20080417
20080416
you are here
Every morning she looks at her bellybutton over the arch of abdomen. It has been slowly disappearing over the past few months, flattening out to match the curvature of her stomach. It’s almost a perfect arc now. Where there used to be an indentation, her connection to her own mother, there is a shiny smear of scar tissue. Every morning she runs her fingers over the spot and thinks, you are here.
She remembers the first fish tail turn it made inside her, startling her. She had drawn a sharp breath and sat down in her chair in front of the blackboard. She’s not sure how long ago that was. Long enough that she has bought new jeans, longer shirts and dressed with several seams in the interim. She knows enough now to be able to locate the barb of its feet, the slight protrusion of its head. She monitors where it sits inside her as she sits at her desk correcting essays and exams. At night she feels it move, turning so its back is to the bed as she lies on her side. She thinks, you are here.
She dreams about being in labor. Sometimes she dreams that it just walks out of her and crawls into her arms. Sometimes she dreams she has lost it, and that her breasts are leaking from lack of use. Sometimes she dreams that its father is holding it. From those dreams she is invariably woken by an unusually violent kick. She opens her eyes and thinks, you are here.
She remembers the first fish tail turn it made inside her, startling her. She had drawn a sharp breath and sat down in her chair in front of the blackboard. She’s not sure how long ago that was. Long enough that she has bought new jeans, longer shirts and dressed with several seams in the interim. She knows enough now to be able to locate the barb of its feet, the slight protrusion of its head. She monitors where it sits inside her as she sits at her desk correcting essays and exams. At night she feels it move, turning so its back is to the bed as she lies on her side. She thinks, you are here.
She dreams about being in labor. Sometimes she dreams that it just walks out of her and crawls into her arms. Sometimes she dreams she has lost it, and that her breasts are leaking from lack of use. Sometimes she dreams that its father is holding it. From those dreams she is invariably woken by an unusually violent kick. She opens her eyes and thinks, you are here.
20080415
Clout
He was at least a foot taller than her. That was what had drawn her to him, his height. His body was bigger than any other boy in her life. He filled up spaces, and she assumed that that meant she wouldn’t have to. She could sit in the corner at parties, where she felt comfortable, while he took up enough space for the both of them. And then they could go home together, and he could take up all the space in the bed, and she could be as small as she wanted. Perfect.
Getting his attention was the hard part. Getting him to look down a couple of degrees and notice her. Luckily, despite their huge difference in height and build, they shared a lot of things. They had grown up in the same city, both love bicycles, and both would rather have eaten cereal than any other food.
She followed him around, learning things about him from other people, collecting all their shared traits into a pile in her ribcage before she sprung them on him, almost all at once. She sat next to him at dinner, and though she could tell that they had grown up differently, had different values, and were headed for different things in their lives, she knew she needed him. Needed his bulk next to her, jeopardizing while it protected her safety. She needed the uncertainty: the danger that came with his size as well as the protection that came with belonging to it.
She succeeded, of course. People always succeed in getting what they need. Or, at least, she did. Next to him she felt tiny and girly and pure. At parties, she would sit back, with a drink in one hand, and watch him. He would get riled up, too drunk and angry to control his heft. That was part of the charm- at any moment he could easily pick her up, pick any body up and just carry them away.
The first time they made love it felt as though a hole was being torn in her middle. Not in that way (don’t get the wrong idea; they were not, in that sense, too mismatched in size) but in some unwholesome, spiritual way. In the middle of the act, she realized: I am disappearing under this boy. The thought of it drove her wild with pride: she was accomplishing this small, unvocalised goal of receding from view behind the bulk of him, but at the same time it made her feel insignificant and insubstantial. No one would be able to appreciate her feat if no one could see her. And underneath the bulk of this boy’s flesh, no one could see her. It was beautiful and tragic, to disappear from the world during an act of love.
The feeling of tragedy slowly dissolved as she rested her head on his enormous expanse of chest and slept, dreaming of the ocean. He had his arms around her and he understood both his ability and responsibility to protect her. But underneath that, because he wasn’t as thick as his frame implied, he also knew that she was protecting herself from people like him. He closed his eyes and tried to dream of little things, but instead lay awake breathing in the smell of her hair.
Getting his attention was the hard part. Getting him to look down a couple of degrees and notice her. Luckily, despite their huge difference in height and build, they shared a lot of things. They had grown up in the same city, both love bicycles, and both would rather have eaten cereal than any other food.
