“Where the Sun is the World and it Sneaks in Unexpectedly” (2023)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
(Words: Courtney Seymour)
December 25th. I’m hungover from a night of Christmas Eve karaoke with the other artists in residence. We all opted for holidays spent at the studio complex in Blanca, Spain; for this one night, we congregated as an incidental family for celebration. The karaoke, however, rarely made the leap over our cross-cultural chasms; no group knew the hits of the others’ teenage years. The Germans wanted ballads, the Spanish wanted disco, and the Americans wanted 90s alt rock. So we stayed up too late, seeking common ground over The Beatles, Pet Shop Boys, Tracy Chapman, and ABBA, squeezing out moments of delight in unexpected shared classics.
Today, in contrast, is tranquil. My body and heart are flaccid with dehydration, but I blearily wish to spend every Christmas like this, lying perfectly still in the little apartment with a view of the mountains and the papercut blue sky behind them, the small woodstove chattering as the fire sucked air through its vents. Just coffee and a silent sunspot on the white couch, blissfully lonely. I even nearly forget to apply my daily testosterone gel, the spikes of gender dysphoria barely puncturing my relaxation. The sunbeams creep off the couch and across the floor, the coffee digests, and my muscles gradually itch with an increasing loudness, persistent as a dog whining for her walk. Wading through the muddy hangover, I throw a couple of objects in my bag—canteen, journal, keys—and tie my hiking boots.
The town is full of stairs. Beyond my apartment’s door, Blanca’s valley meets the rising hill, and only one or two roads allow cars. The rest of the streets are footpaths, dotted with cat shit from the booming feline community, and the houses pile on more steeply every block. At the highest point of inhabited buildings is Centro Negra, the arts center that houses our residency. I wander past its terraces, relieved to find no sign of human life after last night’s party, still feeling preverbal. My feet steer upwards, past the studios, through the final alleys where all the houses are small and as broken as eggshells—abandoned for who knows how long. Beyond these final structures, the crags thrust up, ochre in the late morning light, a dry December wind tussling esparto grass on either side of the footpath, which curves up toward The Virgin. Situated at a pinnacle, she’s a goliath Mary in white marble and smooth, modernist style, erected in the 90s. She looks out over the valley, and is treated locally as a friend and confidant, her feet scattered with cut flowers. I tip my cap good morning to her, then turn left to meet the trail that continues eastward along the ridge.
The past two days, I’ve hiked up the ridge, going a bit farther each time. I’ve noticed a pattern: The ridge has levels, like a video game. Each stepped outlook conceals the next, so when you think you’ve climbed to a summit, you find that another, even higher outlook lies in front of you, the path growing more goat-tempered with each rise. I put on a Jules Reidy album in my headphones: droning, abstracted guitars that match the caffeinated hangover. I imagine my boots as hooves, keep a slight bend in my knees at all times, and don’t so much walk as prance the spine-like ridge. To my left, the hill rolls downwards—steep, but not deadly. To my right: raw cliff. Enormous boulders created bubbled landings now and then, comfortable places to pause and observe progress. I don’t pause. My hooves are locked in a pattern and, like a puppet, I trek onward.
After about thirty minutes on the trail, I finally take a momentary break, reaching the farthest point I’ve explored. Yesterday, this is where I turned around, saving the next teasing summit for later. I recognize the oddly jutting slabs that create a messy barrier in the path, like a shelf made of teeth. A sizable cairn shows that others before me stopped here too, if only to quickly add a rock. I pick up a dusty pebble and easily balance it atop the pile. And just now it dawns on me that I: a) am low on water, b) have no cell phone service, and c) didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I hover over the edge of a protrusion, scanning for the continuation of the path in rubble beyond. I shimmy down a gap between the jutting stones, and see that from the underside, the long row of toothy formations are shaped like oyster shells, all sticking out at a perfect 45-degree angle. I tilt my head so that in my vision, the massive shells rise up at a plumb perpendicular, the rest of the world slanting uncannily around them. The warped view draws my lips to a smile; I’ve crossed into a surreality where orientation and gravity clash, my tilted vision creating a new Mount Shasta. Looking over my shoulder, I become certain that the boundary of the shells is a one-way door, sealing itself behind me. The path reappears below the shelf as a small descent, before sweeping up into the next hill. Got to go down to up. Got to go forward to go back again.
