For a Lover

Somewhere along the line, you unknowingly banned me from my phase of eclipses, that seemingly perpetual spell of darkening where illumination could find no refuge.

I never knew how difficult it would be to write about happiness, or how nearly unwilling I’d be to use that very noun. Even now, all of my instincts as a writer are reprimanding me for using such an abstract word in such an upfront way, are yelling that this sounds too much like the sort of elementary topic sentence that makes it impossible for a story to reveal itself piece by piece, shard by shard, one sliver at a time. But here I am, dodging my inclination to substitute “happiness” with some more ambiguous phrase: “seasonal contentedness” or “temporal satisfaction,” because in spite of my cynicism (or, perhaps, realism) for once, I want to at least make believe that I don’t think this is ephemeral.

I can’t help but to think of you as a montage – as instants formed, sort of like the strands of my own hair woven together in a thick fishtail braid. And so I espy us, collapsed on hills that I pretend are bluffs (because I am so very precarious, and often sidle away from you), wondering what the night clouds would look like if we still had imaginations, pretending we understand the world on a molecular level, and envisioning our bodies melting away into the soil, so that only our freckles and scars and pitted skin remained, forming the reflection of constellations in the sky overhead, like the Gemini twins – connected, consolidated. Or I see us on the floor of my room, you with all your external creativity, penning pictures on my palms, and me quietly wishing I knew how to do anything other than write. And then I remember you during sunsets on the river – you, artfully arranging plucked flower petals on my converged knee caps while stationed in a graveyard, and me knowing that we were mirrored echoes of one another, like the water and the sky before us. And when I can envision no longer, there you are, knocking on my door in the morning with a potpourri of my favorite fruits, or stumbling into my bed during the aurora after a meteor shower, or gifting me poetry anthologies with titles like, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love. (And ah, we don’t – forever wide-eyed and dreamless.)

We stumbled so suddenly (together), and your hands grasped me apace, before I became a shell in the ocean, seemingly burrowed deep within the sand and invulnerable to waves, but instead instantaneously drowned in the waters, adrift somewhere in that blue-green cavern. You walked me home in the rain on the night we met, and dried me off in your bed with the wind from your whispers, and I know that event to be a sentient metaphor, for although I am happy, I so often make a revolution and return to dreariness, but you are indefatigable, and are there to absorb even my most tempestuous deluges.

I am not Dante or Petrarch or any of the other great Italian poets, and I cannot compose love sonnets to slip under your doorway or in the pockets of your jacket, but know that my heart will always beat in iambs for you, with you. I am, I am, I am, it sounds, (in love with you.)

Bathing Beauty

Today I walked down by the shore of the bay - that yoke of sand and undulating, tepid water - allowing my feet and eyes to palpate those smooth stones that burrow right along the coastline. Of course, I imagined myself as Martha again, that reticent poet the Lieutenant so loves in The Things They Carried. I picked up coral, kernel-sized rocks and purple pebbles and even a seamless, featureless white stone that reminded me of the one so longingly described in the novel. Somehow, the beach has a way of making me think about everything and absolutely nothing all at once, like scrawling out vast catalogues (with a new number on each list for every grain of salt and sand riveted to my limbs), only to tear off the paper from the notepad and toss it aside in favor of an unmarked page. I thought about James and war and how I can't write anymore, and about my father backpacking out west in lieu of college, and about how I need to stop wishing I were more tragic - some sort of doleful, misplaced doe living in those grassy sectors that are all too close to highway medians. To unbutton my own skin a little, I stationed my towel near the dunes, where I could canoodle with the sun, nuzzled my feet into the sand and let fistfuls of it sift through my hands like funnels, and imagined that I really were living in the forties, which isn't hard to do on a secluded beach in a vintage-inspired bikini. I let myself assemble a Bathing Beauty wish-list: all the thises and thats I want to have to be a more genuine swimsuit clad lady of the past. Thought I'd share all those coveted items:

1) An embellished bathing cap, to keep my pin curls in place. In the forties and even later, women essentially never ventured into the water without neatly tucking their labored-over locks into a floral (or otherwise) decorated swimming cap.

2) A pretty lace or paper parasol to keep my complexion looking nicely browned, rather than horribly roasted.

3) Back issues of magazines published in the forties to peruse while lounging on the beach. Nothing like a little inspiration from the glamour girls of the bygone days.

4) A wide-brimmed, straw hat for mid-day beach strolls.

And of course, some accessories I already own that no bathing beauty should be without:

1) Impractical pumps to keep those legs looking long and lean.

2) Fresh or silk flowers or some alternative hair accessory to keep you looking finished and well polished.

3) A vintage handkerchief to dab our faces with in order to fool men into thinking us dames never sweat.

4) And of course, we mustn't ever forget our red lipstick; if, in the forties, women in the military were expected to demonstrate their femininity in spite of their service with stained lips, then certainly, the bayside was no place to be without makeup!

Now, please, all, get to the beach before the summer, too, is bygone!

