12/12/2024 (Suppl.)

Get in the Telepod: Love Letter to Brundlefly

My love,

When you gripped the barrel of that shotgun, pressed it to your antennae'd head, and wordlessly begged Gina Davis to shoot you, I cried like my dog died. Like I was a child again, screaming "No!" as Scar let Mufasa hit the ground. I was ruined...even though I had watched you die a hundred times by then. 

I first met you when I was sixteen. And I didn’t understand you. You terrified me. You made me uncomfortable. Looking back now. I see you as you are. 

My Brundlefly, before the change, in all your twitching nervous, your long hair and uncomfortable suits, you looked like every one of my wedding photos:

Happy from the neck up, looking like you wanted to shed your skin like so much meat sloughing off of chitin. Watching you again, at 30, I finally recognized that look.

I saw the Fly again right after I started hormones. Right after I looked at my body and decided to get mad science involved. When you told Gina Davis that your machine takes you apart and puts you back together somewhere else, I knew what you meant. 

Within days of my first dose, I could feel the hard and unforgiving angles of my boy body melting, dissolving like film stock, like liquid latex, like the rounded edges of the estradiol under my tongue. 

I wanted to melt with you. I wanted to be purified and glopped together by an accident of science in the body I deserved just like you did. 

Because even as Jeff Goldblum won arm wrestling matches and did gymnastics and fucked Gina Davis to exhaustion I didn't want him. I wanted you. 

I could see you under his skin, gleaming and clicking under his tissue like a Christmas wrapped Geiger counter. You were radioactive and my half-life just doubled with my cup size. Brundle, we were made for each other. I saw mandibles and thought man...I want to fuck that bug. 

And then your ear fell off. And your fingernails gushed into the sink. And your teeth danced into a mason jar on your medicine cabinet shelf. You were sick, but fascinated by your own changing body. Brundle, that first three months of hormones I thought my tits were going to kill me. I thought the mood swings were going to break my brain. I thought my new body was going to burst through my flesh like knuckles through old apple skins. 

I was tired of feeling rotten, but amazed at the new tree sprouting from my past. You were afraid, but giddy enough to climb the walls. Baby, me too. 

I know what it feels like to be a monster. To have people look at a miracle and have nightmares about your kids. To see a brand new kind of beautiful, and reach for a shotgun. 

Gina Davis would never love you like I can. Would never let your spit melt her face while Howard Shore plays loud enough to rattle her bones. 

But I would.

I would get in the pod with you and back-and-forth until our genes fall in love. I would let slick, glistening plates replace my skin. I would stridulate my legs in public, crossing them tight like a teen at their first adult movie. 

You were my first adult movie, Brundle. And this is a new kind of puberty after all. A David Cronenberg baht mitzvah of broken glass and acid kisses. 

I want to KY and rubbergleam. I want to feel your wings beat the bed as you break me open. I have been dying to be soft my whole life. Lean down and melt until I can fit through a straw.

Brundle, your mistake was trying to be human. Your mistake was looking at the past and thinking that it would feed you. My darling, why do you think the telepod took your teeth? The past is spoiling, all you can do is kiss it goodbye. Trust me.

Right before I saw you again, right before I got you tattooed on my thigh, right before I started the hormones I left New York, my marriage, my job. I was taken apart and teleported to Atlanta. 

There was dissolution, but there was a bountiful joy in the fear. I know you know what I'm talking about. I saw it in your compound eyes when your old body started to fall apart. You kept your ear, your fingernails, your teeth, all your evidence of your glorious change. 

I've taken more photos of myself in the last three years than I have in my entire life. I am my own museum of change. I am a monster with the full film of my becoming frame-by-framed in my phone. The wigs. The waist trainers. The stuffed bras. The lingerie. 

My love I have thatched together a bed of our bleeding befores. I have ripped the shotgun from Gina Davis' hands. We’ve both had complicated breakups. We both have monstrous appetites. I have dreamed you a new ending. It’s right here.

Climb down from your canonical death and crawl towards me. Click your mandibles and find me writhing in a slick pile of old photographs, of cheap suits. Make love to me in a storm of chirping locust song. 

Pin me with your six legs and, like your failed telepod, like your misunderstood attempt to steal Gina Davis' baby, like my hundreds of miles in a rental car from New York to Atlanta, take me away.

Let's fuck like our ribs are chrysalis.

Let's fuck the butterflies in our stomachs into a storm of color.

According to film critics and congress, we're both monsters tonight, my love.

So climb down from the shadows, chitter your greased chitin one last time

and fuck me like one.