Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus

Goodmorning, Se単or Alfabus A Novel

by Kathryn Fischer

For my mother, Chris, and Tina. They were there all along, even when I didn’t see them.

Thanks to Juvenal for helping me to acknowledge that this was the book I really wanted to write. Thanks to Edie for tearing it apart with me and seeing the wider picture. Thanks of course to my classmates; we took ourselves just seriously enough. We loved, lived and wrote hard. And thanks to all the men and women whose spirits bless my life.

Contents

cause i’m a feminist.

5

goodmorning, SeĂąor Alfabus.

6

i raped you.

14

not so pretty girl.

21

i’m so in love with you.

28

are you lying to me?

37

i'm sorry.

49

Dear Ruth.

53

dear M.

55

it was hot.

57

story that repeats inside my head.

61

sunken in.

66

throwing bowls.

77

i went to the bay.

87

i have started to write in numbers.

94

this morning waking.

98

hegemony works like this.

103

ghosts.

110

dear mom.

128

don't contact me anymore.

130

final letter to M.

136

an open letter to my women friends.

138

fabricated love affair art project.

143

Deep down, you understand me, you know I adore you.

You are not only something that is mine, you are me myself.

--Frida Kahlo

5

cause i’m a feminist.

Well cause I'm a feminist, that's what I am.

How do you know?

I just know cause that's what it is when you want to be everything, when you're a girl and you want to be true to yourself.

What does it mean to be true to yourself?

Do everything that I want to do and not be judged.

Did anyone tell you what a feminist was?

Not exactly, but my mom's a feminist I think, 'cause she used to do stuff in Chicago, like maybe she fought for equal pay for men and women.

Who else is a feminist that you know?

I think my aunts are, 'cause they always tell me about the goddesses and one gave me a purple T-shirt with a woman on the front holding the planet in her hands. It's my favorite T-shirt. And another one of my aunts, her room is painted blue and when I go visit her it feels warm and there's always women around and we sing together. And I think, that's like being a feminist.

Are you always going to be a feminist?

Well, yea, that’s what I am.

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goodmorning, Señor Alfabus.

Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus. She awoke from a heavy sleep and her lips formed these strange words. She had never had a dream so vivid. Her eyes focused on the blinds.

Parallel lines of light and dark sucked her into a trance. She knew there was a body there next to hers and a slight breeze from the window but these evaded her senses; she was sunken in. She was gripped again by the strongest sadness, again not wanting to be alive, again seeing nothing but parallel strips of light and dark. Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus, she said. The words came to her lips from some place deeper than this morning; she couldn’t stop them. The body next to her turned and stroked her forehead.

I can’t remember who I was before Señor Alfabus. I look around. No one will tell me. They stare at me blankly, as though conducting behavioral observations. They must think me strange, but I do not remember what is strange/not strange. I ask what are you thinking? And they say nothing.

I can’t remember. I cannot remember.

I can visualize a photograph, taken by a childhood friend. I called it Tasting the Fifth Dimension. In the photograph, there is a longhaired girl, playing the part of me, and she is standing off-kilter on the tip of a rock, arms outstretched, her left hand dipping down nearly touching her toes—who/me/is/she?

Four in the morning and I find myself obsessing over words on my body, placed there by you. I recite them in order, I create their order. I cannot stop reciting them. I raped you. I'm sorry. I'm so in love with you. I love to hear you sing. Did you make him

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cum in your hand? Did you? Are you lying to me. When I masturbate I still think about you. We’re not having a conversation; you’re the only one talking. I can't be close to you because I'm still attracted to you. Don't contact me. At times I believe I am made of nothing but these phrases. They hold me hostage; they are my saving grace? Each one a new designation of my body.

You must be right; I am the only one talking. Perhaps you do not exist, and only I do. Perhaps. If I stop calling you by your name, and only begin to refer to you as the letter M, perhaps the reality of you, the reality that you are nonexistent, will begin to illuminate itself. After all, doesn’t something become more real when you put a name to it?

I sit in cafés, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, drinking more caffeine than my calf muscles can tolerate, knowing that in the middle of the night I will lie awake, stretching them futilely against the wall. I see people I think I have known and I ask them their name. I ask because my legs are shaking violently, and the regret I would feel, upon leaving the café without asking, would be worse than this sensation of caffeine ceaselessly invading my bloodstream. And when I find out that they are not you, I sit back down, trip over my own feet, make some polite apology for the inconvenience. But I will do it again, the very next evening.

Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus.

Goodmorning is all the mornings I have awakened and no longer wanted to live.

On this horizon line the occupation of my body begins. My voice—that I heard echo within my own ears; my eyes—that perceived themselves mine; my hands—that felt they

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were connected to this skin; none of these are mine. They are yours. And yet you do not exist-- or, I cannot remember.

When our spoken words could no longer do justice, we wrote each other letters.

One might argue that the writing of a letter is less than direct, and therefore less intimate.

But I assure you, I could say the same things to you in person. But they would require the right space, time and silence. Elements that preexist the reading and writing of a letter.

Connecting under these conditions was not only a beautiful gesture--ink on paper scraps, the tangible record of our love--but it spoke volumes about the nature of our souls.

You and I agreed that psychic communication happens during the writing of a letter, so that once I put my words on paper, they were unlocked from a place of secrecy and flew to you. Before you physically received those words in your hand, I believed you had already read them. Indeed, you had. Your letters also were already part of me when I read them and yet time and silence had elapsed since their composition. The supposition of identification and closeness existed in those letters when I opened them, and reading them only confirmed this sense of self--yours and mine, merged--that I too had been maintaining on paper.

