She sat thinking where will I put on my white dress?
She walks to a window looking out on tall mountains. They are impossible to see through the thick fog of snow descending from the skies. Everything is the depressing color of whiteness. She thinks, even these white walls are oppressive as she gazes out hoping to see something more beautiful, more colorful, more full of life. Although this is supposed to be the happiest day of her life, she cannot help but think that a part of her is also dying.
She stares intently at her hands, the burning flesh under her engagement ring, stands out to her. She turns it around on her finger, rubs it up and down. She rubs the diamond into the fleshy base of her finger, imagining a time when she was happier, clearer headed. The times of riding in the car with Diane, parking on the road by the reservoir, and shot-gunning weed, from mouth to mouth finishing each breath with the lightest pressing suction of a kiss. Riding in cars with girls—or one girl specifically, she thinks. She is caught on the image of Diane’s teeth and their crooked, darkened imperfection that she found so devastatingly sexy. She remembers the feeling of those teeth on her body, sliding from her neck to her stomach, and finally to the place her fiancée tells her is sickening to look at. Her own deformity a perfect match for Diane’s teeth, the flesh gliding into her mouth between the incisors to a place of utter perfection.
She continues to push the diamond into her hand, thinking maybe eventually it will push through the skin and that maybe she will feel the terrible pain that resides in her heart. Then she laughs a little to herself about the platitudinous nature such a statement invokes. As she looks down at her hand she realizes there is not the slightest hint of a cut. Her hand lifted with two fingers curled into the palm and two pointing towards the newly flashing sun. Her diamond, like a prism, shines rainbows around the room. She observes that the snow has stopped. There is not the slightest hint of a storm.
--
Her mother busted through the door demanding to know what happened to the georgette dress bathed in gasoline? Again she is at the window looking wistfully at the black mountains whose ravines were runneled with streaks of white snow. She thinks to herself, there is no way they could have found Dane’s torched body deep in the woods, the fragments of her designer silk dress wrapped around his body.
Diane had changed since the early days, of hitchhiking from small mountain town to mountain town. She was no longer carefree, gently strumming cords of guitar in the hopeless plight of making music. Diane had physically altered his body to become Dane and with that everything had changed. The Testosterone made him a completely different person, taking away the sweet light in Diane’s eyes. Now he was all blue pinstripe power suits, and facial hair. She had always been supportive, even as Diane decided to transition into a Dane. Although she considered herself to be a lesbian, Diane, now Dane was worth changing her identity for. She wished that maybe she would not have been so willing to give herself up. Since their marriage Dane had become violent and obsessed with making sure she knew he was a man. That he was THE man in this relationship. Something they had never been concerned with before.
He had all of his teeth replaced with implants, and oral the admiration of her had ceased. “Disgusting,” he would chide her. And he never bit anymore—would no longer show her that simple but powerful sense of desire. The incessant pleasure she received from the sort of pain that only comes when flesh gets stuck someplace it shouldn’t. She had only wanted Diane to come back, to end the suffering of her longing of spirit. She looks towards the streams hoping that a stone will gleam and redirect her attention away from this. She feels sutured at her center—the thick stitches stretching to contain the entrails waiting to explode from the casing of her body.
--
“How are you?”
She stares into the abyss that is this white room—a new white room that has no sympathy for her. She ignores the question she has been asked. “How am I,” she thinks? She has no use for a question like this. She isn’t crazy, she isn’t like Agnes down the hall that believes there are alligators and doves nestled in the thick egg noodles they are having for dinner this evening. She doesn’t see or hear inexplicable things—rarely feels anything anymore. Her only crime is being passionate beyond repair. She had dreamed that through the flames, Dane would be re-born Diane again. The dream had been so visceral that she had lost herself in liminality, not asleep, not awake, and not even dreaming. She still feels stuck there.
Yet this doctor continues to ask her these impractical questions.
“What are you doing?”
She glares at the doctor. What is she doing about what? About being locked up in here? She thinks about last night when she tried to bite herself hard enough to see if she can feel again. Digging her teeth into the flesh of her arm she sometimes breaks the skin but more often she gets frustrated that she cannot make the blood appear. She stares at so sweet a throat as the doctor’s. The doctor’s neck elongated by the turtleneck she is wearing, she wonders if the doc ever hurts? If the doc ever desires to feel pushed and pulled in the way she does—stretching her flesh to its limits. She has never wanted to inflict pain before, always preferring her own body to be the receptacle of waste.
She thinks about some places where swords hang from the walls, like the words she longs to say but cannot. She stares at the doctor’s teeth, they are pearly, shiny, and white. She is disgusted by their perfection. They stand at attention like a little white army, waiting to ask questions that deserve to be answered. She does not answer but instead rubs the line of plaque between her blackened gums of what is left of her now-rotting teeth.
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