Panayot Gaidov

Extract from Some of These Myths Are True

The Moon’s Monologue

Did we really come all this way just for you to keep standing still, Teo?

Jump! 

Go on, jump!

Let the waves wash off the pain. The ocean is just a passageway.

Do you see the birds trying to break through the wind? They are chasing the horizon as it melds with what lays beyond, wings leaping towards the uncharted. Follow them, Teo. 

Being here now feels just like it must have felt back when the Old World was the only known world, and in that flat circle of a world, these cliffs marked the end. Cabo da Roca, Earth’s edge. Then what? A new beginning, of course. We aren’t at the end. 

You are leaning forward. Good. Keep going.

If one arrived here by chance, they might feel scared. Not us. We came for whatever lies beyond the rough ocean and the sky. The sky has had me covered like a glass lid encasing a precious flower (the lid protects the flower, but who said the flower needed protecting? Who said the lid, or this sky, aren’t but prisons? Who said the flower wanted to be precious and not a creeping unruly botanical thing? Unsheathed.)

Don’t be afraid. We’ve been through this. It’s simple. Just see what I am showing you.  Teo, just listen to my voice. 

The ocean beckons you. Its sirens are flying towards you. Their grey curls bristle, their wet claws burn. Here they come swirling around you, pulling on the collar of your jacket, ruffling your hair into the wilderness it ought to be. Hear the woodwinds they are playing for you.  

You are hesitating. Don’t.

This jump will be nothing more than a sip from a water glass – you need only tip your lips to it. 

One sip. A parting gift. Here it comes.

…

What happened – you were ready. Did you forget why we are here? 

Let’s sit at the inn and write then. You can start by saying that I am in your mind, the parts that you’ve kept hidden for over two decades. We will call me the moon, though I will be many things. You, Teo, will be the sun, blazing forth for the joy of others.

Come on, we finally have a story, we can’t let it slip away. I will whisper the words to your obeying hand. Some of what I say will be true. And by the end, that’s all we will remember. Then you’ll know why we came to these cliffs.

Whatever happens, I love you. Not with the old good-for-nothing, self-sacrificial kind of love. No. I’ve learned to love you the way I imagine the ocean, baring its white teeth, must love the rocks – until their end. 

One last try?

Jump, Teo! 

Jump! Jump!

The Myth of Mist and Earth

‘We don’t see a boy,’ the sonographers said. Rita eyed the blurry sonogram. A boy is solid stuff then, visible and assertive from the womb. A girl is haze. Rita felt the thought echo through her body and gain weight as the supercut of twenty-eight years on earth played in her mind, reaffirming the truth of her conclusion.

The blond hairs of her arms rose. The more Rita thought about it, the more convinced of it she became. Yes, girls just aren’t made to be seen, are they. She felt this deeply, and the thought scraped her heart, and smeared her lungs and spleen and uterus. It poked right through the membrane and seeped into the pores of her unsuspecting baby. Message delivered. The soul of the unborn shuddered in response and was split in two. A half-sun and a half-moon, each struggling to fill its mother’s belly with its glowing, blooming self. Who will the child be – he or I? What will it be: earth or mist?

‘Mom, what did they say?’

‘Dido, I think you’re going to have a sister!’

It was at that moment that the four-year-old first learned to clench his jaw. His mother’s message sent a jab to his stomach. It’s not that he didn’t look forward to holding his little baby sister, it’s that he didn’t want to so soon. Perhaps when he was in school and had friends. But they said to expect the baby at the turn of August, and it was March. August was not very far, and it was the middle of summer. August was when Dido gets lowered into the water and splashes around while mommy holds him. He could be a shark or a seabird or a starfish. He felt the waves tickling his skin. Then he paused, a thought: his sea suddenly snatched by other hands. If mommy were holding this baby in August, who would be holding him? The mush of his cheeks hardened. Dido pictured the child having blue eyes like his mom’s (their mom’s?). Suddenly, nothing about summer or his life felt safe.

On July 29, two women in their fifties brought a sweaty woman in labour through the rusty green hospital doors. A four-and-a-half-year-old boy followed behind. 

‘Oh, I expect she’ll have big blue eyes! Like you, Rita!’ said Yana, gazing at her daughter’s belly.

Petra said nothing. She was consumed by numbers. She knew that babies born on the 18 or 29 of a month are doomed to a life of misfortune; that numerologists claim they are the martyrs of the world. Petra, born August 18, knowing herself, worried about her granddaughter. 

But neither the astrology nor the sex of Rita’s second child was a done deal. For hours, the baby stretched and kicked – I, the moon waxing, full of premonition; he, the sun, spraying his blazing gases – and so, still at war inside, the body was pulled back into its maker, riveting the three-man audience.

