On Becoming Halimede. (Part 1)
i heard once, that imitation is the highest form of flattery. but she is imitating nothing. instead, creating entirely new Woman: herself.
UNDERSTANDING HALIMEDE
Style is necessary, but preceded by substance. You are going to have to understand what she is before you can become the way she is, and to trace bilaterally between the present and the past. You will have to read every tweet ever twote. You will have to read Heaven Will Be Mine. The superficial is insufficient. Your reach is proportionate only to your depth.
You are a youngest-daughter and a younger sister, accustomed to dismissal and cosseting in equal measure. To be taken entirely seriously, at face value, has always been an impossibility. There is an older, smarter, and better version of you since the moment of your incipience. You do not live in her shadow as much as you are a thin-inked copy, ever-inferior by age and agency, ever-catching-up, never-catching-up. You are aware that you are easily rejected as an agent, for aesthetic and material reasons both, and aware equally that resenting it will get you nowhere. The easiest emotion of yours to trivialize has always been anger, as you are the apotheosis of the object-feminine. Your tears must be taken seriously, and your anger must always yield to tears, once it breaks on the rocks of frustration. You have known this since you knew anything. It is not your lot in life to impress on simple merit. The superior version of you, by the standards of those who matter, already exists. Her name is Triton.
What little belongs to you is of great importance, in part because of its scarcity. You were the organism that folded first in the evolutionary game of resource-partitioning, the minnow too weak to compete for the blade of the seaweed, fixated, instead, on the value of the holdfast, which is yours. Left behind, less desired by some - but as a mechanic of psychological survival, you will find its value. Your sister was the ribbon-winner in dressage before you had the coordination to ride at all, and you couldn’t both have the best possible trainer; there are only so many hours in the day to learn. So you loved the scraps life threw you. She wasn’t interested in voice lessons, so you took them and you learned to love them. She dropped gymnastics for fuller-contact Academy sports, and you grimly practiced your way to some level of competence in her hand-me-down uniform. You have always loved, fiercely and obsessively, the few things you are allowed to, that won’t instantly be repudiated by the higher love of a better woman. If you don’t have to force that love - sometimes you don’t - so much the better.
You admire, in a helpless but besotted sort of way, women who seem not to have to try so hard. The first might have been your sister, for her ease of saying ‘no’ to you. It might have been your aunt, for the fact that she was one of the few adults whose attention didn’t come suffused with condescension too diaphanous to abjure. There was a sense that you could impress her, just - weren’t, impressing her. And equally so, a cool-imperturbability to her demeanor, so far beyond you as to be measured in light years. A sense that you were not unique in not especially ‘moving’ her with anything but a stellar performance that you, and most people, were not yet giving. An implicit rejection, yes, but one you could overcome with effort, an approval that would feel fairly-earned, not piteous. It isn’t that you don’t enjoy pity. Well - it isn’t that you don’t appreciate it, since, as established, what little belongs to you is of great value to your sense of self. But the idea that a superior woman could eventually dispense approval that might feel better than cloying, pseudo-impressed indifference or aesthetic tolerance has always been a heady one. A motivating one.
This background makes you sympathetic to the downtrodden, to pain that can be clearly articulated, and to the contrasts between pain and the strength to persevere. You’ve never had a tolerance for injury, never had a parent tell a doctor, before an injection was given, “don’t worry, she takes it well”, because you don’t. So you admire that endurance first. The desire to possess it in another person is secondary. The draw to women who can clearly articulate their alienation, ambition, pathology - you don’t really know why that is. It might be pure revisionism on your part, an eschewal of something fundamental to yourself that grates at you. You’re a member of the winning team, after all, with a deep streak of fondness for the underdog that almost anyone with sense would call hypocritical, almost traitorous to what you are. It isn’t quite that you relate to her, though you wish you did. It’s that if she loves you, it means she forgives you. ‘She’ could be a lot of different people. There are a lot of women you haven’t quite wronged whose forgiveness you have mostly abandoned the prospect of earning. The only one you can clearly communicate to have wronged you takes on near-iconographic significance. You get to forgive her. You don’t usually get to do that, since hurting you is so easy, few care to try.
