I became a gargoyle in the Summer of 2022.

The neighbors used to call me the girl in the window, but that is no longer who I am. So much time has passed since that I imagine there is no one left that has ever known me in my original state. I didn’t expect it to happen, didn’t think such a thing could happen, but I should have known there would be some consequences to my sitting hunched over the windowsill for endless hours upon hours. I should have known there would be consequences to my life.

I had been occupying a small room in Paris, in an apartment on Rue de la Tour, not far from the Trocadero and close to the Cimitiere du Passy. Even though it was a sweltering summer, I had arrived with a thick pair of closed-toe shoes. When I look at my feet now, I’m surprised I didn’t see the resemblance to a gargoyle earlier. They haven’t changed much, have always been crooked and grew steadily more so as I got older. The nails are odd shapes, some pointy, some flat, some growing on top of each other in ridges only visible with touch. When I’d arch my foot over the French windowsill, the curved grip looked like I was rehearsing for Notre Dame.

Perhaps I was. I had always wanted to be up in the sky. Years of wearing women’s shoes made by men, have given me patches of dry and hard skin, layered upon each other. Along with skin that refused to shed, it gave my feet a scaly effect, beast-like effect.

I was made to be made of stone.

On that particular day, I had just returned from doing one of my favorite things when visiting other countries- taking photographs while on a walk through the cemetery. My walk was cut short by stabbing pains in the bottom of my stomach, some strikes feeling familiar, and some like nothing I had known before. I thought I might be dying, and then thought, as if to comfort myself, that if I did, I would be easy to bury. Has anyone ever died in a cemetery? Would I be the first?

Just as I was leaving, it began to rain and I paused to sit inside a mausoleum with the name Mathieu carved upon the lintel, a gray-colored stone lighter than sky. I let the rain pass in Passy. Being in such pain did not take away from the beauty of summer rain in a Parisian cemetery. In fact, I remember thinking that this would be a beautiful last sight and I would be lucky to have it.

After a few moments, the drops abated into nothing and I walked the few blocks to the apartment. The apartment belonged to my mother and her husband, a man who I have referred to as my stepfather only a handful of times in the thirty years I’ve known him. They had invited me to stay with them for two weeks, and I had happily agreed. I must have forgotten what life was like with them, what they were like with each other, the constant fighting that started out slow enough but quickly went way beyond bickering. The shouts and slamming chairs. The violence of words. I grew up dreaming about love while people argued around me. I remember the pieces of smashed plates that I tiptoed through, learning how to step over them so quietly. If I attracted any attention, I knew the fury would turn to me, simply for appearing in its sightline for something as minor as a trip to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Years of living like that does something to a child. It makes them anything but a child. I had forgotten that nothing between them had changed. I had put myself in the line of sight.

Perhaps it was this absence of judgment that turned me to stone.

*

I had arrived at Charles de Gaulle earlier that day, filled with jetlag. I didn’t feel well even before my stomach pains began. I had tried to take a nap, setting my alarm for two hours, knowing it would take at least one before I fell asleep, if I even did at all. I was not a sleeper, never, not even as a small child and now, thanks to my current condition, never will be. I did fall asleep, though only just. Not even an hour and a half in, I was woken by my mother. She was speaking to me and waiting for a reply for which my rolling over and pulling the sheets over my head was an inadequate response. My plan to take a short nap in the hope of feeling better, so that when I woke, I’d be well enough to endure whatever activities would be forced upon me that evening. As my mother shook me awake, I accepted that my plan had failed. I gave up trying to secure sleep and I got up to be notified that my mother’s husband was waiting for us downstairs. We were to go and have lunch. I said I wasn’t feeling well and that I had been trying to sleep, and then, in a quick mounting anger I hadn’t expected enough to gird, I began to rant about not being told what to do or how to take care of myself, and why didn’t anyone ask me what I wanted? Didn’t it matter? And how could someone ruin my sleep when they know how hard it is for me to achieve it in the first place, that I’m already more stressed out in the first few hours of my vacation than I am when I’m at home working seven days a week, thank you very much. I was so frustrated at that point that I may have threatened murder. I can’t remember, but whether or not I did, I imagine, that too, contributed to my current state of stone.