Occasionally, the grandmothers would clamour: ‘It’s time! She’s coming!’ as if they knew anything, and Rita would push and push and then would groan upon discovering she’d been lied to. But until an identity could emerge, the baby’s soul remained lodged. There was only one body, and this family only had space for one of us. 

I pulled them all in like a tide. This birth was my first performance: ‘The Moon Is Full’. 

The grandmothers’ eyes watched the swelling galaxy expectingly, awaiting their little girl. I was manifesting myself into existence and, as I discovered later, the universe too had been on my side. The sky that night had been blessed by a waxing full moon, glorious and still-expanding. Doubt seeped into my enemy’s fiery orb.  

I was growing plumper and heavier with every mention of me. I could see myself take form; I knew exactly who I was going to be. Their hazy, blue-eyed baby girl. Their beloved granddaughter; their martyr.

The sun began to give out as I drew the audience closer. Just another minute inside, another minute of holding their gaze through my mother’s rapid breaths. It is through concealment, after all, that we get a reveal, and what is more satisfying than that? Like a vampire, I slowly drained everyone as night came on, but my act was vital, it kept them on their toes. Am I too eager (this is my first story), being at once a moon, a cloud of haze, a vampire, a lifeforce, and a daughter, too? This isn’t how they tell these stories. It is my way. Here I can be all I was never allowed to be.

Soon Rita got tired. The exuberance of the wait came to feel like an opening act refusing to cede the stage. The eyes of the grandmothers still orbited her belly. Exhausted, Rita glanced at them and fell into a glum rumination. Who would look at her with this much want after she gave birth? A stage made to be danced on and deserted, was that her fate – again?

Rita declared herself in need of rest, closing the curtain on me before I could be birthed. 

In almost full bloom, I pressed inside my mother. My mother. I pushed. She breathed. But without an audience, I was weak and here my counterpart retaliated. The sun fired his dying spark at the mucky tube that bound our body to Rita, and the big bang that had created this universe of two, the mother’s thought that had pitted boy against girl, fate against wish, echoed once again like an incantation. A boy is solid stuff. A girl is haze. 

A parent’s thoughts are laws to children. 

Poof. With that, I was blown into grey mist, to be contained within the skin of the newborn baby boy. Dawn.

While I had focussed on channeling the energy of the audience, the feeble sun had snaked his rays straight into his mother. The two had conspired against the feminine. She had sent the grandmothers away on purpose. She had wanted the boy, radiant; malleable. I had been cheated. Rita and her boy had based their bond on the promise of boundless love. Through him, she too could live again.

But my thoughts can be spells, too. I called them snakes, because that is what they were, and that is what they became, though now I wish to chop off one of their heads and let them fight over one body. A snake, for their conniving conspiracy against me. The umbilical, charred in the explosion, turned its tissues to hard scales, grew a mouth and a set of teeth and a tail which it slithered into its mouth, and with its teeth bound the two forever: Motherhead and Tailson. 

The snake hardened into stone and the stone became a part of nature, and nature was a respected judiciary. It had its own laws.

The first law the boy would learn from his stroller: it pertained to the sky. It said that the boy was under it and that so was everyone else – except his mother, as she held the sky in her eyes. Leaning down to him, her face stretched behind and beyond it, like God. 

The second law commanded that the world be not a circle or a sphere or a universe but a peephole located behind the arch of the mother’s shoulder and neck, right where she held her little one. 

The third law would come when the soles of the Tailson’s feet first landed on solid ground, and trotting about now, it addressed the matter of destinations. The little explorer could run from any sort of place – a bench, a tree, even the sea – straight into Motherhead’s arms. Like other laws, this too would be in force indefinitely. 

The fourth would be to remain a rock in a world full of mist. 

In the early hours on July 30, the boy came out of his screaming mistress, red, I’m sure, with the knowledge of their crime. 

When they got the call, everyone rushed back. Fireworks in the family were in order, yes, but blue ones, not pink: there was no girl. Rita had a son, a puny and pale boy that did not have blue eyes like his mother, nor was he a girl, and he had even jumped over the 29, avoiding his grandmother’s forebodings. Petra crossed herself, grateful.

But though their predictions hadn’t realized, to the grandmothers this baby was still uncharted land, and new territory means war. Who would lay claim first?

‘What will we call him?’ they asked.

Since this was clearly a whole-family affair – minus Stefan who waited at home as husbands did – Dido was happy to have a say, too. What was a funny name that would work? Call him Dorotey, after grandpa! he said. 

Petra’s eyes filled with tears. Though she had vowed to never impose her convictions on her son’s family, about anything, but especially on what they call their children – not after falling victim to such an interference herself back when – she just couldn’t not agree with her grandson when he himself had suggested it. ‘I know it would have meant the world to Tedi,’ she professed, calling her late husband by his nickname. 