Braiding

Precursor:

It's not that I haven't been trying to write lately; I have. Maybe the plodding pace of the summer has left me feeling a little lackadaisical when it comes to, well, just about everything, but I've picked up the ole' journal from time to time nevertheless. Anyhow, it seem that regardless, I haven't yet composed anything of real substance this summer, but I've realized this past weekend that my lull in inspiration does not have to equal a lull in posts. Point is, I've been having some computer problems of late, which has motivated me to go through all of my documents and back files up, and in doing so, I stumbled across many, many pieces that I had forgotten about entirely. It's interesting, sifting through all this work from high school, appreciating them in a whole new way (back then, I found a way to loath everything that was inked onto paper from my imagination.) Here's something I wrote in my senior year, when we were studying forms of non-fiction; it's called a beaded essay, because it takes a cluster of ideas and strings them together in a unifying way (as one would in creating a necklace.) I suppose because of this it may feel a little disjointed, but hopefully some sense can be made of it! Here goes:

Braiding

The heirlooms that linger in my space, in my home, are enigmatic, cryptic: they are sphinxes.

The first time I saw them, I was eight or nine, maybe younger. They were like two spokes on the wheels of my bicycle, only healthier in their thickness. Even then, I could tell they were woven by the hands of a basket maker – the three entities of my grandmother’s hair folded into one, three separate strands unified in braids. Such a curious finding to stumble upon; the memory of a lost desire to join the convent. I wondered for many hours, for many days, I wondered about what changed her mind, noting differences between the hair on my own head and her severed hair: both dead, both dull in their tone. The preparation of mind it must take to part with long locks; I can imagine her in front of a vanity wearing clam diggers and saddle shoes, leg shaking like a jitterbug, eyes watching the scissors as though they were ready to start dancing. And I can picture her carefully parting her hair on the top of her scalp and down the back, and then braiding the two sections in the slow, steady rhythm of a waltz. She would cut them away quickly, without lingering, and be left with blunt ends, with no hair to hide behind. I never found out what stopped her from becoming a nun, never got the real answer, only the fantasies: “She met your grandfather and that was the end of it,” my father told me. “No,” my mother said, rolling her eyes like windmills. “That isn’t it.”

It was the typical tourist’s souvenir, the inexpensive take-me-home. A small wooden box with black varnish and doll sized hinges, mother-of-pearl inlay and a depiction of a Japanese tree on top. But the miniature chest did not come home to America empty – it came carrying war – the civilians, the scenery, the expansive ships of the navy, and hollowness. (My grandfather came back with hollowed out cheekbones and a hollowed out soul – the war had stiffened him.) This is how I imagine his homecoming to have played out: he steps over the threshold, present in hand, luggage slung over a shoulder, to nothing. No wife, no children – all had left, careening him back to the wide swaths of foamy sea again, only the depth of blue and mysteriousness of what was under the surface visible. There was a note, that’s all – a small scrap of goodbye – though its contents, its excuses, its explanations, remain unknown to me.

That house was filled with the past and the future was all that was ahead; he plowed forward, trying to fill the chest, trying to develop new memories, finding a new wife, a faithful one; finding my grandmother. Her parents bought the house, kissing their farewells to Baltimore City and welcoming the suburbs. It was the model house: simple, brick, wood floors, three bedrooms and a cave of a basement. And that house was passed down to my grandparents, then to my brother, and filled with innumerable uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers, filled with Sicilians smoking, baking, laughing, praying the rosary, downing wine, and living.

Visiting my brother is like living in a photo album. Visiting my brother is like being in grade school again. The décor has changed since the holidays and weekdays I spent visiting my grandparents, watching television specials and eating potfuls of macaroni and cheese. The carpet has been ripped up to expose the flooring the house was born with, the colors of the walls more muted, the stairwell no longer lined with framed photographs, the old furniture traded for newer pieces. Without the velveteen couch and the knickknacks strewn throughout the rooms, I can see it better now for what it is. I can appreciate the arcs in the doorways and the old-fashioned marble tile in the upstairs bathroom, both circular patterns, as in never-ending, as in everything ultimately comes back to meet. Circular like the heirlooms I own: never really mine, and yet somehow a part of me. I have always been captivated by these objects: their stories so unexplainable, their past sitting idle, waiting to be invented. Their history lies in my hands, in my heart.

La Moda

Let me lay down the ole cliche: new blog, new beginning.  I've decided to intersperse my usual musings (which generally take the form of personal essays and experimental fictions) with something yet untried: fashion.  So in between my writings, look out for photographs of yours truly and all her style inspirations.  Before you're compelled to condemn my vanity, though, let me enumerate a few of the reasons I've decided to take this leap.  

1) There was a span of time this past year where I was downright content slapping on my "Free Tibet" tee shirt, worn out jeans, a gaudy necklace, and my trusted beat-up cowboy boots.  We all have our moments of lounging, I'll acknowledge, but my ultimate hope is that with the desire to blog, I'll simultaneously find myself developing a desire to avoid haphazard wardrobe choices.  Be warned that you'll most likely be taking a gander at an overload of vintage inspired outfits, because I see this blog as a means of fueling (or perhaps curbing?) my obsession with the days of yore. 

(Note: Yes, God, I realize how utterly frivolous this sounds, but a girl has to avoid unalloyed seriousness, right?  Right.)

2) In my own obsessive fashion blog following, I've come to appreciate the careful attention so many fashionistas out there put into the layout of their photo displays.  As I see it, this gives me an adequate excuse to play with the overpriced Adobe software my father spontaneously decided to buy for me while I was still in high school.  Bear with me through all of this, though, as I'm still learning.  I designed the header for this page tonight, and in its original form, it's all cremes and lilacs and sepia-toned colors, but for some reason, when I uploaded it to Blogger, it turned blue and pink.  I'll try fiddling with that again at a later date. 

