The Toughness; 1

(written 09SEP2007 thru 26APR2008)
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I feel this foreign
non-sexual attraction sometimes.
It’s like I see something mysterious in my own gender.
In her book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
Maya Angelou describes her anxieties that she may be homosexual,
and even then still,
a freak of a homosexual,
because she felt little sexuality concerning her supposedly-homoerotic behavior.
She resolves the issue when she realizes it is not homosexuality that is afflicting her, but a Want to be a woman.
She is late developing, without breasts for a long time.
She feels disconnected from herself sexually, and finds it confusing.
I see guys in the same way, and it used to bother me, until I came to the same conclusion. What part of me did the Abuse kill that keeps me feeling all the time like something is missing?
Something wordless I see on the cover of magazines, on movie posters: Masculinity.
Meanwhile the guys who are helping the photographers and directors represent this in medium, don’t have it in real life.
Some of them are ridiculous, lacking all the qualities that I somehow pick up on, some vague Masculinity.
That’s how I know it’s got little to do with the mediums I’m seeing the Masculinity in, and everything to do with me.
I’m aware I come from Abuse.
According to the books I’ve read
I come from extreme Abuse.
I know I’m numb.
I know I can’t feel on the inside of my skin.
When I was sixteen I could remember little before the age of twelve, if anything.
Lately I’m in my head a lot, trying to analytically pull the truth out of the few clues I catch along the way,
like in certain photographs or movie posters.
There are two of me, the Ghost, and Him.
My Soul (?) And my Body, holy (?)
I knew Him a long time ago,
the whole person,
The one who effortlessly owns the qualities I try hard to remember and recover.
I see Him everywhere,
in the statue of David,
in a trashy Muscle magazine,
in abstract art at the Met.
It always soaks me with sadness.
That’s not homosexuality,
that’s something else.
Girls and guys have supposedly fallen in love with me. They claim I’m Him, and see nothing but Him, and I leave them, quickly, hurting them. I didn’t know what else to do.
Sometimes something will ‘click’ and I’ll be Him, for an evening, or a morning, but it doesn’t lasts long.
The longest it’s ever lasted was on June 1^st, a few years ago, when I got a lot of my memory back.
Before, when I tried to remember, I could only see colors. What happened on June 1^st lasted awhile, like a high that lasted a few months, but the numbness came back, and a feeling of incompleteness. A feeling of not being Real.