3. A world where body is synonymous to holy

The last time I visit Lucy Liu’s paintings, my first instinct is to take up my usual position on the bench, but I stay standing to study the artworks more closely. I notice the way the paint has dried in thick, undulating layers, how the background shifts and changes as if glitching around the figures’ hair and body. The lighting is strange and almost shadowy. I feel as though my ability to really see the paintings is obscured; I interpret them in blurred shapes and plumes of colour, many parts rather than a whole. A vague sense of panic washes over me. I am distracted by the people walking past, watch them glance at the three paintings, pause, and then snicker as they move on. I want to tell them; this is so much more than sex. 

An artwork I made when I was seventeen hangs on the wall above my bed. A nude body, mapped out in yellow, orange and red pastels, stands in front of a black backdrop embroidered with stars. The head is thrown back, the eyes closed, the arm reaching out to hold a white lily that unfolds in fabric petals from the canvas. But the aspect I think about is the breasts, which flare away from the body, leaving black crescents under each one as if the skin has been torn open. Sewing those crescents back together is the criss-cross of bright red thread, the needle left in the fabric, unfinished. I made this artwork as a future self-portrait, a dream half realised in pastel and paint; only once I knew it would come true did I have the courage to put it up. For years I let it collect dust in a corner of my room. I couldn’t handle the suggestion of freedom that at the time seemed impossibly far away.

It is that gap—the gap that turns breast into chest, the gap between existing in your body and living in it—that I have finally sewn shut. I’m still running my hands over my chest in awe, in wonder. There is space in my mind to focus on loving and loving to look, to behold my body as something sacred and mine. I had been squatting for years in a house that didn’t belong to me, despite my name on the door. But three months ago, I got the keys and began the renovations that would turn my house into more than just a home—into a temple. Now, I touch my skin and leave glitter where my fingertips have traced. There is no barrier between myself and my pleasure. Sex feels like flying now. I let myself bathe in fairy lights, push the covers off in a tangle of limbs. My body twists and aches and unravels. My mind stays exhilaratingly blank. 

Back in the gallery, I keep moving to leave and then returning, the ache of something like betrayal pressing against me every time I turn away. It feels uncanny to have found these paintings at this point in my recovery. Like the artwork on my wall, Lucy Liu’s triptych points towards the life I am learning to lead—to embrace a lover and only see orange flowers. To escape the boundaries of my own form. To embody imperfection and find it beautiful.

As I stand there, shifting my weight, every previous encounter in that room condenses into a single mass of sensation: the video’s voiceover, the hard wobbly bench, the hazy light, the feeling of being somewhere else, transported.

…

It’s Sunday morning, and my sheets, a faded pale turquoise, are clean and smelling of lavender. The light filters dimly through my curtains. A slip of blue is visible behind the translucent white fabric. The wide pastel flowers on my covers are crinkled and warped, the doona having been thrown off in the night. I’ve slept naked and my skin is warm and smooth, sleepy. The faint smell of incense from the evening before still hangs in the air, sweet and woody, inviting. Above my head the ceiling is dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, my own chapel fresco. The world is warm. I roll over onto my back, fingers absently tracing the scars on my chest, eyes closing softly. My head tilts to the side and deeper into the pillow, and I take myself to that quiet place. My consciousness fades in and out. My hand rests gently on my stomach, my inner thigh. This is the moment before the moment, the mapping of a figure I am still learning to recognize. This is where I start. 

1. To become yourself is no gentle working

The colours draw me in first. Those pale, shining florals, draped haphazardly across the canvas like broken wings; the marbled pink and blue and that buttercup gold, threatening to leak from the confines of background onto the blank white plaster beyond. The paintings pulse outwards with something heavy and cool, suggesting something bigger and primal. My eyes trace the bodies lacquered into stillness by the thick layers of pastel paint; those disproportionate limbs invite in my own body the sensation of strangeness, of dislocation.

A loneliness like cool water seems to trickle over me. Something about the interior space being inverted, exposed. There is a pale, quiet trembling under the surface of the acrylic; that vulnerable, familiar feeling of being stuck beneath your own skin. I can't pin down what I feel. I only know what I project, what I carry with me—the years living in a body that doesn’t quite feel my own, whose edges drip and blur in my mind.

I sit in front of that central artwork and fight the urge to see how her own body reflects mine, the way I have done for years in galleries and museums, searching for the shape of myself in marble statues and soft Renaissance paintings. It is paradoxical to look desperately for something that turns up, inevitably, distorted and unwanted. To realise feminine has never seemed beautiful to you when it’s on your own flesh. 