3) For the longest time, people have asked me, "Where do you get your clothes?"  Well, ladies and gents, now is your time to find out, I suppose.  You'll see that I shop almost anywhere affordable (my attic, consignment shops, and H&M, to name a few.)  Growing up around a thrifty mother who seemed to be sewing constantly, I learned early on what well-made clothes look and feel like, and that they can be found in places other than high end boutiques and expensive department stores.  To me, it's less about individual pieces and more about assembling a head-to-toe, cohesive mien.  

And there you have it.  Currently working on a new essay, so be sure to check back soon.  In the meantime, I've reposted some of the more recent entries from my old livejournal.  Gotta have a little bit of history!

♥ Vintage Betty

The Minotaur

 We two are sumo wrestlers, wedging between the nooks of one another’s flesh with all the force of Venus’ atmospheric pressure, panting like carnivorous bovine animals as we fight to resist our expulsion from the ring.

This is what it must’ve felt like to exist as the Minotaur, Asterion, before he was slain into non-being by Theseus.  I can imagine myself in the Labyrinth now, the beastly offspring of Mino’s wife and the Cretan bull, a tragic amalgamation of human and brute.  It wouldn’t matter that I was a stranded toddler in the serpentine maze: I’d keep expecting you to turn up around every corner, every hedge, perched on some bush of quilted leaves, waiting for me. I’d convince myself that I could never know the complexities of that warren, and that I’d never pass along the same regions twice, just to retain the hope that reaching you was fathomable. 

Inconceivable, to divorce myself from thoughts of you.  Maybe we’d rediscover one another in the center of the erratic network of passages, and our hearts, reflectively, would turn to kernels – soft and edible.  We could devour each other whole, picking through our innards, getting to know our very essences. 

Or maybe we’d stumble across one another on insomnia driven walks in the night.  The initial collision would frighten us both, but I’d soon recall what skin-to-skin contact felt like, and offer myself over to you like some sort of sacrificial lamb waiting to serve its purpose on the altar before god. 

This is all I really want: to surrender myself, and for you to cave in like an old wooden house with a disintegrating foundation – to let me fall headlong into your chest, and to open your arms to accept me as a parenthetical note in the text of your pneuma.  

The Preta

We are hungry ghosts.

I was reborn into the realm of insatiability as a preta, and found myself collapsed like an empty, pried open freshwater mussel on the parched earth, all convex stomach and chiseled out limbs.  “Please,” I used to plead with the air.  “I just need something to drink,” I’d say, curling myself into a logarithmic spiral like some sort of nautilus shell.  I knew it wouldn’t be long before the other skeletal demons around me would start gnawing away at my skin and bone, feasting on my corpse, fighting to quench their own hunger.  I was ready to fall prey to these hyenas; I was ready to give up trying to sustain myself on human feces and carcasses. 

If there was any real nutriment in that hell, I didn’t know where to find it.  I used to watch one of the other nameless, mummified women in her forage for food.  She would claw at the barren soil in search of worms, shoots of grass, bacteria – anything.  She would climb wilting trees, struggling to catch squirrels, breaking off bits of bark and reaching for handfuls of leaves.  Relentless: whenever she came close to obtaining nourishment, the critters and plant-life would dissolve before the pits of her eyes, and I’d gaze at her in all her helplessness, noticing how her slits turned to hollow caves when the food vanished.  She never died.  She never became someone new.  She just withered up like a shrunken head under the rays of the scalding moon.  There, the sun left us shivering, so that every afternoon, my irises would tear around the flat terrain, searching for another individual to huddle up to.  I wanted to be near someone.  I wanted to gather the rest of the ghouls up like firewood and light a match so that we could garner our own heat.  There may as well have been no one.  We were all Anatman – without soul – and when I tried to lend my touch to another being, my fingers would pass right through his body.  We were loiterers, waiting to pass onto another world, another domain, and yet convergence with one another was impossible; there was no such thing as a lingering caress or brush or graze in the sphere of pretas.  

All I ever received as one of those hungry ghosts was pity.  Humans couldn’t see us, but they must have detected our presence, because there was a monastery nearby that used to leave out bits of bread and sometimes meat for us to binge on. I fell in love with one of the monks there, and I once splayed myself out on the stone steps leading up to the building, trying to keep cool and wishing he would walk out into the night and begin the downtempo strides of mindful meditation on my torso.  I wanted him to pick blossoms from the trees that shrouded the outside walls of the temple and tuck them behind my ears.  I wanted us to realize our escape together.  I wanted to be able to touch him, but knew that even if our separate worlds were to intersect, I couldn’t, because I was a woman, and because it would fracture his lifelong vow to celibacy.  

In the darkness, on the stairs, I remained, imagining my own resurrection.  If I could only train myself to be inanimate, I might turn into a thyrsus – one of those ivy covered, pine cone tipped staffs wielded by characters of mythology.  These wands are a symbol of fertility, with their phallus shaped fennel and seed-like woody fruit.  If I learned the art of shapeshifting, and morphed into the thyrsus of Dionysus, maybe I could signal my own rebirth.  