She followed him around, learning things about him from other people, collecting all their shared traits into a pile in her ribcage before she sprung them on him, almost all at once. She sat next to him at dinner, and though she could tell that they had grown up differently, had different values, and were headed for different things in their lives, she knew she needed him. Needed his bulk next to her, jeopardizing while it protected her safety. She needed the uncertainty: the danger that came with his size as well as the protection that came with belonging to it.
She succeeded, of course. People always succeed in getting what they need. Or, at least, she did. Next to him she felt tiny and girly and pure. At parties, she would sit back, with a drink in one hand, and watch him. He would get riled up, too drunk and angry to control his heft. That was part of the charm- at any moment he could easily pick her up, pick any body up and just carry them away.
The first time they made love it felt as though a hole was being torn in her middle. Not in that way (don’t get the wrong idea; they were not, in that sense, too mismatched in size) but in some unwholesome, spiritual way. In the middle of the act, she realized: I am disappearing under this boy. The thought of it drove her wild with pride: she was accomplishing this small, unvocalised goal of receding from view behind the bulk of him, but at the same time it made her feel insignificant and insubstantial. No one would be able to appreciate her feat if no one could see her. And underneath the bulk of this boy’s flesh, no one could see her. It was beautiful and tragic, to disappear from the world during an act of love.
The feeling of tragedy slowly dissolved as she rested her head on his enormous expanse of chest and slept, dreaming of the ocean. He had his arms around her and he understood both his ability and responsibility to protect her. But underneath that, because he wasn’t as thick as his frame implied, he also knew that she was protecting herself from people like him. He closed his eyes and tried to dream of little things, but instead lay awake breathing in the smell of her hair.
20080414
this is what she wants to tell him
(i started this a long long time ago, finally put it into perspective. it's not finished; probably several versions will go up here over the next few days. anyway.)
A
On the plane she sat next to the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. After dinner (she chose the chicken, the magazine editor had the fish), they talked about writing, and then about men, and then about Paris and its pull. She had never been quite so honest during a conversation with a stranger before. She spoke about her current writers’ block, describing in detail the anxious wrenching it created in her stomach. She mentioned him, the man she was traveling to see, by name. Speaking it aloud in the closed and stagnant air of the plane seemed to at once tarnish its perfect ovular sound; the way it usually heaved from her mouth was stunted and compressed.
Paris, their destination, was, for both of these women, a mysterious and elegant entity. Though neither of them voiced it, however, both could tell that the other had read Tropic of Cancer, and had let its nihilistic view of the city romanticize it somehow. Both associated it with sex and lice- both loved it all the more for that.
Stepping out of the airport, into the cold and wet, she eased into her French through that menial task of buying a train ticket. She found her vocabulary came easily back to her, the words seeping from her mouth as if she had been born with them. She felt confidence in her ability to direct the cab from the station to the hotel. She hadn’t felt this at home with discourse since the speech and debate classes she had taken in high school.
Checking in, embarrassedly indicating her understanding to the manager when he insulted her to his friend, she realized she was exhausted. In the room, she turned on the television and ran a hot bath. It was already late; midnight, almost on the dot. Though she was only in the Marais, close to the centre of town, and though it would have been easy to go out, buy a bottle of wine and guarantee herself a good night of sleep, she decided not to leave the room. She instead marinated in the tub, feeling the tension and dust soak out of her body.
B
They had met the summer before, in august. Her birthday that year was sticky hot. Her sister had held a party in her honor, inviting enough people to fill her tiny apartment three times over. She had picked him out of the crowd. His voice caught her ear in the same slow and violent manner in which she imagined venus fly traps might catch bugs. She had asked him where he was from (the answer, London) and they had reminisced over the city they hadn’t known they shared. At the end of the night, she was left with nothing of him but an empty pack of Gauloises with a phone number written inside. According to a mechanical woman whose voice she had become familiar with throughout September, the number had been disconnected.
A
The next morning, at around eleven, she woke up confused. She had dreamed that her iris had gotten stuck to her glasses. She had been unable to put it back into her eye, so she had thrown it into a gutter on the street before going up to her apartment. Up in her kitchen, she had turned on the tap to wash her hands, and the iris dropped right into her cupped palms. Then she woke up, confused. She put in her contact lenses, washed her face and, for the first time since her arrival, turned on her phone.
