This is a manuscript I ran across tonight while digging through old papers from when I was maybe eighteen, the kind of thing you do when you’re packing and don’t want to take anything unused or unnecessary with you into your new life. I liked some of this though. I took a few pics to go with.
The man is dark-haired and round-faced with a square jaw, but I’m not sure. It’s always the same. Nameless, at least to me, with dark lids looking into me, stroking tenderly and lightly my hair. Sitting down below the house stilts, beside the river gully, we’re talking wild, but none of it remains to remember. Only his long eyelids and brown eyes, Russian brown it seemed to me now, eyes full of soft black like broken pencil lead. I’m scared now to think about it, but I don’t think I was scared at the time. This was my mother’s house, remember. I lived there, in those wood-paneled rooms.
One time I sat with a guy in the cab of his truck and he offered to let me steer if I wanted to but I should probably sit in his lap so as to make it easier, but I refused seeing as some natural restraint was telling me to be uncomfortable. This is not to say I didn’t stay up at nights thinking about maybe someday when I grew I might still know him and maybe we could marry seeing as I’d only be ten years younger. That wasn’t much, was it? Mama went out once with a guy nineteen years younger than her. He used to read her love poems by Kabir behind closed doors. I used to read the book, but couldn’t figure out what was so great about it.
I liked novels. Mom also used to buy Pepperidge Farm cookies for this guy. At least novels were stories, and stories you could get lost in. She was trying to fatten him because Scott was young and starving-ass skinny, and still lived with his mother, and washed his hair with detergent and was a haunting failure at being a composer. We didn’t really know if he was a good composer or not because it cost a lot of money to hire an orchestra.
And then there was an altercation between my mother and his brother regarding the money he apparently borrowed to pay our electrical bill, and he lied about having beaten his brother for her, and then one of her paintings got mysteriously slashed, and we always suspected one of them had snuck in and done it. He didn’t come around for a long time after that.
And then cold and cold and lonesome cold and gone and reminder now of trips spent chasing something I couldn’t figure out, and that which I long for is so shifting. Frozen-cold, hard pavement-cold, yes fuck-cold, the witch’s marrow that twines you in and makes you want to swallow. Oh, I’m so tired. Start at the beginning. Sometimes I think I spent my childhood in a darkened room. Through a white-sashed window through six separate panes, I can watch a broad, leafless tree. We live on the edge of a gully. A ravine, really. It’s a hundred bodies high, it’s very high, and the river runs through heavy with melted snow. Sometimes, the room opens and I can walk to the far shore of the river over footbridge, under dangling swooping telephone wires.
I don’t bring any food. It isn’t worth it. I know I’m going back. I know I’m deconstructing an essay of temperance, a lifetime obeying what I don’t understand. I think I’ve sensed that man floating in mother’s dreams, floating in mother’s dreams, spinning mid-air above her broad queen bed. I’m not sure whose man he is. I’ve suspected he really should be mine. His hands are dark and dark-haired and strong-nailed and I’ve wondered what it would be like for him to touch me with these fine long fingers.
My bed is thin. My sheets are flannel and itchy with balls from long use. My bedframe is square planes of pine. It was a bunkbed before they separated my sister’s bed from mine. No one else can really fit in this bed. It’s under the molded ceiling I dream of floating up to soft wings wrapping me, bearing me upwards.
I lie though when I say no one else can fit in my bed. I imagine him. I never fill in the face though. My man is tall, dark and faceless. And I will someday perfect me so that I can be perfectly desirable and there will be no question or anguish. I will have perfect clear skin and wear designer clothes and never say anything that’s wrong. I will have a thong bathing suit that fits snug over my toned hips. No one will be able to resist me, including him. I picture myself at night, outside of me, and watch what I look like breathing and wrapped in a twisted white blanket and hopefully looking so compelling and beautiful. I judge my beauties against my imperfections and decide I’ve got twenty years, surely I could master my faults. Surely I could remedy that stricken look in the mirror, and the habit of looking in the mirror all the time itself. Although then I wouldn’t know what people see when they look at me, whether the guy with the truck sees my blue eyes, my mouth which Mama always says is rosebud. You see, I need the mirror so I can check.
The only way I have any hope of knowing I’ve improved is by looking. Mama looks in the mirror this way too. I’ve seen her. Sometimes I try to imagine what I’ll look like with breasts, breasts like hers, with great cherry-gumdrop nipples and pale veined skin, breasts that seem to droop a little like fruit that’s just overripe. Breasts with stretch marks from doing all that hanging there. Real woman breasts. I can’t imagine how these tiny circles will ever grow.
It’s at night I most feel him spinning there. He lays down besides me in the bed. He does not slide between the covers and come to rest lengthwise next to me; he materializes there. He lays there and so gently runs his finger along my ribcage, sliding his nail along thin nighttime cotton, up the hipbone and down, down the slope to my stomach resting on its side, and he cups the tender mass of my female belly. The cold blue light fills the bathroom window. I lower myself into the sink, he slides his hands down my spine, my eyes are white, my teeth are blue and rotting with fungus, moss growing in the crack in our backs with abandon, he raises me, he lowers me, and all the while fingers are seeping round thighs, thigh bones, I can almost feel his vibrational warmth, I can almost make it real. I can feel the nape of his neck bristling, it’s one on one in one.
The mirror is cracked from side to side and beaded with dew, with steam from bathing, there’s a limelight from the mirror and I wait for the mist to clear so I can see myself. And all this time, we never leave my bed. All this time, the covers rest lightly against the frame and cold of winter, and I never leave my bed.
I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I’ve personally never seen Powell’s close down the Pearl room for a reading before. Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.
