Dear Patrick,

Dear Patrick,

I wake in the morning. I dress: khakis, black tank top, denim jacket. Leather belt hanging low on the hips. A pink scarf around the neck for a feminine touch.

There is an exhibit at the Met I've been wanting to see: "Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed." I go, because I'm drawn to it, drawn to how we have altered our bodies throughout the centuries with fashion, flashing womanhood like a neon sign. How we have created ourselves through dress, over and over again.

There is one piece in particular that catches my attention, a long gown sewn with scales and feathers, myriad, iridescent, with the torso sculpted as a snake's belly. I don't know what to make of it. There is something in me that resists. I cannot identify myself with her. It's like looking into the mirror, that moment of confusion. That's not me. There was a distance between me as a woman and the creature in the dress, even though I knew that under that dress she was just as solid as I am, just as warm. She was othered by that dress. Woman and not-woman, snake and Eve, both at once. Monstrous.

You come by later to visit, and we sit down with the catalog and look. When I show you the picture of the snake dress, you say, "That's dead sexy."

I was offended, initially. Confused. Looking at the photograph now, though, the catalog spread open on my desk, I can see what you mean. On a mannequin, as it was at the exhibit, the dress was just a curiosity, something by P.T. Barnum. The Incredible Snake Lady. On a real woman, it is transformative. She is exotic, terrible, powerful. Sexy. Sexy because she is powerful, because she stands with such command and ease. I want to beher, alien as she is, to own that alchemy of sex and authority.

"al·che·my Pronunciation Key ( l k -m ) n.

1. A medieval chemical philosophy having as its asserted aims the transmutation of base metals into gold. . ."

Alchemists saw in matter something indiscrete, something without boundaries. Substances were implicated in each other, irreducible. The difference between gold and iron was simply a matter of scale, one easily able to shift into another.

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, her protagonist studied alchemy before creating his monster. The monster itself is a creation of alchemy, a "phantasm," in the words of Mary Shelley, caught between worlds: both living and dead, man and machine.