After Seùor Alfabus, everything has spun out of control. Or which came first? It is through the act of living that I am constantly writing a letter, that you, alone, will read— are reading? I feel as though I have no choice in the matter; my body is the pen and it is writing you, and only you, a letter. Or is it that my very body has become the letter and the words on the page, the flesh of my body and the flesh of yours have merged? One letter, yours and mine. Or is it truly that my body is writing this letter into void--my body

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becoming void--and the existence of you is an extension of my mind? I cannot remember. I used to call this letter made of flesh being in love. Now it is only violence.

Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus. She acknowledged him. He was there, standing just above her bed frame. He brought comforting darkness. His command was so powerful that in that moment, she saw nothing else and loved nothing else. Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus. She acknowledged him again. There is something about Alfabus. He appears in moments of metamorphosis, in moments when the borderlines between self and not-self are no longer discernible--much like the body of a letter.

When my cousin became religious she began to say HE is the most important thing to me. Walk beside me and look toward HIM; hold my hand and we will walk towards HIM, together, hand in hand. But if you choose not to, I will still love you, I will not forsake you. Señor Alfabus, are you the most important thing to me? Have these mornings wishing for death become my only saving grace? I like the way your name rolls off my tongue. I like how your tone sucks me in further. [The body next to me strokes my face, he strokes my face.]

What happens when you begin to tell stories about yourself in the third person, from the perspective of the gaze? And yet the third person is you? What happens when you begin to write letters to someone else, but the someone else is you, and indeed the recipient of the letter is you? What happens when there is no separation between self and not-self? When they collide? When every action is performed in relation to the other, executed with the consciousness of this other’s gaze? Not only their physical gaze, but the

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intention of their gaze, the germination of their intention, their judgments, the entire mind and body belonging to the eyes? What happens when you begin to see yourself through the eyes of someone else at all times, when their eyes become your eyes, so that you are constantly looking at yourself through your eyes as though they were not yours? What then?

Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus. There’s no denying him.

What was it that brought all this about? The writing of the letter--a collision of oppositional voices, transformed into one--might be the key. But was it a particular letter that caused the collision; was it a misunderstanding on my part all along? Have I been forever pretending that anything outside myself exists at all? The man living behind my bedroom wall falls asleep to his TV, nightly, relentlessly. And I lie awake. This is our existence—or non-existence.

Believe me, I’ve tried to understand it. I’ve tried to rationalize it through a series of complex multivariable equations. My father was a mathematician, you remember. He wrote an entire dissertation consisting of numbers and letters that represented numbers, only twenty-five pages long. He is a good man. He is a man who once counted and named every animal in Noah’s Ark before putting me to bed. He is a man who stayed next to me until I fell asleep, and when I wouldn’t let him leave, he slept in my doorway. He is a man who drinks seven beers in the garage, alone--a man my mother calls an alcoholic. He is man who plays the guitar on the porch after the mosquitoes come out and smokes a cigarette. A man who told my mother she was mindless, disorganized, fat. He is a man

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who scratches numbers onto napkins and says, I am thinking right now. He once said to me, You are not good at math. He is attached to this phrase and yet unattached.

You too, M, have uttered arbitrary symbolism. And you too will grow from a good boy into a good man--have grown. You, who, with me, once felt the earth move in the tall grass of late summer, under the widest sky. You will make love to your wife. You will teach your children to ride a bicycle. You will bury your father and your mother. You will cheat on your wife and she’ll beg you not to leave her, and you won’t. You will hesitate on my memory for a moment after you turn off the late show and the house is too silent. You, whom I loved so desperately that fear of losing you consented to abuse. You, whom I could not differentiate from myself; you, the recipient of every letter, of the paper of this flesh of this body which is a letter to you.

These must belong in the mathematical expression of explanation. There must be a means to write an equation; you could follow it from left to right and it might involve a traffic light as x, a wagon wheel as y, an old farmhouse as z. What I know is that my family was not bombed to oblivion by a corrupt government, nor starved to death by their own president. They were not massacred by paramilitary machines in a tropical jungle. I went to school, eighteen years of school. My mother was not gang-raped by hideous latenight intruders; I was not born addicted to crack; my brother did not perform strange rituals in obsessive isolation, only to be later diagnosed with some devastating mental disorder; my father was not a serial killer whose true identity was revealed only after being caught. Or was never revealed because he killed us all. No, none of that happened.

None of these are variables. In this equation my father said, you are not good at math (x).

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You read every word in my body (y). And I woke up one morning to find SeĂąor Alfabus looming at the head of my bed (z). This equation is easy enough to follow.

Let’s pretend for one moment that every narrative has a single origin, that the single origin is attached to a single phrase, stemming from a single idea. And the phrase is spoken by one mouth which belongs to one person who has entered a single context for one instance, and the sunlight will fall in one particular angle upon his face. And after the relaying of the idea, there is one single conclusion. Let us pretend for one moment that when my father said you are not good at math, this was the single phrase he could have said, did ever say, that there was no dissertation behind it, no solitary graduate school nights. That he and I existed alone in that split second, independent of any subtle distraction. And in that existence we were singular, apart from the history each of us had lived up to that point. Let us pretend that after my father said this, the only possible reaction was that I would begin this letter to you. It would consist of words on a page, one piece of paper, cut from a single tree, that lived in one corner of a single forest that lived and died once. In the single reading of these words, your response would already exist as though it were the one letter and the one response we would ever write. And these would contain the whole of our bodies, yours and mine, no longer separate, word into flesh.

Goodmorning, SeĂąor Alfabus.

I began this letter to you in some kind of false faith. I must have thought that truth would be discerned, that I would be granted some finality from that action, that the father who could not be fully father might be embodied in you, that your knowing me would be

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complete, whole, that the transparency of the paper on which my letter was written might make transparent my essence, my one life, my instance of living.

The Señor offers me safety in his darkness. I am searching for an origin. I am searching for authenticity to this illness. Was it from one moment onward that every word, thought, figure of speech was already owned by the possibility of your reading me, knowing me? Whatever you are. Or was I you from birth? It is as though I began this letter before even knowing you, coerced by the sick mandate of fate. And it contained, before the words were written, the intimate expectation of your gaze. And yet, I remember, you do not exist. This strange disembodiment might appear exterior to me, as though I could fight it. But when I can no longer struggle against it, is it anything other than myself?

Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus. He has arrived.

I wish I could say that you were dead to me. That your hand were not my hand, your eyes were not my eyes. That an equation could be drawn with a series of simple causes from which we could predict simple outcomes. But you are my fragments of memory, my obsession, the obsessed mirror of self. To what extent your body and mind actually exist I do not know. Your words have been etched into my body; I long to give them back. Perhaps by numbering them, one by one, I will shed these words of yours— even though I will never be able to completely disown them; you and I, your words and mine, being one and the same.

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i raped you.

There was the hockey game. We had to leave for the hockey game, or we were going to be late. There was the traffic on 66 and 95. Always. And there was your splitlevel house. From the living room on the second floor you can see the front door on the first, and it presents the idea of an exit, and the idea of the traffic, and the impending hockey game.

I cannot remember how you were on top of me, M, only that the transition felt smooth. We were vertical then horizontal as though we were being played like marionettes. The sheer strength of the fall made it utterly controlled, precise and directed.

It's funny because I do not remember you as strong, and I was afraid that going down would hurt, the head would slam backwards into the floor, the perfect hair would come undone. Instead I've patched it up so that the history becomes soft as the sleeping sounds my lover makes when I wake from this nightmare, stare at his body there in the morning light.

In my memory I am wearing a rust-orange dress, with the simple straight cut of a secretary's suit. I had come by your house, looking like a pretty temp, with my hair all up in a bun. I had told you that I didn't want to that morning; I guess it was something like the fact of having pulled on my panty hose. How long that takes, you know, to make sure your thumbnail doesn't snag the nylon. They were on so tight, they pulled in any concept of fat on my teenage thighs. They weren't yet women's thighs and those hose still pulled in everything that shouldn't be there. It is that idea of the hose that is omnipresent, that I couldn't take them off and put them on again, what a pain in the ass. But. I know for the

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hockey game I wouldn’t have worn that dress, I must not have had pretty hair, I wouldn't have put on those panty hose for a hockey game. But the times you forced yourself on me and the reasons for no and the clothes that I wore and the expressions on my face have all run together.

I only know for sure that this was one of the blue-ball times. I know you’re snickering, M, but don't tell me you don't know what I mean. There was something about blue and balls and how painful that would be, you know, to sit at a hockey game and have your balls all blue, the cum just dripping out at the tip of your penis, building up like the milk inside a nursing mother’s breast.

Women put pads inside their bras after they start breast-feeding because sometimes their babies don't want to suckle, but the milk just can't help but come out, there's such a tremendous force building inside. When I was thirteen, I watched my mother put the strange plastic machine up against her breast and the white milky nutrients would pump through a set of tubes and into bottles, to be put in the refrigerator and stored for later, when my father would be home alone with little brother and he'd be bawling for mom's breast. We should have brought the pump out for times like this, for times like the hockey game when the balls get so blue, just like mommy's boobs. I guess it was understood that I would act as the machine. After all, it had to be done. You said later, “[I know you didn't want to be the machine but] I didn't want to ruin the hockey game.”

It was okay lying on your living room floor, because it was covered with a plush brown wall-to-wall seventies carpeting. I was comfortable, more or less. It was okay to lie there and negotiate; I mean, it could have gone on forever, but there was the hockey game and there was the thought of the traffic, and we wouldn't want to park out in the satellite

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lots, we'd miss the first inning, or whatever they call it at a hockey game. This was my first hockey game. I had never gotten to see the players beat the shit out of each other for real, real life. Maybe they'd get into a juicy fight this time, maybe they all would be afflicted with blue balls, making them especially ornery; maybe the ice intensifies the blueness of their balls. Maybe the ice is the cause of this cruel affliction, maybe I am as cruel as the ice.

I wouldn't really call it negotiation, though, there was too much fear involved. I don't know where it came from, but it was real and it was thick. It was like the idea of dying, the idea of losing you was; that was the fear you inspired in me when the head of your penis was resting against my clitoris. This act was both a test and an interrogation.

And your interrogation was an ultimatum. It was either with you or without you; it was either yes or a resounding no.

There was the idea of arousal; I mean, to some extent my clitoris acts alone, there is a physicality to it, when it gets rubbed it hardens. There is a message in my brain to get wet. And, there must have been a part of me willing to listen to it. It would have been easier to just obey the mechanics of the moment. But the guttural emotion wanted to leave, wanted to abandon. Wished only that I were not facing this ultimatum. And the fear was gripping, as gripping as death: What if, what if, I lose this one thing that I love, this thing that is life itself? You said, Ruth, we’re going to be late to the hockey game.

That is not to say that there was no rational conscience that understood its job to check the self-created melodrama, no matter how strong and real the melodrama felt, no matter what kind of dichotomy I'd created out of the situation—life or death, yes or no.

She was a shaved-headed butch feminist holding the planet in her hands. It was she, the

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conscience, that was angry, and the anger was directed not at you, but at me [whatchu afraid of, get over the fear you stupid bitch, say your peace, throw this man off]. And then there was the resignation sneaking in. It was saying, fear or no fear, it doesn't matter. Don't take yourself so seriously. And the resignation, too, turned into berating.

I don't know when the attacks started, but it seems as though I have always faced this arresting fear of death. Arresting, that is, in unexpected, momentary spikes of terror. I may be entirely engrossed in the act of living when suddenly death appears imminent and horrifyingly empty. I’ll stop everything, shove my arms out wide, thrust my chest forward, and grasp for something real to hold onto, shouting, stop! Stop! I don't want to die, I don't want to die, Jesus Christ save me. The first time I remember it happening, I was sitting on the kitchen counter and I must have been six. Aunt Jane was there babysitting me, and we were drinking orange juice before bedtime.