The Things I Carry

 Sometimes, I imagine myself as a pendulum, strung from the intestines of some antique grandfather clock by the chords of my hair.  I know that I am composed of the polarities of Heaven and Hell and that Purgatory is a place I can’t hang onto for long.  (This image has been recycled in films since the beginning of time: Limbo is the edge of some canyon and my hands are neither calloused nor sinewy enough to perpetually grip onto the lip of the withered earth.)  

            This is the only way I know how to talk about my hypomania.  I am capable of making sense of some rudimentary physics concepts because they are inherent to my very being: oscillations, for me, can occur within the same day, within the span of a few hours, within one week, within each individual month that ultimately accumulates into many months, which will eventually form an entire year. I seesaw between moods, so that every emotion is like a different vacation spot, and I have the time to expend making day trips to each one.   I have toured the kind of loneliness where each heartbeat is a new harrowing surprise, and have made excursions towards undeniable elation, (when it’s as though every interaction with the world is a new drop of water helping to make the cup of the self brim with liquid.)

            And here’s the thing: hypomania is in part what has helped to fertilize the ovum of my creativity.  My respective elevation and deflation gives birth to zygotes: ideas seeded in the confines of my brain, curling their roots around my nervous tissues, fighting to sprout their little heads.  These plants push through the soil of my consciousness until I agree to sit down and nurture them, write about them so that they may fully germinate.  This, too, is where my insomnia stems from: I am so incessantly inundated with my own thoughts that I can’t sleep.  Sometimes, I am enamored with it, and I become overblown with pride for being able to operate without the kindling of dreams.  Other times, I am a fed-up lover, and fantasize about training myself to be one of the Buddhist monks who can exist in meditation and hear a gunshot without reaction: external noise is as “neutral as a bird crossing the sky” for these renunciants. 

Either way, I am prone to grandiose notions, and here is the one that has become a sentient life form in my mind today.  I haven’t been able to bar myself from looking at photographs of women during WWII: civilians, Red Cross nurses, Rosie the Riveters, female soldiers.  If this were the 1940s like I’ve always wanted it to be, and I was on the Home Front while you were off waging wars, I’d wait around for you forever.  I’d write you love letters and send you symbolic tokens of my affection that could survive the mail, like Martha in The Things They Carried:

In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble. An ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky-white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

            It would be enough for both of us, subsisting on longing and distance and words alone. But this isn’t the Second World War, nor is it Vietnam all over again, and you’re not countries away from me, and even if you were, I’m not sure you’d ever make it back to the States anyway. And so I have moved on, or am trying to in spite of all my original intentions of remaining an unsullied little girl in the midst of this continual bloodshed. 

"Cadaver Me, Cadaver You"

Friday night, where are you?  I’m lonely again.  I want to drink myself to non-memory.  I want to find an anonymous boy to get under my shirt.  “I don’t make a habit of this, by the way,” I would explain.  “It’s just a phase I’m going through,” I’d reassure him (or rather, myself) as we made our way to the graveyard.  I want to feel spiritual and sordid at once.  (It was only a few months ago that I rolled my eyes at the cliché of necropolis sex.)   I want to slaughter that corpse-like core of mine, to flick away my corrugated seed-shell so that I can be devoid of an essence.  I want to learn about nonduality in the physical sense, to purge the world of its duhkha and thereby assuage my own suffering.  We could be empty and open together.  We could breakdown all preconceived boundaries and become mirror-like, reflecting one another, becoming one another, learning what it means to exist without horizons.  This is what I mean when I say we should live intersubjectively. 

Most of all, I want to be touched without thinking of you.  I want to realize my Buddha-nature and stop clinging to the hope of a future, because those fucking daydreams are precisely what cultivate a disconnect with my present world.  But I can see myself now, becoming intimate with the grass and soil, thinking how close the stars look, (because the sky is really just a dome-shaped building,) and wondering why I haven’t bothered to memorize the names of all the constellations.  I would absorb all of this, and know that the boy unraveling my skin couldn’t begin to understand what I meant by any of these abstractions, and so I’d stop him and make him tell me what he was passionate about.  (“And don’t give me some bullshit like economics, because I don’t believe that anyone can really see the lyricism in any of that.”)  I’d scare him with my questions: he thought that I was a pliant tree branch and this was just facile, Friday night fucking.  He overlooked the part about me wanting to really know someone.  I’d whisper something about being hung-up on another guy, and say, “Isn’t this like a Beatles song?  Or no, maybe it’s Bob Dylan.  God, why can’t I think of the name right now?”  Hopefully he’d respond by asking, “Isn’t everything like a Beatles song?”  And I’d surrender, knowing that he was right, and later realize I was thinking of the lyrics to “You won’t see me.”  (“Time after time, you refuse to even listen.  I wouldn’t mind if I knew what I was missing.”)

This is stupid.  I wish someone would just love me for a few hours in an isolated cemetery and then leave me for dead with the rest of the brittle skeletons and disintegrating cadavers. 

Paradise Lost

I.

