What I Know About Being Seen

I know about sticky heat that clings to your skin like honey and attracts more than bees. I know about damp grass and fertilizer and the whine of mosquitoes or gnats hovering just underneath the outer layers of sound: cricket chirp, lawn mower, walking stick tapping asphalt. And I know about hearing the whir of something dark and invisible, even below that insect hum, and wondering whose eyes are blinking just on the other side of the air, whose face threatening to show itself from behind screens or garage doors or chain link fence.

I know about being watched from every angle of summer: your 11-year old thighs spread out from shorts and stuck to the bicycle seat, kinks of dark hair begun to curl up around the edges of a bathing suit, shoulders caved in over invisible breasts, blue eye-shadow smudged futilely behind plastic frames and gums aching from the pull of sharp, new metal. I know the cringe and crawl in your gut from the squinty smirks of pot-smoking boys, the thumbprint of your grandmother’s hairdresser who squeezed hard and hissed, "thunder thighs," the bite of your younger sister whose tanned breasts leave you weeping with envy into your pillow. Worse, I know the shame of being watched when no one else is watching, of being caught unnoticed and undesired, invisible to those who would have ignored you, had they known you were there.

I know about the tug and pull to be seen and finally the letting go of all but your own breath, your own face in the mirror, and of course that watcher, that goon, that faceless crowd always there just behind it. Usually, you’re on stage, sometimes with script in hand, sometimes with a bottle of deodorant held to the mouth like a microphone. The scene or the song is always brutal, dishonest, like a clipping from a magazine, someone else’s torture, someone more dramatic and glamorous than you. "Save me," you plead to your nose, to your mouth, to your own eyes, and slowly, past years of periods and sunburns and bra sizes, you begin to fall in love.

I know about growing in love with the sounds of your own words, how they look put together, the texture of the sounds in your mouth. And I know the compulsive thrill of glancing in car windows to check out once more your own fabulous reflection. Better still, your reflection in the eyes of others. At a party perhaps. Or a karaoke bar. You need to see it—need to be told over and over that you are beautiful, desirable, intelligent, that you are different and more courageous than anyone else, told until you flee for home and collapse under the weight of your own image. And then I know about needing at least a few days in bed, naked, unwashed and bare-faced before you are desperate or horny enough get up and pull on the glamour again.

I know about pretending to the world that you’re untouchable, that you don’t need anyone, that you leave people; they don’t leave you. I know about sliding through fingers, touching just the tip of this or glint of that—then rushing home to the mail box or answering machine or email, desperate for the pull of another human being; eating in the dark; smoking on the back porch; imagining an audience even when you’re taking a shit and pretending that somehow your shit is so much more graceful than anyone else’s.

I know about hiding on the bathroom floor, playing solitaire with the water running, hoping no one will need to use the toilet soon. I know about lying beside your lover in bed on the second floor, so desperately alone in your own skin that you think any minute you’ll get up and climb out the bathroom window just to see if you can do it.

I know the imprisonment of skin. How it binds you to this world, yet hides from you the inner workings of your own body. And I know the tyranny of the body, always threatening to betray, to fail; always wanting more than you are willing to give it: air ... water ... movement ... light. The body, wanting and needing like the worst lover, yet bound to you until death do you part.

I know about parting the skin with a needle or a knife to know that you are more than water in the mouth, or words, and still needing, in that first moment of pain, to be catalogued, viewed, praised. For what is the point of doing anything at all if there is no one there to watch? What is the point of the words on this page without you, my beautiful second person voice, to catch my reflection and hurl it back, as I determine to write harder, uglier, more relentlessly against you?

ãElizabeth Terry
3/5/1998