The memory coexists with a recollection of asking her if she'd ever had sex. Both incidents took place in the fluorescent green kitchen, the old kitchen with linoleum floors, before it was renovated. It was an embarrassing question for a six-year-old to ask an aunt who'd never been married and never would be, whose own fears crept in, own doubts and deepest sadness kept her in the darkest of depressions. Prisoner to never, ever, being a mother.

I was asking Jane the question and then with a quick and sudden stroke, the panic attack. There was nowhere to hide, I was so exposed and there was nothing to grab onto.

Maybe curl up into a ball, or jump from the counter-top and run for a moment around the linoleum kitchen floor. Oh Jesus Christ, this death is so real, and it is coming for me. It wasn't the violence of death, or the pain, and it wasn't the threat of hell. It was the

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knowledge that there was nothing else. After this, nothing else. No me, no conscience, no me, conscious of me, just void.

Lying there at seventeen, perhaps I felt that I had succeeded, like my mother, in relation to her sister Jane, had succeeded. I had beat Jane; I wasn't just having sex, I was in love. I was gonna get married and have a kid. There must have been sick pride somewhere in the resignation. Pride makes the resignation easier. Under the layer, there must have been a seventeen-year-old Ruth wanting to be six. Under the layer, there was my aunt Jane, the one I would not become. She was the one who cried every Thanksgiving dinner, she was the one we knew was clinically depressed. We were, too, but Jane--no husband, no kids, no pretense to cover it all up. She would be the focal point for our fears. We were all nothing like her, we were all nothing like her, as though chanting this would provide reassurance that we were happy.

That was the kind of fear the idea of losing you inspired in me. So, I guess, given that, it was understood that I would act as the machine. There was no sacrifice considered on my part. As you put it, all couples go through this kind of negotiation. This is how couples are, this is what they do. I would understand this. You were asking me to make my case, but I couldn't really think of anything convincing. I couldn't think of anything that amounted to the gravity of your sacrifice. And time was running out. My clitoris was hardening, even the head of your penis was starting to slide up inside as I was lubricating.

My body was saying it's okay, Ruth, just don't worry about it. It was saying that in a soothing voice, cooing, you don't have to worry about it, there's no sacrifice and your body is not your mind. Then the voice turned serious and sadistic, like a storm rolling in,

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raging before you can even run for cover. For God’s sake, Ruth, you bitch, don't take yourself so seriously.

You cannot imagine my ceaseless rationalizations. You cannot imagine how I have tried to place my woman's body back in the physical reality that is past, how I've empowered the resignation to mean fine you can take me, but you haven't taken me, bastard. Maybe there was power in that divorce—the body from the mind. Maybe there was domination in my resignation. Maybe letting you have my body was a smirk. Maybe it was a beautiful dancer, bowing out. But none of that came just then to the seventeenyear-old, to the inexperienced, to the fear acting as machine. Indeed, you did have my mind. The idea of losing you placed so much fear in me, so real and so arresting, that I went to grab on to something and I felt there was nothing except to take your penis and just stick it up inside me with a purposeful resignation.

That was the grayest moment. That is the moment when the jury leaves the courtroom with concerned wrinkles on their foreheads and we wonder at the muddiness of truth and reality, experience, choice. Or maybe the judge just slams his gavel, case dismissed. I look ever at you, and you look back at me, and I just blink.

The sex was just sex. It was learned, it was routine, there was nothing momentous in it, nothing terrible, no pain, no passion, nothing. It was like going to the supermarket and deliberating for a moment over the right zucchini. It was easy as pie, and then it was over. You know what I did in the end? I broke just like a little girl (I've always hated that song, always hated that concept). And when you asked me why I was crying, it was then that I betrayed myself. Because the conscience made her appearance. And I said, serious

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as ever, sincere and sweet as ever: I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at myself, for not listening to my heart.

I don’t know why I said that. I’m only just learning to forgive myself.

How badly I wanted to let you off the hook. How scary it would have been to hold you accountable. There is a sick smile on my face now—look at how sickening it is. Can’t you feel me, speeding up? Can’t you feel my words, rising out of my stomach to my throat, ready to vomit? Isn't it funny, the kind of power, poverty, desperation my love had?

I might almost regurgitate a laugh. How funny that I could tell you, with true sincerity, I’m mad at myself, not at you. That I could tell you I had not listened to myself. I am laughing hysterically just now, can’t you hear me? I am laughing, you are funny, I am laughing. I am laughing.

And there are a thousand Janes, there are a thousand feminists, and beautiful dancers, sitting in the stands.

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not so pretty girl.

“Jesus,” Ruth's best friend Lisa would say to her, “That sounds like rape to me.”

She said it nonchalantly, as though truth were self-evident.

They had been parked there at the edge of the lot for over two hours, their eyes adjusting to the gradual darkness. They spoke sideways at each other, stared into the bare trees in the suburban forest beyond and pondered their shapes. This was an adult aloofness they were beginning to perform, sometimes accompanied by a cigarette. They were just learning to envision themselves in relation to a larger world and somehow the bland repetition of tree trunks allowed them to imagine magical realities outside of the familiar.

“I don’t know, Lisa. I don’t know if you could really call it that," Ruth finally answered, quietly. Her heart was pounding inside her chest, but she appeared to maintain her cool, continued to avert her eyes. “I think you’re overreacting.”

Lisa twisted her jaw and peered out the sides of her eyes. Remained silent.

Ruth didn’t help. They found themselves in a stand-off before either of them had agreed to it.

“Ruth,” Lisa tried again, after nearly two minutes. “I don’t know who you’re kidding, or why.”

“I just don't know if it could be called that, okay?” Ruth said, feeling angry at Lisa instead of validated. “In any case, it’s complicated ...” she trailed off, though she could feel herself wincing at the betrayal, thinking of times she'd cried during sex with M. “Whatever, Ruth.” Lisa retreated.