She resolved not to call the number he had given her until the third day. He knew when she was arriving, but he had to feel as though she had tricked him- at least for a few hours. She had, nonetheless, a burning desire to know if the number was real or not. If it wasn’t, it didn’t matter- she was busy, and important; had places to be, things to do, all that. But there was no denying the fact that she had come here for him. She went to a payphone and dialed.
It rang, and rang, and rang. When he finally answered his voice was exactly as she had remembered it, despite its being used for the slippery, glossy vowels and startling consonants of the French language. She could hear his face in his words, could smell his scent of cigarettes and unwashed hair. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and her skin goose-pimpled despite the heat of the day. She hung up.
B
Embarrassed to ask her sister about him, she had let her curiosity and attraction to him go for a few months. She felt this unrequited, unexplored possibility was feeding her in some way. It was the summer just after her last year of college, and she was hungry for a lot of things: hungry for food, that is to say, money; hungry for inspiration; hungry for love affairs; hungry for attention. She had miraculously gotten a job as assistant to the editor of the fiction section of a new magazine in New York, and that was how she spent her time: assisting. She longed to be assisted. She had recognized that in herself, wrote about it in her diary, and the next day, he called.
A
She passed the time attending various luncheons and suppers with important people. She didn’t pay attention, didn’t care that she wasn’t doing what she was expected to. Her fingers itched with a keenness she hadn’t felt before- they had memorized the number of their own accord; several times she had to stop them from dialing it without her consent.
Finally, after brunch on the third day, as soon as she had waved good-bye to the only woman wearing furs on that sweltering July day, she allowed them to dial. They did so with a feverishness, and one again her skin prickled and thirsted as he greeted the call. She drew a breath. He laughed down the line, and told her to come over.
B
“So I walked up to him, and he was wearing these big black leather gloves. And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t answer, and it was clear to me that he had no answer to give. He put his big, gloved hands on my face and looked me in the eyes and suddenly I felt terrified.
“So I ran. It was the running of horses, and it was going to fast and with such rhythm, you know?”
“I’m allergic to horses.”
“Well it was like I was a hundred horses running, and then I fell and as I was falling I knew that I would never be able to get back up. And I couldn’t. I was stuck there, encased is some kind of invisible honey. I had fallen in a kind of curled sleeping posture. And he came up, kneeled over me, put his hands on my shoulders and told me, in a big round voice, that I was alright.”
“And?”
“And I knew I was. I knew I was alright. There on the sidewalk, curled and stuck, I knew I was ok because his hands where on my shoulders and his voice was perfectly capacious and pear-shaped. But I still felt terrified.”
“Why?”
“Who knows. Then he left and I was alone and the fear bloomed and threatened to break the stillness on my body. But he came back, just at the brink, and told me to close my eyes and remember that I was sticky and that I was stuck. He told me to remember that I was still. As soon as he said that the fear blossomed into a buzzing terror in my bones. I told him to stop it, to make it go away but he just stayed kneeling with his hands on my shoulders, telling me that I was going to be fine, and I knew that I was.
“And I laid there like a fallen animal until finally he just picked me up. He just plucked me right off the ground and I stood on the sidewalk. He took my face into those big hands again, and looked me in the eye and said ‘Everything is going to be alright. See? You’re fine’.”
“And then?”
“And then I woke up. I opened my eyes to see the imperfect white of my wall, and found that I couldn’t move. My body was encased in some sort of honey. My bones were buzzing with some kind of floaty, unreal sensation. So I closed my eyes again and told myself I was fine, and then I opened my eyes and everything was back to normal.
“Every time I think about it I get this uneasiness. Like I feel totally safe and yet so immensely at risk.”
“Come to Paris.”
A
It being too early for drinks, they chain smoked and make nervous conversation instead. This was their second encounter in person, and though they knew each other, or thought they did, everything was laced with a sense of urgency, a need for substance and weight. As soon as it turned five, a somewhat reasonable hour for dinner, they left his apartment and dined in a run-down, cheap restaurant, Persian. Why Persian? she wanted to ask him, what are you doing? But she said nothing of it, decided to trust him and his choice of wine.
In the restaurant and on the streets together, they spoke French. It felt as though their Englishness detracted from their right to be together here and should be kept hidden from the public. She thought his accent imperfect, his vocabulary limited, but didn’t tease him as she might have someone else. Every time he stumbled over that re, forced the sound out of his teeth instead of his throat, she caught a shortsighted glimpse into a future between them.
