the habit of being

” It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in scrutinizing… that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness…” -Henri Poicare

It is a photograph of a coat hanger, a hanger hanging from a knob, and one might easily think that is all there is to it. The wire is black, slightly warped, a bit akimbo and humble in its way, though somehow self-satisfied. It is a hanger that simply hangs, coming equipped with no special wood, no padding, no paper sheath proclamation of “I heart my dry-cleaners.” There is only the twisted neck, strangled below the hook that hugs the knob, and the imperfect isosceles triangle suspended from it, casting a slight gray shadow on the otherwise immaculate closet door and wall which create the solidly white background.

* * *

For days after the attack, Greenwich Village was silent. They cut us off from the rest of the world, as if 14th street were the dividing line between that which was real and that which was surreal, the hair that divides sanity and madness. Those of us who stayed smelled the smoke of Ground Zero in a quiet solitude. We gazed at our neighbors over their facemasks and scarves; occasionally, we even smiled understanding half-smiles, but we no longer knew one another, just as we no longer knew ourselves, and we no longer knew our world. I walked along Broadway with my friends as they photographed the dust cloud, standing in the center of the huge street abandoned even by the caravans of yellow cabs.

I began to see my yesterdays as if they were love poems, lost in the mail and only partly remembered, in broken metaphors. In a sense, I felt more in love than I ever have, despite everything. Before it happened, I told my new friends or acquaintances that I hadn’t had sex since June, and I suppose they pretended to be shocked. I was the girl sitting on the floor of the smoke-filled jazz club waiting for the 3 am set to begin. I was the girl waiting for the moment when all awkwardness fades away and the entire room — musicians, subdued drunkards, sleepy college students, bricks and old photographs on the wall — begins to blur into one floating melody. We all tapped our feet or swayed our shoulders or nodded our heads or sat perfectly still as the music invaded our negative space, and when we glanced at one another in the dark we felt as if we must have known each other on some level where it hardly mattered that we neither knew one another’s names nor spoke the same language nor read the same poetry. We were fluent in listening and thought and almost-thought and non-thought: we were all in love.

* * *

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
- e. e. cummings (65)

* * *

The door in the picture is slightly cracked, open only wide enough to leave another black line, serene in its straightness but only millimeters shy of parallel with the edges of the frame. This line, which urges the viewer closer to the photograph and beckons her to look behind the paper, somehow, to see what is hidden, is not so thin as the wire of the lonesome hanger, but intersects it from beneath in two places as it travels its course from the top to the bottom of the photograph. The knob of the door to which the hanger clings is colored golden but is not at all flashy. It, like the hanger, is only there, in a room which must be nothing more than plain, quite flatly utilitarian, with its white white walls, tinted slightly rose by the light. The source of this pinkness is unseen, as is the majority of the door itself, the greater part of the walls, yet in this tiny view, not much larger than a coat hanger and a knob, the character of an entire room, an entire life, can be observed, if one only takes the time to notice it, to see. The plain and simple things are all too often written off quicky as shallow, lacking meaning beyond that which is immediately thrust forward.

To say that a hanger (or a photograph, a story, an emotion, a scene or a life) is simple is to say it has no value, if one defines simplicity is the reciprocal, the opposite, of complexity. This black and white vision leaves the viewer (or participant, as the case may be) unsatisfied. In order to full experience and appreciate life or art, one must be able to detect the utter simplicity of that which is complex, as well as the complexity of that which seems simple at first exposure. One must find the beauty in each, and realize those separate beauties are in fact one.

However, simplicity should not be marred by transposing it into that which it is not. Though that which is simple often masks many layers of complexity, simplicity itself should not be defined as a function of complexity. The beauty of simplicity comes along with a certain controlled elegance. We mustn’t contemplate so much our tiny scene, our doorknob, our crack in the door, our black hanger. It is only itself, and that is enough. It is a scene for any room, quite normal, yet somehow so profoundly simple. In its simplicity, its straight-up reality, lies meaning and beauty. The outline of this hanger could have been applied to the surface of the wall by a skilled calligraphist with his black sharpie marker. Nothing could be so basic as this triangle, which hangs amid the whiteness like a woman’s hips, bones poised to be palmed.

* * *

I remember, before I came here, my naked body straight and flat against tightly woven hotel carpet, my neck held in place between his ankles. That was my love. That was June and this is September. Sometime between those two months saw my mother tearfully walking down to the subway station, leaving me alone in Greenwich Village; sometime between those two months everything changed.

