This piece is purposefully passive, but before that it was naturally inspired that way too. Which is to say, at the time it happened (not just as a written reflection) there was a removal from feeling, there was a separation between sensations of the mind and body. If anyone does read it, and could tell me anonymously or however, how you felt about it - that would help me greatly. Are you effected at all by the distance, the removal. I try to be true to the emotion, the authentic feeling, and am always resistant to forcing feeling, drama and/or action where it was not genuinely present. However, if you are yawning rather than engaged this may be something I need to become more aware of.
Maybe I need this piece to react more, to be more jarring. I want it to be non-judgmental, but maybe I am resisting feeling. Maybe the passiveness prevents the point being obvious. To me it is extremely interesting, even profound, that in silence there is so much thinking. I think the scene I am trying to write is that of shock and betrayal. This idea that behavior changes. Perhaps my great failure is what I resist saying. How I cannot simply say that after three years my exboyfriend moved to the city and the same night I was reintroduced to him was also the night I slept with him. Why? Because I already had so often before. And at a certain point, I thought it would be easier to do that then try and find his humor appealing. Yet that decision is not what I am surprised about, rather I am surprised by who he was that night. Someone I felt I never knew and could never feel anything for. As he tried strangling me (some erotic behavior, not criminal, of course) and slapped my ass, I was made to feel nothing. I could only think his feelings towards me had changed dramatically. The time had changed us and our opinion of each other. It was an empty feeling, the type when you fall asleep unsure if anyone gets you, whether your image gives the impression that you desire things so opposite from what you want inside, that not even you can communicate what you need, the feeling that becoming close to anyone is a challenge too harsh to accept. So instead of being let down, you decide to not feel anything at all, your eyes are blank and your body indifferent, you take what is given, and wait for the moment when you can slip away.
For him, my place was not familiar. It did not even seem like something he may have known, nor something he could try to remember. His being here (where I presently am writing) was the first time, of many times, I instinctively hoped. Although, I must make you aware, how instinct races beneath the conscious, and therefore, this hope could not be separated from how I was then and who I am, now, always.
Does that mean it means more or matters most when I figure who it is I am? You must understand, that not even I was aware of what I wanted then. It is only now, that I have begun to see myself acting and think of why I chose to be that certain character I was being.
I tell you this, expecting you can now trust me and believe my mind was seeing a realm, possible in the reality confirmed by logic. Now let us go there, September 7th, the fall of my final year. I imagine he is enclosed in the consistently uncomfortable space of elevators.
Do you ever wonder how that is? That every time you treat yourself to an elevator ride, kindly giving legs a rest break, you become more exhausted from the preoccupation over what a nuisance your body is, just standing there soliciting nothing usable—skin, smell, and that god awful sight of yourself—you would rather not be associated with it! Are people staring at you or their own hopeless figure frozen from quietude inside the framing of the elevator’s sliding door? Distracted and yet, you become inevitably intrigued by the mirrored image, a sort of blurred effect, like a memory advancing through time. Becoming regretful with what’s faced, we wish we had remembered to take the stairs, instead of subjecting our self to otherness. How dependable we are!—falling victim to self-conscious gaming, always forgetting the routes for avoiding human contact, that awkward tension when we do not know if our want is another’s want. Perhaps we are unwilling to travel the distance taken by the anonymous. It could be, unlike others—the nameless, faceless, beings of nonbeing—we desire to be seen and consumed, a want willing us into sharing space, even though we would rather cease to exist during that elevator ride, than continue feeling like we stand alone in the presence of one or many.
He steps onto the carpeted hallway of the seventh floor. His body is two doors down from where I eat, sleep and try to live. Breathing six floors of air out, while the elevator continued its advancement in spite of him, he thought now in the absence of others, “That was not so bad.” And in reality, it hadn’t been, but it takes a moment after the moment being reflected on to feel how weightless affects are.
I answer his knock by opening the door and pulling him closer inside the space I have tried to make reflect my present being. Everything goes spilling forth into his eyes: my face aged by the three years of our absence, the apartment’s scent like my very own second skin and my voice which speaks for my presence but, also reminds him of the distance between now and then. A distance that spans time, a time made valuable not by sight but by the resonance of speech, where my absent voice sounds of a time that ceased being, the collection of moments before the instant I said, “We are over.” But now, I must see that my language had no strength and my voice did not keep its reason, for he is back and it is all because of me.
