"Passion is the experience of being consumed by something. It is not always pleasant."
Isobel O’Hare is a queer nomadic poet who currently lives in Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of the chapbooks "Wild Materials" (Zoo Cake Press, 2015) and "The Garden Inside Her" (Ladybox Books, 2016). You can find her at @isobelohare.
FIRSTS
My father wanted me to be a child model, to win trophies like my cousin for being the most beautiful. My mother put a stop to that idea.
No rouge for these fat cheeks. No blowouts for these baby curls. No grown humans living their fantasies through the buck and canter of these little limbs.
Her resistance did not save me, however, and after the divorce I found myself on an uncle’s countertop in a kitchen that smelled of beer and gasoline.
Mostly I remember the swimming pool full of trash, the padlock on the refrigerator, and the shimmery pieces of paper stuck to the walls.
I looked at everything other than my assailant, my first experience of dissociation. And when he was finished, I spat on the floor,
my first attempt at expelling an intruder from my mouth. He told my aunt and I got in trouble for spitting, the first time I was blamed
for fighting back. The first time I remember thinking, at four years old, that I will be punished for the things that happen to my body.
My mother tells me the story of how I stepped in a bucket of red paint in that same house, ran through all the rooms leaving my little red
footprints on all the carpets. How everyone--all my cousins, my mother-- spent hours scrubbing the evidence out for fear that my aunt
would murder me. I remember a knife, my sister running down the stairs away from someone. I remember us leaving. The same man who had
touched me tried to touch my mother. She took my sister and me to an apartment in the suburbs, on the dirty side of the railroad tracks.
It is there that I first remember dancing.
My dead child is genderless, like me. You paced outside the bathroom door saying something about not being ready, while I peed onto a stick and tuned you out. No one is ever ready, I think. We are not batteries. And what is pregnancy to me but being consumed by the dreams of some other machine?
I've never read a horoscope that didn't claim my partner and I were uniquely suited for one another, equipped to overcome the challenges of being a human being in love with another human being. Even the slip of paper spat out by a boardwalk fortune-teller said this was so, and I held on to that paper for a year.
After we split you had children with another woman, told me you had a feeling when you met her, that she was the one. The one to have children with. That it was a feeling you had never felt with me. I understand. It is difficult to want a child with someone whose body makes them nauseous, let alone the thought of another body growing within it.
There is a photograph of us seated on a bench by the sea. I have my head in my hands and you are looking up at the camera, beaming with amusement. In another photo we are waiting for the 51B bus to Clondalkin, seated on the pavement beside the Liffey. My forehead is planted against my knee and you are kissing my hair.
You tried to get me to take Tai Chi with you, but it was too peaceful. I needed to kick something with all my strength, to feel that I was beating my organs’ proxy. Fourteen years later I perform the movements. I am clumsy, but watching the teacher is traveling back in time to every park we ever went to together. Me reading a book on the grass, you flowing through the postures. Being young is being not ready. Is wanting in theory but shrinking from the flesh of it.
“Firsts” + “Being Ready” are previously published in Fuck Art, Let’s Dance Issue #014