Still, here I remain, in New York City, where buildings fall down and thousands of people die so close by that I smell the smoke of the explosion for days. There he remains, 2000 miles away, thinking about it all too much. Nothing is as simple as a hanger on a doorknob in April, a picture he sent me with others, showing me his surroundings as they were and as I imagine they still remain. There is no appreciating quiet beauty in a war zone, and no one really feels right about going to a jazz club in “a time like this”. Simplicity seems lost, another casualty in what everyone seems to refer to as “the tragedy, ” but I am still in love.

* * *

I am taken with this thing that is smallness. The word itself defines everything I seek. Smallness is the only paradox, and perhaps the most basic truth. Within the very small, the indistinct and indivisible pieces of life, lay worlds of complexity so often obscured that they again become what is simple, what is ultimate and beautiful. The concept of infinite smallness underlies all of science. I study cells. A cell is by definition a tiny thing, yet with any knowledge of biology comes the realization that within a cell are numerous smaller elements, sub-specks working constantly as an orchestral whole, accomplishing feats of such scope and specificity that no chemist or biologist could hope to reproduce them in the macroscopic world. As research progresses, humans burrow deeper into the realm of the very small, all the while opening up increasingly complex worlds of knowledge which stack like Lego blocks. Atoms to electrons to quarks and down down down toward nowhere. What next? Is there a limit to the number of times something can be reduced to fragments? Is there a truly finite idea in all the universe?

Conversely, what are the truly large things? What is hugeness, what is complexity? What are the things that break us apart with their sheer gravity? What are the ideals which enlighten us? We break them all smaller and smaller into shapes and lines and numbers and letters and specks and soot. We hold them and we love them and we strangle them and we fuck them until they are not entities on their own, but parts of ourselves. Complexity cannot exist without simplicity. But what then is life itself? What is a child, what is a person, what is a lover? Are these beings functions of the amounts of space they take up, both in the carbon-based world and in the memories of others, which we are beginning to view as indeed part of the carbon-based world? Are they something more? Is to be alive to be truly, undeniably, complex? Of course. But life is complex beyond the reaches of human thought, and if true complexity is unfathomable, then everything we see as complex is a simplification. Nothing is completely understood at the extremes - we don�t know the limit of largeness just as we don’t know the limit of smallness.

Size is only a matter of projection. I choose to project on negative infinity; I believe the truth lies in the very small, the very simple. I look for it in a cell; I look for it in a photograph of a hanger on a wall, in a single solitary moment or an image, in a word, in a feeling. But one could easily explore the opposite extreme. It is incorrect to define vastness as nothing more than the sum of small things. Layers of complexity come with emergent properties, quite separate from what lies beneath.

* * *

Restless, in the days after the twin towers fell, we, the onlookers, were all pulled in opposite directions. There was on one side the desire to join the new cause, to add to the hope, to help, to be there, to survive. Constantly still was the equal but opposite pull of depression, of wanting to hide and to run away to and to make it all simply disappear. Thus we, the bystanders, all walked around with looks of confusion and shock on our faces, we all broke down from time to time, we all cried, we all decided to change the world, we all decided to accept it, and we all decided to deny. Eventually, we, the survivors, all just kept on living, with the pull that never completely faded, and noticed there was no way to describe the true color of the air. That shade was thick and touchable, and it could never be contained on a television screen, not in the constantly repeating video coverage of the second plane’s entry, not in the crumble or in the aftermath or even in the stream of interviews with eyewitnesses. For those of us who were there, that color became like a repeating number in the back of the mind of a semi-neurotic. 3333333333 all the time. Walk, 3, talk, 3, sleep, 3, 3, 3. 3, the color of our tragedy, which couldn�t be subdued by flipping the off switch on a remote control. The sirens kept wailing and the fighter planes kept flying overhead, as the fake Rolexes and Oakleys sold on the street were replaced by cheap American flags. I was still in love.

* * *

The hipbones in the hanger, which are not really there, I see perhaps only because unlike the rest, I know this is not only some closet and some hanger, but your closet, your hanger, your golden knob, your lighting and your lines, and yet another piece in the puzzle that comprises your story. I would very much like my own hips to be settled in your hands, secure against your stark paper-white walls, floating in this photograph with my body in your endless expansive negative space. I ask myself, could I ever be so fragile, so elegant as this black hanger with its painterly, unbroken line of wire? Could I offset a wall with parallel shadows while retaining such grace, such finite placement? Or is it enough that I recognize the beauty of your photograph, of the mundane objects you have captured in a way only you can? Is it quite enough that I see the sensuality of what to most must be only just a hanger, a coat hanger hanging on a knob, and nothing more?

