The Body Keeps the Lore
{pt.I} Tongue of the twin
I thought I would write essays. That would become my voice with which to sing awake the land. I thought I would marry my love of amateur, yet devoted research, and waxing poetic on the things that cause me to burn, whether in fury or in love, or more often, an alloy of both. But the burning leaves me in cinders.
I thought, if I could demonstrate some semblance of cleverness, if I could coat my tongue silver, then perhaps I could set others alight as well. Perhaps readers of my words would then step outside and find themselves blinking as though seeing anew, a world teeming with awe and animacy, a sensation which so frequently floods my own body. Perhaps the toroidal field of their heart would then horripilate at the sudden influx of life upon its opening. Though, if I am being honest, I had additional, self-centered motives. Motives beyond infecting others with a deep sense of belonging and therefore obligation within and towards the more-than-human. I wanted to prove myself convincing. I wanted to prove my thoughts and feelings valuable to others — to other humans. While desiring to give others the feeling of belonging within environments, I longed for belonging within sapiens society. What better way, I believed, to achieve this than to master the tool we have long used to distinguish our species as separate from others: written language. Look how well I can use this tool we have wielded so beautifully, so hideously, to bend thought and nature alike. Don’t you see? I am one of you! I am…human. Aren’t I?
 Am I?
My mother tongue was not English. My mother tongue was forked and tasting the air. It was a curled shepherd’s staff as I peeled my lips away from my canines in an unrestrained yawn. It was hiding coiled around the back of my skull, sticky and poised behind my chisel-mouth. My mother tongue formed a ladle as I lapped at snowmelt, crouched at dawn over a lake’s edge. It girded fine twigs, and with one graceful motion of my velvet lips, relieved them of their verdant sleeves.
My mother tongue was animal.
It was as though I was born with pathways in my brain that did not register human behavior as the source material when learning how to be in this world. I saw how my mother spoke to strangers making them into friends, I saw how my father’s words were spells invoking laughter which would magically bubble up from the mouths of others upon being spoken into the ether. I saw how my young peers would flock and move during the unstructured break time outside at school. They parted and reunited as if choreographed by a shared and invisible electromagnetic field like murmurations of starlings.
I watched — and none of it formed any meaning to me.Â
But, when I watched the rabbit in my mother’s garden, my nose twitched—too. The snakes taught me to read the news scrawled across the leaf litter, in the grass, and between the stones: here is where a towhee uncovered a fungus beetle, here is where a rabbit dug to cooler soil so she could escape the heat as she rested, and here is where a being who is no longer a caterpillar, not yet a butterfly, but a kind of rhopaloceran jelly is suspended between two lives, losing all form but holding all memory.Â
My voice preferred the reverberating electricity of a growl with its many interpretations and intonations over the blunt thud of ‘no’. Chairs and utensils at the dinner table were a betrayal of my body’s lust for the ground and the longing in my fingers to touch and tear and have the first taste of the food which would become a part of me. Learning how to properly bark and howl with the neighborhood dogs seemed oh so much more urgent to me than learning the tedious and cryptic sport of human conversation. My crippling shyness and fear of strangers helped me pass as polite and well-mannered and my secret could remain curtained behind the invisibility that is girlhood. But inside…inside I was seething. Inside I was all tooth and claw, hackles bristled and tail tucked, pacing my paws bloody. Pacing within the confines of my own body, the body I protested against all my life. I don’t remember much time spent with other children in my earliest years. What I do remember is my twin.
We were not identical, my twin and I, yet we were the same and I told my secret to no one but her, for it was her. Where I was smooth skinned, awkwardly balanced on two feet malformed at birth but later molded into a shape resembling those of a human’s, she was all hunter. We shared a body, a mantle I yielded to her as often as I could. My parents will don soft smiles of endearment when they recall the tales of raising a little beast child. How I pleaded to be fed from a bowl on the floor, how I would only answer to my twin’s name, how I spent hours walking on all fours, sniffing, stalking, investigating the taste of leaves and stones, and how this went on for two years. What their smiles will not, and cannot tell you, is that this was a time of not only play, but panic.
Is this really it? This is what I was born into and what I must go through life as? I felt an ineffable shock at being human, an unspeakable grief that I had been robbed of such a sensuous life. A nose that could gather up the history of the land and predict its future as a polar bear can detect presences weeks old and hours before they arrive. Ears that have mastered ornithomancy; ears that swivel and collect omens at dusk. Skin safely hidden below a forest of hair or feather, each one a receiver, extending the sense of touch beyond the body and shielding it from touch all the same.
But what was I to do with this nakedness? These extra, de-clawed digits?
There was an awareness, or rather, a prickling sensation that began around the age of six or seven. It rippled through me on days my twin accompanied me to school. We didn’t speak much in front of the other children, but when we did I sensed something I couldn’t name. A new presence would enter the room. It wasn’t hostility— that would come later—it was an implacable aura of discomfort that grew around others.
It was an aura that grew and grew so that it pressed me into the back corners of rooms, into the outer edges of groupings of bodies, into a more and more compact posture, and eventually it ballooned to a size that drove my twin as far from my skin’s inner walls as possible, to the innermost locus of my body where she has been lurking ever since.
Without my twin, a disquieting transformation began. A kind of lycanthropy in reverse. I forsook my forelimbs for gangly arms which hung uselessly at my sides. My perpetually bruised and scabbed knees turned pink and smooth once again. My nose, too lofty now to host the perfume of alchemizing decay occurring in the loam, became dulled as one loses a language the less it is spoken. I amputated my phantom tail, shaved the wolf from my flesh. I ceased my howling. I hid my teeth.
I bore my body like a muzzle.Â
A song for my twin: Wolf - First Aid Kit
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