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“What do you mean, whatever?” Ruth shot back, her voice easing into the comfort of conflict. She didn't want to leave the conversation without some sympathy. She doesn’t understand M and I anyway, Ruth thought.

"Well, I don't know what else to say.”

“Well what do you expect me to say? I'm not going to leave him. I guess that's what you're saying I should do.” Her voice was nervous, hurried.

"I'm not saying you should do anything, Ruth. I'm just worried about you." Lisa said calmly.

“Yeah. I guess sometimes I'm worried about me too.”

They were silent, still not looking at each other. The engine had long since been turned off and the heat had all but left the car. It was March but they could see their breath in the air.

Lisa took Ruth’s hand from across the long front seat. She turned to her, trying to break their distance. “Listen, do you want to get some fries or something, coffee at the Metro?”

Ruth wouldn’t let down her guard. “It's late,” she lied. “I promised M I'd meet him tonight.”

Lisa pursed her lips and took her hands away, placing them both on the steering wheel. She tried again. “Just get some coffee with me for a minute. Meet you there.”

“Alright,” Ruth said, feeling juvenile. She opened the car door and got out without looking back at Lisa. Shivering, she found her own key in her jacket pocket and fumbled to put it in the lock of her parent's car.

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Ruth started the engine and and the CD player blared full volume. It numbed her quickly. She screeched out of the lot without waiting for Lisa and pulled into the crowded parking lot of the Metro Diner five minutes ahead of her.

It was nearing midnight and groups of teenagers had started to take over the restaurant. Ruth and Lisa sat in one of the seven booths and the waitress brought them two coffees and a plate of fries. Flatt and Scruggs were singing honey let me be your salty dog on the jukebox.

The girls poured their cream and sugar and eyed each other sheepishly. Despite their argument, they were full of new feelings of autonomy--deciding where to drive, what to order on the menu, when to come home. Finger on the trigger and an eye on the hog, honey let me be your salty dog, Ruth sang, almost inaudibly, into her coffee. It was the first moment she’d let go since talking with Lisa in the car. Her mouth curled with secret pleasure and her blond hair fell forward around her face. Lisa watched her. She reached to put a lock of hair behind Ruth's ear.

Ruth looked up and stopped singing. “I love bluegrass,” she said. “Listen to that close harmony.”

Lisa looked at Ruth’s face light up and she couldn’t help but soften. Survival always seemed to come down to those little moments of joy. “I know, Ruth.” Lisa said, adoringly, though she loathed the song.

“Thanks to whomever put this on!” Ruth shouted aloud with a sudden burst of energy.

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Lisa rolled her eyes, embarrassed and elated. An old man at the counter caught Ruth’s eye and gave her a grin. Ruth smiled at Lisa, laughing inside herself at the image of this exchange. In that moment, Ruth felt that she could see the two of them objectively, as though she were watching a movie.

“Listen, Lisa,” Ruth said, suddenly confident. “About what we said earlier. You know, about M. I’m not going to let that happen again. It’s just a matter of being strong inside myself. In any case, don’t you think we all just need to live in the moment for this last summer?”

“Yes,” Lisa said somewhat flatly. She was tired. The conversation was over.

Ruth stood and reached into the back pocket of her jeans for a quarter. They were tight around her thighs and she felt a pinprick of disgust. She gave Lisa another smile and then walked to the pay phone in the back of the diner.

She rang once and hung up. She didn’t want to wake his parents, and she knew he'd know it was her.

Coming back to the table, she said, “Lisa, I'm gonna go.”

"I'm not done with my coffee yet.”

"Sorry, I know. But, look, I should talk to him or something."

"Right, yeah, talk to him," Lisa’s anger flared again. “Where are you going to tell your parents you've been when you come home tomorrow? Spending the night at my house?"

"Actually, yeah," Ruth confessed.

They were silent together while Lisa glared at her. Then, "Goddamnit, Ruth."

"Don't be mad at me," Ruth pleaded.

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"I'm not, girl," Lisa lied, with a biting tone in her voice, "Just trying to figure out what the hell you're doing."

"Whatever, fuck it. I'm in love with him. I can't just drop him."

"I know you're in love with him, Ruth, you've fucking told me that about two million times."

"Yeah," she said only. Then she got up and walked out the front door.

She drove too fast again, turning the music up almost as loud as it could go. I'm invincible, so are you, Ani sang over the speakers. We do all the things they say we can't do.

All the lights blinked yellow after ten at night and she sailed through them arrogantly. Some empty Northern Virginia highway, Ruth's mind wandered. Some crazy long-haired girl, playing the part of me.

We got rings of dirt around our necks.

Fuck them, Ruth thought, they'll never have me, not Lisa, not M, not my mom.

Fuck all that. Skip school and taste the fifth dimension.

We smell like shit, still when we walk down the street, boys line up and throw themselves at our feet.

She imagined herself dirty, sunburnt, ragged, riding a bus and staring out the windows, headed somewhere far away. She blasted out her ears and thought, I am invincible, invincible.

We both carry a switchblade in our sleeves, she mouthed, me and Lisa, me and Lisa we do.

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A new song came on and she drove faster, ran all the stop signs in M's silent neighborhood and scanned the rear view mirror for cops. She peeled into M's driveway and slammed the breaks.

Ruth didn't turn off the car. She didn't want to ruin the feeling. I am not a pretty girl, I am sorry but I am not a maiden fair. I am not a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere.

M stepped out the front door with his finger over his lips, and his forehead wrinkled. The headlights of Ruth's car shown bright white on the garage door's sterile paint.

Fuck you were the words that first came to her head. The caffeine and the music took her higher. You'll never understand me as I really am, she thought, this free woman.

‘Cause this is who I really am whether you know it or not and your words roll off my skin.

