the habit of being

(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.)

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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.”

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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.