Exquisite Mariposa

by Fiona Alison Duncan

  I knew all this and still a part of me circa thirteen to twenty-eight judged others who acted girly in public—talking only about relationships, for instance, with little lilts at the ends of their sentences—if they hadn’t also figured out a means to money and/or other measures of consensus reality power because that is dangerous. I know how Just a Girl codes are read, and lately, I’m performing them all the more exaggeratedly because of it, even when it’s to my detriment. Lucien diagnosed it: Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

  I wish I’d known better than to judge the likes of Miffany. I wish I’d known since forever how little judgments reveal about the objects of their scrutiny—it’s on us, baby.

  Miffany and I sat at a corner table between two windows in the dumpling parlor. Condensation had collected on the glass. As soon as she sat down, Miffany started doodling into it. Little naked devils with round butts and no genitals, butterflies, and what looked like doughnuts and a deconstructed American flag surrounded our tiny table, which was now crowded with slurpy rice noodles, shrimp dumplings, steamed pork, and fried sesame buns. Miffany didn’t order or touch any food until I noticed and said, “I’m charging it to the agency.” A lie worth every penny.

  I didn’t know what to interview Miffany about until she started talking about what I’m usually too ashamed to: boyfriends. (Classic girl talk.) My Lucien and her Josh, their substance abuse and subtle abuse, and how we loved them regardless. We talked about how it could be “spiritually productive” to be in a “low-key abusive” relationship, a way to work through familial and cultural trauma. “The sex is so good!” (When it also hurts.) At the time, we both thought we were “actualizing through their gendered ignorance.”

  “It’s like Josh and I are the same soul,” Miffany said, locking eyes with me with such intensity that I was just like: “Totally.”

  “But he keeps trying to make me his mother!”

  “Ugh. I know. Like Lucien says he wants to, but he doesn’t get how to love my soon-to-be woman. Before Lucien, I always had like, educated, older lovers. Now I’m having to learn to explain my priorities, desires, and boundaries. It’s actually helping me in business negotiations.”

  “Ha ha!”

  The most astounding revelation of my conversation with Miffany—and this was always happening at La Mariposa: my diseases, habits, and pain articulated as gendered and cultural as I learned I wasn’t alone—came during a talk about body dysmorphia. Miffany was “feeling disgusting” from all the “trash snacking” she’d been doing these last few weeks.

  “I know I haven’t put on weight,” she said. “But I feel out of shape, and I have to remind myself, that’s okay. Don’t obsess”—because when she used to, and this has happened to me too—“I would feel like I was a Hans Bellmer doll.” Every limb was a thigh, her breasts and belly ballooning and multiplying, until she was just orbs and orbs. She’d float out of the room, or she’d shrink into a spit bubble that would pop in her own mouth, and then she couldn’t eat at all.

  Body dysmorphia, as we experienced it, is beyond low self-esteem. It’s not about not loving our bodies, the answer to that being: Every body is beautiful, equal opportunity objectification. No, this disease came from a recognition of the truth that We are not the body, without the embrace of it being practiced. When you’re granted so much attention for your form, and you like aspects of that—validation, I exist!—it’s easy to get confused: to mistake the form for the feeling, the body for the being. You can get superficial. Self-objectify. Let men and media, who assume you are your body, use it, and so: What does that make you?

  Lucky for us, the body is wise, a messenger. It will act up, in an attempt to wake us up, if our minds give in to falsity, like if you accept and repeat the language virus: You are your body, little girly.

  Miffany told me that about a year ago, when she was living at La Mariposa, partying a lot, and working part-time at a juice shop, she had started seeing from a God’s-eye perspective. Outside of herself. Vertiginous.

  She’d been tooling around with makeup, trying to diet on free juice, and daydreaming of real careers. “I was bored, I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I thought if I looked better, my life would be better.”

  She became obsessed and, once the idea crept in, it took over. The language virus had Miffany caking on makeup and skipping even juice meals as her body clammed up in acne and started holding water in weird ways.

  You can’t control me, the body retaliated, can’t wield the world this way!

  The language virus wanted her to be seen as the ideal of beauty, but she—her Realest of Real she—didn’t want to be seen like that. She wanted eye to eye, God as flesh.

