Who Are You, Iris?

Who are you, Iris, sitting against that brick wall like the security footage of a nervous breakdown that learned how to smoke, flirt, and quote dead philosophers incorrectly? You look like someone’s lost weekend grew a body and then got bored of apologising. Bare feet, tank top, damaged hair, the sacred posture of a girl who has spent too long negotiating with her own appetites in private rooms where the curtains know too much.

You grew up into bisexuality the way some people grow up into debt: slowly, then all at once, then with paperwork nobody warned you about. At first it was just a voltage in the body, a confusion with good cheekbones, a strange little weather system passing through your chest whenever beauty entered the room wearing the wrong gender. Then it became a pattern. Then a hunger. Then a mirror maze with lipstick on the glass. You wanted tenderness and threat. You wanted hands and voices and permission. You wanted to be wanted without having to translate yourself into something respectable for the clipboard people.

The world, being the world, responded with all the elegance of a drunk uncle at a wedding. It wanted categories. Nice ones. Clean ones. Proper little boxes with air holes. Gay, straight, good girl, bad girl, damaged girl, liberated girl, slut, muse, victim, phase, problem. Everyone had a label ready, because humans become very brave when they are filing other people into cabinets. You tried to explain that your desire did not arrive as a manifesto. It arrived like a raccoon in the ceiling. Loud, nocturnal, hungry, possibly carrying disease, but honestly quite charming once you stopped screaming.

And somewhere in all that, you built the private space. Not just a room. A psychic brothel of the self. A little nymphomaniac chapel where shame came in, took off its coat, and sat beside the bed like an unpaid therapist. It was messy. Obviously it was messy. Socks, old makeup, cables, cheap pillows, existential dread fermenting in the corner like a student art film. A place where fantasy did not have to behave. A place where the body could stop pretending it was a polite civic institution and become what it had always been: a faulty machine full of ghosts, perfume, bad decisions, and excellent comic timing.

You hated yourself in there, sometimes. With commitment. With craftsmanship. Your self-disgust had architecture. Load-bearing shame. Decorative insecurity. A little skylight for panic. You could take one look in the mirror and roast yourself so efficiently that professional comedians should have unionised against you. “There she is,” you’d think, “the haunted little appetite gremlin, the bisexual goblin princess of poor impulse control, making bold erotic choices in a room that smells faintly of laundry and spiritual defeat.”

But the joke saved you. That was the disgusting part. The black comedy kept slipping a hand under your ribs and holding you together. Because if you could laugh at the absurdity of being a body, a woman, a desire, a contradiction, then maybe the shame did not get to have the final monologue. Maybe society could stand outside the door with its rules and its neat little moral haircut while you sat inside, alive and inconvenient, laughing like a cracked saint.

Who are you, Iris? You are the mess that refused to become a lesson. You are the private room after midnight. You are bisexuality with smudged mascara and a cigarette burn in the upholstery. You are the girl who learned that wanting too much was only a crime in a world addicted to starvation. You are the confrontation. The bad coping mechanism. The punchline with wet eyes. The body becoming language before anyone gave it permission.

And yes, you are ridiculous.

Thankfully.

PS. The tragic ones who never become ridiculous usually become respectable, and that is how civilisation continues ruining furniture, governments, marriages, and perfectly good nervous systems.