M stepped towards the car and mouthed to her through her window. “Turn the music down!”

She looked into M’s eyes but she was determined not to turn the song off before it ended. Put me down punk. I don't need to be rescued.

“Ruth, fucking turn the music down; you’ll wake up my parents.”

Ruth told herself again, I won’t turn the song off, not before I’m ready. That’s what it means to be strong. But she did anyway.

She flipped the headlights first and they seemed to fade off the garage. She turned the key and the music ended abruptly, shattering her fabricated image. She still stared forward for a moment trying to retain her strength but when she opened the car door, its weight real in her hand, everything was crushed.

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The letdown almost hurt, but then she saw his face and fell into his arms and she smelled him and--Lisa and the word rape and not so pretty girls with switchblades up their sleeves--everything she felt she forgot in a moment.

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i’m so in love with you.

College dorm room beds are really very narrow. Extra long and extra narrow.

They must make them that way to discourage kids from having sex on them. That's what Ruth and M thought anyway.

It was one in the morning and they were piled together in Ruth's dorm room. M had come for the weekend to visit her, and they both lay there, stuffed into the bed, forced to remain quiet because of Ruth's roommate who was snoring on the other side of the room, probably ten feet away. Lying on their backs side by side, M's arm was underneath Ruth's neck. Ruth kept pulling away slightly. It was hot in the room and it felt as though M were an oven.

M took his arm from underneath her, but started kissing Ruth gently on the face.

Then he took her shirt and started tugged at the bottom gently. Cool air against her skin felt good and she didn't protest when he took the shirt off and began kissing her stomach.

“I'm tired, M,” Ruth said.

“No big deal,” he said, “I'm just kissing you.” He said it just a little roughly.

“I know.” But Ruth’s stomach tightened with the feeling of dread. Not again, not again do I have to do this. I'm too tired. Her body ached, it was as though her body became even more exhausted with the prospect of having to deal with M's advances than with any real exhaustion.

He kept kissing her, moving down towards her stomach and the hair around her pubis. Ruth kept her eyes shut and tried falling asleep.

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M pulled himself up against her, drawing himself back up to her face, and pushed his body next to hers. He took off his shirt and his boxer shorts and pressed his body hard into hers. She noted his erection and stayed still.

M began tugging on her nipples and stuck his tongue in her ear.

“I’m so in love with you, Ruth,” he whispered.

“I’m so in love with you, M. I'm just tired.” She turned over onto her stomach.

He rolled a leg onto her in-between her legs, then loosened the drawstring around her pants and started taking them down.

“Is this okay,” he asked, “just if I take off your pants? Its got to be hot in there,” he laughed, since they both knew exactly what he was doing.

“Yea, okay, that's fine,” she said softly, without emotion.

She was naked underneath and he rubbed his hand in-between her ass cheeks. He mounted her fully and stuck his knee close in to her crotch.

She flipped again, tossing him off, so that she was laying on her side, her back to him.

He acted like nothing had happened, just began spooning her. Then he pulled his erection under her legs so that it was touching her clitoris. He started moving back and forth deliberately, breathing hot onto her neck.

“M, I'm tired,” she said.

He kept pushing into her.

“Baby, seriously,” she said, but his skin felt so nice. Its gentle familiarity was a challenge. She wanted him to know that he wasn’t entirely unwanted.

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“But girl, I hardly ever get to see you.”

“Yea, I know, but we had such a long night.”

“So?” “I'm just feeling super tired,” she said softly. She wanted to say something definitive, and yet she didn't know how. She had vowed to be more clear. She didn't know how to do it. Next time, she thought.

“Mmmm,” he breathed, “you're so fucking beautiful.” Still ignoring her, he angled himself so the tip of his penis was starting to enter her just a little, get stuck in the folds of her vagina.

“M. Please, I'm exhausted.” This time she got her tone of voice right. It was commanding, dead serious.

As soon as she'd said it, she regretted it. Fuck.

M was silent as he pulled away just a little bit. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you not attracted to me? It’s ‘cause I'm fat, isn't it? You think I'm too fat.”

“No, M. Stop. Let's not do this.”

“It is, admit it.”

“I don't know, Babe. I'm just tired.”

“Admit it, Ruth.”

“Fine, what do you want me to say? Yea, yea, I guess you have gained some weight since high school, but that's really not the point. I'm telling you, that has nothing to do with it. I love you, I love all of you.”

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“What do you mean that's not the point? We never see each other, why don't you want to make love?”

“I'm just fucking tired.” But in her mind Ruth couldn't entirely figure it out, either. She couldn't tell him anything definitive, there was nothing definitive to say, but the idea of having sex with him was the last thing she wanted to do.

“Goddamnit. Whatever, I don't get you at all.”

“M--.”

“No, stop it. What the fuck is going on? I bet you fucking made out with James again, didn't you? Didn’t you? Fucking tell me, did you?”

Ruth knew that was coming. “No, M. Just that one time that I told you about. Can we not get into this?”

“Tell me about it. Tell me about it again.”

“Jesus, M. I told you everything that happened already, its not that important.”

“Oh yeah? Did you really tell me everything about it?”

“Yes.” “Tell me again. Tell me the story.”

“M. I'm tired, we've already been through this.”

“You're lying to me, Ruth, I can tell.”

“I'm not lying to you, M. Don’t accuse me of that. I never lie to you.”

“Then why don't you want to have sex?”

“I just--.”

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M took his finger and outlined her mouth. Then he placed it in-between her lips and started moving it back and forth. She knew what that meant.

M nodded at her and bit his lip, his finger still between her lips, slowly growing wet with her saliva.

“Just for a second, Ruth?” he asked her.

Well, maybe just for a second, Ruth thought, if that would make him feel better. She scooted down into fetal position, her head next to his stomach, and then placed her mouth around his dick. The first smell of it repulsed her, but she opened her mouth wider to let in some air and tried to shut her nose from breathing in at all. That just made her jaw ache. Not giving up, she moved back and forth slowly. Her jaw felt heavier than ever. Her whole body felt like shutting down with exhaustion.