I'm not beautiful enough to be a Rita Hayworth, or wistfully doe-eyed and sad enough to look like Judy Garland, and I will never be as thin or chic or experienced as Carrie Bradshaw. Sometimes I like to imagine what I might get away with if physicality could only be served up at a buffet, and I could stuff myself full with the traits that all of these women possess. When I can’t manage to utterly drown myself in a moment, it’s usually because I’m daydreaming about what might happen if I let the world take a glimpse at my own insanity, (like if I unbuttoned my dress part way and let one of the straps melt off my shoulder so that some of my skin could be revealed.) 

II.

This Easter, in church, I only heard the first steps of the priest’s sermon, because his words became the inauguration of one of my many reveries. “And when Jesus had risen,” he said, “he showed himself first to Mary Magdalene, not to his mother, Mary, or to his Apostles. Mary Magdalene, the person we would least expect.” “Mary Magdalene,” the Father kept repeating. “We are all Mary Magdalene’s. Each of us – you and I, are like Mary Magdalene.” The name became a mantra for me, and I meditated on the five syllables: Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalene. The priest told us that this meant God acts in unexpected ways, and in my brain, I imagined that line as a sentence on notebook paper, and crossed it out with my pencil and instead wrote, “This means that even metaphysics can’t overcome sex and love and sin.” So I envisioned myself as Mary Magdalene, wrapped in the stained white linens used to mop up the blood of Christ, kneeling before him, kissing him everywhere except on the lips, acting reverently and romantically all at once. 

Biblical stories turn me on. 

(They can be so tender and yet so raw, so divine and yet so human. I want Jesus to wash my feet, Satan to tempt me. I want to grow out of the ribs of Adam and realize sin with him as we sip on the last dregs of Paradise and watch as all of humanity collapses.)

Eventually, I wandered back to the present, and pictured myself up on the pulpit, like when I used to lector during high school as part of my service to the church. Only this time, I would deliver a monologue of my own fabrication to the congregation, rather than passages from the Bible. I would talk about how I wished Jesus could step right out of the stained glass windows and Stations of the Cross that encased the sides of the building. “You’re all dead,” I would explain to them, in a flat tone. “And the only way you might wake up is if you watch the Resurrection unfold before your eyes in real time.” If I had charisma, and if I were alluring from the outside, and could speak without fumbling, they might listen to me, rather than stone me to death like the disciple Stephen. 

III. 

On Saturday, I indulged in my monthly swing dancing session, but it wasn’t the same. I was clothed in the dress I wore when I went to visit the aforementioned poet, and I couldn’t decide whether I was glad or upset about the fact that it didn’t smell like him anymore. I danced with Kevin, who I took an aerials class with a couple years ago, and who I’ve always wanted to marry. “If I’m remembering correctly, the last time I came here, you had a guy with you,” he said, spinning me under his arm. I put on my best confused look and pretended I didn’t know who he was talking about and feigned that I was in the habit of bringing boys out dancing with me on a regular basis. “All I’m interested in right now is true life romance,” he told me. “What?” I asked. “True life romance,” he repeated. “How’s your true life romance going, Kevin?” I said, and he told me about the “lady” he was seeing, and how he had been waiting around for her to call, but got fed up and opted to come out to the Dickeyville Mill to partake in some lindy hop instead. “That phone call could be happening right now,” Kevin said. “Don’t wait by the phone,” I urged. “Don’t be that guy,” I said, wishing I could take my own advice. 

The alcoholic Frenchman who once asked me to Paris came up to me soon after, took my hands in his without asking, and said, “There’s my beautiful daughter. You could be my daughter, you know.” (“No shit,” I thought. “Or granddaughter.”) We danced, and he held me closer than I would’ve liked; his thigh became all too familiar with my groin, and the protrusion that is his stomach nuzzled my abdomen. I had no choice but to let my chin rest on his shoulder, and I tried not to make eye contact with the other people in the room, because I knew seeing someone human would probably make me cry. To distract myself, I thought about how I might let him fuck me if he satiated my gluttony with enough expensive wine and a book deal with his publisher. 

I danced with all the regulars that night, and some people I didn’t recognize. The first song of the evening was spent with Mike, who used to flirt with me and call me Andy because he was convinced I looked just like Kerri Green’s character in “The Goonies.” He asked me for my number once, and I gave it to him unhesitatingly, but never called him back because I had just graduated high school, and he was cute and affable but I didn’t know how old he was, and that scared me. Mike confessed to me that he hadn’t been dancing for a couple months, but we moved together in smooth time, and I found myself wishing I were brave enough to ask him to kiss me, or to take a meandering walk together around the historic mill town hand-in-hand. I could tell he was watching me throughout the night, but not as often as he once did, and that made me want to cry, too. 

Even with my fragility, though, I did manage to have fun - it's sort of impossible not to when you're so physically connected with so many people, and you can anticipate their movements before they make them and respond by following. John made me smile the most.  I never call John “John,” because his nickname is better. In private, I refer to him as “bobble head,” since he allows his whole cranium to sway and totter in rhythm with the music as he leads. “How are you tonight?” he asked. “I’m fine,” I responded. “How are you?” “Okay,” he said. “But I would be a lot better if I were dancing with a pretty redhead right now,” and I told him I could arrange that, and linked my arm with his as we stepped onto the floor. He danced with me more than usual that night because he could tell I was upset, and each time, he delivered a million of those corny lines of his until I grinned, at which point he would say, “There! I got you to smile!” We circled around one another in swing outs, and I thought about how much better off I would be if boys liked me instead of men. When will I be beautiful enough for someone of my own age? Where are all the nineteen year olds who will tell me I’m pretty, and when will I stop being stubborn enough to believe them and throw myself in their arms for a neck and neck dance?

