Metamorphosis
This is a love story!
To wake up in the body of a human being with female genitalia, and in Tunisia; you need to be free of fucks to give.
Pardon my French.
First thing first, you traverse a sexually frustrating dream where all your traumas and complexes mix to form a Guernican tableau.
You open your eyes soacked with the sensation of the dead people from your life. A 40°C city morning is a good motive for you to shave at least your legs.
Big day ahead, and you are a “lady” who works for an international Brand at the Banlieue Nord and must respect the affinities of a dress code. It is not sweet to hurt the ceo’s feelings. You’ll educate people of expensive suits and generous pockets. Top bananas are generally sensitive, careful!
Now you cannot shave your legs.
Not because you are sleepy and physically drained. Rather because the bathtub is clogged and unclean; a morning surprise from your flatsharing bitches. Dova and Eb and Bah: The cows with whom you co-pay the electricty bill.
Now you might wonder, how come; 3 beautiful “ladies” with beautiful legs not cleaning their bath dirt afterhand?
Nonsensical to picture?
When you see one of them walking inter-cafés like a dandizette, with her fresh hair, looking down on everybody, it doesn’t cross your mind I bet: her leftovers of unhygienic disrespect.
It does not.
She looks good and all you do imagine is to fuck her straight in that ass. Does it count: the faecal matter she leaves behind for her roommates?
That ass.
This is how coastside “ladies” in Tunisia handle bathtubs and social manners in general.
(No offense for the coastside chicas. I only happen to be a narrator who is a bit into phenomenology, stating facts, and poems that capture the moment. )
So no razor work in this bath pond today.
You put on the ugly palazzo pants. And sandals to torture those infected blisters on your feet.
Heat up coffee water.
And since you’re in “the” mood this morning, you can manage to scramble an egg, add it to a slice of toast smeared with Harissa and cucumber, and take it with you as the day lunch.
Your co-workers would then give you the “Oh she has no ass already why she’s on a diet!” look — The day’s conversational appetizer to socialize with sugars; delicate, well-nourished, urban “ladies.”
Now the “poetic caesura” where you sip your coffee in the balcony all topless. Stare at perturbated pigeons here and there, and wonder What in the fucking world I do here!
It is supposed to look like an antique stand in a rural balcon where the mountains are visible and you erotically show that you’re winning.
But it’s Tunis goddamn it! The forever-schizophrenic-colony where enraged dogs are barking at 7 a.m, and all you see in your purview is a bloc of buildings where likely there’s some pervert zooming to film your tits.
Now you try to powder up the bags under your eyes in hope they look fainter, but they end up like metalized cracks on a newly painted wall. It’s fine, living things age in time. Sometimes it’s more visible than we hope.
You mitigate your face’s imperfections for the day ahead. Pity your own colors. Have a last look into the disappointing fridge. Snatch the garbage bag and slam the door as angry as possible in an attempt to bother the dormant cows inside.
You stand thereafter read the note hung on the broken elevator and sigh in French “IMPOSSIBLE!”
But it is possible! and it is happening! and you are walking down the stairs of nine floors!
And so what you do some morning exercice?
If you’re “still” in the mood, you’ll pass by Albaba and buy a slice of madleine (a tasteless sponge-textured thing) and since you are very like-yourself today, you’d keep it in your bag for the whole day because a strong “lady” doesn’t have the stomach for second-hand matters such as a snack. Or maybe not to feel the guilt of not having a snack in the bag already. Or of not having a cooked lunch. Or of not having the impression of being human being enough.
If you’re this kind of “lady,” you greet your neighbors. Wish them a good day.
Say good morning to your nextdoor neighbor holding his new plant and wait untill he tells you it’s a Morenga.
Say good morning to the store fella and ask about the Chinese kids PityFish and PityPity.
Say good morning to all those faces you suddenly know without really knowing.
After few street harassments, you succeed to stop a taxi, and you make sure it doesn’t exceed your budget.
(Depends on the driver )
If he is the good kind, he will shut up and not interrupt the Scorpions song on IFM.
If he is the scumbag kind, you’d slam the door as angry as possible after you get off before your destination, as in “You won’t get this extra dinar you hungry bastard!”
And so what you walk extra 10 mins on your feet?
Some extra exercice on the way to office.
Once you’re there, it hits you again that you don’t even have your own office desk like the others. That’s because you’re a flexible/fresh employee.
Can you settle yourself here-and-there for now?
Pas grave. Elle gère.
For a strong independant “lady” everything on hand is temporary: Your desk, your job, the city where you live, the money you make, the people you acquaint, the things you possess, the personalities you wear..
