A misspell is not a mispell is not a misspelling. I don’t know what it is yet. A mistake breaking my automatic functions? A subconscious revelation? A bodily confession? I think what I write without thougt is truer than the careful composition. This is where the lie is, outside me. My hand knows something that I do not know. That I am in the mispell. 

Each day begins with the autoportrait of a persona. Dressed with a camera, I play a game of hide and seek in which I impersonate the hider and the seeker, and the camera is the antagonist. So, “Disney French Dogwalker Jumps Out of the Television Screen” ties her dog leash to a pillow; the camera hasn’t caught on that she left her dogs back inside. “Teen Dad Finds Himself Sleeping to Work” haphazardly pulls his hat forward; the camera can’t glimpse last night’s makeup smudged. “Career-ending ACL Tear Pushes Soccer Girl Towards Executive Duties” copies Arnold Schwarzenegger's mandatory poses from the television screen, first in pencil on paper, and then with her own body; the camera can’t find her in a room with ten bodybuilders. I live in this disappearing act. 

I find myself undoing the autoportraits. I peel and scratch. I draw over what the camera caught. Transfer what remains onto fabric, onto paper, onto whatever will take it. Then I find myself redoing the undone, piecing my bodies back together. I know the ease with which the image can fall apart. The self, the feminine, while fragile, does not so easily come apart. Still, I work at it. The body looking may not know it is looking at a body. But it feels it. The way the hand knows something the mind does not. Frank leaves the apartment stove on by mistake. Frank walks Winona around his suburban American neighborhood. Frank’s red nail polish dries out before he reaches the pinky toe. I erased myself somewhere in the making. My doubles did not. 

What I am looking for, underneath all of this, is a self without the burden of having to be one. I am, however, caught inside the maintenance. So, I wait with my hands for the misspell that leaves me once it comes.