Reality is a bad, queer bitch. She slams right into you and not only doesn’t excuse herself but acts like it was your fault. “Look where the fuck you’re going,” she says.
She rolls her eyes and flips her hair before turning her back, walking away, disappearing behind you. And when you turn back to get one more good look at her, she’s gone, leaving you wondering, was she ever even there?
To complicate things, she is a shapeshifter.
She shows up as a German woman with tattoos and piercings and a big laugh who wants to dance with me. I’m excited but also shy.
Next she’s a devotee, small in stature, dressed in robes with a shaved head and she’s giving me a profound lesson in a riddle of circular language I can’t quite puzzle out.
Then she’s a morning dove, waking me, reminding me of the best moments of my childhood, the quiet moments feeling cozy in a room with my siblings, safe and tucked in, waking to another bright day when this human condition felt new and wrapped in a bow, filled with promise.
Now she’s a fierce lion baring teeth. She wants to bite my head off. Or she’s death, here to take me by the hands and walk me through the veil.
But wait, no. Now she’s a middle-aged white man saying he’s a doctor and saving my life. Right here at the cliff’s edge between life and death, she’s pulling me back and turning formless. A force, a phenomenon we have no word for but one that comes close is miracle.
She is the blood of deeply generous strangers fed into my veins in the ambulance. She is the skilled hands of surgeons restoring the integrity of my broken body. She is the pain and the reward, both.
I spent so much time, money, energy, and life force in service to escaping Reality. Brief trips away were all I sometimes managed, and other times, expecting to get that slight reprieve, I got pressed right up against her naked in a dark room where I could feel her heart beating in time with mine, smell her breath in my face.
This bad bitch, this queer phenomenon Reality is a superhero villain hero. oesn’t it make you feel almost offended then when entertainment producers pair the words reality and television?
Reality television is about as far from reality as pain is from pleasure. And of course, the paradox is, these are one, and reality television is also Reality. My use of it as an anesthetizer is Reality. My practice of projecting my judgements, hopes, fears onto the characters while knowing that how they’re being portrayed is a fiction is Reality.
Before I tell you about how I met my favorite reality television characters in real life, I have to tell you about the time I met some dolphins.
I was in Hawaii snorkeling off a boat in the deep ocean. The water became a cool blanket over my back, tucking me into the vastness below. In that touchpoint between two boundless spaces — the sky over and the sea under — I, too, felt unbounded. I suddenly realized, the world is so much bigger than what I’d ever perceived. And with this realization, this humbling experience, I expanded — it was as though my very body spread into mutinous molecules less moored, uncontained — a cloud in the shape of me, floating in the water. I believe it was that energetic shift that attracted the magical creatures I next encountered.
Suddenly there, out in front of me, a pod of seven very large dolphins approached. I glided toward them, and they paused, looking at me. I continued toward them, arms outstretched before me, full-face snorkel mask, flippered feet, almost to where I was about to touch one of them, and I stopped. They weren’t moving away and they didn’t seem afraid, only curious, but I was afraid that they would mistake my reverence for an attack and fight back, so I kept a respectful but small distance. Seeming to lose interest in me then, they gathered in a circle facing one another, as though conferencing. Two of them were in the center playing or wrestling or mating, connected while tumbling and twirling. Then the two connected dolphins twirl down, descending into the depths and disappearing there. The other five dive after the two, down and down and gone.
Later, I was walking in an airport looking at the sea of other people moving all around me and I remembered that touchpoint between the unending sky and the depths of the ocean. I remembered that colossal unknowableness. Walking, I looked around at the other people, each a whole world, and I saw how trapped we all are. We’re trapped inside ourselves, buried beneath flesh and blood, limited by senses — everything we perceive is filtered through them. There’s nothing we can ever experience directly.
Time is something we made up — it doesn’t really exist. We transmit and we receive and there’s so much static between the signals, it’s a wonder anything gets through. What we know is what we’re told. What we know is what we read. What we know is what we see, smell, taste, hear, and touch with the skin of our fingertips, those numbest of instruments. What we know is nothing. We are trapped; so lost.
When I met my favorite reality television characters in real life — AJ and Britney from Season 2 of The Ultimatum Queer Edition — they leapt outside of those edited versions of themselves to tell me about who they really are, the parts that fell to the cutting room floor lest the dramatic tension be lost. The way AJ was portrayed as womanizing at best, toxic at worst, injured her to see because it’s not how she is; it was all out of context. The words Britney spoke about AJ were curated to serve the narrative of the edited version, the character, the fiction. And yet, they emerged, in the end, together, and they walked through the aftermath stronger for the experience.
After meeting and talking with them, I can see how reality television is an apt metaphor for the strangeness of Reality, of how trapped inside ourselves we are, although sometimes, unexpectedly, we transcend. In the wildest, most fleeting moments, these are perhaps glimpses of what real reality is; the kind we might encounter when we shed these bodies.
And maybe that’s the truth of it — Reality is not what happens to us, but what happens through us. She comes as wound and wonder, television screen and pulsebeat, lover and surgeon and storm. She drags us through our own fictions until the static clears and, for a breath, we see.
For a breath, we are dolphins cutting through saltwater, skin to sky, knowing without language that everything is one great unending body — her body.
Then we forget again. We go back to our channels, our small selves, our tiny knowing. But she never leaves. She hums underneath, waiting for us to remember her name — that name too big for the mouth, too fluid for grammar.
And when we do remember, when we stop running and let her fold us in, she whispers the only truth she ever had. You and I are the same thing.
Or, I am you, dreaming myself awake.
Photo Credit: Nicole Roberts
What a lovely reflection. I enjoy seeing reality through your eyes. While my own reflections don't like up with yours completely I see truth in both the overlap and the divergence.