  “It got so bad,” Miffany said. “I would try to go where I used to be fine, like to the same parties, with the same friends, but I wouldn’t be there. Later, when I would try and remember the party, I realized I couldn’t picture myself there, I couldn’t fathom my body in a room. I didn’t know what conversations I had, who I was talking to, my mouth moved but . . .”

  It was as if her spirit had fled the scene, and Miffany couldn’t see through all the shade and noise, the assumed judgments, who’s looking at who. The language virus had Miffany trying to see herself through everyone else’s perspective, those being imaginary though—not Real. More like magazine gazes and beauty contests. Close-ups of celebrity cellulite on rags in the grocery store checkout line. Hot or Not. Who Wore It Better. Hierarchies of beauty fortifying class divides. If she’d been calm enough to receive it, Miffany and I agreed, she would’ve felt beautiful, as in loved, how those around her loved her.

  This is why I feared being a girl and being close with other girly girls. You have to be vigilant in engaging with girly or else its associated language viruses can infect you. There are so many ideas of what a girl means—false ideas repeated to consensus. Even if you were raised to question them, they get inside of you, they organize your thinking and doing, your being. For a long time, I tried to inoculate myself against these viruses by repudiating the feminine. I wore my hair short. Didn’t flirt. I was hyperrational. Cool. And then someone fucked me like a woman and all that blocked Mother Nature, fatal-femme energy rose, and since then, I’ve been day-by-day learning to revere my femininity, while surviving in this dickhole reality. I’m terrified of being taken advantage of.

  Before I left for New York, Alicia had told me the one thing she didn’t want was for our show to be marketed “as anything even related to a sleepover.” During our meeting at the branding agency, I relayed this to Alexandre, who replied, “Sure.”

  When I got back to LA, I received an e-mail from Alexandre with his notes from our meeting. Cc’d were four male names I recognized from the agency’s contact page. The subject line was: “Cool Girls Sleepover :)”. I marked the e-mail unread and crawled into bed.

  Episode 05—“F is for Fake”

  HOW DOES THE REAL FEEL? Every time I get there, it feels like a landing, like Earth to Fiona. It’s humiliating, because you know it was there all along. We’re in it even when we’re not. Like, you’ve seen someone drunk, right? Their sloshy speech, clumsy limbs, and lizardly libido, and you’re sober, at least with regards to alcohol. The Real’s like being so sober, you realize that anything can be an intoxicant. Stories are, and characters. Ego trips. Social pressure. Most people are out here tripping on their own personal cocktail. What’s your fix?

  Throughout my teens, I dosed on straight girlfriends and straight As. In my twenties, I tried everything I could think of: nicotine, sugar, amphetamines, psilocybin, LSD, ecstasy, cannabis, Valium, Xanax, DMT, alcohol, sobriety, monogamy, polyamory, abstinence, sluttiness, sleeping until noon, rising with the sun, semesters off, one B- (in a seminar called “Boys Dudes Men,” duh), raving, lazing, waitressing, publishing, traveling, volunteering, sugar babying, consumerism, Buddhism, masochism, vengeful feminism, feminist solidarity, Catholic studying, popular science studying, workaholic-ing, like Mom, like Dad, Protestant work ethi
c unlearning, queering, neo-Marxism, New Ageism, Taoism, fashion journalism. I tried Ludwig Wittgenstein, Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Alan Watts, Sun Ra, Philip K. Dick, Courtney Love, Chris Kraus, Durga Chew-Bose, the Quran, and on and on. I tried way too hard.

  Before I moved to Los Angeles, after spending a summer in Toronto, I was almost twenty-eight, growing my hair long for the first time since fifteen and having vivid dreams. My dreams often feel as real or more real than waking life. I got off for the first time in a dream—this, when I was an anxiously anorgasmic sexuality studies major. A month later, I orgasmed with a partner. Repeatedly, my dreams have awakened me to true possibility.

  It is a fact that no one wants to hear about other people’s dreams. It’s like we can’t even. When I’m reading Jung, whose work I otherwise love, as soon as he starts detailing a dream, the letters get all scrambled, it’s just weird shapes on a page. Given this psychic block, let’s pretend this dream was Real Life, because that’s how it felt.