After dinner, they went to a bar and had beers like old friends might. Conversation was coming easily by this time. Not only were they talking about flying, and the price of hotels, but they were comparing their emotional responses to various artists, making plans to go to museums together over the next two weeks. They were discussing film and art, how each of them had always secretly wanted to make documentaries but had never been able to afford camera equipment as students. For the first time, they were able to use hand gestures to elaborate on their points. They were beginning to get used to being able to speak freely, to look into each others’ eyes.
Soon they had each had one too many, but he hailed her a cab and told her he would call.
B
That wasn’t the only time they had spoken of dreams. He had told her of a similar one to hers, in which he was the young antelope chosen and run down by the wolf on the plains. “Have you seen how they do it when they finally catch them?” he had asked her. “They just bring the antelope right down and the wolves get up on top of them, almost in an embrace, and a quickly as they can they kill them. It’s almost like an act of love. That’s just what it was like in the dream. The most profoundly tragic and terrifying thing was happening to me, but all the while the wolf was whispering ‘shhh.’”
After he said this, they were both silent a while, each of them taking in that profound tribulation, made to resemble ardent devotion by that single sound: ‘shhh’.
A
Of course she called. She waited as long as she could, until the end of the week, and then she called. They had dinner together again, and she drank maybe a little more than her share of the bottle of wine. They followed dinner with a stupid, cheesy walk along the Seine, each of them faltering. They had had time to remember their previous conversations in the interim between this night and the last; suddenly the necessity of weight and significance became clear.
They needed something tragic to happen in order to snap them back into reality; a jolt from somewhere to remind them that they were inherently vulnerable and did not need the other to create that feeling.
A
She wants to tell him that his face is what she sees underneath the blackness of her eyelids when she closes her eyes. She wants to tell him to wake up. She wants to tell him to wake up, and reach out an ashy-skinned, dry-palmed hand so that she can hold it, and through that convergence of skin remind both of them that shared desire for vulnerability and reassurance. She wants to tell him to wake up, and to stop dreaming and to open his eyes to what is looking him in the face.
She had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of water and writing. She had been seated there for a long time, maybe two hours, just writing. He had walked in, sat down next to her and asked her. And she had told him. She was writing. She couldn’t look him in the face so she took a drink of water and then she could look him in the eyes so she did. She put her face up close, really close, to his face and looked at him and as soon as she did that he had closed his eyes.
This is what she wants to tell him.
I am here, next to you, sitting in your kitchen three thousand miles away from my kitchen, which is nicer, and has more food in it. I am here and I put my face close to yours and you closed you eyes. Your eyes are not open. Your eyes are closed, you closed them when I put my face next to yours. I am not asking anything, I am only telling you that I am here and that is all and now what will you do with it? Because I could sit here writing these words forever. I could sit here forever and now this moment is yours, it is your turn now, and so what are you going to do? I am here and I am sitting in your kitchen and there is a bed made up on the couch. There is a bed made up on the couch for me, I know. This is what she wants to tell him: I am so angry with you for closing your eyes.
She says nothing, and slowly pulls her face away from his. She says nothing and takes another drink of water and somewhere not too far away a police car’s siren goes off, startling her a little. His eyes are still closed. She picks up her pen and starts to write a little bit more. He opens his eyes and looks at her words there on the page.
A
On the plane she sat next to the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. After dinner (she chose the chicken, the magazine editor had the fish), they talked about writing, and then about men, and then about Paris and its pull. She had never been quite so honest during a conversation with a stranger before. She spoke about her current writers’ block, describing in detail the anxious wrenching it created in her stomach. She mentioned him, the man she was traveling to see, by name. Speaking it aloud in the closed and stagnant air of the plane seemed to at once tarnish its perfect ovular sound; the way it usually heaved from her mouth was stunted and compressed.
Paris, their destination, was, for both of these women, a mysterious and elegant entity. Though neither of them voiced it, however, both could tell that the other had read Tropic of Cancer, and had let its nihilistic view of the city romanticize it somehow. Both associated it with sex and lice- both loved it all the more for that.
Stepping out of the airport, into the cold and wet, she eased into her French through that menial task of buying a train ticket. She found her vocabulary came easily back to her, the words seeping from her mouth as if she had been born with them. She felt confidence in her ability to direct the cab from the station to the hotel. She hadn’t felt this at home with discourse since the speech and debate classes she had taken in high school.
Checking in, embarrassedly indicating her understanding to the manager when he insulted her to his friend, she realized she was exhausted. In the room, she turned on the television and ran a hot bath. It was already late; midnight, almost on the dot. Though she was only in the Marais, close to the centre of town, and though it would have been easy to go out, buy a bottle of wine and guarantee herself a good night of sleep, she decided not to leave the room. She instead marinated in the tub, feeling the tension and dust soak out of her body.
