Exposed: Sunflowers and Wings

Art: Unknown 

The ceramic blossom twinkled in the shop window next to a poster reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In the picture the flowers strained, menacing and desperate, against the confines of the space. The little sunflower beside seemed to us liberated, its yellow petals at rest in the illuminated display. Kristina said that it felt like a sign. Her voice always surprises me. It is hushed, yet stronger than her frail body suggests; her Russian accent is dark and robust. “I am surrounded by death,” she continued, “but this to me is life-affirming.” At a café she considered purchasing the flower pin. I placed a series of pills in her mouth, which she washed down with her hot chocolate through a straw. Pain, anxiety, inflammation, infection, more pain. I could see her crunching the numbers in her head. There was hardly any money; I knew that. I wiped her lips and she smiled, “Fuck it.” Her wheelchair whirred as we retraced our steps and made the purchase.

Life and death collided within the shimmering sunflower I now wear around my neck. The light and the dark, the warrior and the beggar queen, all animating the pendant that rarely goes unnoticed with its petals of matte yet oily yellow.

 
In Tobin Siebers’s words, the lone girl in a wheelchair fails to part the sea of human beings in a crowded hallway. She comes to a halt, showing infinite patience with the people around her, yet she has little chance of being seen and addressed as a human being.


When my husband and I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, an elderly couple casually asked him, “How old is she?” to his dismay. “Did they think you were an object?” he asked me later. In so many words, yes, I am an object that needs to be transferred from the wheelchair to the car, from the sofa to the toilet seat. In the eyes of others, I am the echo of a human being frozen into inanimate matter.


People see someone quiet and humble, grateful for any crumb of attention. I am either chaste or asexual. I am infinitely patient. I know my place. I am the object and the abject.


My wedding day was a few months ago. In my vows, I said that when I imagined love before I met my fiancé, I thought that if I even ever get a chance to love and to be loved, it would be thanks to the feat of looking past my illness, possibly because I have a gentle heart. But I do not have a gentle heart and my husband doesn’t love me despite the appearance of my body. He loves all of me.


As people get closer to me, the optics change. Not a lot of them choose to. A lot of them get only as close as to get trapped in the space between knowing me and imagining that they do. But some do risk proximity.


The crucial dissonance between what people expect to see and what they actually see comes primarily from the fact of my strength, my fierceness, my unapologetic pride. I’ve survived a lot of what was barely possible and some of what wasn’t.


My body is small and broken, but the grain within me is almost non-human at this point. The price I’ve paid for it is the price no one should ever pay. It’s like the universe chuckled and said to me, “You wanna be a hero? A warrior? Sure. Let me first put your mother in the hospital with skull fractures, let me kill your first love and husband-to-be, let me take away your mind, and let me murder you.” My mom was in a car accident, the man I was engaged to passed away due to late-stage cancer, I was later hospitalized when I disappeared into an inexplicable delirium, unable to recognize my own family, and, as I was promised, one night I was found unresponsive due to an accidental overdose.


The same winter I bought the sunflower pin, a friend took a picture of me. I was in my sturdy, black power wheelchair, with heavy leather wings, dark and geometric, shooting upward from my body/wheelchair. The wings were just part of the interior design inside a shopping mall. Once I stood beside them, the optical illusion of a delicate figure, etched feminine and true, rising proud and strong with her silver-studded leather wings, was complete. Inscrutable were my eyes and merciless were my wings. The inside and the outside finally came together.

 
My wedding cake was obsidian black, with a golden dragon coiling around it. “A dragon is not a slave.” It doesn’t matter how much the world tries to mutilate my mind and my body, I explained to our guests. I will never be a slave to my circumstances. It means that some will repeatedly demonize me, yoking together the deformed and the sinister, to expel me from the comfort of normalcy, the normalcy without heroes and without villains, the normalcy where you cannot lose your honor because you never had it to begin with.


This is the price I am willing to pay for standing up for myself, for turning my mind into the sword, for protecting my loved ones, dark-gazed and barbaric.
 

Do you hear the beating of the heavy wings in the air?


So I want you to look at me.
 

Really look at me.
 

Remember my eyes.


For I am the wound.

 

I am the salt.


I am the object to shatter all objects.