Ask me a Question, Please

[I just finished writing this in all my early morning insomnia, and I’m realizing now that it reads like a young adult paperback that bronzed middle school girls buy as a diversion during their summer beach trips, but I don’t really care.]


Today, for Accepted Students day, I stood by St. John’s pond for nearly two hours, branded with a sunflower yellow question mark badge. I had volunteered my time to give directions to all the confused high schoolers and their parents, who were lost in the labyrinth lanes that weave throughout campus. The kids at St. Mary’s interrogated me more than any of the prospectives, in part to mitigate my hands-on-hip boredom and in part to be smart. One boy was rolling his bicycle up the path towards the bell tower with two friends when he turned around to talk with me. 

“Yes, hey, I have a question for you.”

“You go right ahead, sir” I said, taking one fist off of my torso to point at him. We had met the week before in the kitchen at a townhouse party on the greens. My cup was empty, and he was the force field between the oversized Tupperware container (begging to have more red liquid ladled from its bottom) and me. He looked in my direction, smiling but distracted. “What’s a clever way I can tell that guy his fly’s down?” I was so drunk I had to keep one eye closed so that he would remain in focus. “Your barn door’s open,” I told him, leaning in too close and characteristically letting a single lid flutter before he took a side-step so I could reach my intended destination. While I was bending down in my too-tight paisley silk dress (I bought it three years ago at a consignment shop when hunger pangs were a source of pride), I heard him delivering the phrase to the shaven head white boy with the unzipped khaki cargoes. I twisted the upper half of my body around, feet still pointed at the plastic tub (as though they were the fixed roots of that cask) and gave him a thumbs up. The next day at brunch, he saw me and reminded me what his grin looked like. 

So here I was, meeting again with the blue-eyed boy who had to probe drunk girl for a one-liner. He looked at me with all the seriousness he could muster and said, “Are you wearing sunscreen?” I shook my head at him, returning the smile for the first time. 

“You really should be.” 

“Yeah,” his friend to the left agreed. “We should bring you an umbrella.” 

“A parasol!” I said. “And I could wear a dress.” I gestured to my own figure, attempting to show them what my imaginary frock would look like. 

“A kimono,” the boy said. “And you could pose under the cherry blossoms. It would be a whole Japanese theme.” We all stopped to imagine for a moment, and then he said, “But really, you’re right in the sun.” 

“Oh, but don’t worry; I never really burn,” I confessed. “Of course, I say that now, but tomorrow I’ll probably be bright red.”

The three lingered for a few minutes longer to chat, blocking the brick walkway, before the boy from the party asked me to show him the way back to the dormitories. And then there I remained, enveloped in the sun, asking every high school senior who passed if he had any questions. “Really,” I pleaded with them. “I’m bored. Ask me anything. I’ll tell you all the secrets you want to know.” 

Throughout the day, I found myself continually verbalizing this same locution: “The Princeton Review lists St. Mary’s as one of the happiest campuses in the country!” “Everyone does seem really happy here,” they would respond. Or, “So, really, you’re a freshman and you’re already this content? Wow.” And I was happy. I was excited to be sharing with these people, divulging my experiences, telling stories to strangers. (I found myself wishing I had one of those question mark badges to wear every day. All I really want is someone to talk to; it’s so difficult to watch a day drone by without having stumbled upon any sort of real human connection.) 

Later, after a two-hour drive back to Baltimore, I sprawled on the couch in my living room, talking to my mother while she waited for dinner. “Hey, Larry,” she called to my father, who was at work in the kitchen. “How about a beer?”

“I could go for a beer right now,” I said, off-hand. 

“Do you drink a lot of beer?” my mom asked. 

“Do I drink a lot of beer?” I said. It was half a question, half a flat statement, and the words echoed in my head while I tried to formulate a response. “No,” I finally told her, realizing that this would be the first Friday in a long time that I wouldn’t be getting barely-stumble-back-to-my-room drunk. I thought back to all my sloppy dance floor kisses, all my public grinding; I thought back to how typically teenaged I’d let myself become. A year ago, last semester, even, I would’ve looked on at girls like me, partly envious, but mostly disgusted – disgusted by how I’d morphed into a paradigm for all that is wrong with my generation. 

I tried to piece together the events from last weekend – how I’d found myself switching from boy to boy, searching for something stable, someone who would hold me until neither of us could stand up any longer. There was the guy in the navy, the guy who drank from an open bottle of wine (“Classy,” I told him in earnest), the guy who sailed, the guy with the Chinese characters crawling up his arm. Tattoo boy was my answer. He wouldn’t let me leave, but not in the way that’s overbearing, just in the way that we both knew we needed one another for the night. I let him kiss me, even though on his first few tries I told him it wasn’t a good idea. We danced. His hands were everywhere, and I mimicked his touches, and he laughed and asked coyly if I was copying him. “I’m just following your lead,” I said. “That’s what I do – I’m a follow. You have to show me.” At one point, the flower in my hair fell out, and I bent down towards the floor, feeling around to find it. He asked what I was doing, and when I finally had my hands on it, I rose back up to his height, and said, “I can’t lose this. I’ve had it since the eighth grade.” “The eighth grade?” he asked. “Yes,” I told him. “I keep things forever. I hate temporality.” We danced even grittier, and my sequined flower started slipping away once more. “You keep knocking it out,” I said, and he grazed the side of my neck with a few of those half-wet, half-dry kisses. “Is that better?” he asked softly, and I answered with my hands, pulling him in tighter and allowing my fingers to loiter on his back in exploration. We talked about how we couldn’t see anything in front of us, and what we were studying (“I’ll write your papers if you take my tests,” I told him. “We’re a good match.”) We talked about how I liked girls, and how neither of us could really hear the music, and other fragmentary thoughts that I can’t remember now. Eventually, I got angry with him for no reason. 