“You came!” I say inside his embrace, but I know I felt nothing, not even the comfort of closure as his body pressed mine. “I told you I would.” “But that was three years ago, I figured it was no longer what you wanted.” “It is always what I had in mind, but not everyone can make a move as instantaneously as you.” Through the glass I have given him, I can see his hand trembling. I pour Malbec, so a certain density can fill the transparency of our unsettling engagement.
It is obvious we share a similar unknowingness of the reason we are together again, and so I comment on the weather. Yet, in a rush to avoid either of our interiors, I forget how meaningless exteriors are. “It has been one of my favourite types of day,” I reveal with a confidence that seems removed from myself, almost like I am impersonating someone I think I should be. “Overcast,” he laughs not sure he should. “You have always been so facetious!” I feel as if I am stand in the same situation I had left us—small and supercilious—like his presence is inspired by the need to teach me how to think. “Overcast is a fine way to be,” I react, this time taking total control of myself.
I notice there is nothing to be said, which makes me think how the perfect silence would be perfect to have, to find, to create. He speaks immediately after the thought, just as I expect he will, since he always had—a consistency I can compare to his refrain from having to hear me or wanting to listen. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” No one knows who he is and lets face it, we are in Los Angeles, where no one cares either. “We do not exist unless we have a name.” “Not true,” I disagree without inhibition. “I think of many I have only seen but never formally met.” “Well, I must have a name if I have been talked about.” “Who says I have told anyone about you?” “What’s got you?” He looks at me like I am someone I have never been. “The weather? I am only being playful.” “It comes with the territory.” “Well, I am a guest." “And you have never been playful.” “Hey.” He makes my voice silent, my mouth speechless, my words meaningless. “I love you.” Spaces come between his words, so it sounds like he has intentionally hinted toward fragments of being—nouns without purpose.
Hours lost their importance, as the night owned us both. I became drunk because it was the only emotion I found available in my apartment. The only emotion I wanted to indulge in—something separate from myself, I could blame my behavior on, if need be. Within this place of mind, our breaking up seemed to loose its meaning, and it was as if the only thing that had any life was our bodies validation of the other.
I fought nothing. I was over it. Over the act of being between barriers, the art of caring. If my mind had been present I am sure it would have responded just as my body had—logically, conveniently—judging off facts, “My body has slept in his before, there is no mistaking, a heart can only experience what it has not known.”
And so I felt nothing of it, when he bent my body in two, taking advantage of its halves. Mouths upon the others nocturnal hole, darkness tongues can go exploring through. The moment between a beating heart, I waited for his touch to move me, to trace hope inside my mouth, to charge my body with sense. I waited for something I expected we all are responsible for, that we can give and found myself waiting for longer than I could, before becoming weak, tired of the betrayal.
His hand pressed into my shoulder’s muscle, while the other closed the lids of my sight and prowling, wrapped around my neck, until I became tighter and tighter, my breath lessening. I went along with him, thinking I had to—pretending his perversity had never been a secret, like it was direction my body knew by heart, as if it were the reason we came together.
Contorting anatomy, my body shaped as an arch, I imagined he thought I appeared like the character for the role, like I was meant to be on my knees. Staring into nothingness, I thought of the message he was telling me—a conversation between sexes—and wondered whether he was listening to my body. While fist pulled hair with pain, no sophistication or subtle contempt, I became committed to the way the body blows, hissing,
“SEXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX!”
Loud slaps against my ass, and I felt nothing of it.
Not until now do I think how easy it is to go missing in the darkness, when the night owns us all. How easy it is to play your part, to pretend to be an expert at what you do not know because it is embarrassing not to know. And so I act like I have done what he needs a hundred times before, as if in silence we share the same gesture, that we depend upon the same wants and needs.
On that bed, that bed which is mine, I respond as if it is his, feel like he does not talk to me because he does not know my name, that he will keep me only during this night and then I will have been had. And I wonder whether this is his way of getting back at me and saying what he never had. This time leaving me with the guilt. This time leaving me to face my denial.
But it is not until now that I can liken it to those elevator rides, the consistent hope they present you with for the moment when you can exit where you are and be where you had been waiting to be. That distance after the moment defined by profound silence, where you thought only to yourself despite the body beside you, where staring at you is some other you that you felt you were but did not want to know. The distance after he has come, where suspended over you is a body you have seen before, but whose silent voice has you feel you could never know. So you come to show something can be made of the silence, but it is not until the moment after speech that your secret is revealed to him, “I hadn’t a name to cry because I never knew you so you could exist.”
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