* * *

“in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,” (3); “nothing which we are able to perceive in this world equals/ the power of your intense fragility” (13/14); “the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)” (19); “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” (20). These are statements of contradiction. How can that which is frail be powerful? How can one body, one essence, one person (with small hands, no less), contain all that is implied by this poem? How can that which is tiny be at the same time boundless? How can one poem explain everything?

* * *

The massive can be ugly, can disguise itself as fate, can color itself gray as hate. The massive can impose itself, in all its various pieces. Have not the screams, the tears, the broken windowpanes, the calls home, the candles, the dust, the flames and frightened faces changed us all forever, down to the tiniest particle? One voice repeats itself, in oscillating sound waves, frequencies raining down from a jet plane, connecting one world to another: “The plane’s been hijacked.” It is hard to concentrate; it is hard to be still, to simply BE, when the world is forever in the way. “The plane’s been hijacked. We’re all going to die.” I see it in slow motion, that building falling millimeter by millimeter upon itself. I see a place I stood in myself, marveling at the cleanliness, the order, the perfection, yielding mass chaos. And where is simple beauty in all that? Where can we find it, despite everything? “The plane’s been hijacked. We’re all going to die. I love you.”

Love is the smallest thing of all, by virtue of its simplicity - it is purely what it is, and there can be no other description that fully conveys it - and in its ability to encompass everything else. To be small is to be also immense; to be simple is to be also complex. Look at a hanger, at a cell, at a note vibrating off the walls, a voice, a sigh, a moment suspended, I love you. The entire world, in a sense, is surrounded and covered by love; we are all a part of it, tapping into it, as if drinking from a fountain, or floating in the ocean, or falling from the sky as rain. When one is in love, one can’t help but feel that one’s self and one’s lover are only very small particles drifting around in some higher state of being, that love itself is the tangible force which holds everything together. Yet, as e. e. cummings explores in his poem “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,” the broad expanses of love are often projected inward, or, in this case, into one’s object of affection. The speaker of this love poem describes the awe he feels in the power his lover holds over him. The speaker of this love poem describes the awe I feel in the power my lover holds over me. Love is both tiny and vast. Love, in its endless simplicity, pervades even the most huge and horrific disasters. Despite everything, love is everything.

I sit in the grass on Washington Square Park. There are pigeons and people, so many people, on the 4th of July.

The first time I came to New York I was 13. Now, I am 18, and this is where I live. Though I haven’t moved yet, I know. I just know, walking around here and looking - all these people, two lovers embracing in the grass, a girl in pink jumping rope, people working in sketchbooks, people walking their dogs, every style of clothing imaginable. Nothing seems flat, and I’m not afraid of getting lost anymore. I belong here, in a relatively cliched way.

It is beautiful, calm, people are asleep, the breeze is perfect, there are birds and trees, a cross on the top of a building. Orange flowers, cell phones, video cameras (people video other people, just ordinary people walking by, only they are not ordinary at all, and neither am I). They never stop, these people, always moving, changing faces and bodies and sounds. The constant movement is static in itself, and as calming as the ocean, and somehow even still, in in a sort of alternative way, maybe like quantum mechanics, though I can’t say why. Close to me a single squirrel stands on it hind legs, looking around. An old mime gesticulates in a beard and a tuxedo. Some guy in grey looks at me, occasionally. There is a pen for children and a pen for dogs. Benches dotted with backs of all lengths and breadths.

(It occurs to me that I could be fucking you loudly right here in this grass and no one would care at all.)

We could be those two lovers sitting together, lost in their own little world, observing the the walkers in their strange getups as if they were no different than the trees, the purple NYU flags, the yellow cabs, the birds and the breeze.

The squirrel likes me, it is practically in my lap.

I want to be a performance artist, paint myself brick colors and lie still in the path, watch this odd kaleidoscope picture change again and again, as if nothing but a speck apart from it all, an object with eyes.

I think it will rain, and I didn’t bring an umbrella.

