now you see me...

I practiced invisibility for many years. When you say that no one should go out expecting to be invisible, know that as I left my child's body I tried to keep whatever quiet and nondescript silvery film covered me. I tried to keep still as a mouse, still as the books I read. I stayed passed over, or imagined myself passed over. I became an eddy in the flow of humanity. The first time I came into an understanding that I was not invisible for all practical purposes, I was twenty and in a foreign country. A country, moreover, where dark-skinned (mostly smiling) faces insisted on meeting my eye. Here I could not escape by being in my own head. I was loudly, publicly white, very much an object of curiosity and conjecture. And there I realized I had never been invisible. I had never come to terms with the striking truth of my own identity. The closest I had ever come to wearing my own skin was when I mingled with performers, bravados, young lions boastfully holding a posture, their swagger all tail and flowing hair. Among people to whom a mask was so essential, people who maintain a separate stage identity beyond all proportion to a normal human ego, and who may not mingle easily with the common fold, among such people I found a strange kind of freedom from my self-imposed exile by invisibility. Their masks oddly freed me from my own. I could slip out of my dull cloak and stand, feeling myself no longer all elbows and knees and knobby shoulders. I felt that what I had become was not so foreign after all in their company, where it could be taken for another mask, and where those with true seeing would not mind. Knowing that my full realized existence would challenge social conventions, I kept my moments of lucid embodiment to the practice of performing, a new skill I exercised as I once had invisibility. The three months I spent under tropical suns were three months of constant performance, constant embodiment of an identity, when I knew that I exist without borders when no one is looking. (I am like the cat, everything, nothing. Examine me Schrodinger, and I am fixed, a contrary to your constant.) The exhaustion of stares, blazing stronger than the sun, weighed on me. That battle constantly waged within my face. Knowing that I will fight to be seen, to express myself, knowing that an aggressive assertion is linked to some presentation of selfhood, I yet linger in the penumbra, whispering what I would shout. Awaiting some cue to step from backstage and to take my place in the spotlight.