7/14/2024
Oh No, She’s Writing About Haunted Houses Again
This is the third summer back home and I am staggered by the joy of being swallowed in heat. To exist in the heat requires resilience and a willingness to expose the flesh. It locks you into the body with every step on the heat-rippled sidewalk. New York was hot, but never Atlanta.
When I sweat through my sunscreen and stumble back home to my air conditioned apartment, I know that I am where I belong. I know that every drop of sweat I left on the sidewalk is a benediction of salt I offer my city. It wasn't mine, not really. The salt of my body always belonged here.
I've been thinking a lot about belonging lately, about community and language and the choirs we preach to, not to convert but to hear the choir lift up its voice in return.
Being back in the South is a gospel song. The trees are flaying themselves alive with the songs of cicadas. I've talked elsewhere on this blog about my qualms with publishing a book. I was worried about returning to the frantic and thin feeling of needing others' approval when I write. I was worried about losing the healing confidence and sense of self that propelled me to write again after my eight year hiatus. I was worried about drifting, rudderless, a ghost in search of a house to haunt, of a place to belong.
This month I’ve been invited to give a reading to celebrate my debut collection of poems, What Was Eaten Was Given (pre-order here) at my favorite bookstore, Charis Books. I still remember being a closeted teenager in the back of the room at Charis, almost too preoccupied with whether or not I belonged in a place so aggressively feminist to hear the poets and authors and singers of the monthly open mics. I think, even though Charis was always welcoming, I could still feel the chitinous scratching of my own discomfort at being a “boy” terrified of their own inevitable femininity. I always felt at arm’s length.
I'd made the drive from New York to Atlanta countless times.The last time I drove it, watched one of the most iconic skylines vanish behind me into an unraveling landscape of asphalt and sunlight and billboards that still believe in God, it felt like Odysseus.
After renting rooms in Jersey and Queens and moving back briefly for a week, with no set address beyond a few weeks, it still felt like coming home. Like crossing over. New York, for all its charms and for all the sincerely happy memories with my ex-wife, never felt like that. I never felt home in my body.
In Mike Flanagan's phenomenal miniseries The Haunting of Hill House, based on Shirley Jackson's phenomenal novel of the same name, the matriarch of the doomed Crain family explains to her daughter:
“A house is like a person’s body. The walls are like bones, the pipes are veins, it needs to breathe, it needs light and flow, and it all works together to keep us safe and healthy inside.”
The wickedness and neglect and petty resentments and unsettled spirits of the house are what made it lonely, made it hungry, made it sick. It was as much haunted by its living occupants than by its host of ghosts. Perhaps that's why New York felt so alien. The house was unfinished. I wasn't home in my bones, felt the disrepair and garish incompleteness of my skin. Even with the first clumsy attempts at remodeling, with wigs and skirts from Amazon, I could feel the sun coming through the windows of the house, could feel air flowing and my bones shaking themselves dustless and new. I could live here, in this body that was no longer a tomb.
I was no longer buried alive, I was living.
A quote I can't for the life of me attribute, but has always stuck with me is "what is home if not the last place they find you?" I've been approaching life and belonging this way ever since. The city, the hearts of lovers, the art, and the body I am found in must be a home, even after I have left it cold and vacant as a winter pool. I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, and bodies, and what we do to them to live.
Perhaps it is the constant drumming of panic about hormones from right-wing politicians. There is a concerted effort to take away the things that make me feel human, that quiet the ghosts of my house, that make this skin something to live in. Whenever I read about a new proposed bill or a new court decision about HRT I can feel the ghosts of my body grow restless.
In Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, the magic of the witch’s curse in the castle manifests as an uncanny human-ness to the house. Arms hold up candelabra. Fireplaces have faces. The house turns its attention to the new woman walking its halls. Even amongst the joy of first taking hormones, I could feel the tension that this could all be taken away, that this couldn’t be so simple.
I felt my body watching the strange new ingénue making a home in them, the hope so bright and splendid it was almost painful to hold, like a tungsten light. It burned to have the hope of being beautiful inside me, to feel it becoming real, and then, once it was real, becoming threatened.
That’s part of why I wrote What Was Eaten, to chronicle and make concrete this dream of this body. I want to feel the tangible story of my splitting skin, my unhaunted house, even in the event of its being torn down. Cocteau’s movie, the Haunting of Hill House, these stories of ghosts and houses and hope always feel like dreams. I can’t afford to be a dream anymore. I am skin. I am blood. I am fat. I am nerves. I am bones. I am tits. I am words typeset and pounded into paper reality. I am vibrations in the air. I am a book, now. I am bound here.
This reading (which you can sign up for here) is a celebration of that bondage. I am home in Atlanta, in my skin, in my lovers’ hearts. I am something new and my sun-kissed doors are wide open to guests. My lights are on. My ghosts are quiet. If they take the hormones that gave me this body away I will be vengeful and haunted again but eternal.
I will be eternal. I will be home in the last place they find me.
The body of a woman.