I might have so many adventures here. I might have no time left even to think or to write them all down. I’ll just get up one morning and decide today I will -go- somewhere. I could do that again everyday and never run out of places to go, even without leaving the city. Yet something is missing, and I want you here to see this with me, because you’d really SEE it, in the way only you can, and you would understand.

. . .

Home. Not home. In between homes.

Orientation was tiring. I did a lot of walking around Greenwich Village, adventurously. Explored many little stores, some of which had sections one had to be 18 to enter. Met girls with lots of piercings and very little clothing. Talked with Thea from South Carolina (who is also in a large-scope long distance relationship) and Brad with blue hair (future English major and wimp, but has read lots of good stuff, and recommended good ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s). Shocked people with stories of south Georgia at the “diversity workshop.” Went to the largest used book store in the world, which is indeed quite huge, with books on shelves so tall you have to get up on ladders just to read the titles of the ones near the top. Took a biology test. Realized that I’m going to attend the kind of college where the orientation leaders show you the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a big screen in a lecture hall, scream all the call lines, and even dress up and do the floorshow. Got used to telling people that I’m a biology major, and registering their shock. Rode in taxis, alone, didn’t get lost, or raped, or even murdered. Signed up for fall classes:

MONDAY
9:30 -10:45 Calculus I (lecture)
11:00 -12:15 Molecular and Cell Biology I (lecture)
2:00 - 3:15 General Chemistry I (clinic)
3:30 - 4:45 Writing the Essay
TUESDAY
9:30 - 10:45 General Chemistry I (lecture)
1:30 - 6:00 General Chemistry Lab (lab)
WEDNESDAY
9:30 - 10:45 Calculus I (lecture)
11:00 - 12:15 Molecular and Cell Biology I (lecture)
2:00 - 2:50 Calculus I (recitation)
3:30 - 4:45 Writing the Essay
THURSDAY
9:30 - 10:45 General Chemistry I (lecture)
2:00 - 3:15 Molecular and Cell Biology (recitation)
FRIDAY
9:30 - 10:20 General Chemistry Lab (lecture)
11:00 - 12:15 General Chemistry I (recitation)

I’m an academic masochist, though I’m starting to think masochism doesn’t exist.

. . .

Haley: “My two years of biology in high school were the toughest, most magical introduction to any subject I’ve had. I found I was good at humanities, but I was better at science. And I had no idea what I would do with a humanities degree, didn’t want to be an academic, and didn’t want to do business; besides, I was horrible at econ. Most importantly, I found that academia killed the most exciting parts of the humanities for me through its excruciating essay assignments and bombastic academic writing. In contrast, academic science gave me the vocabulary to discuss biological sciences and the tools to answer my billion questions. Even with all it’s systemic problems and personal frustrations, I love science. I found it incredibly exciting and question-provoking. I still do.”

I wish I were more original, but I must admit that I feel almost exactly the same way, especially about how classes often ruin everything I like about the humanities, particularly writing.

I decided, before I left for NYC, that I wanted to make a zine, a little paper collection, highlights from sarasvati and erendira. I am not forgetting about that, it seems important. I want to send one to my AP English teacher. I promised her non-academic writing for a year.

(ETC: A story is always hardest to tell for the first time. After that, it can be called to mind fluidly and recited at will. The telling becomes automatic and is much more an exercise in sound and cadence than in fragment reconstruction, mystery restoration, thinking through black holes or keyholes, working from part to whole (what is that called? one of the tropes) or vice versa. That’s why I tend to feel as if I haven’t really finished living a moment in my life until I’ve written it down. )

The starting point is one hotel, crazy mad and all business, save a room in the back where I swim with tricky dolphins in a pool. (This reminds me of Trois Couleurs: Bleu, when Juliette Binoche is floating in the water.) The trainer shows up and exiles me, much to my dismay, but she is strong, muscular in a bright blue bathing suit, and I am only myself in my dress, which isn’t tailored enough to make me look pretty.

In a nicely decorated room with no water at all (and no dolphins, tame or otherwise) stands my grandfather, leaning on a mantelpiece and speaking seriously into the telephone. Upon noticing my entrance, in the pretty but unflattering dress, he cradles the phone against his shoulder and informs me that I must go to China, though I am headed somewhere else. I have never been to China, and I am worried (It’s New York, says J when I tell him this part, and I say I know.)

