“Because I am unclean. Because my skin is cursed. Because Odin lied, and I am cursed … only not in the way I feared. My touch is bad. My fortune is to hurt, and to maim, and to spoil, and to fail, and to lose, and to contaminate.”
Because my birthmother did not want me. Because my birthfather did not want me. Because Odin did not want me. And then there was you.
You gathered me warm against your breast, the first warmth I knew, scented of milk and honey and leavened bread, and fresh-cut flowers, and other things that an infant could scarcely understand. You loved me, you loved me through childhood and you grew me up on your healing water into adolescence, on days filled with delicate paint brushes and wet goldleaf pressed so carefully to vellum, and dried flowers and herbs crushed by mortar and pestle into the finest softest powders, and then there were the days when I was cold and could not be warmed, and did not yet understand why, so you gathered me near in shawls and blankets and furs, and first taught me to conjure a sliver of green–green, the color of life and envy in equal measure–into the center of my palm, and there in your hands was a nest of chirping magpies, and you bade me craft the mimicry of an empty magpie shell, and it WORKED. And there sat I, a foundling who did not yet realize he had been disinherited from birth, with an uncanny instinct of his own unbelonging, suddenly presented with the sublime possibility of a thing to call his very own. A self. A reflection. A voice.
I was a young man, a young woman, and you loved us both. And then I loved men and women, and you nurtured these blossoming affections. I bore children so young, and you taught me to be a mother fierce and forgiving all in one. I strained until all my muscles were sore to tilt into the line of Odin’s myopic sight, discarded again and again, with a dismissive and casual blandness that was cruel. You taught me to love my brother, so effortlessly like him, even when he was brusque and self-absorbed and oblivious and impossible to love.
And even you, I sent a MONSTER, too VORACIOUS to MURDER the two men you loved most to see clearly that it might kill YOU instead. Even you, who did not once slight or wrong me. You lit me a candle that I doused at the bottommost measure of its wick. I, parasite, mongrel–
–he said my birthright was to die, and he was RIGHT–
Despair falls thick around me.It is molasses in my gullet. It is lead shackles around my ankles and my wrists. The sores are deserved. My solitude is deserved. I would wear a leper’s bells if it would save anyone further whom I love from ruination. But my disease is deeper-running than that of the body. So I rage, and in my rage, craft myself the illusion thatI have the right to exist.
“You see, mama … when I survived infancy, the universe tipped a bit off-kilter. The hurt I have caused solely to defend my existence is a symptom. The woes that I have endured are the cosmos correcting the error. And my damned capacity to endure it all? My penance.”
Modern Life is Rubbish 