They are the Mozart to my Salieri.
With dreams of being the wanted ideal I spent adolescence praying to gods of couture and when the blessed day of financial independence came, days were spent in attendance at the houses of worship on Oxford, Regent and Bond Streets. The blunt knowing that I was no Adonis had me desperate to become beautiful; the instruments of clothes were at my disposal.
I studied fashion literature with such veracity that the ensuing melody came in experimental forms, new genres, new beats, new orchestrations, but again, these left me out in the cold. So to the mind I went, from couture to literature.
Books had been ever a constant. A childhood was spent with words, suckled and weaned with newspapers, toddling with tales, scribbling at puzzles and babbling over dictionaries. Books had lined my walls and carpeted the floor where I trod and because of such, it had been taken with total ignorance as to their importance.
So when realising my strongest asset was the mind – for my aesthetic was failure – books in every form became what I idolised. Never forgetting my original devotion to gods of couture, I became polytheistic with my prayers. It was all desperation, to be sought after, to be found attractive. Rather than creating music I read it and wrote it and imagined it. Heard the strings, the brass, the percussion, knowing how to utilise them instead of the actual performing.
Little did I know that being a blue stocking was also to lead one on a path to deeper isolation. Seeing around me people partnering, falling and being hopelessly in love rendered me hopeless. I, the one with the closet of clothes and the library of books, a mind saturated with knowledge and information, was sitting alone amongst a throng of the unread and unknowing. So I plotted and schemed ways to show my hatred of them all. Perfecting the evil eye, summoning curses so they too would become as dreadfully alone as me.
My aesthetic orchestration was no longer seen, creating raised eyebrows and curled lips; it was simply overlooked by sexual beings. Here was my lacking, a serious lacking of person. I simply am not a sexualised being. Whatever sex I had experienced had been one of convenience, a convenience to the other person. When no one was around, then I could be seen.
No longer wanting to be seen by any kind, I hid away amongst the books and clothes. No more music was to be made – a life of silence and isolation was to be mine. With evil in my heart I ventured out to work and executed daily chores, trying desperately to ignore those around me sporting a loved one on their arm, hands holding another hand made my heart burn with vicious fire.
However, what the heart wants, the heart tries to attain. I could not maintain this anger; it was ruining the mind of wondrous knowledge I had gained. No more pleasure at the music I heard, only the war drums of loathing. And I wanted to hear the concertos, the operas and minuets so beautiful in sound and aesthetic.
I try now to be content with my solitary existence, praising those who find love, living my own love through theirs. The pain it creates is brutal and scarring; it jars the mind upon every occurrence but I bear it with the greatest equanimity one can muster and dab the iodine over the lacerations, repeating the arias in my head to soothe the ache being felt as I see lips meet and hands grasp each other.
To return home to the books and the clothes, my unsexual body is swathed in cottons, cashmeres and silks, no longer having to see its deformity. Building the mind with new information, theories, settings and vocabulary, I find love using the instruments only known and ever trusted.
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