Short Story from Escapades: I Awaken

                                           

  I Awaken

by Kyle Phoenix

(originally published 1993,1995 and 1996 and part of the Escapades compilation by Mr. Doyle)

          My eyes are closed.  I awaken.  I lay for a second, still, trapped in a dream.  I patiently await to wake but I am already.  My mind searches for what is missing.  My sex.  I let my hand slide under the covers and am stopped by my body as it betrays me.  I reach farther and what allowed others to see me is gone.  I touch farther, no longer my sex a direction but now a depth.  My fear is enraptured by my joyful thirst for knowledge.

          I reach deeper until I am lost within myself.  I am shocked and laughing and angry and darkly pleasured.

          My hand is engulfed by another tool for life, deeper within my depth, life's possibilities.

          I stand differently.  Muscles that were once a thought away are now miles beyond my mind's reach.  I hurt.  I hurt because I'm trying to command the past.

          I look.  I stare.  I touch.  I hold my new self with both hands and find a new tenderness, a new wholeness.  What I felt minutes ago was missing is now found but it isn't what I lost.

          I smell different.  With my musk, it's strength is gone.  It's still strong but sleek, linear, far more subtle.  I am now sublime in my bodies perfume.

          I dress differently.  I am freed out of slacks...but I am endangered in that freedom.

          I walk with eyes on me.  I never noticed how many eyes there are.  Now I am a thing.  I am where my sweater rises and my skirt dips.  Where the seams of my pants tighten.  Now I am a mystery and when I am not, I am a stereotype.  I am a competitor when I thought I was a compliment.  A synergy of the inimical.

          I talk and am not heard.  When they do hear, I am wrong.  Dismissed.  What was once expected that I refine and focus in the past I am now excluded for.  Others try and determine my "no's" and "yeses".

          I earn but there is so much they demand I acquiesce for my earnings.  I must wear that.  I must believe or perpetuate a lie about age.  I must propagandize what is not my weakness.  I must not call wrong wrong or right right.

          I love.  But again I must give fiercely, totally, individually.  That is my place.  My role.  He has his choice.  I am their choices.

          I tear and there is agony.

          " My son, " he says.

          And I hate both with all of this love.  Am I just a go-between, a vessel, a tunnel for one man to come into and another to come out of ?

          I love them with this hatred, with this agony, this depth, this tool, this exclusion, this selling, this right right, this wrong wrong, this soft, this strong, this lack of direction.

          With my eyes open, I awaken.


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