1. Monstrous monstrous monstrous me, bent over and illuminated by the white light of the fridge. At midnight. On a Monday.

2. Monstrous he, horse, equus, cheval.

One part French – un parti francais- for his beauty. One part sea creature for the spiny ridge that thick braids form along the crest of his neck. Like individual vertebra on a bony water monster. So FIERSOME and bold. So funny when, undoing the tight criss-crosses of hair I unravel thick curls and change the beast entirely.

3. Monstrous she. One day mother and then, over a series of months, morphed into something else. A fragment of what she was, skin into scales. Eyelids into peels of old fruit. It seemed she decomposed before us, reappearing one day as a synthetic strip of white bedsheets, saline scented and small. Scales were covered over with tegaderm strips. Tears replaced with indifference. Eyes moving under worried ruts of skin, reflecting chemicals and careless words. When I tell her, “You don’t mean that,” she looks at me for two long minutes and I think she might break. “The nurses are trying to poison me,” she finally says. And then, robotically, “there’s a fat caterpillar crawling in the drapery.”

4. Cyborgs are what monsters become with age and adulthood. They are the smoothed over mess of hair and teeth and legs. They are the disguise of all that.

In their undoing, monstrosities are revealed.

5. Undone and monstrous. Monstrous he. All those years ago. Raging up the stairs. Throwing down from the top landing an angry blur of words so harsh they left me openmouthed and in contention with the embarrassed tears forming behind my lashes and lids. Falling despite me.

6. Transition: space between places where I become myself again

I am ever a monster in any set environment. It is movement that changes me back. The transitory states and shapes where I feel inside of life.

7. I dreamed last night of promises broken. The patterns of them, over time. Bounced checks. Rejected cards. The monstrous ways he weaves white lies over wide lines of telephonic separation. I’ll take care of it means nothing from his mouth but I believe it anyways. The monster in me, masochistic, wants for the white knight in him. Wants to be defeated and proven wrong.

8. Monstrous many. The animals, like children, don’t contradict. I see this every day. They are unfiltered in their wants, and simple. Cyborgs are monsters that lust for something more. We were all monsters to begin with.

I spent hours on hands and knees, nuzzling thick calves under the table.

Hours cantering around the ceiling-high storage island in the basement, jumping over broomsticks and ski poles, the hollow logs and stone walls of my imagination. My kingdom for a horse! I yelped before I became one.

9. It’s strange to think how inside each body lives a whole life full of knowledge. Stuff nobody else knows about. This is what separates you from the cyborgs. Cause here we are and everybody loves to talk about the same thing. The same someone else’s thoughts. But nobody knows what you’ve got.

10. I don’t hate my history, but I think about it all the time. Even when I don’t think I’m thinking about it, I am. I’m a living remembrance to what once was. They moved out and away from each other. Stopped talking. Separated. But I stayed on with both. Kept his joviality, her art. Became this walking amalgamation, a monstrous melding of two opposite parts. Maybe that means I can never be peaceful, maybe it means I’ll devote too much time to a quest for appreciation made impossible by this contradiction we call ourSELF.

11. Wittgenstein: “It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: ‘they do not think, and that is why they do not talk.’ But –they simply do not talk.”

We made whale sounds beneath the surface.

Mustang cries across the back yard.

12.

Moments of uncontrolled laughter. Incessant. Increasingly inaccessible with the addition of years.

Color and smell. These are what monsters drink. And in the taking of sense, memory is made.

Bright turquoise. Marigold yellow. India. I went when I was ten. When, a decade later I returned, it was to a piece of myself.

13. There’s this

There’s this wild desire to return to where we came from. The soft cushion of skin spread over her sternum. The skin I fit into. Fell out of. Climbed back into.

And the verdant smell, equus, like the warm center of a damp mulch pit. The warm center of monstrous me. The love I fell out of, and back into after years of disintegration, separation.

There’s this

nostos

This search for return.

This quest to reclaim.

Our monster of origin.