come across. Instead, I’m acutely aware that there is something off about me, I wonder if they can sense it too. 

I feel alien like I do in most social settings. I’m either making too much eye contact or not enough. I’m either too quiet or have too much to say. I’m too aware of my body, of which bits stick out and the fact that my clothes are sticking to my skin. 

I try to forget the feeling. I buy another vodka cranberry at the bar and hug my friends, our heads pressed together, while other bodies push through us in search of a cheap drink. Standing in the crowd I feel prematurely old. The last time I was in this room I was a different person, I hope I’ll be a different person the next time too.

The dance floor is the emptiest I’ve ever seen it.  The DJ plays Pink Pony Club and I’m screaming the loudest. I don’t know how to dance but the fact that I am shouting every word makes up for my inability to do so. I try to remember that everything used to be so much worse. 

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Three days later my mum drives me to pick up a copy of Stone Butch Blues that I ordered a couple of months ago. The entire book is available as a PDF online, as the author, Leslie Feinberg, worked to ensure anyone can access it. But I wanted something tangible, something to hold and to highlight, and I was willing to pay the near $40 for it. The drive is familiar, one I’ve made hundreds of times throughout my life. I look out at the bay and its silver horizon and imagine Bul’s creature emerging from it, tendrils reaching towards the sailboats floating in its path. 

I don’t know when I first felt different. I look through the windscreen, to the city that I’ve known my whole life—the city that has raised me—and try to pinpoint where exactly I was when I first felt out of place. But the feeling has always been there. We pass the street my high school is on, the park at its dead end where the beach meets rich man’s suburbia. Was it there, in the bathrooms when I was supposed to be in class worrying about exams when instead I was worrying about the details of my face? Or was it in that park, drunk and running through the darkness, collapsing in the arms of friends I thought I would know so intimately forever?

When we all come together now, mostly at birthdays, my insides contort, threatening to expel something rotten. 

I look at these women, these girls who witnessed my coming-of-age, and fluctuate between sadness and anger. Most of all hurt. It was with them I shared secrets and bottles of vodka, who first showed me, that I was worth something. These days, I try not to think about who betrayed who, or whether there was a betrayal at all. Maybe, it was meant to be this way. Maybe, I can’t find out who it is I’m meant to be with them by my side. 

Mum pulls up on Fitzroy Street and I walk inside the Pride Centre by myself, down the back, to Hares and Hyenas. The heaviness of the book weighs down my hands as I walk back to the car. I won’t read it just yet, too afraid of seeing myself in the pages before I’m ready to. 

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The following night I lick gelato off my fingers while I walk from Lygon Street to the museum. The bag my mum used religiously throughout my childhood is slung over my shoulder. 

The Carlton Gardens are dark and menacing. A swing moves by itself in the playground as we pass. I want to stop and run towards it, to heave my legs back and forth, and launch myself into the air. But we keep going. I can’t remember the last time I was here during the day. 

Sheepishly, my friend and I travel down the escalators to the IMAX cinema, unsure whether we are too early or running late. A line has formed at the doors to the cinema in the foyer, so we make the most of our time and head straight to the bathrooms. I’m not looking where I’m going, overtired and dreading the fact that I probably won’t get home until after midnight, I almost walk into the men’s bathroom. Not noticing, until I look up at the skirtless figure on the door. We joke about it, the irony of me almost walking into a space I’m not sure I fit into, while the one I’ve been entering my entire life feels equally as foreign. All before, we go watch a movie that is one big trans metaphor.

We’re at the first screening of I Saw the TV Glow as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. My friend and I scramble for a seat. I am anxious, and this manifests in the constant need to pee. I get up again, awkwardly squeezing past strangers and apologising profusely before running back to the toilets. I imagine cutting my hair as I look at myself in the mirror. I curse myself for still not having the courage to do it, before going back to my seat, slightly less tense than before.A lot of people online complain about how the movie disappointed them. It wasn’t a horror movie like they expected it to be. But horror isn’t always poltergeists or strange murderous men. It is not always possession and blood and guts. The real horror is spending your life wondering if you were meant to be someone else. “What if she was right? What if I was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful? Buried alive and suffocating to death on the other side of a television screen?”The film itself is part analogue horror, part trans parable. It is about pulling yourself out of a false reality. It is not the conventional horror aspects that make it scary. What is terrifying is the overwhelming feeling of dread I got each time the screen went black. Is it over now? Is this finally it? But it would just keep going. When it finally did finish, all I could think was, that this can’t be how it ends.

The real horror is that there is no end to this. The real horror is the protagonist, Owen, screaming hysterically for help at a children’s birthday party, everyone around him frozen. No one is listening. If Bul’s creature is screaming, who is there to hear it? You are drowning and no one can save you but yourself. 

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Today I got home to a postcard all the way from San Francisco, from my friend who I last saw late at night outside the busy Fitzroy pub. Every day I’ve been watching their travels unfold through my phone. I envy their courage and the work they put in to become this version of themself. I flip over the postcard while music blares through my headphones.The bookstores are beautiful, and the weather is the perfect amount of warm. It’s the small things that remind me of you—listening to Clairo on the train, buying Eileen Myles at the bookstore.

I imagine myself in a new city, strange but somehow familiar. I can’t see this version of myself—this braver version who found the guts to cut their hair and finally be honest—but I know they exist. They have always existed inside me; like I existed in my mother and her mother and her mother before her. 

Since that day in the gallery, I’ve been asking myself: if this thing has been killed, then what killed it? 

Or maybe it was never killed at all. Maybe, it was always meant to exist this way, to be indescribable. Besides the creature, like all art, doesn’t owe its audience anything.