A little bullet of anxiety lodges in my throat, and I gulp it down. It’ll be fine. I drink a careful sip of water. Under the midday sun, my awareness falls into my feet again, finding a sleepwalker rhythm. In this ambling trance, on the path dappled with goat hoofprints, I encounter three harbingers of transformation:
1. I notice an orange butterfly keeping pace with me, alighting on wild flowers. Its presence is constant, or it has a relay with its neighbors, ensuring I’m never alone. The saturated hue of its wings and its erratic flight path tickle my peripheral vision to a point of distraction, and I almost slip more than once when it startles me. But out here, I decide, I shouldn’t be picky with friends.
2. The path at this point has all but dissolved, but the terrain is gentle to my plodding, and I make up my own footings as I follow the ridge. In my improvised trail, I bisect a geological rupture: a thick vein of translucent quartz. I reach down and pick up a fat, dusty crystal. No market value, but the gem, forged in ancient tectonics and immense pressure, feels precious. I pocket it, disobeying “leave no trace” hiker philosophy for what feels like a loaded memento.
3. Continuing through knee-high brush, I look down and see a flawless silver snake skin clotheslined across the grass in front of me. In the tarot deck I often use, the image of a snakeskin decorates the Death card—an icon of shedding, releasing, rebirthing. I breathe heavily, my head as light as my canteen. I cautiously step around the skin; I do not take it with me.
I have lost my sense of clock time, feeling instead the metrics of heat and fatigue. I mount the top of this next rise, but I can’t stop my legs from bullying me to go farther. Just one more. It’ll be fine, just one more. The one just beyond is not so far; I submit. It passes in a blur, noticeable more in my sweat stains when I reach the top than in the memory of the journey. I am quite high. I gaze beyond to the next rise: too far for today, and the haunting voice that drove me here agrees. I look to my right and see a round, flat stone with a small gnarled pine, both clinging to the ridge’s lip. I walk onto it. I tremble as I look over the edge. The earth falls away so far and fast that my eyes fog and spin for a moment. Once more puppeteered by a foreign desire, I sit down on the edge of the rock over the cliff, feet dangling into the deep air beyond. I pull out my journal. Still shaking, I write:
I am sitting on the edge of a big cliff. It is Christmas. Nobody knows I am here. I could disappear forever if I choose to right now.
It has been exactly one year and two months since I started taking testosterone. I feel better than I did on this day last year.
I’m choosing to stand up and walk home and see what happens if I stick around till next Christmas.
I notice my feet are my own again. They get me the hell out of there. I’m both light and heavy at the same time, a body of oil and water. I hurry down in that equine gait, from stone to path to next stone, climbing up through the shelf of giant oyster shells, nodding at the cairn, driven by a hunger to get back to the other artists and our new canon of inside jokes about karaoke. I make the final leap down into civilization, and the town catches me in its soft knot of roads.
There’s a piece of me missing now; it stayed up there on the ledge, neither jumping nor turning around, just holding vigil for the in-between moment. That piece still talks to me through radio waves that I pick up mostly in REM sleep. He calls to check in on how I’m doing. I ask how it’s going in the liminal jumping place, and he describes the wind and sun beating around him. I picture him kicking his feet in the air like a teen on a swing set. He’s not afraid of the height anymore; a matter of acclimation, I guess. He always pouts that I need to come visit him someday. I answer, “maybe.”
Leo Croff: I am a trans American writer and artist living in Berlin, Germany. In poems, memoirs, and fictocrit, my goal is to alchemize my and my community’s experiences into contemporary queer folklore. I believe storytelling is a powerful tool for processing the surreality, anxiety, and twisted comedy of transitional chapters—whether it’s gender transition or other types of personal transformation. I look to sci-fi and fantasy for inspiration in reframing the memoir, interlacing specualtion and magical realism with my own memories, letting impossibilia leak into the everyday. In my community of artists, sharing our stories and visions enables our collective meaning-making (and sense-making) of living as gender minorities in an increasingly hegemonic era. By sharing alternative narratives with the broader world, perhaps we can open more doors for empathy and multiplicity. Online: loucroffblake.xyz, Instagram: @__b.r.i.c.k.s__