“This isn’t about you, just so you know,” I said, pushing him away a little. 

“Oh, it’s not?” he asked. 

“No,” I replied, shaking my head. 

“What’s it about?” 

“It’s about this hipster poet thing who I really like,” I divulged, biting my lip. I looked him in the eyes, or where I imagined his eyes would be if I could see, and said, “Why doesn’t he like me?” 

This time, he shook his head at me. “Has he ever danced with you?” he questioned, bringing me in towards him again. 

“Yes,” I whispered, and then looked towards his face once more. “Yes.”

“Then how the hell can he not like you?” he asked, and kissed me for the thousandth time. I didn’t like the way it tasted, and I couldn’t decide if it was because of my own breath or his or a combination, or just the simple fact that I knew I could never like this boy after the evening had concluded. I can’t really coherently remember how the night ultimately did end, actually. A few days later, a friend told me that the smoke detectors went off in the building we were crowded into, so everyone had to evacuate prematurely. What I do recall is that I initially left tattoo boy without much prying away on the part of my sober guardian, Isabel. As we made our way to the door, though, I panicked, and found him again, reaching out for his hand, and he leaned in towards me, but I laughed and shook a finger at him and said, “Not with the lights on, not with the lights on.” Isabel dragged me outside, and I was fine until we had nearly reached our dorm. But as we trekked back on the dirt paths leading towards Queen Anne, I found myself wishing I had asked him back to my room, just so I could have someone to lay next to – a puddle of limbs, limp arms and legs all wrapped around one another. Even in my drunken haze and uncertainties and exhaustion from a week jammed full of dance rehearsals and homework, I knew that in the very least, I needed that.

Prologue

Today, I've been thinking about how there was a time when I was serious about being a legitimately productive writer. It wasn't so long ago, really. (Actually, I guess the truth is, that was nearly 12 months ago now, but it's a scary realization that I've been gone from Carver for that many minutes, hours, days.) Anyway, at the end of my senior year, I had resolved to complete a series of personal essays about my childhood - a collection with some real solidarity was the goal. Well, I turned out about half a dozen, I think, and then the summer arrived, and when it was over, I dragged myself to college, and for a long while I felt entirely too displaced to start crafting again, until eventually I forgot altogether why it was ever so important to me in the first place. But with second semester, I found myself stripped down again, returning to that primordial state, rushing back to what I knew, what was familiar, what I could remember: writing. 

I'd like to take the time to awaken those dormant essays, so I've drafted a prologue to the potential memoir to try and keep myself rooted in this goal. (This probably makes it appear as though I take my own writing far too seriously, but please know that this is more of an exercise to keep me invested in my work than it is some overblown dream of having a book to pack away and send off to publishers.) 

Prologue

The memories of my childhood are fragmented sentences – they flit into view like hummingbirds hungry for nectar and fly away even faster than they came. I have tried, in these essays, to link clauses to the incomplete memories, to make them whole, complete. 

I can recall clearly my first sips of embarrassment, how they made me feel clumsy and fumbling like a drunk: the time I ran full force into the sliding glass doors at my aunt’s townhouse during a summer barbeque, the instances when my parents argued like thunder and lightning when I had friends over to play, and the time my mother took me to a shop full of dolls in old Ellicott City. I can only remember one of the collectables in that store – the faces and clothes of the others are as lost to me now as the names of all the children in my kindergarten class. I can see that doll now, perched in her wooden crib, silver locket dangling within the ruffles of her lacy dress. The necklace may as well have been dripping with diamonds – to me, it was as glittering and glamorous as jewelry purchased at Tiffany & Co. I stretched my hand out towards the locket, moving slowly, building up to the moment when my fingers would feel the etchings on the heart’s surface. But before I could touch it, the man behind the counter saw me and said, “Do not. Touch. Anything,” and everyone in that one-room store turned to look at me. My whole body smoldered, the fire spreading quickly from my face to my heart and all my extremities, and I wished I would burn down to an ash small enough to fit inside that doll’s locket. 

It seems that adults don’t always understand that children experience emotion as intensely as grown-ups, and that, in some ways, as a child, the feelings are even more vivid – as bold and bright as the primary colors. When embarrassment and humiliation seep into the skin of a child, she is not braced to console herself. As a little girl, I possessed no internal mother cooing and comforting me when something went wrong. Instead, I fixated on the event, unable to release what had happened, unwilling to stop mentally reprimanding myself. 

