El’s Story
As told to Celyn, in Asineau, January 11th, 1720, in response to Celyn’s Story of Getting His Name
“I appreciate the offer, but I need it not. Let me tell you my story. I grew up in Gowerbourne, on the Wistel, one of four siblings. It was an idyllic childhood, in many ways. We ran a warehouse and trading house for the shepherds, and each spring would organize the wool and sell it to the riverboats and halfling traders taking it to Embry or Tollen.”
They finger their sleeve, which looks very well made. “We’d buy the fine cloth later, with the profits. My father loved to be seen in fine things. He could never understand how much I hated to be shown off. For when I came of age I developed curves, and I couldn’t stand the sight of myself. I think if I had told him I was growing to be a man the hard way, like you, he would have understood. But it wasn’t that, I just didn’t fit in that awful feminine body. But I was also young, and I couldn’t explain it, and my father, he and I fought over and over again when I’d refuse to wear the outfits he bought me, always looking to show off my beauty, he said, always looking to find a good suitor. I ran away from home a few times, but always returned. I did love my father and my siblings and had nowhere else to go.”
They pause, looking thoughtful.
“I do not like to dwell on those times. My twenties were difficult. I married. I lived. I cut my hair short. It wasn’t enough. And I was still a stranger to myself.”
They continue.
"About six years ago, I started having dreams. In my dreams, I looked different, each time I slept, but always, in some fashion, right. And never so womanly as in my real life. Each dream felt like a foretelling of a possible self, like a choice being offered of a future. And I always felt like I got to choose my future, my body, my relationship to my body, like I got to be myself, not a label or a type or a gender. I became addicted to those dreams, sleeping more and more each day, neglecting my life, the business, my husband, my family. But I couldn’t stop, for the sense of possibility presented each time I slept was like nothing I had experienced before. My family knew something was wrong, but after many years of… " They pause. "Well, it was hard to confide in them. But I finally told my youngest sister, Cece, who was the widest travelled of us – she has been as far as Tollen twice – and she told me about a man — Jor — in Tollen, in the north, a poet, she said, but who was known to interpret dreams.”
They pause again, and won’t meet your eyes for the next part of the story.
“I am ashamed to say, I fled home shortly after, seeking this Jor. I took my share of our family’s wealth, and left only the briefest of notes. I discarded my old name, and took off. All I can say is I was confused and naive, despite my 30 years of age. The name Jor seemed like a talisman to me, something outside my dreams I could cling to. I traveled and found Jor, in the great city of Tollen.”
“He was chaos, and a miracle, all at once. His dark days were difficult, but when the clouds parted he taught me more than I can describe. I learned to see the signs in my dreams and how to see my dreams in myself. I learned how to listen to the Wyrdling when they talked through my dreams and desires. Jor wrote prayers. Poems, really, of supplication, connection, and I absorbed them. He knew a woman in Tollen skilled in the arts of magical inks, and transformed me."
At this point they pull up their shirt, and you see a band of ink, each letter black and grey and bright red and blue and green, somehow, all at once. Written across El’s clearly flat chest is a set of words:
"you are full of wildness and wilderness. swear to the girl you were and the boy you aren’t, swear to everything you were and are and will become: i will always find you. i will never abandon you."
These are obviously some sort of magical tattoo. They say: “It is part of a larger poem Jor wrote, an enchantment, an embodied prayer, a gift. I left Tollen in possession of myself, sort of, but seeking a quiet place, where I could listen to myself and learn anew who I was. I drifted for a year, until I found Eleanor. She radiates space, and quiet.”
They hand you a carefully written paper, with the full poem. It is clearly a talisman of sorts for them:
a body is a skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside. i don’t want to be a volcano. i want to be a garden full of flowers bursting open toward life, all of them singing, i’m here. i mean something. i want to live.
stop trying to be a mirror, silly. remember you are a doorway, a garden, a long twisted path that leads to an ancient temple. you are full of wildness and wilderness, of secrets passed on by the spirit of the Wyrdling. go hunting in your body and devour the pleasure you find there. raise your arms to the sky and swear by your sinful sacred skin, swear by your marrow, swear by the lightning storm dancing in your pelvis, swear to the girl you were and the boy you aren’t, swear to everything you were and are and will become: i will always find you. i will never abandon you.