https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNc7JqOy3FR/?igsh=MWR6d2JzN2xyMTdkaw==

illusion zine format?

Maybe better to alternate. make this more creative. less like an essay.

minotaur's perspective. your story. minotaur story. your story.

Stop trying to convince people. Just tell a story. Express the hurt.

A wall. A wall. A wall. An opening.
A wall. A wall. A wall. An opening.
A wall. A wall. An opening. A wall.
A wall. A wall. A wall. A wall. A room.

No one's eyes come accustomed to darkness
like this. My first impulse is to run, headlong,
to find an end to the the void my eyes made
of the world around me.

My horns embedding themselves in stone.

Panic makes way to hopelessness.
Hopelessness is another word for acceptance.

In the absence of light
all I can do is feel, and feel, and feel.

A wall. A wall. A wall. An opening.
A wall. An opening. A wall. A wall.
A wall. A wall.
A wall. A wall. A room.
A wall. Two holes in the stone.
A circle. An orbit. A practice.
Small slivers of light.

2021

I try to keep track of my symptoms, but it makes the anxiety worse. The anxiety being worse makes the symptoms worse. I try to keep only a peripheral eye on them. Maybe they will go away.

I am young. I am healthy. I am vaccinated. The blood tests are normal. I'll be okay.

Eventually, I learn to see in the dark.
The people who stumble around here
wonder at the walls whose anatomy
I have mapped with my endless feeling.

Everyone longs for the light at first.
The loss of what was, their lives
on the surface. They miss all the people
who could kill them with their love.

2024

I look at my friends mouths when they speak and imagine a hallway of other mouths, doorways of lips and teeth opening and closing with words and breath. If you look into one mouth, there is another hallway of mouths, just as vast and unending, undulating with hundreds of thousands of breaths colliding.

My living room no longer feels like it's filled with three people, but hundreds, thousands.

The only mouth I can control is my own. It holds in its tight-lipped grasp the question Is anywhere safe? The words echo along my insides, the labyrinth of my lungs and all the breaths I've taken into my own, the memory of air. Air, and all it carries with it.

I wasn't born like this.

The experience of being and bearing
the punishment for another's carelessness
is enough to make anyone monstrous.

I am a product of hubris.
I am a product of a man
who believed he deserved
everything he wanted.

If I follow the path of memory through my lungs, what might I find?

A bass line. Wildfire smoke. Her breath into my mouth on that day in

Despite my mother's best efforts
I knew my father's shame
from the way he would not
look me in the eye.

I remember the first day
I really saw myself,
sitting at the edge of
a palace fountain.

The buds of my horns.
My elongated snout.
The dark brown that
filled my eyes, lid to lid.
Those animal eyes.

May 2023

Everyone is vaccinated, and everyone is dancing.

I no longer wear a mask. I pencil in my moustache and circle my eyes in black. Emboldened by testosterone, longing to live my Hot Topic teen boyhood adolescence that I missed.

We call each other faggots and thrash beneath flashing lights to queer people singing queer music, breathing queer air.

We fear angry men with guns, but we do not fear each other.

The scars have made my skin
not unlike gnarled wood.

Still, I venture out into the streets
in the early dawn hours, while many still sleep.
I run my hands over the brightly colored columns,
admire the frescoes and the birds that gather
to peck at whatever bits of food they can find.

If they see you, they will kill you
my mother's words ring through my ears
whenever I duck behind a column to avoid
any early morning passers by.

I know they might kill me, and still
a part of me wants to be seen.
A part of me wants someone, anyone
to just look at me.

December 2023

I don't remember being sick at all, but I know there were two November weeks of my bedroom ceiling blinked away into memory. I've been sick five times this year, as opposed to my usual once-a-year cold. This time it's different. The COVID test comes back positive. This virus I've tried my hardest not to think about.

A month has passed. When I stay still, the world spins. When I move, my limbs fill with lead.

Will it be this way forever?

The chest pain that's been there since December 2020 intensifies. I try not to look at it directly.

Cardiophobia. Fear of my own heart.

I become preoccupied with the mouths of others. Wet spittle. Sometimes I can see it, sometimes I can't. Either way, I know it's there.

What's in it? What's in your mouth?

No one gets to see my mouth anymore. It is mine. It, and this new body, spinning in on itself endlessly.

I'm okay. Just spiraling a little.

There is a room at the center of all this
and it is my own. It is the one space
that has only one entrance and one exit.

It is the one place no one
can sneak up on me
and it is the one place
I can't escape.

Occasionally, people wander by.
I tell them the paths I've taken
so they might stumble less
but I have no path to an exit
to share with them.

I am not alone in this labyrinth,
yet I am still lonely
when I hear the town,
their music spilling in
from above.

I try going to concerts masked, but I can't keep from cross referencing the number of people in the room to current waste water statistics.

1 in 35 people currently contagious...150 people in the room...the rate of air flow filling our shared pocket of space.

I was never one for math.

I try to tell the world around me. That it can happen to anyone. That the last thing they want is for it to happen to them.

No one wants to look at me.

They avert their eyes. I wonder if it's because I'm queer, or the mask, or both.

My mother would later find me,
a chipped piece of limestone in hand
gashes around the line where
the fur of the bull meets hairless flesh.

I was so sure there would be
a normal human boy beneath.

Like a sculpture found in a block of marble,
perhaps I could be beautiful:

A prince the townspeople could admire.
A son my father could love.

The considerations of going to an event

• Is it indoors or outdoors?
• Is it masked?
• How many people will be there?
• Am I getting paid to be there?
• What are the current wastewater levels looking like?
• If I get COVID from this, will it feel like it was worth it?
• If the long COVID gets worse from this, will it feel like it was worth it?
• If I get sick and pass it on to a friend and they get long COVID, will it feel like it was worth it?

It seldom is. It seldom is. It seldom is.

I long for simpler times. Longing means little in a pandemic.

Something is in here
that wants to kill me.

I trace the red thread
along the halls - a flash of fire
in the dark.

I know that if I follow
the path of another life's line
to its source, I will do nothing
but accelerate my end.

Where I see the thread,
I take another path.

It is getting harder
to find a single wall
untouched by the hero
of this story.

Hero. Noun. The one who lives to tell the tale.

December 2020.

Her flight has just landed, and I've just picked her up from the airport. She gets in the passenger seat, removes her mask, and kisses me.

Earlier that day, I texted to ask if she'd be okay with masking for a few days after she gets home, just a few days of quarantine to make sure she didn't catch anything. She tells me that she won't mask in her own home. That's the place I should be able to feel safe, she tells me.

A couple days later, we're sitting in the basement together. I've just hit the bong and passed it back to her when she says You know what's weird? I haven't been able to taste anything recently.

If I followed the red thread
that's draped across
my world toward
its origin
I'd find my sister.

Betrayal never comes
from an enemy.

Maybe she thought this
was the only way to love
the monstrous.

Maybe she just tries her best
not to think about it at all.