Amaranthine

“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own.”

How I longed to embrace the woman on the other side of me: Marty Nelson. As it states on my birth certificate, at least, but I am Madeline. That is who I am, heart and soul. I thought the day I lifted my head to the heavens and sang out “she is me” proudly, with my bright red lipstick painted on, would be the happiest of my life. They make it look so magical, so easy on tv. But this personal declaration and embrace of one’s true self is a call to arms. In this country, it has become an act of war on one’s body and person.

As I stare into her gaze, I feel tears begin to swell. My gawky frame begins to wither. I won’t last long. Not in their world for I hardly exist in my own.

I love her, I love her, I love her. But I am not strong enough to be her. She is the version of me I have awkwardly been trying to become. Tall, sophisticated, and pretty. So very pretty. She wears her confidence like a brightly colored boa. She is not an insecure twenty-something whose parents cast her out, friends abandoned, and society shamed. It’s not her fault that she still stubbles when left unshaven, or her long neck exposes the apple of biology, and strong bones lead to questioning stares, she has shed all that. Baby has become the butterfly. They won’t throw rocks at her. They won’t question her. They won’t condemn her for a metamorphosis she cannot hide. A second puberty full of experiment and error on display for all to condemn or condone without touch, eye contact, or personal involvement. Ally? I just want love and the sweet embrace of someone’s open acceptance of me. Not the movement, not the act of brave defiance, but me. I am not a righteous act. I am a human being. A soul searching for its human container. I don’t need a community, I need to feel like a human being the same as anyone else. When I first saw her, identified her as the missing piece, as the ghost haunting the empty existence of him, a living shadow, I thought I would know what it was like to be like anyone else in the world… but I was wrong.

She is my everything, but as much as I want to become her, I want to live, and they want her to die. They would rather he conform and fit the shape of a mold that does not suit them. To walk as a lineation rather than something that could be considered offensive.

A woman, a human as is should not be offensive as they are, but I was born into a world determined to hate me. So, I paint the barbie pinkness onto my lips one last time. I smoosh them together and what a mess it creates on my teeth with that play-do meets crayon taste. A joyous creation and an act of defiance. But this is not a revolution. This is a life.

I choose how I die. Not you.

“Please,” I touch the mirror, “embrace me, Madeline, even though I failed, and ran away from you.”

I will take her before you can take her from me.

~

“Jesus, man, what is wrong with you!”

“Dude, wash that faggy shit off, and let’s get going.”

They roar with laughter, can you believe it, their buddy showing up with a mug of makeup on? Hysterical!

He runs upstairs to wash it off so they can hang for real, but when he comes to the bathroom door he finds he cannot open it. Something is barring the way. Stranger still the light is on. He knows no one else is up here.

“What the,” It didn’t make any sense. The gang came by to pick him up, get a little grub, and get going, besides they are not allowed upstairs, and he was the only one in the house before they came. Maybe something fell. No biggy, he pushes against it only to step in the thick moisture of something seeping out from behind the door…

~

“What is this?”

Madeline asks, her voice more frantic than the first time as she had looked to the stars in her broken desperation, but no answer came from its vast and sparkling depths.

“What condemnation is this?” She says, choking out what little voice she can find, but no more. She too is now silent, yet her mind is as sharp as ever jumping between acceptance, misery, stoicism, and rage. Searching, longing, praying for explanation in anything left to her.

“To still be seeking once succumbed, left with nothing and no one in the wake of one’s own desolate solution. Life is hell,” she thinks without movement. “Maybe it actually is better this way.”

She sits collapsed on the cold tile of the dingy bathroom floor, locked inside a state of incomprehensible regret.

“Please,” She whispers. Her palms lay upward in her lap for she no longer has the strength to lift them. They had backed her into this corner, yet still, it was she who ached. This buildup of cascading resentment for all they had pushed her to, would it ever end?

Slowly she dares move sight downward, hoping not to see what had triggered this state of moral confusion, but knowing better. In the limbo of this breathless silence, she takes in the truth of her hands and all they had been capable of. She cannot go back. What she has stained can no longer be washed off. The crimson shade is a highlighter to the cracks in her skin's story, it splashes crisscrossing without pattern or reason, for there was and is no reason. What could possibly be the reason?

“Let something regret me.”

~

The dampness underfoot causes the rug to saturate the sole of his shoe as his step sank in the soaked compression of its grain.

“What the f-” He looks down. “No…nonononono…” It’s blood.

Before his mind can even comprehend the depths of possibilities, his fist beat against the door. Flashing before his eyes is the thought of every person he has ever loved… That is, except for one.

~

They say we hurt the things we love, but Madeline thinks that cannot be true. People have always been too willing to hate, freely and openly, but a sympathetic touch and compassionate words are hard to come by. Even those who dare look at her with contempt while those who might sympathize avert their gaze. She is too awkward a situation and they are busy living their lives. So their incessant but detached remarks on her person and the predilection they claim he chose, become the standard, her normal. How hard is it to respect? To grant someone a pronoun, for god's sake? Why are we so eager to protect establishments over individuals?