So you log into a crazy platform. Remove old notes and random payslips. Prepare new ones. Play Nouvelle Vague by Nouvelle Vague. Switch on lights and air conditioners. Water the frontdoor plant. More papers into the printer’s feeder. Toilet papers checked. Excel sheets ready. Google calendar synced.
You scan the “lady” from Descamps, the office accross the street. She looks like a coastside chica too.
The cleaning agent arrives, dragging her swollen feet. And starts rearranging the kitchenette and you wish you had enough money to cheer her up one morning with a good well gesture. A lunch dish, a doctor paid visit.. Things you should have provided for your own self, but you know — An independent “lady” is independent even from her own self. She’d rather care about somebody else’s parent. Somebody else’s story. A homeless immigrant. A delinquent teenager in the subway. A delivery man in the rain. A beaten dog by the sidewalk. And so.
Then, you struggle with the coffeemaker. But you’re too proud to ask for help. You google how the Italian thing works. So what you don’t understand shit?
You are not really eager to use it. You just hate how they monopolize it every morning for their Chinese whispers reunions. You go instead for a smoking pep-start in the couloir.
They give you the
“This small girl smokes? She’s very small for smoking!”
And listen, there is no pride in smoking. It devastates your lungs, nerves, teeth, skin.
And your vulva.
But you are irrelevant to the moment. You take everything as a compliment.
Then, a senior expert joins you in the couloir. The belle femme type. She’s impressed by your puff aura. Shows you her son’s pictures. Tells you about her ongoing divorce. Enlightens you a bit about work and insurance hacks. Suggests you go together to the SPA one day.
You know you won’t.
Then you catch up with the English gentleman at the photocopy. A conversation on Hardwick Hall and Mary Bateman takes place. He helps you with a list of ideas for your workshop afterhand, which none of your Tunisian colleagues would bother offering. You help him as well with direction notes on how to survive collective taxis in Tunisia.
(He as well, must’ve awaken in the body of an English male, in Tunisia.)
The day proceeds, and you lose more hair. More cells die. More stanzas in you die as slowly as that small egg luteally dies inside you.
More Zoom links. More people wasting their money only to hold you accountable afterwards. More people mistaking you for their little maid.
More nails polished and arms bronzed and legs neatly lasered. More of “I don’t know where to park my Range” or “I can’t miss my padel session” kind of problems.
A strong independant “lady” is cursed by the fact that she knows more than she bears. And foresees more than she wishes. And the more she dumbs herself, the harder the truth bounces back at her face.
Wreck.
No one would like you when you’re low. They’d rather not understand your lows, because it is tiring; the amount of compassion they’re supposed to express either by decency or by moral affection.
There’s fatigue in love somewhat.
But let’s skip to the good part where you efficiently master your sour coping that you beat down your own being. That’s what makes you loved. The entertaining clown that you are. The warmful witness within. And not the injuries you can’t help. No human in the world will ever truly excuse the things you can’t help. At best, they’ll romanticize it; not to get the silent version of you. The silence that mismatches their needs and expectations of you, and makes you a cynic “villain.”
You are too anehodonic for a villain.
A strong “lady” is so considerate that she simplifies her language and reduces her meanings into tasteless affirmations out of courtesy and down-to-earth commitment.
If you are this “lady,”
you will ban your inner syntax of things. Supress a stubborn death in the midst of daylight. Accept compliments of pity that your mind ridiculizes. Take the things as they are, and let too much life happen to you.
Only you “lady,” know what you know!
By the blackening window glass, the woman from Descamps gets to switch off her lights sooner than you will.
If you’re “still” in the mood, you’ll play some commercial tracks. Put a papier mouchoir on your feet blisters. Leave people’s names and stories into Excel columns, wish goodnight to the empty chairs, and take a French leave.
If you’re this kind of “lady,” it won’t urge you where to run to when it’s all but lampposts behind-and-ahead of you.
It won’t differ if it’s heat or rain.
Needless the hurry.
You woke up in this morphology, to this familiar day of this familiar life. And it looks like you know well this life, although it’s not yours!
It’s not you who is subduing all of this. And none of it is real to you.
What you are; is but a small ladybug, who happened to wake up in the body of a female human today morning.
In your rightful life, you were a ladybug.
And one day, you landed peacefully on the hand of the man you love most. And never has he known it was you.
He just praised you for “good fortune,” and did not kill you.
He only left you be, released you away.
But the moment he left you be, you were doomed straight to wake up in this body, to live this “lady’s life for her.
You were a ladybug, but now you’re only a “lady” ..
I’m sorry for the metamorphosis.
