hi, and welcome to our cultural exchange programme

ugly the way I am

When we both broke our fingers in the summer of 2013, I stopped creating and you started creating with your left hand.

When your baby brother died the following year, it was like a forest fire had scorched the earth and levelled it anew. You were now a broken dam. You were grief folded compactly into a thousand origami-cranes—scattered. Though I wished things were different (and I did, I do) this acidic environment revitalised my roots. I was a spruce unstunted.

At Uppsala I told everyone about the wonderchild back home. In some fables you were my enduring muse and in some others the twin I usurped while gestating my greater self. I captured you in series after series. In glass and steel and wood and ice. I was madly in love with us. With who we had been and who we were becoming. Who I was becoming without your shadow shrouding my hands and the award-winning work they produced.

When asked what we were to each other, I called you friend, family, better-half. I said you were my oxygen, but also Mount Everest. Someone who's crown I'd exerted an enormous amount of effort to graze with the tips of my fingers. To nick just a tiny bit of their summit, but somehow you were depleting and still growing taller.

At school, you were the contortionist bending yourself to fit inside the hearts of others. Or maybe I was the contortionist because you never tried, you came prepackaged small and wiggly, and I was always the one bending myself out of shape. When called on in class you would add "I guess," to statements you knew were true. There's a certain humility in appearing unaware of your talent and letting your fans believe they've co-created with you by finishing your sentences. A certain endearing humility. And they applauded, they loved you because above all else you knew how to make yourself small before their egos.

I like to think I knew the real you. Before grief took you on a one-way trip south. You weren't like them or like me, who could only create when given the instruction manual. You were a bottomless well. Talented, yes, but more so brave. Braver than all of us because you returned, again and again, to lay yourself bare on the operating table while strangers who'd never cracked themselves open nor knew what their insides looked like peered inside you to deem whether your spleen looked like a spleen, your liver a liver.

They pigeonholed you and misinterpreted your intentions because they had yet to understand you weren't creating from the same place as they were. You weren't creating at all so much as reconstructing yourself. Painting your body instead of the canvas. Exploring your relationship to gender, your ancestry, your identity. Uploading terabytes of virtual serotonin to touch-starved netizens who liked the way you deconstructed the world; made it beautiful, comprehensible, less isolating.

To some of us you were God. We wanted to touch you, to know you. Know where you pulled your creativity from. Where in your body you felt pain and beauty. And some of us wanted to rip it out, to anoint ourselves with your perspective, to eat from your flesh and drink your blood. Naively. Naively, I ambushed you with a kiss outside Divan's, thinking maybe I could transfer more than the still lingering taste of smoked salmon from your lips. You'd let others kiss you but it never stuck, so why was this different? Why did you choose me? Why did you burden me with understanding the full scope of my mediocrity?

I hated you. I was obsessed with you. I loved you. I wanted to be you. Wanted to fuck you, suck all the creativity from you and leave you ruined like a drone struck city. But the phone call took care of that, didn't it? The whirlwind of honking traffic, hospital corridors and funeral arrangements tapering off to the stillness of his wake. The oppressive grief.

If "what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger" is our pop-cultural manifesto, then you were supposed to be its poster child. You were supposed to rise from the ashes stronger and remind us again why we were so much lesser than you by making us weep. Absolve us of mortal shame and remind us that, yes, this is what it means to be human. To be a momentarily flickering ember in the dark and uncaring cosmos.