the habit of being

I am a body like a Navajo blanket. I want you wrapped up inside, giving me shape.

(Alone, I cannot relate these things which have happened to us, because they are too beautiful, and I have decided I hate words. I am afraid of not writing them down; I feel like that it what I should be doing now. Starting from the beginning, every thing. But I cannot, and I wish you would do it for me. Put my hands in yours and make the words come. I need help. )

I am surprised by my own sexual desire, by the reality and intensity of it. It shocks me, that this want is not a thing of dreams and fantasies, or rather that those fantasies have so much substance, are so much who I am. I said to you, you are so much nicer to me in real life than in my dreams. I felt such relief in expressing that, even in such a modest and vague way. I felt I had attempted, at least, to bring together two worlds. I did something I had been previously unable to do.

As I stood waiting in the airport I ran over and over in my head these dreams I had been having, so many dreams over and over the two nights previous, and the second you walked off of that plane I wanted to create all those dreams, dreams that had forced me to get out of bed in the middle of the night. I wanted to tell you to do everything you had wished you could do to me, with me, in all those months since I had last seen you. And yet when you did arrive everything changed, and I felt meek and uncomfortable, and I cursed myself as we walked around Savannah, so oddly hand in hand, like we did not know what to make of one another. And how you said the same things over and over in the car when we left the airport, these things that meant nothing, and I laughed that fake laugh and curled up inside myself and could think only that I wanted very much for you to suddenly turn to me and say “I want to fuck you,” and I hated my lack of courage to say it myself. And I could not be genuine until I felt like that point had been made. This is how I view repression, it is very much the thing that made me unable to say that, right then, when you walked off the plane, even when I imagined that every aspect of my posture must have screamed it. (That part, of course, is only a dream.)

In a way, it is the same thing that keeps me from voicing my desires, even when they are quite specific. In a way, it is very separate, because as you said, I want these things done TO me, and that is a huge part of it. I want it to be your choice. I wonder if this is too idealistic an outlook. At the same time I believe that our wants, sexually, must converge, just because it would be fitting with everything else about our relationship. I am so excited with thoughts that things will only get better and better. That amazes me, that it is even possible. And somehow I know that I will never cease to be amazed.

All the same there are so many things I want to be able to say to you, and there are many things I feel I have no capacity to say. There are feelings I want to share with you that I could not even begin to explain to myself, could never put into words (I am limited, in that respect), unless perhaps I was extremely intoxicated. Sometimes I feel intoxicated when I am with you; I feel more alive, like the air that was once simply there is instead doing some sort of ballet dance and massaging my skin and screaming at me, daring me to move, all at once.

I want you to know how I felt when you tied that ribbon around my wrists.

I am cold in my house, and I wish to put that line in italics because it has so much meaning. I am cold in my house.

(In my house, in my room, in my space, in my skin, in my cells I am ice and a vanilla bean speck, a nucleus which has died somehow, or even a star. My compassion is endless, while my warmth runs negative.)

“Why do I have to be here this summer?”
“Because this is where you live.”
“Because this is where I live?… I live in my head.”
“Well, I guess we all do… To a certain extent.”

I was crying, my head against her side, on the dirty tan blanket she read under. I had been crying all day, and it took all the courage I could invoke to climb those stairs, dragging my heavy eyes to look at her, my mother, now so foreign from my binary perspective; I was so afraid. She didn’t know what to tell me, and I just wanted to say “you still love me, don’t you?” (Question Number One: Can a mother love a daughter who gets fucked on the floor of some generic Hampton Inn hotel room and tells her she was at Media Play until 1 am the same way she loves a daughter who wins the English department award and National Merit Scholarships and studies biology diligently for hours and hours?) but instead I said I needed a hug and that I would be so miserable. And she was still, in a daze, so like me, and I felt I was killing her, and went back downstairs.

I sat down again on my own bed and he walked up to me, comfortable, familiar, warm; he stood there and held my head against him as I cried and cried and cried. He stroked my hair and I sobbed, and it had been that way forever, and I said again and again that I didn’t know, and he said he needed his keys, and finally I gave them to him.

And he left. And I kept crying.