B
They had met the summer before, in august. Her birthday that year was sticky hot. Her sister had held a party in her honor, inviting enough people to fill her tiny apartment three times over. She had picked him out of the crowd. His voice caught her ear in the same slow and violent manner in which she imagined venus fly traps might catch bugs. She had asked him where he was from (the answer, London) and they had reminisced over the city they hadn’t known they shared. At the end of the night, she was left with nothing of him but an empty pack of Gauloises with a phone number written inside. According to a mechanical woman whose voice she had become familiar with throughout September, the number had been disconnected.
A
The next morning, at around eleven, she woke up confused. She had dreamed that her iris had gotten stuck to her glasses. She had been unable to put it back into her eye, so she had thrown it into a gutter on the street before going up to her apartment. Up in her kitchen, she had turned on the tap to wash her hands, and the iris dropped right into her cupped palms. Then she woke up, confused. She put in her contact lenses, washed her face and, for the first time since her arrival, turned on her phone.
She resolved not to call the number he had given her until the third day. He knew when she was arriving, but he had to feel as though she had tricked him- at least for a few hours. She had, nonetheless, a burning desire to know if the number was real or not. If it wasn’t, it didn’t matter- she was busy, and important; had places to be, things to do, all that. But there was no denying the fact that she had come here for him. She went to a payphone and dialed.
It rang, and rang, and rang. When he finally answered his voice was exactly as she had remembered it, despite its being used for the slippery, glossy vowels and startling consonants of the French language. She could hear his face in his words, could smell his scent of cigarettes and unwashed hair. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, and her skin goose-pimpled despite the heat of the day. She hung up.
B
Embarrassed to ask her sister about him, she had let her curiosity and attraction to him go for a few months. She felt this unrequited, unexplored possibility was feeding her in some way. It was the summer just after her last year of college, and she was hungry for a lot of things: hungry for food, that is to say, money; hungry for inspiration; hungry for love affairs; hungry for attention. She had miraculously gotten a job as assistant to the editor of the fiction section of a new magazine in New York, and that was how she spent her time: assisting. She longed to be assisted. She had recognized that in herself, wrote about it in her diary, and the next day, he called.
A
She passed the time attending various luncheons and suppers with important people. She didn’t pay attention, didn’t care that she wasn’t doing what she was expected to. Her fingers itched with a keenness she hadn’t felt before- they had memorized the number of their own accord; several times she had to stop them from dialing it without her consent.
Finally, after brunch on the third day, as soon as she had waved good-bye to the only woman wearing furs on that sweltering July day, she allowed them to dial. They did so with a feverishness, and one again her skin prickled and thirsted as he greeted the call. She drew a breath. He laughed down the line, and told her to come over.
B
“So I walked up to him, and he was wearing these big black leather gloves. And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t answer, and it was clear to me that he had no answer to give. He put his big, gloved hands on my face and looked me in the eyes and suddenly I felt terrified.
“So I ran. It was the running of horses, and it was going to fast and with such rhythm, you know?”
“I’m allergic to horses.”
“Well it was like I was a hundred horses running, and then I fell and as I was falling I knew that I would never be able to get back up. And I couldn’t. I was stuck there, encased is some kind of invisible honey. I had fallen in a kind of curled sleeping posture. And he came up, kneeled over me, put his hands on my shoulders and told me, in a big round voice, that I was alright.”
“And?”
“And I knew I was. I knew I was alright. There on the sidewalk, curled and stuck, I knew I was ok because his hands where on my shoulders and his voice was perfectly capacious and pear-shaped. But I still felt terrified.”
“Why?”
“Who knows. Then he left and I was alone and the fear bloomed and threatened to break the stillness on my body. But he came back, just at the brink, and told me to close my eyes and remember that I was sticky and that I was stuck. He told me to remember that I was still. As soon as he said that the fear blossomed into a buzzing terror in my bones. I told him to stop it, to make it go away but he just stayed kneeling with his hands on my shoulders, telling me that I was going to be fine, and I knew that I was.
“And I laid there like a fallen animal until finally he just picked me up. He just plucked me right off the ground and I stood on the sidewalk. He took my face into those big hands again, and looked me in the eye and said ‘Everything is going to be alright. See? You’re fine’.”
“And then?”
