Skeleton

I am a walking skeleton, but I’m not dead. I’m alive, and indeed, walking.

The moment I saw the building chopped in half right through the middle, with its front torn down and the cut surface stripped bare and naked, I felt a kinship. Broken windows like lacerated wounds, open-ending pipes as if pulled-out guts, discolored bricks reminiscing skinned muscles, violent and visceral. No more entranceways, only an overview of the leftovers in absolute entirety, still standing, standing still. My feet kept on relaying the next step to the other while my head rotated according to the twisting of the neck in slow motion, all so that my eyes could stay fixated on the decrepit phantom for a few more seconds, all so as for a bit longer to gaze at the pillars and floors that had supported the weights and made up the structures, to taste the foul air that once circulated within, the bones and blood, those meant to be hidden and implicit, now divulged ruthlessly without mercy. Ah, now I see you, a skeleton. You are broken, dying, vulnerable, but so beautiful.

I had this dream of being completely naked walking in a grey weightless office space where objects had ambiguous edges like those inside an out-of-focus Gerhard Richter painting. Long and winding corridors came and went like undertows leading to nowhere or empty halls divided by glass walls; sounds were mute as if traveling from somewhere far away or underwater. Occasionally, snow would fall from the ceiling, forming a thin layer of pale velvet on the vainly varnished office desks, soon degrading to simply moist, then simply nothing. People roamed around at a measured and deliberate pace usually with a cup of coffee and some documents held in their hands. I couldn’t make out their expressions, ambiguous. They all seemed preoccupied with something, most likely work-related. Everyone dressed professionally in freshly ironed suits and carefully tucked blouses. But they didn’t take notice of me. They interacted with me as if with anyone else. But I was absolutely naked with my tits hanging and a thick bush of curly pubic hair never trimmed in rainforest style. They could see all of it. I seemed to be the only one who felt like I was out of place.

I started to see more and more skeletons around me. On a daily basis almost. Winter trees, for example, and they were everywhere. But only in the winter, of course, and that was important. That winter trees only existed in the winter. That trees were only skeletons in the winter. Winter and skeletons went well together. No more lush green leaves for disguise, just protruding forking branches covered with dry burnt umber bark creasing like an old man’s wrinkles. Death was near but the hope for spring was high, too. 

Guillotines, for example. These apparatuses for killing were built to be self-explanatory. They grinned shamelessly, hauling up the austerely eroding yet astutely whetted blade pickled red by years, rust, and lost blood without wasting a single twitch, or line, or breath, raising their sharp cheekbones and balding eyebrows, and tick. A head was detached. 

Scaffolds, also. Not so different from guillotines, perhaps only a tiny bit more uptight and reserved, not as flamboyant, not as scandalous, not as despicable, but almost.

Portcullises and wicket doors, also. Railings and balusters, also. Laces and crochets, also. Merry-go-rounds, ferris wheels, and roller coasters, also. Peaches, pears, and apricots, also. 

A crystal ball but not a basketball. A novel but not a notebook. A diamond but not a rough stone. A bridal veil but not a hijab. A tarot card face-up, but not a tarot card face-down. A lamp turned on, but not a lamp turned off. A teardrop trickling down the face, but not a teardrop held back inside the socket. 

A flower not bearing a fruit, but not a flower bearing a fruit. A flower bearing a fruit, but not a flower not bearing a fruit. A walk to school, but not a walk in the garden. A walk in the garden, but not a walk to school. A rainy day, a snowy day, but not a cloudy day. A cloudy day, but not a rainy day or a snowy day. A night with a dim moon and bright stars, or a night with dim stars and a bright moon, but not a night with neither. A pitch dark night with no moon or stars, but not a night with frugal light from either. (In mathematics, a manifold can have a skeleton too — the core, whatever it deformation retracts onto.)

I pretended I was just the same as everyone else. Calm and subdued, I greeted whoever came my way, in just about the same manner as how they’d greet me in the first place, talked to them and smiled at them, politely and demurely, only with my head often down and elbows trying to cover the nipples timidly without being too obvious. I was naked. Nobody talked about it. I didn’t seem to know how I ended up here, cloth-less. I was cold and lost. I wanted to hide and feel warm. I wandered and sauntered, for a long time, until I saw a door in the distance. I started walking towards it.