Yana sighed at this quick demise. The idea was within reason. After all, it is customary for boys to take the name of their paternal grandfather. The parents’ deviation from tradition when they named Dido had steered the family far enough from principle. Then, as if to tug one last time before letting go, she exclaimed: ‘Oh, yes, he could be Teo! It sounds so sweet – and no one in the family’s been called Teo.’

As per the matriarchs’ order, this was to be a child of tradition. The boy became known as Dorotey – Greek for God’s gift – ordained to ascend the stairway to his blue-eyed God’s heaven. In the background of his mind, the girl that didn’t come to be lived on. Silent, nameless. Haze. 

The Mist’s Complaint

I too want to be earth, said the mist. 

When people pass through me, they are ghosts floating through the kingdom of air. Nothing is left behind here. No smells or voices or memories. They leave untouched – dizzied, at best, by my constant swirls – and leave me untouched. 

  I wheeze through all in silence. 

I want to be earth; I want to unfold out of these words and just be – as I am – for all to savour. There is a heaviness in wanting to feel and be felt, and in this heaviness, there is freedom. There is love in this exchange. My soil will absorb something of everyone, perhaps their kindness, perhaps their judgment; and they will take my grains and my sand and my dirt. The fact of me will stick to their feet and their calves and to their entire bodies, and I will have been real. 

My whole life takes place in pinnacles that stretch as far up into the sky as I want them to. If I am facetious, it is because from up here everything seems out of reach. Maybe if someone got close enough, I would see them. If I could touch them, maybe then I would understand frailty.  

The Myth of the Stuff Queens Are Made of

What makes a kingdom? 

The drawing of any kind of circle can make a kingdom. A circle can be drawn around a school, a neighborhood, a bar, a house, a restaurant. 

For Teo, it was an umbrella. 

He pressed the ground one hand at a time, lifting off in a new way. A gypsy wheel, which is what cartwheels are called in this kingdom, needed momentum. He had met a girl, by chance a gypsy, who had boasted her acrobatic nimbleness. He had let her ride his scooter in the sea gardens where they had met, and she had come back smiling and had said that gypsy wheeling is more fun than these vehicles and that she could do five at a time. Then she had rolled downhill for five or more times, her legs slender brown twigs slashing the air. 

Teo watched and feared the ground. He had not come so close to it as in that mid-air moment when his face could almost smell the cement. It was acrid from the crushed plums that had fallen off the canopy of trees above. He usually stood upright like he was taught and walked on his toes, levitating away from the ground with grace. He was more used to floating away than planting himself.  

The more they practiced, and they practiced a lot in the time it took for his meal to arrive – he was having dinner at The Umbrella, the restaurant in the sea gardens under the big red umbrella – the more they practiced, the more certain he became of the ground beneath him. 

The two had slowly begun to roll away from the table. The girl was barefoot and when she swept the cement with her feet, little pebbles stuck to her brown soles. Teo thought about removing his sandals. He looked to the table but instead of approval, he saw his father flailing his arms in his direction.

He told his new friend he would have to go soon. Did she want to come with him? 

His grandmother who had been a puppeteer now joined her son in grabbing and smacking the air and the precision of her gestures could not be misread. He heard his name being called which embarrassed him. He told his new friend to wait two seconds, that he would be back. With almost no hesitation now – though his feet were still not as straight as hers – he did another gypsy wheel. He heard his father’s voice reminding him to straighten his back, but he answered that this was harder to do upside down. 

He wheeled his way to the umbrella happy to demonstrate the new skill to his impatient audience. His almost-straight legs were like sunrays scattering light in their direction and sweeping up a bit of sand as they flew. Teo bet Damyan couldn’t do a gypsy wheel or at least not with his legs almost straight, because Teo was taught by a real gypsy – his new friend. They did not hear this and said he can show them after again dinner; his fish would get cold. Eat first, they urged. He sat down. Could his friend come, too?

‘Who is your friend, honey?’

‘She must be eating with her own family, darling.’

Teo didn’t know. It looked like it was going to rain soon, someone noted. Lucky they were under the umbrella.

‘But she is waiting for me.’ 

‘Let me talk to your friend,’ said his father. 

He came back, the girl still standing away from the restaurant. 

It was then noted that she was a gypsy. Maybe they could play later, but not at the table. No, no, let’s eat, Petra echoed.    

‘But I am not hungry yet!’ Teo ran to his friend who was jumping on the chalk-coloured tiles that other dining children had abandoned. 

‘What do you want?’

‘I have to eat now.’

‘Go away then!’

‘Maybe we can play later?’

