Invisible Monsters

"Do the things that scare you the most."

"Make me into anything, but just love me."

"What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want."

"When I met you, I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be."

"Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera."

"Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock is ticking."

"Sorry, mom. Sorry, God."

"Now," those Plumbago lips say, "You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night." That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. "When you understand," Brandy says, "that what your telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want to whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates."

"You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage."

"I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after."

"This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only became fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it."

"Him yelling, Give me lust, baby."

"Haute couture and getting hauter."

"It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power."

"Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here's a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd better have some good head and shoulder shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down the competition."

"Give me empathy."

"Give me attention."

"Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then."

"Just remember, the same spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close"

"The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:"

"Vogue on location."

"Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It's going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven't played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French's Mustard, Rice A Ronni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention."

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Give me tolerance."

"And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up."

"Birds ate my face."

"Jump to the week after Manus's last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ."

"Save the world with some advice from the future."

"I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."

"The nun's arrived with the man ad his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who'd be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life."

"She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around of the base of a penis."

"Don't you think that somehow television makes us God?"

"Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past"

"All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing."

"The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush are just the genitals of a different life form."

"The future is just wasted on some people."

"Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another."

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."

"How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?"

"It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under your bed."

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

"You're safe because you're trapped inside your culture."

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."

"It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love."

"A Million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me."

"What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself."

"People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."

"The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey."

"I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone."