Raphael Rae

Sticking the Landing

I had my first seizure of July 2023 today. It slid right under the tripwire of August rent collection, each new month marked by a razor-edged specter like a video game boss level. My thumbs are clumsy, and so each time: the boss stuns me, and there go my coins. Tomorrow. I see it coming from miles away, even with my eyes squeezed shut in the opposite of ecstasy. 

First, my nerves flickered bright and empty in the manner of a neon sign. OCCUPANCY! No occupancy. OCCUPANCY! No occupancy. OCCUPANCY! No. No. No. I took a preventative beta blocker too late; the Rube Goldberg machine of my jitterbug muscles had already sprung into action. My lemon-eating face. My rapid Kegels. Instability seeping into every crevice and joint. My boyfriend led me to our bed so that I could be violent with myself in safety—the purpose of a bed is to enable violence’s soft landing—and after the ache and the twitch and the twist and the thrust, he buried me beneath our heaviest weighted blanket. I went away for a while, burrowing into dream logic. 

My boyfriend led me to our bed so that I could be violent with myself in safety—the purpose of a bed is to enable violence’s soft landing—and after the ache and the twitch and the twist and the thrust, he buried me beneath our heaviest weighted blanket.

I dreamed of an ennui-struck Nadja and Laszlo from What We Do in the Shadows, draped in velvet and with their fangs displayed lewdly, initiating a threesome with a goth psychic on a water slide. I dreamed of sexual roots that never existed outside of the dream: a boy knuckling his heavy and spiked silver ring into my pliant flesh, on the grass in a park in the sun. In my dream, I knew for sure that a boy had once claimed me like this, but I didn’t know which boy. Bodies and voices I’d longed for blurred. A domino run of desire—the first boy may never touch the final boy directly, but dream logic means that one boy leads to another to another to this: my boyfriend pinching me all over post-seizure so I’ll laugh. 

Seizures are not scarier when you have them all the time. Seizures are not scarier in isolation beneath a blue moon. Fear of my body (or the forces enthralling my body) is not something that I think should be quantified this way. Each breed of fear is different but immeasurable. They’re dogs at the vet, refusing to step on the scale no matter how many dental treats staff members proffer. Instead, they insist, please behold their wilder dimensions. A mat in their fur, a spring in their step, a lolling tongue so pink it verges on neon. Almost communicates, as it slips in and out, OCCUPANCY! No occupancy. OCCUPANCY! No no no. 

What color is this fear and how does this fear feel beneath my hands? Seizing in our bed with my fist wrapped around my boyfriend’s finger, I think that actually this stunned-quiet fear is the faint pink of a ballet slipper. Beneath my hands, it’s just as satin and just as thoroughly battered with a hammer and a blade. It’s beautiful! It’s simple! It wrenches blood and blister-pus and nails from my feet as I twirl faster and faster! 

It changes how my bones grow! 

I learned about the practical ways in which ballerinas torture their shoes when I sped through Megan Abbott’s sickly-elegant, neo-noir novel, The Turnout. In close third-person, Abbott describes this torture as “a ritual as mysterious and private as how [a ballerina] might pleasure herself.” Soon after finishing the book, I rewatched Black Swan for the first time since I was fifteen. Natalie Portman, as Nina, provided clear visual aids through which I could understand the pastel breakdown that Abbott narrated with love and gore. Deconstruction in the name of soaring stardom: scissors and stitches and scratches. Breaking the body to find the guts. Both Black Swan and The Turnout are about suffocating mothers. They are about suffocating homes, and “homes” includes the bodies of their stars. These stories wallow in the sexuality of suffocation; not choking, that cliche metonymy for every sex act with a sharp edge. Suffocation. I mean the pillow, not the hand. I mean something disembodied, deceptively soft, and indelibly native to the stage of the bed. 

Suffocation. I mean the pillow, not the hand. I mean something disembodied, deceptively soft, and indelibly native to the stage of the bed. 

In Black Swan, Nina suffocates Nina with a pillow in her afterglow. Or is the perpetrator Mila Kunis’ Lily, spine flanked in black-ink wings, who was onstage in the bed one ecstatic moment ago, her tongue as talented at dancing as her slipper-maimed feet? Or is it Nina’s mother, slipping past the barricaded door via Nina’s doubled throat? Decades of horror drip from her favored epithet, “Sweet girl,” in cloned-Nina’s mouth, before the pillow buries our first Nina in sleep, which for her is the absence of dream logic. Slippery dream logic dogs her every waking, aching footstep. In sexy, scary suffocation, she is set free. 

Is it scarier to fear the mother, the lover, or the self? Is it possible to fear the mother, the lover, or the self in the same way you might fear a stranger with a knife in an alley in the dark? When you know too much about the source of the horror, what happens? What happens when I know too much about myself and then my nerves glitch and there’s no one but me—sheathed in my thoroughly mapped familiarity—to blame? 

Because I do fear that’s what happened here. Yesterday at the beach, I chewed and swallowed a magic mushroom, and soon I knew everything. I knew the constellations of my boyfriend’s pores and I knew the blinding beauty of a crashing wave. I knew that I was still alive somehow, and I knew that our towels blanketed a graveyard of creatures I would never get to meet. Our friend Tamarea asked the sand, “What did you used to be a part of?” I freshly and glowingly knew beyond language what I used to be a part of. 

Then today I had a seizure for the first time in so long. 

My body is my home and my home’s foundations rot. Water damage leopard-prints the ceiling. Panes of glass have been cracked for years. In an early episode of Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman’s friend asks him what happened to the ceiling, why it’s not where it ought to be. What happened: Jesse put a body in the bathtub; he tried to chemically dissolve the body; he also dissolved the bathtub, and a barely-there tub overflowing with bloody chunks of human meat crashed through the floor, therefore through the ceiling. Red and pink splattered the hallway like a valentine exchanged between cannibals. Jesse explains: the house must be settling. His friend lets it slide. 

What happened: my nerves flickered bright and empty in the manner of a neon sign. What happened: red and pink like a cannibal’s valentine. 

What happened: my body must be settling. Learning to touch the earth. 

A Hazlitt interview about The Turnout ends with Abbott declaring, “We’re all stuck with ourselves, and again that’s very noir. You can only change yourself so much.”

What happened: I changed. The changes stuck. For so long, my body was stuck twirling through its life cycle, a ballerina in a music box deprived of unmapped paths. But even dancing impossibly in the seventh dimension, some things stick. Our blood is sticky. Our muscles remember. 

Tomorrow is like a fairy tale’s first clockwork foray into imagining. Tomorrow is as darkly limitless as the little mermaid’s dissolution into surf. 

Tomorrow I’ll pray for no! No! No neon signs! 

Tomorrow we pay rent.