“M, I'm just too tired,” she said, pulling away.

“Fucking James. Tell me what the fuck happened between you guys.”

“M,” Ruth said, her mouth still down near his dick. “Hardly anything happened.

We came home from some stupid frat party and we were a little drunk and he walked me to my room. We listened to music for a little bit.”

“Was he sitting on your bed?”

Ruth pulled herself up and mounted him, her breasts brushing his chest.

“No. We were on the floor.”

“Were you touching?”

“No, we were just sitting there against the bed listening to Dylan.” Ruth kissed M’s neck.

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“You were listening to Dylan?” M said this angrily, pushing her off him in one motion. She fell down at his side and swung a leg over him, rested her arms on his chest.

“Which album?” He asked.

“Blood on the Tracks; why is that important?”

“Because I don't want that motherfucker to listen to Dylan with you. I don't want Bob to be tainted.” His brow was furrowed.

“M, give me a break.”

“Ruth, you give me a break, you know Dylan is significant to us.”

“I know, M,” Ruth said tenderly. “But c'mon.” She kissed him again on the neck.

“Keep going,” he said, refusing to kiss her back.

“Jesus, M, there's nothing more to say. I told you all this already. I mean, he leaned over and looked at me. And then I knew he was going to kiss me and I started crying. Just like I told you, now isn't that stupid? I started crying cause I knew that I'd have to tell you and I … didn't want you to be mad.”

M's hands were shaking. “I can't believe you let that fucker kiss you. Do you love him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean do you love him?”

“No … M, he's my friend. We have fun together.”

“Did you touch his dick?”

Ruth suppressed a giggle; she knew that would only make M more angry. “Jesus, M, no!”

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“Really? Are you lying to me?”

“No, I just kissed him.”

“Did he touch your breasts?”

She was silent. “Yeah, I mean, I guess a little, just through my shirt. But hardly. I mean, he didn't touch me anywhere else.”

“Fuck you!” M groaned. “You didn’t tell me that before. Goddamnit, Ruth. Does he have a big dick?”

“M! I didn't touch his dick. I have no idea. But probably not, I mean, the guy's a shrimp.” Ruth listened to herself, how stupid she sounded. How stupid they both sounded. She turned again so that M was spooning her from the back. He started humping her again softly.

“But you won't make love to me now,” he said, accusingly. “Do you think about him? Do you think about fucking him?”

“No … I'm not thinking about fucking anyone, I just want to go to sleep.” Ruth closed her eyes again but her heart was racing.

“Sure, yea, right. I bet you want to fuck him. I bet you think about him and masturbate. He's got a better body than me.”

“M. Stop it.”

He was still pressing against her, a little harder now.

“I don't get it, you won't make love to me and you hook up with this other guy and pretend it’s all just so casual and it meant nothing.”

“I haven't kissed him since. It happened one time.”

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“Really? You're not lying to me? Did he go down on you?”

“I told you, that's all that happened. And I told you about it right away after it happened.”

M swallowed hard and relaxed his tone of voice. “Ruth, I want you, feel how hard my dick is, let’s just make love and then go to sleep.”

“I'm just too tired M.” Then M retracted violently and turned away. “I can't believe you,” he said.

“M, I love you,” Ruth said, wide awake with adrenaline. She thought about fucking him then, just so they could sleep peacefully. She started making up excuses in her mind about how it would be okay. She scooted up behind him and held him from the back.

He slid further away from her to the edge of the bed.

This only made her heart hurt, but she did the same, pulling herself as far apart from him as she possibly could, to the outer corners of the narrow dorm bed, so that she was lodging herself in the crack between the wall and the wooden frame.

She lay there, nose to the wall, now unable to fall asleep. Goddamn it, she thought, another sleepless night. And I have a midterm tomorrow in Feminist Theory.

“M,” she said. “Are you still awake?”

“Yea,” he said.

“I love you.”

He didn't answer.

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She kept staring at the wall and listening to the silence. Then she heard something subtle, like the sound of leaves falling. It was the sound of the sheets moving slightly.

Then she felt it, him moving just a little, and she realized that he was jerking off.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She tried to shout, though she knew to whisper, not to wake anyone. She sat up and peered over him so that she could see his hand around his dick.

“I'm fucking getting off, Ruth. Aren't I allowed to do that?”

She stared at him wide-eyed with disbelief. He kept moving his hand back and forth over the head of his penis.

“I can't believe you,” she said, slinking back down and returning to her position in the crack between the bed and the wall.

“Believe it,” he said. He kept shaking his dick until he came with the slightest moan. Then he turned onto his stomach, started snoring within a minute.

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are you lying to me?

You called me. At four in the morning, in my college dorm room. There is a certain light then, at four in the morning, in a dorm. It is an electric blue whirring floating from the laundry machines, a drunken buzz from down the hall, a muffled murmur in the study room. And they never turn the fluorescent hall light off--ever. Under the door crack you can see the artificial daylight they pump incessantly.

At four in the morning, in my dorm room, I answered you. You know I have always talked in my sleep. When I was ten my mother came into my bedroom late at night and I did a somersault, right there on my bed, still asleep. You liked this sleep-talking.

You thought it might reveal the deepest parts of me, and you obsessed about obtaining them. It was through this dreaming and talking that you might access them.

After we left for school and were less accountable to each other, the fear and insecurity grew as we felt ourselves slipping apart. There were nights of endless interrogation in the moments between sleep and dreaming. You’d pose questions that might ward off your insecurity about possible indiscretions; your paranoid scenarios of imagined affairs: Did you suck his dick? Did you let him fuck you? Have you ever lied to me? Did you jack him off into your hand?