“And then I woke up. I opened my eyes to see the imperfect white of my wall, and found that I couldn’t move. My body was encased in some sort of honey. My bones were buzzing with some kind of floaty, unreal sensation. So I closed my eyes again and told myself I was fine, and then I opened my eyes and everything was back to normal.
“Every time I think about it I get this uneasiness. Like I feel totally safe and yet so immensely at risk.”
“Come to Paris.”
A
It being too early for drinks, they chain smoked and make nervous conversation instead. This was their second encounter in person, and though they knew each other, or thought they did, everything was laced with a sense of urgency, a need for substance and weight. As soon as it turned five, a somewhat reasonable hour for dinner, they left his apartment and dined in a run-down, cheap restaurant, Persian. Why Persian? she wanted to ask him, what are you doing? But she said nothing of it, decided to trust him and his choice of wine.
In the restaurant and on the streets together, they spoke French. It felt as though their Englishness detracted from their right to be together here and should be kept hidden from the public. She thought his accent imperfect, his vocabulary limited, but didn’t tease him as she might have someone else. Every time he stumbled over that re, forced the sound out of his teeth instead of his throat, she caught a shortsighted glimpse into a future between them.
After dinner, they went to a bar and had beers like old friends might. Conversation was coming easily by this time. Not only were they talking about flying, and the price of hotels, but they were comparing their emotional responses to various artists, making plans to go to museums together over the next two weeks. They were discussing film and art, how each of them had always secretly wanted to make documentaries but had never been able to afford camera equipment as students. For the first time, they were able to use hand gestures to elaborate on their points. They were beginning to get used to being able to speak freely, to look into each others’ eyes.
Soon they had each had one too many, but he hailed her a cab and told her he would call.
B
That wasn’t the only time they had spoken of dreams. He had told her of a similar one to hers, in which he was the young antelope chosen and run down by the wolf on the plains. “Have you seen how they do it when they finally catch them?” he had asked her. “They just bring the antelope right down and the wolves get up on top of them, almost in an embrace, and a quickly as they can they kill them. It’s almost like an act of love. That’s just what it was like in the dream. The most profoundly tragic and terrifying thing was happening to me, but all the while the wolf was whispering ‘shhh.’”
After he said this, they were both silent a while, each of them taking in that profound tribulation, made to resemble ardent devotion by that single sound: ‘shhh’.
A
Of course she called. She waited as long as she could, until the end of the week, and then she called. They had dinner together again, and she drank maybe a little more than her share of the bottle of wine. They followed dinner with a stupid, cheesy walk along the Seine, each of them faltering. They had had time to remember their previous conversations in the interim between this night and the last; suddenly the necessity of weight and significance became clear.
They needed something tragic to happen in order to snap them back into reality; a jolt from somewhere to remind them that they were inherently vulnerable and did not need the other to create that feeling.
A
She wants to tell him that his face is what she sees underneath the blackness of her eyelids when she closes her eyes. She wants to tell him to wake up. She wants to tell him to wake up, and reach out an ashy-skinned, dry-palmed hand so that she can hold it, and through that convergence of skin remind both of them that shared desire for vulnerability and reassurance. She wants to tell him to wake up, and to stop dreaming and to open his eyes to what is looking him in the face.
She had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of water and writing. She had been seated there for a long time, maybe two hours, just writing. He had walked in, sat down next to her and asked her. And she had told him. She was writing. She couldn’t look him in the face so she took a drink of water and then she could look him in the eyes so she did. She put her face up close, really close, to his face and looked at him and as soon as she did that he had closed his eyes.
This is what she wants to tell him.
I am here, next to you, sitting in your kitchen three thousand miles away from my kitchen, which is nicer, and has more food in it. I am here and I put my face close to yours and you closed you eyes. Your eyes are not open. Your eyes are closed, you closed them when I put my face next to yours. I am not asking anything, I am only telling you that I am here and that is all and now what will you do with it? Because I could sit here writing these words forever. I could sit here forever and now this moment is yours, it is your turn now, and so what are you going to do? I am here and I am sitting in your kitchen and there is a bed made up on the couch. There is a bed made up on the couch for me, I know. This is what she wants to tell him: I am so angry with you for closing your eyes.
She says nothing, and slowly pulls her face away from his. She says nothing and takes another drink of water and somewhere not too far away a police car’s siren goes off, startling her a little. His eyes are still closed. She picks up her pen and starts to write a little bit more. He opens his eyes and looks at her words there on the page.
20080410
20080405
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