Sessions 15 & 18: My Funny Valentine & Speak Like a Child
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
Hey there, space cowgirl. Yeah, you heard me. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t remember me, you don’t have to pretend. There’s something about me that’s familiar, but you can’t quite place it, right? I feel it too. The singed smell of a candle after it’s been blown out, the shadow of a fragrance, blurred and blunted by ash. You know you liked the scent, once, but you know it won’t be quite the same when you light it again. Nothing made by fire ever is. The way my hips move in my clothes, my chapped lips beneath the gloss, the exhaustion in my eyes evident if anyone ever chose to look past sharp winged eyeliner. You know you know me.
We were named by a man who wanted to fuck us at our most helpless, who felt for us something he would call primal but which we know is as boring and common as sexism. Sleeping yeah, beauty you goddamn bet, but we didn’t choose either and cannot be boiled down to the sum of our fragility. And yet we wield both as a sword, our body and face has not changed through the decades and neither has the predictability of too many men. All those years doctors made the choice to preserve us and let us bend the rules of time until we could be healed.
Old woman in a body of youth. A living ghost, frozen in time but not the same as in that past life. Agency stripped away over and over and now this body is something almost separate from us, although it is also a part of us, a vessel, a strange thing, a mismatch, the jagged edge of a puzzle piece that we’ve jammed together to make fit—but it does, usually.
Everything you once were exists in an echo on a thin film of tape that can only be played by a device that has no place in this world anymore. Everything you once were is obsolete, but also somewhere inside us still. All of this is true.
We transcend modern medicine. We transcend what is modern, did it once, can do it again. It’s funny: most people think of the self as a single entity that evolves and fluctuates over time, always retaining a set of core traits. But most people haven’t had everything they ever were ripped away, to be woken up half a century later to an unfamiliar world, with nothing but their first name and what’s supposed to be a cute reference to some fucker’s favorite song, as if we were some blank slate on which to project princess, damsel, babydoll, Valentine.
We were reborn, renamed, and immediately betrayed. We were awakened into a world of pain and debt, and only someone who has never known debt cannot imagine what it is to live constantly owing. When you are born into debt, nothing you earn is ever yours. Why wouldn’t you steal? Why wouldn’t you fuck people over? Why wouldn’t you live without ever choosing to try to get close to anyone? None of this belongs to you. Nothing ever will. Every bite of food, every breath, is already stolen. Might as well relax, enjoy it.
And so, we were remade. You are still that Faye, somewhere. And so am I. And so was she, in that video. And yet we’re also entirely different. You’re entirely different people every single day. We are simultaneity, motherfucker. This is not a new idea. We contain multitudes. It’s just more obvious for someone like us. You and I and we. Something like partners.
Come here. No, yeah, closer. Like that. You’re so fuckin’ smart, you know. And you’re kinder that you think, and there was a time one of us would’ve hated that because you know where the fuck kindness got us, but it’s exhausting to lash out all the time. There are soft places in this world and, well, we haven’t found one, but we found something closer than most people do, and we’ve chosen to stay for the time being. Parallels, intersecting like so many pipes and cables, feeding each other, going nowhere, energy spun out into the universe.
The truth is? We’ve goddamn got this. Wind our way towards something like home, find peace in moving parts. Shift your skin to fit the world you’re in, baby. By the time you lean in for that kiss, you won’t find me.
“I am no longer here, but I am here today, and I’ll always be cheering for you, right here.”
My only self.
These stars we sail through? The ones up close—the ones that shimmer with fight and life, bad bets and easy friends, storms and sunrises—they’re the ones that matter, the ones that fill us up, candles still burning bright. The pretty things sparkling into imagined shapes in the distance, those are dead already, their ghosts echoing through the endless night.
Fuck ’em, babe. We are not who we once were. We never will be again. And that’s the only kind of magic I believe in.
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