Aphrodite

I woke up to the sound of angry gulls and the glitter of uneven sunlight dancing against the pink roof. Slowly into focus came two mini-trident shadows and a hefty silhouette, then a thunk as bill met calcium—are these the words? The point of contact where an angry gull’s anger comes out of its body is what, a bill? This roof was made somehow, though I couldn’t say who made it or whether anyone made it at all or it simply became made. I am new here.

The smell of smoke now meant an airflow—what is a smell after all if not an announcement of something new. I must have a smell, unknown to me because I have never been new to myself—as long as there has been an I, I have been there with that I. The beak, it’s not a bill, it’s a beak? Or is it? Down again in determination, the fixed energy of a creature with no imagination, and then a rupture, bigger smells, other words I didn’t know yet, too many to count now, opening a hidden staircase to the other side, where I’d never been, but if I was to go could never go anywhere but.

It was not as easy as I’d hoped. The shell’s pink room was hard to leave, the staircase was slippery and my leg muscles not very strong since I’d never used them. When I finally made it out, over, I thought, so this is where the work begins. I met two travelers, dusty from roads I’d never walked on. I told them my name and watched as their eyes shadowed over. As it happens, they have to think they’ve found you, not that you’ve found them. Playing hard to get, they call it. I put on some clothes because that’s what they all seemed to be doing and smeared some of the dirt from the road onto my legs. I pretended to ignore the passersby, heavy carts, thirsty looking animals. I was thirsty too, come to think of it, which I hadn’t before. I looked up at the sky, confused by its coloring and unsure of its relative position. Soon they began to speak to me, to ask me questions. I looked but never answered and this drew them closer. My silence was a web and I could twist them toward each other, so when they turned around they found each other’s faces. It was easier then; they expected a mirror and found something else.

Let me tell you, whoever you are. Did you make me like the shell was made or did I make myself, but how could I when I wasn’t there to make me? Or maybe you are just a you here with me, inside the shell though no one else is here, I see, and you could be many or you could be nobody but me. I have to tell you something. Sometimes I spun them toward each other when I knew they would just dent each other, spin away, dragging damage along with them for the rest of their moving path. I let it happen, I made it happen, even though I knew it would end like this, with you sobbing at all hours, sleeping pressed against a wall, throwing your furniture around and picking various shards out of yourself and all your surroundings. Maybe you convinced yourself there was a good reason for it, but there wasn’t. There was no reason.

Then it happened to me. You’d think that after all this time spent ribboning them into each other, I’d know what to look out for, but there we were in that blue place I’d wondered about. His hair was shiny, a quality I didn’t know I valued in hair. I met him on the road, but the road was not where we stayed. The road was not where what happened next happened. He was near two men from a place with a name, yelling mouth to ear about another place, another name. He stepped back as they started to shove hands against chests and he winked. I noticed a funny smell, smoke? And then he was by me, shiny hair, want to come up to my place. Around his room were instruments I really should have paid closer attention to, but his lips were so red it was hard to look elsewhere. He locked the door. Then he locked another door. I realized later and it was all said and done and there was something leftover, the door I came though gone now forever, and only this smaller opposite-of-a-door: not so different from the shell, except with the shell there was only forward, and now there was only after.

In the end I wanted the same thing that they all did: a place to put myself outside of the shell of my own body. To look in a mirror and see something that looked nothing like me. To bring my insides out and outsides in, to finally find an inhabitant of the tiny room inside me I didn’t know was vacant, didn’t even know was there, until one day, a knock came and I had no choice about who moved in. I wanted to be seen by eyes that weren’t my own. I wanted to see through other eyes. I thought I knew better, but I was wrong.

I found a way to say my name and then to shed it. I peeled away the meaning of words, the gulls and their parts faded away, and back I went, after all, to where nothing is new and nothing is at all.

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Sarah Van Bonn is a British-American writer based in Berlin. Her work can be found in The Southampton Review, The Common, The Rupture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Boiler, and elsewhere. Her essay ‘On Bears’ was one of ten winners selected for the 2019 Berlin Writing Prize Anthology. Read more at sarahvanbonn.com.