Dramatically, I announced that I am now too awake to go back to bed, but too sick to go out, and thanked my mother for her destruction of my attempt at self-care. As she slammed the door on her way out, I took a deep. I would shower. I would restart my day and by the time they returned from lunch, I’d be at the cemetery, stepping against the cobbled stones and inhaling the beauty of the mausoleums with their spiderwebbed doors covered in a rust more delicate than any paint.

By the time they returned, I’d already be gone, already escaped.

I’d be free.

Even if just for a few hours.

*

The sun was aggressively bright and although it was cooler walking down the street than inside the apartment, I was still sweating. Not terribly, but enough to wonder if the heat had anything to do with my gradually slowing steps, my sluggish pace of mind. I told myself that once I got into Passy, I would find a nice spot in the shade and rest for a moment. It was my first time visiting the cemetery and I was excited for it, especially on a day where I’d benefit from the particular peace only the dead can provide.

Upon entering, I instantly knew I would spend hours connecting with the spirits that spoke to me through sculptures and gorgeous graves of loved ones at rest. It was a beautifully kept cemetery, more clean and green than most parks. Even though I took a moment to sit in the shade and heal myself, the pain in my gut did not relent and I decided to continue along, imagining that if I ignored the ache it would go away on its own, eventually. So many of us try this. Avoidance, hope, and fear wrapped hand in hand, holding on tight and praying to a god they don’t truly believe in that everything will go back to normal.

Walking down small stony paths, I took photographs of mother’s holding babies with missing faces, broken wings of angels pointing up to the sky, and panes of stained glass in every kind of color, every hue of blue. The pains would suddenly fade, but just for a few moments before returning just as quick. As I waited for the rain to pass in the mausoleum of Mathieu, I decided that I could no longer manage and that I should head back to the apartment.

The buzzer on the door of the building didn’t work so I had to message my mother to come downstairs and let me in. When I told her I wasn’t feeling well she said it’s because I hadn’t gone to lunch with them.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it would be good to open the French windows and let the breeze dry my tears. When had they started streaming down my face? Why was I so sensitive?

I unlocked the windows and pulled them open with both hands. That’s when I first began my crouch. Delicately, because in between the swirls of the iron railing were tiny spiderwebs, barely visible in the sparkling sun. I looked out into the city. There was a cathedral in the distance and sounds of happy families.

I stayed crouched for so long that I forgot the time, forgot where I was. Instead of feeling better, I felt just as sick, just as sad. As soon as my tears dried, they were replaced by fresh ones. My face was a waterfall. I had hoped things would be different this time. I wanted to have faith, I wanted to be the kind of person who has faith.

If I could be a princess instead, I would grow my hair long and I would drop it off my balcony and let people climb up it, even if they weren’t a prince. Anyone could come and see me.

I know my skepticism has kept me from so many beautiful things, but it has also kept me from breaking. I watched the purple leaves of a small rooted tree wave in the wind. I wonder if maybe

I cried so much that day that my body lost all its softness, all it’s juice. I wonder if trees ever cry and what it feels like to be one, to be effortlessly beautiful, even when in agony.

It was only once I tried to stand that discovered I could not move, that I was frozen, my hands forever to be in fists. I can’t see myself but I can see the neighborhood children stare at me and I can imagine what I must look like. They see me as a monster, but once, I was just like them.

Now, in my perpetual state of stone, I can still feel things as I look out at the trees, the sky, the sounds of other people’s happiness, the sounds of smiles. Some of us are cursed in more ways than one. Things happen and we grow hard. More things happen and we grow harder and harder and we go through life absorbing everything that tries to break us. We keep going but the blows add up and in order to survive, we make ourselves hard. Hard to love, but also hard to hurt.

Though I am hardened, I am more than what has made me this way. I’m not inanimate. I’m not nothing.

Even stones grow warm in the sun.

– Christine Vartoughian