“Every part of you has a secret language. Your hands and your feet say what you’ve done.
And every need brings in what’s needed. Pain bears its cure like a child.”
– Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi –
What was it that Beau did the morning after this revelatory night-musing? The same thing he did every morning, just the same. He awoke just before dawn, splashed cold water on his face from the bucket under the window, ran three times up and down the creaking stairs of the empty building, careful to skip the four missing boards; then he lit a candle, opened his Rumi collection to whichever page revealed itself, and hung upside-down from the open beam of his bedroom doorway long enough to read the entire thing out loud. Without fail, whether his recitation was a single stanza or many pages, by the time the poem completed, Beau was thoroughly at one with his primordial essence. He relished in feeling it pulse heart to tail-tip as he swung himself down and let his feet find ground.
It was the same morning routine that had shaped his sun-greeting the entire summer, prior to moving back to the city for college, though now adapted for the relativity of civilization. Out there, it had been a cold, clear mountain stream instead of a gutter-fed window bucket, and it had been a cascade of mossy boulders rather than creaky stairs, and it had been a firm, abiding branch of a generous fir in place of the door frame reminiscent of someone’s abandoned demolition project. All the same, though: it did the job. Awake, alive, present.
Just as he had the morning before his acceptance into the military, as well as the day after, as well as this day, Beau followed said ritual awakening with a meditation, staring at the sun[1]. Sometimes he sat in silence, other times he rang a bell with a hammer and bellowed guttural chants in no recognizable language, and sometimes he jumped rope while singing rhymey kid songs. This part of the daily routine changed frequently, as Beau found that it helped him to acknowledge where they were all the same.
If anyone ever overheard this eccentric cacophony, they didn’t let on. But this is New York, so they would have. No one heard. Beau’s domicile was an abandoned building in the midst of larger, more accessible abandoned buildings, and not even the craftiest of the hobos who made their way through the pry-bar-friendly window-boards of the other buildings even came within glancing distance of Beau’s place. There were a number of perfectly logical reasons for this, but they, combined with all of the cracks in their logic, all contributed to an intricate Venn diagram that had Beau at the center. Flower-of-Life style.
Having come of age on the edge of the city, a quiet black kid obsessed with Kung Fu, Lao-Tze, Sufism, and Rumi, self-aware as a trans man since before those words were given to him, Beau had a long-developed mastery of shape-shifting, disappearing and reappearing, moving undetectably without flinch, and deflecting incoming tidals of neighboring systems as needed. At this point, he was so practiced with the skills of this multi-tool, he could use it day or night, on-site or off, steady backgrounded or snapped into focus. He didn’t snooze on the tool-sharpening either. Hence the daily cold-water splash. Enlivening. Embodying. Purposeful.
To Beau, it seemed ludicrous, properly absurd, that anyone immersed in an environment that reified the legitimacy of the nation-state on a minute-by-minute basis would have need of any morning routine less stark or strange. Surrounded by visceral theatre that produced a constant glut of consumer propaganda for the embodied ecosystem to process, most of which boiled down to bells and whistles of distraction politics and survival tactics, clanging in the name of the right to drown out the simple truth of what the ground under their feet knew, held, spoke, and sang incessantly, the human body required a devoted custodian and a trusted anchor. Beau could hardly remember a time when he did not choose to meet the dawn of a new day on his own, listening into that quiet before anyone else got a say in who, what, how, or why he should be. Even as a child, solemn and watchful, with a piercing kindness that most adults found necessary to downplay or shake off, Beau was drawn to that dark hour before dawn, mesmerized by its specific tone of penetrating voidness. And in the city, it was the only relative quiet that the day held. So Beau felt inclined to hold it in equal measure. And there he was always held, without fail.
By the time the orange light of dawn spread its fingers through its lover’s hair, Beau was fed and dressed, strapped in to his regular undercover monksuit, ready to hop on his bike for the hour-long zig-zag path to school that was easily worth the price of a stable squat, moot gym membership fees, and avoiding the frenetic hustle of the subway. The frenetic hustle of street traffic, however, Beau considered a treasured video game, whooping a wingbeat of Shaolin’s finest [2] as he soared between lanes and dipped down cobblestone alleys.
-**
1. To be clear, this pulse here. No shade on U2.
2. Faster than the eye can find.