My mind is riddled with a sickness I cannot articulate. a grief so green, it's vibrant.
on the days that I find the courage to strip, to cleanse, to touch this burning skin burning for touch, I make sure to dismantle my epithelial armour. I step into the shower, a mere skeleton of a body, my flesh washing off me. I can see myself in the fog of the mirror, cheeks burgeoning with mycelium, breasts of aerosol, all my curves fluid like slime. easy to mold. easy to cloy. And when my corium drips off my ligaments and runs down the sink, all that I see is a melting candle. i feel empty. i feel euphoric.
My skin, he used to say, was mercury—dense and viscous where it was meant to be rigid and taut, fluid and iridescent, a bit cratered like the moon. Something he could capture into the eyepiece of his telescope. He revered how the chrome of my skin leaked into the onyx of my eyes—a swirl of gray infiltrating an obsidian pool. He said they were like galaxies. my eyes. How he sometimes wanted to tear my cornea open and drown in the void of space within.
I know you are hiding darkness in there. We were swimming. He kept insisting how the water and I were one. The same creature in different vessels. always leaking. always bleeding. I found his fixation on transubstantiating me into a liquid odd. I see now why he used to say that. How I wish to tell him that it was not Andromeda he had seen in my eyes. It was death. How my eyes, like skin, were always platinum, how necrosis clouded the gray. But again his allegory wasn't that far off from the truth.
Transcending the boundaries of the terrestrial civilization might require one to sacrifice a sliver of their mortality. How wanting to tear away the body you were born in requires you to die first. How the annihilation of mortality is where the extraterrestriality of humans begins.
What are gods but a mutation we could not achieve.
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I think about afterlife as much as I think about bathing. How our cognition desires to surpass the bounds of ephemerality, into a dimension where we perhaps do not don a corset of carcinogenic cells—organs that do not function, eyes that don't see beyond the visible.
In theory, they are pretty similar. bathing and metempsychosis. Both involve escaping the cage of your ribs and stepping into a world where flesh in its rawest, unaltered is sacred.
When the water snakes over my wrists, I think about all the girls who are probably bathing at the very moment. how we all are partaking in a communal purification—attempting to scrub this planet off us and become extraterrestrial. Sylphlike cobalt bodies, eyes almost diaphanous, lithe shining with an opalescent sheen, a skin that fits the wearer.
Aliens for us, in some forms, I believe are projection vessels. das unheimliche, an object uncanny. I think I know why we want to colonize someone that was never ours. I feel that maddening ache in me now, to dissociate, to eclipse my eugenic fate, to vanquish my natality and seep into a skin devoid of a heartbeat. of hunger. of lust. omniscient and luminous.
That night his kisses tasted not of love but deterritorialization. I could smell his desperation, when he licked the summer heat off my navel, to merge into me, to coalesce and become more than human. The desperation to dealienate from himself and become something evolution would never allow. He wanted to terraform me with his lips and I wanted to build civilizations over his ruins. Both of us wanted much more than what our corporeality could offer.
I have been obsessed with the idea of metempsychosis since I was twelve. The depersonalization theory says that those who feel cloistered by their anthropomorphic finitude tend to see afterlife as a medium of transcendence. a door to posthumanity. But what the theory does not postulate is the absence of touch. how it drives us mad. to the point of wanting to become non baryonic matter. Touch is what makes us human. makes us material. But how could we, being humans, not long for more?
I think back to that night in the pool often. when we bleached our alien skins white and flushed out the sheddings of our ecdysis. I obsessively carve the edges of that memory into my hippocampus.
I think of the midnight blue that framed him. Both of us haloed gods. phosphorescent in the moonlight. I think of his eyes. lost black planets, finding their way into the roche limits of mine. His touch casted hypnotic spells, some ancient magic. I think of him as the sky. infinite and anisotropic. studded with hydrogen galores alight. I think of his last words.
How even in death, I reminded him of life.
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Some papers I think you would like, if you enjoyed this article:
Eller, J. D. (2022). Space Colonization and Exonationalism: On the Future of Humanity and Anthropology. Humans, 2(3), 148-160. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030010
Döbler, N. A., El Amri, Y., & Carbon, C.-C. (2023). Is there anybody out there? Can individual loneliness, need for closure, and religiosity predict the belief in extraterrestrial life and intelligence? Discover Psychology, 3, Article 21
