The Caged and The Hollowed

A Blind and Deaf World

  I loved the cello, its beauteous curves of fine-grained wood gracefully accentuated by a confident stature as it carried itself with the mien of lord and lady.  Its chiseled scroll trailed by a swanlike neck, tight cords pulled taught across a smooth belly from head to tail in a binding corset. Though it most enamoring feature is the mesmerizing voice released from its depth. A sensual serenade of vibrations, casting a spell of excitement and tranquility upon its prey as it echoes inside your bosom.  It was everything I wanted to be and not to be, but yet I did.

  We were unfortunate souls both trapped at birth, one a beautiful but empty shell created as an instrument and passed around as the world aged, unable to live without a partner. The other a parallel opposite, a youthful soul assigned the wrong body and unable to break free alone. We were one and the same joined together by need and want. Our affinity caused me to be hailed as a prodigy yet they praised not me but the person I was born as. The pain of being invisible and overshadowed by one’s own self was only nulled by becoming one with the very thing that amplified this suffering. I never resented the cello for it provided me an escape spiritually and physically. It was a front and container for another life, an instrument that lead to my rebirth and my death.

   It started as an itch, then a stinging, that evolved into a burning. When I was 14, puberty started and my world changed, I was becoming something I was not…a man. It was also around then when I started to hate mirrors, the reflections mocking me showing what everyone else saw but not what I truly was. One day the burning sensation crawling on my skin and my reflection taunting had boiled up a festering rage inside my chest causing my fist to clench, the need to change growing and the world refusing to budge. The mirror had shattered along with the massive wall of expectations of a cruel world that demanded I withhold my emotions. My blooded hand burned, stung and itched with a new feeling one of euphoria, like I was being set free from all my ties to this body pushed on to me at birth. My mother had come running in, with all her wailing glory, crying about her hurt baby boy as she took in my injured appendage and then my face but never my eyes. If she did like my father, with his own pair of sad eyes, had she would have seen I was in a trance in which I was everything I thought my self to truly be.  A kindred soul manifested into her actual form one chosen by her and not the world.

  That incident caused my parents to give me a wide berth of space, letting me live in my own solitude with occasional visits to different therapists all as two-faced as the last in hope that such an event would never come to terms again. It gave me a chance to be able to move about freely unjudged and unmolested. I had finally been able to use the beautiful cotton dress my grandmother had given to me for 10th birthday, that my mother had stashed away mumbling about her mother in law going senile forgetting her own grandson’s gender, it was quite strange perhaps the old woman in all her wise years was able to see past that body of mine and celebrate the true me. My beloved cello once again came to play, acting as my fairy godmother transforming me into the beautiful Cinderella, as it stowed away the magic from judgmental eyes till I was able to enter my reality. I would wonder around in the night mingling with the crowd and sometimes play as a musician at venues in the downtown area far from those of the fake life I was born into. As I reveled in this temporary freedom a chance came up to irresistible to let go, a permanent fix to a mistake made at birth.

  I had made many acquaintances and friends during my brief time truly living, some beautifully clueless or indifferent to my case of misplaced gender others fully aware  as they too went through such a cruel process of finding one’s self in a world full of stereotypes and preordained rolls. It was through one of these people that I heard of a man that could help me change, make my reality real to others. The address given had directed me to a shady building one that I had to steal my heart to approach and then knock upon its heavy metal doors. A moment of silence had ensued then the door released a loud squeak  a singleeye assessed me from the small crack between the door and its frame before it swung on its hinges allowing me entrance.

  The inside had been just as bad as the outside but with a look of cleanliness to it and the middle age man inside looked the same with a well-practiced “friendly” smile on his face. He had introduced himself as Dr.Alcorn and started spewing about how he had heard of me and would love to help free of charge. I remember nodding dumbly as he explained about the procedure he could do to change my body’s gender, blinded and deafened by the burning euphoria brought on by the thought of permanent freedom.  Lead into a brightly light and sterile room I was told to change into a gown, leaving my dress beside my cello case. Staring at the white windowless walls lost once again in a trance of what was soon to be, as the oxygen mask slowly put me under anesthesia is my last living memory.

I had awoken to the sound of a string snapping a sound I knew well from countless hours of practice. I looked, not with my eyes that remained shut behind pallid lids, across the room to the source of the sound to see my beloved cello’s back carefully cut out by a stranger of a man. Finding the action somewhat distressing I fervently looked around the room for some form of explanation only to see the “good” doctor packaging what looked to be organs in an ice cooler and then my body lying prone on the table.  In the steps of reaching my ideal reality I was ignoring the reality of this world just as it had done to mine.

  So in this world conditioned by ignorance my lifeless and dismembered body was crammed into the creaking husk of wood that was my cello. We were once again one both now equally hallow instruments played by society. We were buried together by strangers in a wooded area exceeding any vow of matrimony as we stayed as one even in death. Deep in the ground my body that once was my cage laid eternally dormant in its own cage of wood as I waited to be seen by a blind world. As days, hours, minutes and seconds passed the wailing cries of bloodhounds could suddenly be heard steadily approaching our burial site. Soon three officers, one holding the cotton dress, arrived in the woods grown upon the bodies of those that society silenced deaf to the cries of others. The canines in the lead pulling with their sensitive noses to the ground, howling in unison as they reached the patch of earth we lay quietly under. The men in uniform sent out our coordinates to backup that arrived swiftly with equipment to uncover the earth that incased our bizarre state of kinship. Once unearthed and uncased the cello that has served as my vessel was once again wrought open in a frenzied manner as axes shattered it to bits revealing my equally broken form.

  A funeral was held the next day, the people cried for the wrong person and the wrong reason all blind to the truth that was me. My mother was the most painful to see as she wailed upon my new coffin and others mourned with her for the loss of her dear son, a young cellist prodigy that would forever be remembered. The procession of pretenses concluded and my father dutifully followed my body to the crematorium alone.  I was never to be forgotten as in the last moments before my body was turned to the licking flames, his stoic face broke like the mirror tears falling as he placed my dress and my cello’s bow at my side the things that  served as my wings. With that last good bye to his baby girl, my body that was now genderless and hollow was sent into the fire. Now this body assigned to me at birth is burned to ash and I am free at last.