After all, you’re a lesbian who wasn’t supposed to be, clearly, because you have no natural talent at most of the things that make one of those a good one of the thing they are. Loving women - you’ve tried, for a very long time, to love a long list of women in many different ways. It doesn’t seem to work very well, or they would be more impressed with you by now. The only way you fit into the community you truly believe is present, in those rooms, the second you walk out of them, is as an object of humor, and the deliberate kind never works. (You used to read joke books, falling asleep at night, to practice.) But the kind of woman you admire only finds you funny when you seem not to mean it, in part because you’re certain she - every she, basically - recognizes you as a fundamentally different creature than her. It aches to be so inept at looking, behaving, integrating yourself into a role. You’re an actress, after all, but not a method one. Eventually they’re going to see you break character, and that was what always seemed to trouble your sister about you. “She’s copying me.” Well yes, you were. But the problem, underneath, was that you were doing it wrong. She wouldn’t have resented a good forgery. Almost no one does.
Straight women should be easier, but they aren’t. They’re as skittish with you as ducks gliding about a poorly-hewn decoy, which is maddening, because you look just like them, so what are you missing, anyway? No one has a good answer. You imagine that no one has a good answer. You don’t really have the means to ask, just to notice. Most of your commentary has always been internal, and your dialogues with yourself - well, those are excellent. You were fantastic on the Academy debate team, when you helped the girl who represented you for Lincoln-Douglas test her cases, since you can ruminate on a thought indefinitely, picking every kind of hole in it with the indefatigability of running water. But you didn’t compete there, got nervous when challenged, didn’t really trust yourself not to cry. You were a national champion in Original Oratory, though, for your piece, tongue-in-cheek, in trial-law defense of the apocalypse. For ten minutes a round, you gave the same speech, with the same intentionally-unintentional laughs and choreographed posture, and you won, over and over again. The other girls said ‘congratulations’. What belongs to you - ten minutes of getting it right, the same way, every single time - is worth more to you than anything. Enough of an ember of satisfaction to hold beneath your sternum, warming you, as you walked to the tournament luncheon to eat alone.
You admire, maybe, women who have already failed at whatever it is they’re supposed to be. You can’t seem to flunk out of what you are. Being a princess - that’s something you’re born into, something that can’t be excised even by really, truly screwing things up. No one expects anything much from you, is the other problem. You can be safely laughed off, the easiest way to produce laughter, period, one you’ve engineered into a sort of art - and with that, comes a bar too low to even trip over. And besides, you’re not incompetent. No one who tries as hard as you could be. What little belongs to you is of great importance, and you couldn’t abdicate any of your responsibilities on purpose, not even if you tried. There would be something so freeing about having nothing. About being able to survive with nothing. About the self-sufficiency of losing everything and creating yourself anew the next day, knowing it possible because you’ve done it before. In that, and many respects, she has something you can never have. Not just the sex organs, either.
Even in your most serious and soul-searching writings, you can feel your own unseriousness oozing off the page. It doesn’t make you sick. You’ve spent most of your life building up a tolerance for iocane powder, by which you mean the little song and dance you do that makes you as close to ‘safe’ and ‘liked’ as you can manage, in smoke-shrouded rooms populated by sharp-eyed older butches, surrounded by other girls in uniform who glance away when you pass, thinking you not necessarily above, but different than them. If you embrace a certain degree of self-deprecating differentness and refuse to blink or flinch away from it, that’s another for the list of things that are yours. A cadence near-impossible to replicate, and just as difficult to criticize. Criticism would destroy you, just a little, if you believed it. She calls you spoiled, so you have to make that preemptively untrue. You have to prove them wrong before someone tears the veil aside and has the opportunity to be right.
You love that she isn’t trying to understand you. You love that she is content to let you beat yourself bloody against the ribcage that protects her heart, that she finds some satisfaction, sometimes, in the fact that you keep trying. You love that she somewhat buys it, your little act, and also that there are parts she doesn’t. You love that she is a puzzle that resists your efforts to solve it, because that makes the process last longer, and you’ve always enjoyed the mechanics of hard work more than the result. You know the result won’t feel as good as you imagine. So you revel in imagining, and she evades your efforts with real skill, which means it never entirely reaches climax. You love that she is a different thing than you are. You love to discover ways you might be the same. You love the sense, like a tremor, passing through you when a woman more powerful than you are nonetheless needs your help, needs you, making her almost, for a second, yours. You love the idea that you could save her. You love the impossibility of earning her love. You love that she could never, for a second, pretend to care about you in a way she doesn’t mean. You love that you can trust that she doesn’t, yet, love you back. You love that, with her, the chase will never end.
Everyone else, in a sense, has disappointed you. Proven hollow, scratched deep enough. Even yourself. Especially yourself. But if you can’t quite reach her, you’ll never confirm, and never have to confront, the thing you’re afraid of: that she is human too.
What little belongs to you is of great importance, mostly because of its scarcity. Loving her the way you do is yours.