Alright, I’m sharing another piece from the draft of my novel Virtual Mercury. The reaction to the last piece I posted was kind of nuclear, in both good and very bad ways, so I have no choice but to continue.
I’m still deeply in the process of writing, but I really like sharing during this process. How you react to the work helps me shape the story. Not in that I’m trying to please you, but how you react helps me find what’s true.
A spinning crystal ball centers the room, splashing my face with light and color. I raise my hands, moving with the slowness of a camera panning up and down my body. My eyes closed. My clothes, warm with sweat. Face, humid. Lights glaring giving the appearance that my whole body is blushing.
I feel the graze of someone on my shoulder. I slink open my eyes. A train of three shirtless men cut through the crowd. I return my eyes to their trance-like slumber.
I could enter the inside of a song. It helped if the song was loud and in a large room. Then there would be more entrances. My cells reformat to their truest being.
Every pop star needs an altar ego. A heightened state of self to enter upon performing. A new self, one that does things the other doesn’t. This practice creates a barrier. Not in a constricting way, but as a delineation of self. Whereas “my self”, in my daily life, would not embody the behavior of my altar ego. The “self” under these new circumstances would. It would permit a certain kind of freedom. A separate code of conduct. Alternate instructions for living.
There was such a thing as too much freedom. Freedom needs a role. It needs to be juxtaposed for it to breathe. By creating a persona to step into alignment was more feasible. It was easier to tell what “this self” and “that self” would and would not do.
A hand reaches for my palm and hoists me up onto a platform. My body raises, I blink open my eyes, and see waves of people. A beautiful petite man with dark, curly hair akin to Jesus, flashes me a cunty smile nearly naked in his bejeweled chrome cowboy outfit. He’s one of the DJ’s go-go dancers and would periodically fish people out of the crowd to join him on his beacon.
Tonight he chose me.
You would think being an actress I was brave, and yes, I will say I have become a lot braver than I have been before. Less shy. Less in fear of my own emotions. But I’m still not so brave. There are a lot of girls braver. And they beat me with their bravery. Their unrivaled experience of living. Their pure access to their own body. So, dancing on a platform in a room of people is frightening to me.
But, if I close my eyes quickly to jump-start my altar ego, it’s like I’m in a music video. I lift up my hands, swirl my pelvis, and drop my arms down to trickle my fingers back up across my curves. I pretend like I’m not being watched.
I have no relationship to god, outside of a keen feeling that I am being watched. At times I feel frozen, my muscles useless, inside brimming, begging, panting, hot. I feel frozen just from others perceiving me. I watch myself from their position. I gouge out my eyes and place them inside of their sockets. I surveil myself. I do god’s work.
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