Marionette

How liberating it would be to be reborn as a marionette! My wooden appendages brought surely to life by my puppeteer levitating above me. His hands would purposefully shape my every movement, force my lax limbs into the form he finds desirable. And I would be totally absolved of the responsibility to generate the energy to move life. Because the varnished wood of my painted arms and legs is heavy, and the effort it takes me to will the tiny joints that dot my limbs can feel so monumental at times.

System

The first layer of the system was a surface skin. It was the public face of herself, what she showed to the world on a day-to-day basis. It was purely aesthetic, necessarily visual - constructed as a means of diverting the world's attention (or so it felt at times) towards a placidity that she was comfortable with showing to others. The profile was a set of data which constructed her as a legitimate living and breathing human being, someone and something that could be easily captured and understood mentally as both a construct and a physical entity. Her date of birth, her height, her eye and hair colour, her familial relationships - all of these kinds of details were meticulously recorded, tattooed into the fabric of the skin. This was the information that stood out, that blazed itself to others of her kind as a proud certificate, verifying her as a being that had been born and conceived of the homo genus - one of us.

Underneath this epidermal layer was the second layer of the system. A spongy dermis composed of interlocking fibres of traits such as a being's likes and dislikes, their temperament and propensity towards certain tokens and objects. The hints of these fibres formed a supportive mass that could be sometimes seen if the skin was stretched translucent enough. It gave the skin form. This second layer worked in tandem with the surface - being as it was a membrane - bits of information were continually passed and reused by the upper layer in a loop that attempted to convincingly convey an iota of unique individuality. Just enough to provide comfort that the mass of cells that composed her was distinctive enough to make her feel she had some kind of unique place in the world.

First time reading

I can still remember the first time reading consumed me. Perhaps I don't really remember it all that objectively. Perhaps I have romanticised it to a point where what actually happened has become irreconcilable with what I recall happening. In all honesty, I am fully convinced this is most certainly the case. Anyway, as I prefer to reminisce in a kind of wilfully ignorant fondness, I remember being given one of Enid Blyton's books when I was about seven or eight. It was a hardback I think, and contained about four short stories. This book was one in a series of similar hardback books all containing short stories aimed at children just like me. These books did not share any kind of concurrent plot line or character, nor did they have any kind of connected thematic elements. If they did, I was not sophisticated enough a reader to acknowledge these connections.

This was not the first time I had read a book. Throughout my kindergarten and early primary school days our teachers had duly scheduled appropriate "reading times", and in almost every classroom I had ever been in at that point there contained at the very least one bookcase. The majority of these bookcases contained slim slips of books. Their covers were made of that kind of slightly tacky, firm, yet flexible material that places a book just a step above a cheaply bound paperback novel. In one classroom, each little book was tagged with a variety of circular stickers: neon hot pink for beginner readers, reassuring forest green for intermediate, and finally, a crystalline dot of aquamarine for those of us deemed "advanced" enough. Everyone in class started at pink and worked their way up. Like every good child brought up in a suitably competitive and assumably meritocratic society, I felt the urge to ascend to blue.

The details of whether I successfully managed to reach those azure heights remain fuzzy, but I suppose the details don't really matter, since elaborating on that particular recollection was nothing more than a bit of self-indulgent nostalgia. Anyway, the point of my mentioning this story is that this way of reading had, until I received my own copy of Enid Blyton's book, been the most definitive and dominant experience of reading I had had. To my young mind, that goal of reading, those slim books with those damn dots pasted on their tacky covers - that had been everything and anything reading was to me. And then someone had handed me this lush hardback book, with its shiny, smooth cover, its volume (four short stories meant four times the width), its weight. The hardiness of the book was astounding to me, and to this day I enjoy tapping my fingers on the covers of hardbound books - ah, how each short, hollow echo brings me back into my childhood in all its rich, sonorous glory.

Already the tactile experience of reading had changed so much for me. And when I opened the book to read...Again the details of how I reacted to that particular book escape me, but I remember the cumulative result of those forays into other worlds: days upon days consumed solely of reading. I must have been on summer holidays at the time! I remember reading a book a day, feeling that irrational and quite unjustified surge of irritation when one of my parents interrupted my reading time for dinner or sleep. Such pointless activities, I thought to myself then. I was reading to get lost, and lost I was, in that blissful state of unconcern and total disregard for the world around me.

While I no longer exclusively read to get lost, and my reasons and tastes for reading and books have changed, that formative experience of reading is always, I think, somewhere in the back of my mind when I get my hands on a new book: the seductive whisper of a summary, any residual knowledge of a book's author and how a book came to be. All urging me to open the cover and wholeheartedly sink into the closeted pages housed within. And yet nowadays, once the promise of a book has been broken by the comprehension of its first few chapters, no matter how good, I can never fully return to that wistful state of rapture. It is as if I have fallen in love with the idea of and brilliant recollection of reading more than with the dull, mechanical act of reading itself.

stuff

Stuff, stuff, stuff. There is so much stuff around me. Stuff to buy to pretty yourself up, stuff to buy so you can appear fashionable to your peers, stuff that you can eat, stuff that you can drink. Stuff you write, erase, and make lines with, stuff that keeps you warm, stuff that makes your lashes longer, stuff that lets you find out information online, stuff that carries things, stuff that cleans things, de-molds things and makes things shiny. So much STUFF! And what do I do with all of it? My daily life is just me interacting with lots of stuff. Entertaining myself, sustaining myself, cleaning myself....with stuff.

Miscommunication

Her words came out as stunted breaths that hung heavy in the air. Words that hinted at some kind of unfinished meaning, begging for others to notice, decipher and understand. She hated this part of herself so much at times. Such a half-hearted attempt at communicating. Trapped inside herself, and always this constant feeling of struggling, itching to burst free. To fully participate, integrate with the other.

why am I in this body? p.ii

This body at times feels like a shell - an encasing that simply houses my bloody contents. I feel like some kind of sausage; this thin membrane of skin that separates interior from the outer world. Only to blister and crackle when exposed to the grill.

How strange it feels to "possess" a body. What does possession over this coagulation of water, plasma, fat, and bone mean? Sometimes I feel like I am looking at an external object whose movements I have some vague awareness of, as though, when it moves a thought occurs, "ah, I knew that would happen." But it still takes me by surprise.

An unfortunate reminder

L was the kind of person whose existence made P feel frustrated with herself. P experienced this frustration as a physical sensation, a constant itch that seemed to simmer deep beneath the surface of her skin, tense enough to burst at any second. As if it was her body's way of physiologically acknowledging what it understood as wild, unfocused hatred.

In other words on some level, L unfortunately reminded P of herself.

L had a presence about her that made tangible the slew of self-criticisms and half-formed thoughts that periodically shaped the way P saw her own sad existence. Being in L's company materialised these otherwise transient and immaterial thoughts,  made them excruciatingly concrete. L was a living, breathing, physical manifestation of everything P felt (and hated) about herself.

Of course P tried to attribute the annoyance to what she convinced herself were more objective criteria - it was her particular manner of speaking, the way she argued about a point that lacked any sort of contention worth debating about, even her body shape and size. These flimsy justifications shot out periodically from her animal brain. Of course L's personality, her figure, the simple fact of her existence, was to blame for P's annoyance.

But of course there was no logical justification. Only that L instigated a set of circumstances, an environment which fostered the unpleasant feeling that one was being continuously judged and criticised. How undignified! To be made to feel so self-conscious without intending to.