Briefly I am in an airport, going to or arriving in China, I don’t remember which, but more importantly I am transported to a much more elite hotel that the one in the States (wherever we were, my grandfather and I), and nowhere do I see anyone Chinese. (The lack of Oriental-looking people in China is not an issue in the dream, I don’t think I noticed.)

{ Interruption, the mail man came: Marvelous present from Miriam! I am so excited and wanting to have adventures now, and that’s good because tomorrow I am going to New York City, by myself, with a pretty antique wine-color suitcase with paisley interior, and all my clothes my mother “helped me” choose to take because they all match each other in different combinations so I’ll have some “flexibility” while still traveling light. Anyway, M. sent me a map of Vienna with keys in five languages, and Victorian fish stickers, a wallet-sized “Chart of Iridology” (I think iridology is kindof like phrenology except for the eyes rather than the top of the head), a Magic Tree I can grow in just a few hours, 2 black and white photos (of Pittsburgh, I assume - one has [American] Indian dolls in an antique store window, and the other is a bridge with dinosaurs (??) on it), and a little book she made and illustrated herself called “A Small Story About the Moon” which is so lovely and fairytale and had red ribbons to close it. Also, a soft grey feather. She has pretty handwriting, and it is somewhat similar to mine (I didn’t know this; I’ve been trying to get her to write me a letter for THREE YEARS). I am so wanting to say think you with lots of exclamation points but she is not online and already told me to have fun in NYC so maybe I won’t get to talk to her until Sunday. And that is not even all I got in the mail! I got waving combs from ebay so maybe I can have more flapper-like hair, and that is of course marvelous because no one can feel like crap when they have flapper-like hair. }

In the exclusive hotel (in China) are chandeliers producing the kind of soft pinkish light known to even out even the worst of complexions, and two spider-like women stand at the desk with their noses in the air and skin much too tight on their cheeks. The woman to whom I speak has the utmost contempt for me, but directs me toward a long hall, at the end of which sits a table with a large floral arrangement, silver trays of cookies and different shades of wine. To the right, a large doorway opens into a much larger ballroom, where a dance is going on.

The dancers are women with long dark hair and white dresses with red sashes (these dresses would not look good on me either, and are somewhat similar to what I am wearing in the dream, and now that I think of it, I think my hair was long too, at least in that segment). They all hold hands, flying around in birdlike formations, only more circle and less V. It is like some native ritual, but not at all solemn, they all grin widely and are obviously giddy. I run to join in, laughing and unaware.

The snobbish woman from the desk, emaciated and frowning, leads me to my room, which is more of a suite, expansive and open. She reminds me, with that hateful look in her eyes, that I am in China and alone, knowing no one and unliked by all.

In my room stands a boy from my past. (He is a scruffy guy from my honors math classes in high school, the intelligent but underachiever sort; he’d stay up all night drinking and then come to school dead tired, slept in class from time to time. Many days he just wouldn’t show up at all. We never talked much, but I always got the impression that he was interesting; he liked Woody Allen and took philosophy classes and wanted to go to film school. He had the second highest SAT score.) I have no idea why he is in China, or in my room, but I am so glad to see someone I know, someone who likes me, unlike those dreadfully sharp women from the desk, and all of a sudden his tongue in is my mouth, and we are making out while the coral and lime patterned wall paper swirls around and I try my best to disregard the fact that I am kissing THIS boy in favor of just that I am kissing and not alone. Somehow in all this we wind up having sex, and all along I am criticizing him horribly, and am even MAD that he seems to be completely inept, and I laugh and insult him, pushing him off of me right before he orgasms, and so he comes all over my leg, and it is ORANGE. (The night before the dream I’d accidentally squirted soy sauce all over my shorts; this seems somehow related).

He follows me into a huge bathroom, like a public restroom with multiple sinks and stalls, only it is part of my suite, and he stands there as I continue berating his performance and trying to washing orange semen off of me. He leaves, and that is all I remember of that.

Jump to the next day, and J arrives and I am leaning against him on a couch, crying, trying to explain the whole story to him. He is upset, disappointed, and I can’t seem to get out what I’m trying to say. I am feeling guilty, because though I wasn’t enjoying myself through the whole mess I was certainly WANTING to enjoy myself, and was a willing participant. At one point J gets up and closes some blinds on a window, and it is horrible, the whole dream was extremely unpleasant, save the dance scene, and I wake up very glad the realize none of it had really happened.

He loves me, and writes “she sees the value both in sadness and in happiness, and revels in intensity and loss of control.”

