Transference | Matthew Vasiliauskas

Every day for the past twenty years I’ve dwelled in a different body.
Dream and memory blur together for me, so that whether my eyes are open or closed, there’s this fuzz of transparency, this web of color in which the swirling bits of static cohere to create a reality where past, present and fantasy overlay to form endless distortions of desire.
You remember that scene I was telling you about? Sure, I talked about a lot of scenes, some boring yes, but some hopefully not so much, and this I believe is one of them.
In it I’m pretty young, four maybe five, and I’m walking down a hallway and into my living room. There’s a greenness to everything, bulbous shifting shades clinging to the walls and furniture, light rolling and dripping onto the carpet so that a trail of ignited patches lead me to the couch where my mother sleeps.
I feel myself taking on the qualities of a specter, my skin slackening, so that I pass through the coffee table and begin caressing my mother’s cheek, my appendages illuminated by a stream of sunlight causing my fluorescent fingers to sink into her flesh, where upon opening her eyes I see my silhouetted self in the moist vacuum of her pupil.
I tell her I want to go out and play, and despite the summer showers, we make our way to the backyard and proceed splashing around in a small pool at the base of our deck.
We become water in these moments, our mass disintegrating and our being transforming into pure movement, our thoughts and laughter rustling like wind so that we ascend into the atmosphere, watching the shells of our old selves stuck in play while we beat and breathe within the veins of endless elements.
Years later I asked if my mother remembered this episode and she said she had no recollection, suggesting that perhaps I had dreamt it.
It was then, as I mentioned to you before, that I became truly fascinated not only by the malleability of memory, but the uncertainty of the self, that perhaps there was no single fixed identity of an individual, but rather we were in a constant state of absorption and transformation, and that in the presence of others we acquired their qualities and they obtained ours, so that within the rushing currents of metamorphosis there was no true or false but rather a descent into the constant cycle of disguise and discovery.
I wanted to take this idea and experience further, which is how the experiments began.
Now, we’ve known each other for decades, and in that time I’ve come to value your honesty and generosity above all else. Truly, I have. Which is why I don’t want to lie to you any more about the nature of these experiments, ones that for better or worse you’ve played a significant part in.
How can I say this? You remember that first week on campus when we met and I told you I was a medical student working on organ regeneration and transference? Well, I was working on transference, but it wasn’t with organs or bones, it was with the self.
Through a process which I won’t bore you with here, I had developed a method for extracting and storing an individual’s consciousness, which could then be implemented into any number of vessels; humans, animals, even inanimate objects.
I remember the first time I did it to myself, and I can assure you there’s nothing quite like it. Initially you hear the echo, a rippling reverberation tearing and morphing the matter around you, a force slithering and gripping onto your throat so that for a moment you feel the pangs of suffocation before being lifted into a stream of incandescence, sleek pulsations puncturing the flimsy fabric of being until the frozen flakes of sight melt into vision, allowing you to gaze and ponder through the perspective of entities previously unreachable.
I needed a more permanent subject to interact with, and I could think of no better person than you.
Now, hopefully you haven’t set this letter down out of frustration, anger or fear because I want to explain myself and why I chose you for such a project, and why the friend you knew, at least the body anyways, has long since vanished and to perhaps give us both an opportunity to determine who or what I’ve become instead.
As I mentioned, and I know you’ve always hated me saying this, your generosity and kindness in my mind is unparalleled, and I wanted to be able to learn the facets and perspectives of existence by interacting with an individual who values life as much as you do.
At first the transformations were slight. I became your grocer, your tailor and the pond where you threw coins in to make a wish. Soon though my curiosity grew and I became your neighbor, your spouse and finally your home.
It’s an amazing feeling to have another being walk through you. There’s a constant hum and vibration, footsteps and tapping fingers both massaging and making you shiver, laughter and crying hanging heavy in the innards of walls and floorboards, and the varied breaths of emotion allowing your survival to continue, so that even the most infinitesimal inhalation maintains the circulation necessary for your existence.
I know this may seem like the greatest of intrusions, and perhaps I may be selfish for saying this, but I wanted to see if I could discover who I truly was, and believed you were key to that.
What I’ve uncovered is that permanent identity eludes me, and that instead of one fixed bit of being I am instead the clay of creation, a substance in constant transformation, molded by the hands of experience in which day to day I succumb to the folds and forces of perception pushing me to penetrate the warm matter of awareness.
I’ve never wanted to deceive you, and hope this revelation provides the clarity necessary in not only mending our relationship, but fixing the frustrations and reservations about myself I’ve been holding onto for years.
Now I drift, minute by minute into light and darkness, but I have no fear.
I have no home and I have no body, but what I do have is a sense of my endless self. And for that, I have you to thank.

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Matthew Vasiliauskas is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago. His work has appeared in publications such as Berlin’s Sand Literary Journal, The University Of Wyoming’s Owen Wister Review and The Pennsylvania Review. Matthew currently lives and works in New York City.