  It was the night before my flight to LA, and I was a wife and mother, like my mother’s mother, a stay-at-home mom. It was the 1950s. My dress was hard to run in, and I was fleeing. Dear life. I sprinted out of my suburban bungalow into the front yard, barefoot and screaming, as my husband pursued me with hands to kill. Not an uncommon scene—cinematic—but what was unusual was the feeling. Sometimes in dreams, as in Real Life, you register little sensation. Other times, like in this nightmare, you’re re-sensitized: the most decadent feels seem to flow beyond your control. I screamed, knowing no neighbors would help as panic fired my limbs to fight. Scattered, searching for my children, my heart hurting so precisely—it was Real enough to wake me up, changed. I understood something now that I hadn’t before. And I knew it had something to do with my new long hair.

  The thing I hate about being a woman is how I’m made to be one. On Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island, hair is just hair, a natural outgrowth of the Divine, like everything else. On Earth, it’s a signal to harass us. When I had short or shaved hair, if I got hit on, it was as an equal or a revered one; almost everyone I dated identified as queer. I started growing my hair out during my last year in New York when my budget became about spending close to nothing. Now I attract Republicans.

  The last man I fucked was this Australian model who party plans for Peter Thiel. I met him at a sex party in the Hills, and since everything is relative, he seemed great. Both there “by accident,” we made fun of the scene until we were a part of it, fucking in a darkened corner of a garden mezzanine, overlooking all of LA. It was good for me—he had a beautiful cock and practiced stamina (she-comes-first manners)—but then, when we met again, he was all like, “My friends tell me I should marry you.” I know I’m kind of asking for it by the way I behave—simple, sweet, and perverted. (Fake.) (“You’re cool and hot,” a different bimbo once said, astounded, “fun and smart.” “Yeah, I know,” I replied, “I work really hard on being ideal so I don’t kill myself.” I.e., I’m insecure.)

  After the marriage scare, I ignored the Thiel guy’s texts for a week, but answered his call.

  “It’s shit or get off the pot, Fiona!” he said, trying to bully me into hanging out.

  “I’ve always hated that expression,” I replied.

  Does this work for you guys? I’d never been treated like a thing a man can corral before LA and the hair.

  In the months before I moved to Los Angeles, I was also experiencing hallucinations while meditating. I wonder if hallucinations, like dreams, aren’t made to share—will you receive them? These hallucinations were full picture shows. My eyes were closed as I watched scenes stream as if on an IMAX that was tapped into my nervous system. I didn’t have to do anything but observe. I had been consciously practicing being more receptive. The Tao was teaching me how. Honor your yin, your dark matter, the feminine. I wanted to walk the Way.

  The way I’d been moving through life before—willful and reactive, in drag, or mute, shy—had inspired duress. In the years prior, I’d been panic attacked and suicidal; addiction-prone, yearning, manic, and then bitchy, lonely, and ashamed. I was vain, and so, as had happened with Miffany, my spirit sought to rouse me to Reality by challenging the body: I got acne, rashes, allergies, fevers, gas, and unusually dispersed weight gain. I was sick.

  Now I was getting better thanks to a new language virus: I give up! I couldn’t care anymore about things I used to, like developing a career, pleasing men, looking good, or even having a home. I was crashing where I could, relying on the kindness of others. Working as little as my hunger could afford, I studied astrology, Eastern religions, and magical esoterica as self-help, and learned to meditate via yoga. A common scene (Eat Pray Embarrassing!), but I didn’t care, because of the feeling.

  I’d started to smell like I hadn’t since twelve, maybe thirteen. Humid and elemental, it was the smell of spontaneity. Pierce that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love! I just was. Still often anxious but learning to ground down. I hadn’t yet met the Real—that humiliating bliss—but these months were like foreplay for that climax. Sometimes, it takes us a long time to get there.

  The two most persuasive hallucinations occurred within a week of each other. During the first, I was in a queer yoga studio, guided into restorative poses, with props all around me, as an elderly woman walked around performing Reiki. During Savasana, our final corpse pose, I’d experienced a feeling of total safety unremembered since kindergarten: I was a child about to nap on a mat.