Yet still I find myself in the closed eyes, the pale complexion, the undercurrent of red and blue where sketch meets skin. I know something of this—the quiet absence in the dark, hand under the covers. I know what it is to be moi et les autres—flanked by flashing images, legs going numb—even to be mostly les autres, to leave the body behind. The feeling of familiarity taunts me, heavy and tinged with guilt or something more potent. It is the space between waking and sleeping, between sensation and feeling; the silence, the taste of yellow flowers a fervent mirage on a slack tongue. It’s the hands running over your body, wishing you could escape the image of it branded on the inside of your eyelids.

I sit in the before of her, the before of me. 

For years I have carried shame in my body like water, hands cupped to keep anything from spilling over. Woman has never seemed to fit me—even in the years before I knew there was a word for anything else or in between. It was always a performance, a dance; hours in front of the mirror tweaking clothes or sucking in flesh to appear something I thought other people wanted me to be. Once I realised girlhood no longer belonged to me, I stopped trying to squeeze myself into a shape I had never been. Instead, I tried to cover up the evidence that I was any shape at all. Shame was the voice promising to quiet down if only I made myself smaller, the voice I tried to placate with baggy jeans and oversized hoodies. But my ears kept ringing with it, loud and incessant. The only way to silence it was to realise I had nothing to feel shameful for in the first place. 

2. There’s a kind of beauty that doesn’t arrive until you stop trying to be beautiful

I have returned to the gallery on my own, to sit again in front of those canvasses wrapped in brightly coloured paper. I stare at them so long that the saturated patterns stay burned into my retinas when I look away. 

It is the skin that strikes me, that absence of colour. I look and look as if expecting to see the white face tinge with pink, or the leg darken under its own shadow. Movement and stillness are synonyms in these paintings. Only now do I register how large the paintings are, baring their skin wide, softly brazen in the dim gallery light. 

Every sound feels weighted and close—the words from the video behind me, smoothing over my ears like waves; the distorted thumps of the audio in the next room, muffled by heavy black curtains; the quiet shuffling of other people’s bodies along with my own as I settle on the hard white bench. Drawn like moths to a lamp in the dusk, my eyes rest once more on Moi et Les Autresii, recognition like a tether between our bodies. It is only her and me, sitting in a place where no one’s asking anything of youiii. I breathe in slowly and feel the rise of my scars, sitting along my chest where my breasts once were. I am still acclimatising to the lost sensation of weight—that is, the sensation of freedom. 

In the months before surgery, when the thought of it was all my mind contained, I tried a few times to adjust to my shirtless body, unrestrained by the compressive fabric that seemed at that point to be almost fused to me. It was a learning exercise; trying to exist in my body without shame, to be present without perceiving myself through someone else’s eyes. Four days before, the lamplight was soft and my feet were bare as I went through the motions of my stretching routine. My face pointed away from the mirror. I remember looking at my hands, small and pale against the carpet; remember crying as I sank into pigeon pose. The tension between my heart and its own casing felt so taut it was hard to breathe. It was unbearable to hold myself in my own skin.

For the first week afterwards, I felt I had retreated into a kind of chrysalis. I was wrapped in multiple layers of compression and attached to various tubes which I carried with me in a small bag. My shoulders were hunched in, my neck bowed. It was difficult to look in the mirror. I shuffled around, hands clasped instinctively to my chest as if to hold myself together, draped in baggy flannel shirts and tracksuit pants. My hair was unwashed and tufty, brown roots showing through the pink. I was an alien in my own body, ugly and contorted—and yet I felt closer to it than I ever had before. Every jolt of pain that cut through the numb haze of painkillers carried with it an exhilarating, exhausting message:

I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive. 

When I first tried on the shirts I’d avoided for years, waiting for that nebulous point ‘after top surgery’, I looked in the mirror and saw every iteration of my younger self: the timid 12-year-old, turning back and forth to see from every angle how her new bra made her chest look. The 15-year-old, pulling the oversized navy t-shirt away from their chest, hair cropped short and boyish, binder straps showing under the collar. The 17-year-old, adjusting their baggy jumper every time they wore a backpack. And I saw into the future, that colourful, textured thing. Warm nights sleeping shirtless, fitted t-shirts, clothes thrown on without a second thought as to the image reflected. The brightness of it all, sparkling blue and green and pastel pink. The smell of summer in nighttime air.

As my recovery continues, it seems to matter less to me—the imperfections my body carries, sometimes lumpy and sometimes scarred. I can breathe easier now. I am being delivered from myself, back to the richness of the worldiv.