At this time I am unable to make a statement in full, I cannot offer a definition. I realize, however, that the way I view control is a very central, if not falsely basic, element in what makes me round and unstatic. I gain all power, all pleasure, from my ability to give myself over to things. A measure of trust, I said, and that is not all. Yet it is somehow so very simple, and below intellectual description, how I feel that be giving up the surface control I am gaining something so much more valuable. This is neither physical nor emotional control, but both and neither at the same time, on different levels, contradiction, and at some central point it all makes perfect sense. Simply said, I am a receiver, yet in receiving whatever action or confession or glossy little pearl is thrown at me, I seem to add as much to the meaning of the gift as the giver. In a way, I am giving a gift as well, and therefore do indeed have control, only the control I gain is not the most obvious, it hides under blankets and behind opaque screens. I am an extreme, I am yin.

The issue is not so much that I find being held down, trapped, enfolded, devoured, to be among the most blaring of my sexual wants. I become only more aware that I have always been aware that power dynamics get me off. My earliest memories of masturbation center on rape fantasies, and I’ve had those dreams as long as I can remember. I can still see even early ones vividly: myself stripped in an empty parking lot, tied to a lamp post, and they came up to me in sequence and touched me (I touched myself), and then they fucked me, one by one, and I feel the concrete, it is cool, and the lighting is such that the ones not having their turn could stand outside a certain circle and barely be seen. (I will, of course, note that I am well aware of the many, many differences between what I would call rape fantasy and actual rape. I’m immensely glad that I have never really been forced into intercourse against my will.) All the same, I have a long-standing fetish, and I will always prefer the term “fuck” to “make love,” if simply because, like in French, the term is much closer to “rape.” I do not like the idea of consent, it seems false.

I discovered S&M in my early teens. I read everything I could find. I went to chatrooms. I visited pornographic websites. I don’t recall feeling guilty about it. At 15, I wanted a job as a model for bondage photography. (Seriously.) I was silly, very young, but I saw clearly I had a strong interest, was ever so intrigued. Still, it didn’t really click with me that my interest could be “real.” Honestly, at 15, I thought most everything about me was part of some false-personality I had created for myself, I thought my life was nothing but a continuum of fabricated stages, based on ideas of who I wished I could be, rather than who I was. For example, throughout the saddest periods of my life, I believed that I was not depressed, but rather that I was somehow playing the role of a depressed person, because I bought into the idea that sadness somehow created beauty.

It took me a long time to realize and admit that my fascination with domination and submission wasn’t just part of one of my goofy teenage personas, and to separate what it was that appealed to me from the blaring image of overly made-up women in black leather bodysuits posing provocatively under captions reading “Spank Me!” in bright pink letters. I never wanted the show. I never wanted the affectedness or the game. I’m really not after some token kink to make me feel like a radical.

Rather, I’d like to be fully comfortable with the reality that my natural inclination is to want to be dominated, that it’s perfectly alright if I find the idea of being tied up as part of sex play exciting (Extremely exciting), that D/s can be a beautiful thing, not necessarily plastic or pornographic or overly done, but simple, very real, unaffected, and satisfying.

{ Insert rant, with apology: It seems like almost anyone who’s anyone in feminism would be inclined to think I’m seriously fucked up. That I’m buying into some damaging stereotype of what a woman’s role is, that I’ve been somehow suckered into an outdated way of thinking that everyone’s been trying so hard to eradicate. My god, since when does the Revolution or whatever the hell it’s called these days cite as one of its goals to dictate how each and every member of the female sex must behave herself in bed in order to qualify as liberated? It’s completely ridiculous, and quite contradictory to everything -I- believe about feminism. But I’m no theorist, and I haven’t read much of anything on feminist theory, or queer theory, or any theory in general, so forgive me if I have no idea what I’m talking about. But I think it’s extremely strange that a movement which supposedly works to end persecution of women (sexual, economic, or otherwise) would do something so blatantly idiotic as to support the idea that women who CHOOSE to lead sexual lives contrary to a very strict set of I-won’t-blow-you-unless-you-eat-me-first standards somehow -deserve- to be persecuted. So I don’t understand the anti-porn movement, and I certainly don’t see why prostitution should be illegal, or why girls who like to be fucked are any less capable of standing up for women’s rights. }

I guess, getting back to what I’ve been TRYING to say…

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.