Hebephilia, by Dorothy Lehane

---

My daughter has been studying me. She psychologizes that I am quick to temper, prescribes not opening my mouth too quickly. She counts me down. Calibrates my cruelness.

*

The house I grew up in was surrounded by graveyards. We sold rhubarb to passers-by. Sometimes they handed over silver coins, sometimes gold. I told the buyers to be careful, that the leafy inflorescences were poisonous. People mostly laughed but on one occasion a woman called me precocious. 

*

I was always hungry and yet my parents were told I was the only child in the family that didn’t look half-starved. My siblings were emaciated. It is a soft word, light on my tongue but years later it took on another weight when it was applied to my father.

*

My father used phrases like cut off at the knees. When I stubbed a toe, he’d suggest cutting my leg off. He would make a saw hand. Other times he’d offer to cut off my tail. 

When I understood that parts of the body sometimes have to be removed, I was disturbed. I’d catch myself saying it to my own children. A hole through time. 

*

My mother always said this life is for suffering.

*

I was thirteen when I started to play the game. He was nineteen and knew all the rules. 

*

In the game you are newly spawned and hypersexualised. If you could peer closer, you could see you are only half-drawn. 

*

The game that is being played is a game called walking-into-a-room-as-a-child-and-leaving-it-as-a-woman. 

*

You cannot find the end of the game, but you will come to understand that the game often ends in critical sadness.

*

You were not hungry, but the food was pushed into your mouth regardless. There was something in the food that you can taste that is not absolutely disgusting. This is called hanging the psyche out to dry. This is part of the syndrome. This is the way it will shape you. 

*

The game frames future relationships, since you cannot wind back the edges or limits of yourself. 

*

You cannot categorise lovers. You will not name them or give them importance. None of your messages are love letters. Modes of articulation are haptic. 

*

You are coerced into talking about the game and this is a new game called pretending-you-are-okay. 

*

You dream that the other player is at the edge of things. 

*

Your brothers tell you that anger changes the hue of your eyes but no matter how angry you become your eyes never change colour.

*

If you give your clothes to the police they will return them. The world will shift. If you are no longer available, your clothes will be returned to your mother. I reject the story, but the story does not reject me. 

*

The chronology of things hurts and does not hurt. There was a body that was overruled. There was a body that was broken into. There is a fundamental disturbance, episodes missing in action. You must re-learn how to play the game.

*

Burning the clothes helps with vanishing. It helps cultivate new and endless versions of self. 

*

There is no fever to my confession here. Perhaps you can hear the collective sounding. A sigh, not a gasp. 

*

There is the privilege of voicing all this. There is the problem of the inexpressible. The problem of pronoun. Ruling her body from your mouth. A sifting through. A selection of tone, language and form. Giving expression to inchoate experiences. 

*

Sometimes I temper the words. And I sense that what I am doing is not truth-speak. 

*

That we are stripped of a tender narrative. That we feel stripped.