But not all of the memories are constructed around those times I understood what shame felt like: I can recall the excitement of unwrapping a doll on Christmas and pulling her around in my new blue sled all afternoon; the time, in a fit of anger, I threw our old dictionary down the stairs at my father and the pages fell out in clumps; and the nervousness I felt when our red-headed golden retriever ran away and was nowhere to be found in the neighborhood. I have set out to write about my childhood before I forget all of these snapshots, before I no longer know what it feels like to be a child, before I morph into one of the adults who are unable to crawl back into the mindset of a young girl. These essays are my way of safeguarding all that I experienced growing up, my way of fondly protecting my memories like a mother hen does her eggs.

On Religion, Jesus Christ, and Lovers

Because the Western world is so steeped in Christianity, I think many of us, no matter what our religion, have located somewhere in our minds a distinct conception of Jesus. Lately, I’ve been working to assimilate fragments of various South and East Asian traditions (i.e. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism) into some sort of cohesive philosophy that can help me live in this world with sympathetic resonance. In doing so, of course, I’ve had to evaluate my (somewhat) Catholic upbringing and consider its place (if any) in my present existence. I’m still groping with whether I think Christ was mythological or real, fabricated or a true sentient being. But the potential fictionality of Jesus isn’t necessarily of primary significance to me right now, I think, because I am more interested in Christ as a character. So often we peg our gods as transcendent beings, entirely separate from the material world rather than innately a part of it. Here is my question, though: why does this have to be so? What about the homosexual men who masturbate to images of the Savior, who see him fundamentally as a lover? Or what about the women who watch Gibson’s passion film, sympathize with the figure of Mary, and thusly relate to Jesus and care for him as a mother? Or what about the teenage girls who wear miraculous medals with Christ stamped on their surface, like some sort of friendship necklace meant to publicly declare comradeship? 

I just reread a paper I wrote last semester for my religion class, “Masculinity in Christianity.” The assignment, in short, was to select a drawing or painting or sculpture of Jesus that in some way appealed to our sensibilities, to dictate why we thought that was so, and to explain, in turn, what that said about our thoughts on the gendered and sexual nature of Christ . In revisiting this piece, I’ve realized that perhaps I, too, expect Jesus to act as a lover, and maybe conversely that I want for my lovers to act as Saviors. Now, before you go thinking this is completely sacrilege, please know that I’m not necessarily pulling an Alan Strang here (For those of you who don’t know, Alan is the young man in Equus who has a concurrent religious/sexual fascination with horses.) In other words, I’m not planning on explicitly eroticizing Jesus any time soon, but I am captivated with the idea of him assuming a role that exists somewhere between friendship and flat-out romance. Here is my essay reprinted, for anyone who is curious to better see what I mean: 

Perhaps Rembrandt’s pen and ink drawing of Jesus healing a leper is meant to portray an effeminate Christ: he is pictured swaddled in loosely draped cloth, which camouflages, rather than accentuates, the assumed masculinity and ruggedness of his body; his hair hangs long, grazing his shoulders, in contrast to the men around him shown with cropped locks; and his posture is bent, not upright, which could suggest a deferential personality, instead of an all-dominating one. But maybe it is these very womanish qualities that can be employed in support of Christ’s manliness; maybe, in their own way, these characteristics can demonstrate a sort of “paternal gentleness,” as David Morgan puts it, that can help to define masculinity (261). Although a tender, benevolent nature may be more stereotypically associated with females, I think Christ’s unflinching humility can be viewed as manly for the simple reason that he maintained it so resolutely.

If the sketch does indeed favor a feminine Savior, it might also simultaneously suggest a “friendship with Jesus” in that it demonstrates him on a tangible, human level. According to Morgan, Warner Sallman emphasized a masculine fellowship between the sailor and Jesus in his painting Christ our Pilot to aid in fortifying young male commitment in faith, and perhaps Rembrandt’s drawing aims to do something similar. In depicting Jesus committing a divine act with such ease, it could appeal to the male sensibility of effortless strength, thereby placing a weight on Christ’s masculine nature in spite of a somewhat feminine appearance. 

It may also be important, however, to acknowledge that this image of Christ is in fact a sketch, not a well defined, fully fleshed out painting or sculpture, which could in itself suggest a sort of ambiguity towards the gendered and sexed identity of Jesus; the lack of clarity in the figures shown may be meant to evoke an uncertainty regarding the character and personality of Christ. While I think my expectations of Jesus are like the sketch in that they are not absolute or certain or fixed, his orientation towards the leper in this illustration is in itself indicative of how I presume Christ to have been. To me, what the drawing reveals is a Jesus who is compassionate and humble: he tenderly leans towards the leper, lowering himself to the sick man’s level. It is this gesture alone that embodies my imagination of the Savior because it highlights his ability to love all. I am personally less concerned with whether Jesus was heterosexual or homosexual, celibate or abstinent, and instead more interested in the idea of his all-encompassing tenderness towards people. In other words, it doesn’t matter to me exactly how Christ went about demonstrating his gender or sexuality, but rather that he had the ability to take on traits associated with both males and females, and the capacity to show love (whether it be romantic or platonic) towards both men and women. By bringing to life this scripture story from the gospel according to Mark, Rembrandt reveals a Jesus who is accessible and affable, which places him in a closer association with human males and demonstrates what I think of as a sort of quiet masculinity, as opposed to an arcane God who is incomprehensible to his people on earth.