  Calm and alert, body at ease, my mind summoned, in visual detail, all these scenes of Fiona aching, from puberty to the present. I watched my past play for me, in a series of medium and long shots, all these moments where I had betrayed some inner knowing. This knowing was represented by a second me, who acted upon my past reality. I kissed the top of my head. Put the blade down. Walked away from the car. Apologized. Made tea. Tucked myself in. Made love with myself—sweet, gorgeous love, the kind that’s both fast and slow, reassuring whispers and carnal gropes, every move instinctual. Fiona on Fiona :P

  The uncanny thing was “I” wasn’t doing any of this. The more my active mind surrendered, the more memories were summoned and taken care of. I watched in titillating awe, and understood how, in every masochistic moment, I’d always known what better to do.

  The second hallucination took place on a sunny afternoon. August 14, 2015. I was told, by a man livestreaming on my computer, to close the curtains, turn off the lights, and lie down with a soft cover over my eyes. For forty-five minutes, he guided me and a thousand-odd others around the world in a meditation into the Underworld. We were figured as Inanna, a Sumerian goddess of love, sex, procreativity, and war. As Inanna, we ventured through a forest to a tree with a door. Through the door, we descended down flights of stairs, stripped of all vestments, until we hit hell. There we were killed and laid on a cool stone table. Each of our organs was inspected, cleansed, and put back. People I’d loved, like exes and great aunts, visited me as my liver was washed and my heart massaged. (I paid eleven dollars for this livestream, timed to a Leo New Moon.)

  The surprise was Ash, a girl I’d half-consciously competed with in high school, whose bare, engorged breasts I’d once caught a side view of. At the time, the desire had been so strong, I imprisoned it. Ash was the leader of our five-girl clique. We didn’t do drugs, watched our drinks, got straight As, and were virgins. We played board games and planned field trips to do activities like skiing and sailing. I was the group outlier. I read feminist erotica and comic books, liked punk music, and had a history as a bad girl. Tween Fi offered boys double-tongue blow jobs, holding her best friend’s hand. At thirteen, I went good—joining this clique—after my great-aunt died. Bad-girl Fifi didn’t go away though. She’d sneak out occasionally, flirting lasciviously with younger-grade members of the football team, or making comments to the clique about clits. This seemed to disturb my friends. They’d “ew,” and once one
of the girls told me, “You better not be a lesbian.”

  So I had loved Ash. Inanna made this obvious. I had loved her romantically, sensually, devotedly. Any ill feelings I had held—like resenting Ash’s frigidity and perfectionism, her Katie Holmes looks back when Katie was more famous than Michelle Williams, and her innate understanding of math and science, like my father, who was so impressed by her—were but a shadow of the love. I really did love Ashley Anne Cooper. And this was okay. It was beautiful, actually.

  Recognizing this, beauty surrounded me. It energetically lifted me, like for Real. My chest rose from the floor, neck and jaw too, until my upper body crested, making a half-moon of empty space between it and the floor. Orgasmic feelings waved in, out, and around my core, piercing my limbs and holding me up. I felt an ecstatic calm culminating in a great bliss like I’d never heard anyone speak of or write about. For three or five or who-knows-how-many minutes, I was lifted, while bright white light poured through my still-covered eyelids.

  I’ve come to believe this was what’s called an “energy orgasm,” the first of many I’ve had since. It was maybe also my “Kundalini awakening.” (A snake lies dormant, coiled at the base of our spine—our Chi, Eros, vital mmmm yummm me God-given energy—waiting to rise. The meditation was, I later learned, led by a Kundalini instructor.)

  Since this experience, what I most want is to get pregnant. If I had to act a sad part, all I’d need to do to cry onstage is think about this new life that may never come from me. Longing tears for suckling babes cleanse my face regularly. The desire is so deliriously motivating, I’ve basically stopped smoking, and the reality show deal, I see now, in retrospect, probably came in part from it. My instinct to nurture these people younger than me, and to get me some money. That’s the only reason I’ll publish this story, if I ever do—I’ll sell my soul to get the money it takes to raise a family.