People are careless in their treatment of others’ emotions, remaining aloof to the fact that someone like her, her, HER could have them, let alone express them with any kind of agency. They will not give her the benefit of expression or the credit of individuality. They will judge her by appearance alone and be happy to leave it at that. They don’t care that it keeps her in the mirror for hours trying desperately to prove them wrong. Their ignorance is the choice. Yet she is being forced to conclude that she will always fall short of everything, but especially herself.

The glint of a star reflects off a hand mirror that hangs eye level to her position on the floor. “Oh, Madeline…”

Never a revolutionary, hardly a fighter, crusader, or civic leader, she remained invisible. A mere nuisance to their existence. An easy excuse to hate.

“I’m sorry I gave in.”

~

He knows all too well how a feeling can take over. How that looming darkness we keep hidden can overwhelm, all-consuming, as it lures one in with the promise of freedom. He should have recognized the signs.

Bracing his shoulder against the door he gives one concentrated heave-ho. It didn’t matter that no one ever dug any deeper into the mess of his own inner world. At this point, he considered himself a master of illusion. He didn’t want them to see or to know. His love knew no bounds but understood the limit of others. It was always for others. And the more he struggled against the weight, the more he felt them slipping away.

Was it his fault? Had he been too caught up in his own battle, indulging the duality within that he forgot himself at his demon's pleasure and those he must protect from its exposure?

Finally, the door gave way! In fact, he stumbles over himself into the bathroom for its ease. As though there had never been anything preventing him.

~

“How ironic,” Madeline thought, for it gave her mind somewhere to go besides the mirror and the self-inflicted torment that bore the resemblance of their perception. “That it should come to this in a bathroom of all places, with its dingy yellow atmosphere and stained tiles.’ She laughs, but it comes out more as a cough. A body’s last reprieve.

Tired eyes roll around in hollow sockets.

“For this, they fight. For this they get to live as I…” she cannot bring herself to speak it. “Sorry slaves to idle worship, for they hardly act their faith, but you tried kid, and now they get to win again.”

The blade of a razor pressed gently to the skin, yet still, the emptiness grows. Trapped inside this never-ending cycle, constantly living in the fear of speculation, of what they might see, or think they see. Silence and loneliness are the only way to stay safe but true.

“Why me?” Madeline asks, though her mouth does not move, and her head begins to lull. She still longs, hopes, and seeks salvation from a human source. “Why could I not be born already free?”

But humanity is inherently inhumane.

~

But he was wrong. As soon as his hands hit the counter, to keep him from falling, he sees the bloody prints left in their wake.

~

Too late does it occur to Madeline that this is exactly what they want. The actualized nothingness of those they deem unnatural and offensive. A threat to the lives that would shame, bully, and take another’s.

Live out loud. Coming out. Out of the closet. Out. Absence hangs over the very definition of the word that now consumes her. Beginning, middle, and end. She thought this would be a tally, be a choice she could make but now sees that it was still under the condemnation of their terms.

There will be no second chance. Her vision has already begun to blur, and the world begins to spin itself in crimson and blackened swirls all around her, coming for her. Again, it is something she cannot escape but is.

~

Jerking head at every angle, he looks around the bathroom to find that he is alone. The blood is coming from him. From his hands.

~

Until we are all free none of us are free. Oppressed, we live hating others for how we hate ourselves. Defining another’s meaning based on how we affirm our own. It is strength as subjection. Hate vs rejection. Some strike outwardly, others go inward, taking a world of hate out on ourselves in the name of their evils, but under our control.

We live to hate.

We hate to live.

~

Steam expels from the sink where he scrubs his hands raw. Desperately he tries to recall his last steps before his buddies came over. What has he done? What did he do? And what is it that keeps him trapped in this limbo of emptiness?

Once the water runs clear he looks to the mirror to make sure he has not missed anything else, deep down knowing that all he will see is her and a reality too late to correct,

A detail where unfinished.

Life where unlived

Love left where ungiven… despite her constant warning.

Madeline just wanted to be loved so that she could love and live as herself, never meaning to cause anyone any harm or fear she ran into its empty arms… but that is why we do these things, is it not? Why we punish in plain sight other bodies and plague minds with constant criticism: to gain the attention of those we choose not to understand by inflicting the ignorance we refuse to correct inside ourselves and multiply its means.

As sacrifices they live and die for this twisted aversion and so recreate the cycle of cruelty, perpetuating this self-feeding loop of self-inflicted punishment and hate.

Feeling abandoned and powerless, Madeline had sought her absolution from the only person that had ever loved her enough to free her: herself. And hoped in doing so to take back some control, for who could callously look at a body empty of life, however fleeting, and a soul, however seeking, now trapped and imprinted for the loss of what it could not obtain, and not feel the sting of remorse that the body she haunts is her own.

Then the transfixion they have on one another is broken by the very thing they are doing it for:

“Come on Marty, Jeez man!”

He swallows against his guilt. “I’m coming.” with one last look in the mirror he wipes the remains of the lipstick from his teeth.

Emptiness…

He turns his yet still she remains seeking what will be enough for her to move on, for she has lived as a ghost for too long

Could they ever be enough in the end for them, what is a body without a pure heart? But she knows the answer. There will never be enough regression for those who refuse to learn. But as she fades there remains in the evidence of his crime one last message, one last cry for help, one last truth…

They’re not worth it… but you are.