Onion Songs

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Only as the changes unwound toward a kind of conclusion did I realize they’d begun much earlier than that weekend of peeling sunburn almost ten years ago. It’s possible, I suppose, that these startling transformations began immediately after my birth, and that my life has been a slow series of reveals leading up to some final truth, some ultimate me.

Of course these revelations have been subtle, otherwise I would have noticed them right away. An overnight change in the texture of my hair, the way it lay against my scalp, or a new highlight when I looked at myself in the mirror, may have in fact been because the fuzz native to another creature had manifested itself in my scalp without my knowledge and blended in with my own.

Or a difference in the way I walked, shook someone’s hand, and mounted a chair at meals may have indicated that some ancient, time-released gene of alternative movement had finally made its effects known. Sometimes awkwardness made me appear barely in control of my own muscular and skeletal systems. Is it possible such awkwardness came not out of a congenital incoordination but out of attempts to control an alien nervous system?

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