‘No. I don’t want to play with you.’

‘No?’

‘Go away!’

The grey cloud above them now gave in. A single gesture of Petra’s hand in the air, a command. Teo told the girl that it is starting to rain.

‘Come under the umbrella!’ he shouted from his back as he ran to hide. 

‘Go away, I don’t like you!’ she said again standing still. 

He put a fry in his mouth and watched the girl. Her black hair was drenched. He thought of her feet. More things would probably stick to them now.  

‘Do you like your fish, darling?’ 

Teo watched the gypsy girl who was no longer his friend wheeling away into the bushes, knowing the earth beneath her will show her the way. 

A sunray pierced the cloud. Gold raindrops glittered around the umbrella. A circle. The outlines of a new kingdom. 

‘We sit at The Umbrella and it starts raining! What a story to tell! The setup is perfect!’ Petra was amused.

‘You are eating like a neanderthal,’ said Stefan. 

‘Wrists on the table like I’ve taught you, honey,’ Rita reminded.

The coldness of the metal rims shocked his pale wrists. Outside the restaurant, families were rushing in covering themselves from the rain with summer jackets. The place was filling up and the ones still standing were shivering and starting to lose hope. 

The Monologue of the Sun

The free have prisons too. In every moment I am contained in frames. Eyes and expectations. My writing supervisor thinks one thing of me, giving me, the bearer of her judgment, two options: to live up to her impression or rebel. 

Here is what I devised. I created another self. One that will grow organically, live inside and nurture itself as it likes, without outside interference, and so, free of the pressure of these walls. No frames: be you, whatever that entails. Fly! 

But here my experiment failed as soon as it began, for how can a self fly without a body; how can it live without senses, with nothing to touch or smell or taste. A vessel that I need to translate for. So, it is bound to me. I am its walls. Prisoner turned captor. 

And so, the air was bound to the earth.  

This other self, this stuffy, constricted air, began to crave more. It longed for the things it had been promised – space, freedom. Soon, it stirred itself into a wind of madness, full of desire to be, and, in this flurry of emotion, to destroy. 

But the earth that caged it was sealed.

Of course, I wanted my other self to win and escape; that’s why I created it! I let it try. I wanted to give in and for it to consume me in its rage and for at least one of us to taste freedom as we had together envisaged it.

My other self took on a gender, female, and an identity and desires. Or was it I who assigned those things to her; did she have agency then?

Pause. A reminder: ‘just being’, as I and the other self dreamt to be, is not running. It isn’t escaping. It is not even inventing (in the sense of inventing a self). Clearly, as someone on the prowl for that coveted state of absolute serenity, I am no authority on the matter, but like anyone who ever tried to convince others of their authority on a matter, I will pretend until perhaps I become it.

Happiness. That’s it. The moments in-between thinking, in-between inventing. Therein lies creation. 

Bodies are frames. But no, that’s not it. Bodies are creation. The gaze of others upon them makes them frames, makes them prisons. Bodies are made of expectations. Rules. How should I know what hairstyle I want when I am fraught with indecision? I have no sense of myself, my vision in the mirror in front of me and the hairstylist is blurred. I am breaking down. 

It is the same every time – you decide, I trust you! No, not so short. Longer. I like it long. It’s always long. No, no, short makes me look like a chicken. I don’t know why, but it does! Like a little boy. Longer makes me look like I always do. But I want something different! I am so bored of this. Think of something different today, I trust you, but not too short. No, that’s too short. Let’s keep it as it is! Let’s let it grow! Let it grow for a few more weeks. It will be good.

Remembering my options: live up to my standards or rebel. 

The gaze of an onlooker inside their curious retina. Judgment poking through the net of the eye. Use tweezers to remove it and to just be. 

Doubt is the moment of seeing the others’ gaze, of imagining a frame upon your being. Use tweezers on it. 

Perfection. The most beautiful frame. It’s as tender as it is rough, a balance strikable by the deluded and confused. A blind seamstress servicing a village.

Patterning. Do you create into or out of known patterns?

What I want to tell you, I guess – what I want most of all to tell myself, though when I imagine saying it, I see my mother first – is to loosen up. 

Perhaps this would be simple if the gaze wasn’t so exhilarating, too. 

The gaze gives us form. Without it, we are water. 

I picture you, anybody: a friend, a parent, a lover, an enemy, and I want to tell you things, I want to show you things and prove things to you. I want to perform for you. So it is you the earth I slither on. You are the earth that birthed and bound me, and I am the fire dancing for your entertainment. I want to be what you want me to be.

My flame hisses. It’s the part you gave me, and I play it. Even when you like to get scorched, I remain at your mercy. Theatre is the balance of the elements. It is survival.