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KNOW THY FLESH
When I embody the wolf, I feel I am the wolf. In feeling, I know I am the wolf. I know this for two reasons:
i. the reactions of my body to the change in my form
ii. the reactions of the environment around me to the change in my form
When I walk down the street and I feel my fur; feel the wrong eyes looking out from my face; feel my ears and teeth; feel my spine match my gait as I step into its muscularity and certainty; people react. I tell myself, they move by you as though a wolf were in their midst, and that thought amuses me. I ask myself; do they see you, truly, and consciously, or are they unsettled by something more difficult to pinpoint, or by your queerness, your alternative trappings, your neurodivergence. Then I ask: does it matter? The reaction is the reaction: I feel what I feel. Does the why matter at all?
How it feels is what matters most to me. When I step into the wolf, it is a process. It is not an easy process. My teeth are almost always where I feel it first: the throbbing, pulsing, itch along my gums. At the points where my gums meet my teeth, I feel tension; a pushing of balled up wanting, waiting. It releases itself along the stretch of my mouth, and my teeth are reformed, shaped into sharp cones, into ragged peaks of bone. With the sharpening of the teeth comes the elongation of the muzzle. I feel a fizzing sensation, a sort of tingling like electricity, around my nose, my mouth, my cheeks. The philtrum feels like it might split. My jaw aches. I have to grind my teeth, wiggle the hinge of my mandible and maxilla. I yawn a lot; my bones pop. There comes a tightness in the bones of my neck. The atlas begins to pulse so hard it’s like breathing.
Around C3 I feel a pressure, a vertebral mutiny. The skin around that column of cartilage fighting bone grows tight, painful. It ripples with phantom fur. I feel little rough quills sitting like a heavy blanket from the top of my head, now crowned with a sagittal crest I feel pulling the rest of my skull after it, all the way down to my tail bone. It is particularly thick at my neck and over my shoulders. I know it is black, grey-black in places, and coarse. I know my eyes are yellow-orange, a deep animal colour, like amber. When I blink, I feel my tapetum lucedum grow membranous and blue behind my sight and I know that if you shone a light over my new face my eyes would shine back.
My shoulders ache to stretch out; my joints become fluid. I pace to feel them move beneath me, my gait a high-stepping trot on the balls of my feet, my toes splayed. I rolled my neck. My body is heavy with its wrongness. It is sealed too closely around a second shape, which kicks at me from within. I breathe heavy, slack-mawed, pupils blown. In the mirror, I see wildness in my face. I get down on all fours, lay on my side. Like this, I feel the soles of my feet catch flame. They are paws, now, my legs angled and furred and canine. My arms I stretch before me, and rest atop, feeling the flatness of my chin against the solidity of their length. My tail bone is a thin twig sweeping sickle-marks into the ground and feathered with hair.
My body is still here, but chalked over it in a way that feels like something resting over me, and simultaneously like something pushing out from inside me, is my other body. There is discomfort; there is pain. There is often a thrashing and somewhat desperate element to my pacing, to my fall to the ground or to the mattress. I try to make myself comfortable. I lie still and focus on my breathing. My mind is a still water of instinct. All I think is it feels like this and what next? I wait for the drive. I am still there inside my head. But the other mind that comes with the other body wants to eat fish; it wants to chase hare; it wants to watch the water. It wants to rest, and to fuck, and to tear. It wants to run over hard ground and to swim against current.
It is difficult to induce the change. I do not call it, but it happens to me. I am learning how to call it, but that has, up to this point, looked less like control and more like understanding the things that tend to trigger it. Getting out of my own way and allowing the change to happen has been my biggest lesson in that regard. If I step aside, allow all the doors in me to open and myself to come flooding out, I can feel it and know it is real. I find myself wound tight and snappish a few days before the moon is full. I am irritable, and driven more by loud and distinct needs, and I seek solitude from humans.
Generally, I forget the moon is coming, and wonder at my inability to be human. Until the night it rises, and my body changes. In the lead-up to the big change, I might feel little parts reshape themselves; just my teeth, for example, or my ears, rotating and flickering, or my neck hair, shaggy and raised. These feelings, albeit often not as strong as I experience them at moontime, come to me also when I am overwhelmed. This overwhelm happens most often in busy, loud, and public spaces.
I find my teeth growing out at work; I find my loping gait transporting me across campus during exam season; I feel my hackles raise on a loud and busy bus journey. I have to work hard to keep the change localised, limited. I have to work hard to retain language, and to follow more complex scenarios and thoughts to their socially-accepted ‘logical’ conclusion. Logic, for me, changes. Reason changes. My perspective and priorities change. I want to whine and growl before I want to vocalise human language.
I flinch at the sound of passing cars; I find the high ceilings and harsh angles of human architecture unbearable. I am drawn to dappled shade, to water, to open air or dark, cool burrow. I find I am more easily confused. I feel my sense of smell and hearing are heightened. I am still me; I am still able to perceive the colour green, for which I will be eternally grateful. I am still able, despite the increased difficulty, to parse human speech. The ways in which I would normally react to stimuli (tipping my head to listen, a caution in all my watchful movements, scratching at myself with flat claws, a hatred of sudden, loud sounds, among others) are amplified. I make quicker decisions.
When I change, I know people can see it.