(Eventually, I stopped. And I remember telling my thoughts in words and my feelings in touch and kisses and screams, and knowing, without doubt, that another WHOLE PERSON really exists in this white thin world of paper Katharineperceptions stapled together so roughly and unprecisely and slightly torn. Being overcome, so happy it cannot be thought of, so real and so alive, so very much myself, pressed against a wall, in the shower or in the rain, so grateful. Realizing, for the first time, what it really means to love someone else more than myself, and how the tears kept flowing, and my body became nothing but an extension of my emotion, and I could never see myself as anything but beautiful, and so much a girl, and so much in love.)

(Again, don’t forget, lovely image: crushing blackberries against skin of lover, drawing pictures in red juice.)

This myth of commitment seduces me day by day, and I wonder if the rules were whispered in my ear as I was but an embryo wrapped in aluminum foil, ready to be microwaved, to explode the world. Just as I marvel at myself, when I can find the idea of folding socks enticing, or even changing my name, or even being a trophy, or even being the good one who gets cheated on but is still loved and pitied. It doesn’t seem to make sense that in this day of liberation liberation liberation and freedom to fuck it all that I might still want the old-fashioned subservient role so many bitches and goddesses alike have thrown off, fodder for ravens and whales. I never grew up in sit-com normalcy, my mother is funny in a Woody Allen way, yet still she makes good soup and kept me from dying for years I do not even have colormemories of. I know my worth in all its tints and shades and hues, and still I crave objectification as much as I eroticise promises and lies. I can’t say I understand. I suppose I could chalk it all up to being a girl. Not a woman, though I may be, but there is something different about being a girl; it’s too much a social class, a political state. They tell us we should scream, and that we are all character actors, slaves to our hormonal curvatures, and drama queens, and so easily mocked.

Yet how am I to prove myself, how am I to live defiantly, without even one piercing, and not wearing my fishnets very often. I am a “nice Southern girl,” and I want to be laced into my corset, vengefully and without sympathy. Also, I want to lace myself, and stare in the mirror, simply, easily, without thought of sex but only long beautiful strings and x-es like heavy black stitching in my skin, a torn white sheet ready to be laundered. (I join a cult for the whoring off of pretty imagery.)

- - -

I like this quotation someone else quoted. It is originally accredited to Pat Califia, though I don’t even know who she is:

“Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant. It means being aware that there is something dissatisfying and dishonest about the way sex is talked about (or hidden) in daily life. It also means questioning the ways our society assigns privilege based on adherence to its moral codes, and in fact makes every sexual choice a matter of morality. If you believe that these inequities can be addressed only through extreme social change, then you qualify as a sex radical, even if you prefer to get off in the missionary position and still believe there are only two genders.”

- - -

I said once, in a moment of false-clarity, late at night perhaps, that sex was a metaphor for everything. If a couple in the act of intercourse is simultaneously making love and raging war, plundering and stealing, worshipping and praying, having and being had, what else is possibly left over for them, as they exit post-coital bliss? And it is said over and over again that sex is not intercourse and intercourse is not orgasm and none of it, none of it, is love. These words are thrown around, juggled by a harlequin in pink, and I say sex is not the immaculately groomed, clear skinned, air-brushed pseudo-people on the pages of The Idiot’s Guide to the Kama Sutra, with their false facial expressions and perfect posture. Damned puppets. I do not want to be a machine. Machines are metaphors for sex, and sex is a metaphor for everything, and I am only one girl.

But what did I really say? I so seldom say anything, but I refuse to forget that about sex, my spanning metaphor, the most prominent commentary I ever offered was “It’s not that big of a deal.” There you have it, the ever-needed proof that nothing is a big deal and we are, indeed, free. Sounds like an Eastern religion. Sounds like a cheap self-help book.

Sounds like a lonely girl.

(My fingernails are splitting in two. And when I look at you, I see nothing but a faded portrait of myself. The absolute worst insult I could think of, just in case.)

Where do I go, when we’re furnishing our dream in a graph-paper chart? Seeing my words printed, I am fascinated with them and not what I am saying. Lost and limp, I can still cross my feet behind my head, and I could always love. My bed is falling apart, and I want to live my life on a flat surface, looking up. And that is all right now, mixed up.