I began searching for human skeletons. I looked everywhere, crossed the continents, sat on a train to Kyoto, strolled in the city of Los Angeles, took a ferry to Antarctica, boarded a hot air balloon to go to Laputa, traversed along the river that flowed backward, rode a broom in the sky of Central Europe, navigated through the labyrinth of solitude with the help of a compass, turned into a mermaid and swam across the Caribbean Sea and fought against pirates… I broke my leg and scratched my face and healed from them. I fell to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and bouldered all my way up. I went to the end of the world and came back. I couldn’t find any human skeletons. I once stumbled into a biology classroom and stared at its staple and accent. The yellowing white pieces of bones looked almost like plaster, the skull, the clavicle, the vertebrae, the ribs, the pelvis, the arms and legs, the fingers and toes, all arranged in such a particular order, no misplacing could be tolerated. I stared and stared but I didn’t know where to look. It didn’t have eyes, the sockets were hollow. It was hollow. I only saw a vast emptiness in front of me and I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for. It was less a skeleton than a black arapaima gigas specimen preserved in formalin inside a giant glass tube container exhibited horizontally in a natural history museum, I decided.

Sometimes I almost felt like human skeletons didn’t exist. I saw many people, yes I did. Only that they were all like those little masks hovering James Ensor in his self-portrait, or those in The Burial of the Sardine by Francisco Goya, refusing to show me anything about them lurking underneath — they were not skeletons, no. But one time, when I ran into an Italian man in an overcoat resembling the combination of a pink polar bear and a white flamingo on a back street in New York next to a traffic stop sign giving out a middle finger, or the other time when you told me about a man dressed in sparkly gold robes and a crown shopping at the Trader Joe's on University Avenue in Berkeley, or when I read stories with characters that touched and delighted and ached my heart so much and convinced me that magic was real, I felt like perhaps I was getting close to finding one, a human skeleton, perhaps there was still some hope, after all. But all I had were speculations, I could never be sure. I kept on searching, for a long time, until I saw a door in the distance. I started walking towards it. It felt like an eternity before I could reach it, every step was as if made on a soft undulating fabric supported by bouncing air, and I was unbelievably light, almost floating, unable to keep my balance or press myself down. Eventually, I was in front of the door. 

I pushed the door open and it led me into a bathroom with blurred edges just like everything else nearby. I stood in front of the mirror. I saw myself, completely naked. Sadness blossomed inside me like a fiesta during a siesta. The grey started to dissipate around me, the edges sharpening. I felt happy because I felt sad, a transparent, effervescent, seraphic sense of sadness, light like a piece of gossamer, lightening up my surroundings in a yellow overtone, warm like a stillborn piglet’s beating heart; deep was the happiness turned into a kiss turned into an engulfment by the Pacific Ocean turned into darkness turned deep turned back into happiness, caressing me with sensual tender touches. I could dance with it. I was dancing with it. Music started playing. It was that song I listened to on the southbound train after you said we should stop talking. 

Looking into the mirror: who is she? Ah, I know. She is the soul, my soul (my essence, my existence, my emotion, my E, me). She was inside me, hidden and implicit, now I see her. She is broken, dying, vulnerable, but so beautiful. I folded my eyelids completely and saw two tiny halos showing up inside her dark irises. I looked into those two pale tiny halos, those two haloes in her slightly puffy slightly pink still watery eyes, I knew then I loved her so much, so profoundly, so infinitely. And so I knew I was loved, too. As she must love me infinitely so, profoundly so, much so. She was the soul, my soul (my essence, my existence, my emotion, my E, me). Now that I saw her, she turned me into a skeleton. 

Ask me anything. I’ll answer you. I’m utterly open now. This moment and always will be. As open when I was bare in front of the mirror as when I walked down the street with the knitted scarf in deep magenta, phthalo turquoise, and emerald green tightly shawling me, with a book in my hands, with the same song forever encoring, with my feet in wet broken Converse and soaked socks from walking on the damp road after rain. Caught my eyes the busted building. 

I am a skeleton, I’m walking, I’m so alive.

*This story belongs to the manuscript.