I know this because they tell me. Sometimes, they tell me in clear and particular ways. My partner, telling me they can see my ears. Friends telling me my tail wagging is as obvious as the sun. Other times, it is more abstract. My mother, when we argued while I was a teenage werewolf, would tell me to stop doing that with my eyes. I didn't need to ask why she flinched away. I knew what she was seeing. Just as I know what people in the street, when they give me a wary berth as I trot by, hungry and tired and feeling the fur between my shoulders, see. Because I feel it. And I see it, too.
i. the reactions of my body to the change in my form
ii. the reactions of the environment around me to the change in my form
When I walk down the street and I feel my fur; feel the wrong eyes looking out from my face; feel my ears and teeth; feel my spine match my gait as I step into its muscularity and certainty; people react. I tell myself, they move by you as though a wolf were in their midst, and that thought amuses me. I ask myself; do they see you, truly, and consciously, or are they unsettled by something more difficult to pinpoint, or by your queerness, your alternative trappings, your neurodivergence. Then I ask: does it matter? The reaction is the reaction: I feel what I feel. Does the why matter at all?
How it feels is what matters most to me. When I step into the wolf, it is a process. It is not an easy process. My teeth are almost always where I feel it first: the throbbing, pulsing, itch along my gums. At the points where my gums meet my teeth, I feel tension; a pushing of balled up wanting, waiting. It releases itself along the stretch of my mouth, and my teeth are reformed, shaped into sharp cones, into ragged peaks of bone. With the sharpening of the teeth comes the elongation of the muzzle. I feel a fizzing sensation, a sort of tingling like electricity, around my nose, my mouth, my cheeks. The philtrum feels like it might split. My jaw aches. I have to grind my teeth, wiggle the hinge of my mandible and maxilla. I yawn a lot; my bones pop. There comes a tightness in the bones of my neck. The atlas begins to pulse so hard it’s like breathing.
Around C3 I feel a pressure, a vertebral mutiny. The skin around that column of cartilage fighting bone grows tight, painful. It ripples with phantom fur. I feel little rough quills sitting like a heavy blanket from the top of my head, now crowned with a sagittal crest I feel pulling the rest of my skull after it, all the way down to my tail bone. It is particularly thick at my neck and over my shoulders. I know it is black, grey-black in places, and coarse. I know my eyes are yellow-orange, a deep animal colour, like amber. When I blink, I feel my tapetum lucedum grow membranous and blue behind my sight and I know that if you shone a light over my new face my eyes would shine back.
My shoulders ache to stretch out; my joints become fluid. I pace to feel them move beneath me, my gait a high-stepping trot on the balls of my feet, my toes splayed. I rolled my neck. My body is heavy with its wrongness. It is sealed too closely around a second shape, which kicks at me from within. I breathe heavy, slack-mawed, pupils blown. In the mirror, I see wildness in my face. I get down on all fours, lay on my side. Like this, I feel the soles of my feet catch flame. They are paws, now, my legs angled and furred and canine. My arms I stretch before me, and rest atop, feeling the flatness of my chin against the solidity of their length. My tail bone is a thin twig sweeping sickle-marks into the ground and feathered with hair.
My body is still here, but chalked over it in a way that feels like something resting over me, and simultaneously like something pushing out from inside me, is my other body. There is discomfort; there is pain. There is often a thrashing and somewhat desperate element to my pacing, to my fall to the ground or to the mattress. I try to make myself comfortable. I lie still and focus on my breathing. My mind is a still water of instinct. All I think is it feels like this and what next? I wait for the drive. I am still there inside my head. But the other mind that comes with the other body wants to eat fish; it wants to chase hare; it wants to watch the water. It wants to rest, and to fuck, and to tear. It wants to run over hard ground and to swim against current.
It is difficult to induce the change. I do not call it, but it happens to me. I am learning how to call it, but that has, up to this point, looked less like control and more like understanding the things that tend to trigger it. Getting out of my own way and allowing the change to happen has been my biggest lesson in that regard. If I step aside, allow all the doors in me to open and myself to come flooding out, I can feel it and know it is real. I find myself wound tight and snappish a few days before the moon is full. I am irritable, and driven more by loud and distinct needs, and I seek solitude from humans.
Generally, I forget the moon is coming, and wonder at my inability to be human. Until the night it rises, and my body changes. In the lead-up to the big change, I might feel little parts reshape themselves; just my teeth, for example, or my ears, rotating and flickering, or my neck hair, shaggy and raised. These feelings, albeit often not as strong as I experience them at moontime, come to me also when I am overwhelmed. This overwhelm happens most often in busy, loud, and public spaces.
I find my teeth growing out at work; I find my loping gait transporting me across campus during exam season; I feel my hackles raise on a loud and busy bus journey. I have to work hard to keep the change localised, limited. I have to work hard to retain language, and to follow more complex scenarios and thoughts to their socially-accepted ‘logical’ conclusion. Logic, for me, changes. Reason changes. My perspective and priorities change. I want to whine and growl before I want to vocalise human language.
I flinch at the sound of passing cars; I find the high ceilings and harsh angles of human architecture unbearable. I am drawn to dappled shade, to water, to open air or dark, cool burrow. I find I am more easily confused. I feel my sense of smell and hearing are heightened. I am still me; I am still able to perceive the colour green, for which I will be eternally grateful. I am still able, despite the increased difficulty, to parse human speech. The ways in which I would normally react to stimuli (tipping my head to listen, a caution in all my watchful movements, scratching at myself with flat claws, a hatred of sudden, loud sounds, among others) are amplified. I make quicker decisions.
When I change, I know people can see it.
I know this because they tell me. Sometimes, they tell me in clear and particular ways. My partner, telling me they can see my ears. Friends telling me my tail wagging is as obvious as the sun. Other times, it is more abstract. My mother, when we argued while I was a teenage werewolf, would tell me to stop doing that with my eyes. I didn't need to ask why she flinched away. I knew what she was seeing. Just as I know what people in the street, when they give me a wary berth as I trot by, hungry and tired and feeling the fur between my shoulders, see. Because I feel it. And I see it, too.