My Strange Rocker
by Trilety Wade
The Young misconceive the Aged, that is, until they too, become old. Harboring misbeliefs that we all become more measured in our final adulthood, a tad boring and a ton childlike. As if the wells of our passions have run as dry as they believe our tear ducts and Bartholin glands to be. We too can cry, and anyone can buy Vaseline.
I was young and blind too. Controlled by my ego, or maybe it was my subconscious, my actions originated from the deepest, unseeing parts of me. Remember the subterranean worms from the movie Tremors? Devoid of eyes and sight. Writhing and desirous. That was me.
I don’t remember getting old.
“It’s like being birthed, you don’t recall it at all, but you know you’re cold and exposed,” was how I explained aging to a curiously big boy with skinny bones at a potluck funeral service. His eyes swelled, the testicles of his face giving away the fact that he was now contemplating his own birth. How easily boys become Oedipal. I decided it best to prey on the appetizer table instead of the Young, so I left him to his suspension.
In my 40s, I believed it was a hoax that women become invisible with time. Figured it was just a lie told by the homely or boring women in their latter years. Of course, society ignores you, I thought, but not because you’re old, you just have less to offer, and likely always did. To think I called myself a progressive and edgy feminist when I was – more accurately – just an ageist and misogynist.
Betwixt a fuss and a rage, I finally aged as the owls followed me home not by wing but by call. Memories of men rolling their Spanish “R”s against my southern lips mix with images of Everestian orgasms, a world traveler by body if not by land. I formed eyes over the years. No longer the sightless creature that terrorized the desert, I now see how blind I was.
But now I am the sighted in the land of the blind. I am the unseen flesh. Being invisible works in my favor tho, especially as I rhythmically surge and sway on a sea of my own making. Our old porch is so offset from the sidewalk that passersby see my perpetual milkweed hair rise and fall above the wooden horizon of railing, a tuft of white silk caught in Nature’s frantically aroused exhale.
Do they imagine I’m entertaining the next juicy, fruitful pie I will bake to cool on our rundown radiator? I am. But Sundown was already personified by Lightfoot, and I am not yet Night. So beyond baking pies, I fill myself with feeling. Slide myself to pleasure.
No one sees me. They avoid the cracks in my skin and the tremors of my hands. They avoid the stoic white hair that wags from my mole, the tail of a tiny grey mouse made of thread and floss, tucked neatly inside my cheek. When my pigment was still thick, I'd pluck the hair in a fit of vanity. Too young to imagine it as a little brown mouse, I saw it only as an imperfection of flesh.
No one looks close enough at me to deduce the strange rocker I relax on most hours. A silicone exoskeleton in an avalanche of white. There is no wood, and the only joints in my hand-crafted piece of furniture are the joints of my own bones: knees. . . and ankles. . . and toes. In an upright kneel, with a curvilinear frame attached to my calves, I am able to rock back and forth of my own accord.
But the brilliance of my design is the two vertical dildos attached to the back of each of my ankles; candles in a perpetual pendulum of melt and remade, ice stalagmites in an eternity of disappear and appear. As I rock back, I am abundant. My body filled by my own force. As I rock forward, I am anticipation. My old body hungry not for youth, but for wise inventiveness.
My double-penetrated penance for the sins I have no time to finish.
Trilety Wade
Trilety Wade writes. The “body” is a running theme of her work. She writes essays, short fiction, and poetry. Rules are rarely followed tho she doesn't shun them, because sometimes the confines of guidelines are cozy.
More: https://trilety.substack.com
Trilety has a talent for cutting through the noise into the heart of the matter, and a unique, sensual way of sharing it with readers. I’m familiar with other of her works (for more, see her website), and this one brings to me a sense of memoir that goes beyond personal recollection to combine important observations, insights and humor for all ages.