I answered your phone call. We had fought earlier that day, and we hadn’t spoken before going to bed, which is the worst kind of punishment. I was left vulnerable to dream my deepest fears, memories of home, and other surreal pieces of nostalgia.

This was a recurrent dream. In it, I’m watching an approaching car from my balcony with the large sliding glass door. The car is driving the perimeter of a wide lake,

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curving around every intricacy of shoreline. My mother is just inside, playing with my brother, a dishrag over her shoulder. They are stacking blocks one by one, red on blue on green, building a giant circus at the center of a great Lego amphitheater. My eyes follow the car’s headlights, mesmerized, until I realize with horror that it will soon reach the house. I turn to go inside, but when I put my hand to the door I realize that it is locked.

I knock on the glass, but my mother cannot hear me. Their circus is getting larger.

Tigers and giraffes begin to appear from the wings, pulled by sea otters floating in selfcontained tanks, which are themselves pulled along by chariots with roman gods seated in them, whipping along giant cockroaches. The car is getting closer. Panicking, I knock louder. The car is approaching. I begin to kick on the glass. Harder. I hear the car stop and park. And the silence of the engine cooling. There are footsteps up the path to the deck. Approaching hysteria, I knock harder. The glass shatters. The man reaches the front steps, climbs them. I see his hands on the banister. And I realize that it is you, I recognize you by your hands. This is your phone call.

“Hey,” you said.

The dream weighed so heavily, so terrifying, that when it exhaled it was the entirety of me. It felt like there was nothing else in this world but to hear your voice. It felt like the one thing that could have meaning. It was the most tender, deepest voice.

“M--,” I said. “Oh my god, I love you so much. I love you more than anything in the entire world. There is nothing I love as much as you.”

You said, “Oh baby, is it you? I love you, baby.”

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“Yes, sweetheart, it’s me, your Ruth. I thought you would never call. I have missed you so much.” I didn’t open my eyes. They were painted shut and it was just your voice, like the one voice at the end of the tunnel, that existed for me. I heard my roommate turn and sigh, in a drunken dream of unicorns.

“I’m sorry,” you said quietly, apologetically. I wanted to hear this.

I said nothing and sunk into the pillow. “You sound a little funny,” I said, teasingly.

“I was sick last night,” you said.

“Oh baby, poor baby.” I cooed, sleepily, lightly, “I didn’t realize. You shoulda called me.”

“Yeah, I was sick and my friend gave me this herbal medication, and it’s just making me feel so fucking weird. I just feel so strange.” You said it gently, but your voice sounded demonic.

“You’re talking weird, like novocaine.” I was dreamy, dreaming, leaning into the “nnnn.” I laughed a quiet husky laugh, from the throat, itchy.

“Yeah,” you said, “I know.” Then, “Ruth.”

“Hmmm?”

“I love you.” It was simple, it was so short, it was so sincere.

“I love you,” I answered, almost drunk with adoration.

We talked. We talked about the dream of the circus, and the party you went to, and then the dreams you had had. We talked about California weather, the smell of Eucalyptus, and sailing on the bay. We talked for what seemed like hours.

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Then you said, “I can feel you breathing. It’s so hot on my face; I can feel you, all the way over there. I can feel your skin, it’s so smooth, it’s so fucking smooth, I just want to fucking grab it and pinch it hard and slap it. I wanta know how you look right now. I want to be able to feel you.” I knew what this intonation meant. I welcomed this development.

“Hhmmm,” I breathed, “my eyes are closed and I’m just on the edge of a dream. I feel so warm. I just want you to lay beside me, baby. Just want you to hold me and touch me. Want you to suck my breasts, my nipples right now and down my stomach, lick my pussy … oooh,” I purred. “I bet your dick is so hard. I wanna see it. I wanna feel it up against me.”

“It is, baby,” you whispered. “Baby, are you touching yourself?”

“Yeah. Hmmm. Yeah.”

“Do you like it?” Deeply, luring.

“Yeah, but it’s so hard …” I was soberingly shy. “to make myself come.” I remembered frustrated attempts at masturbation.

“I want you to lie on your stomach, baby.”

I lay on my stomach. My sheets smelled like me, like sweat, like too many nights.

You continued, “Yeah, and put your hand in front of you. Fingers pointed down, palm up, and reach down, so your clitoris presses against your hand. Do you like that?

“Yeah, it feels so good. Hmmm.” It was sexy, you teaching me this. You had never taught me like this before.

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I tugged, slippery, further in, faster. Thinking, I don’t want to wake my roommate. I was moving harder against my hand, knocking the wall. I moved until I was breathless, and kept moving, while the intensity inside me grew stronger. You kept whispering in my ear, and I concentrated on the darkest spiral, the end of the spiral. I kept moving faster into the spiral, against the palm until my wrist was sore, deeper, and the bone was aching and the pubic bone was raw, and finally, finally, I came in a deep wave, exhausted. Then I fell against my hand, sticky under my face. I fell asleep into pleasant dreams, just lightly, just for a while. And when I awoke I realized I was still on the phone and the receiver was there against my cheek. I said your name.

“Yeah, Ruth?” you said, out of a void.

Your voice sounded deep, it sounded lazy like summer. It sounded slippery like butter, you were slipping and slurring into your words.

“M--” I said. The corners of my eyes were open and I could see a little dawn light coming over the horizon outside my window. The clock was saying 6:32. “Baby.”

“Hmmm. Yeah?” Your voice sounded dark like night, like dreaming. I saw the shadow of headlights pass on the wall above my roommate’s bed. The earliest morning light began to gather on her bedpost.

“You ... you sound different.”

“I know. I told you, this herbal medicine is making me feel strange.” For a moment both of my eyes were open, as though rudely awoken, and they closed softly again. I said your name. In a question. There was a moment then, when the sleeping began to turn off, when the blankets turned back into blankets and my hand again

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became my hand. When everything again began to resume its actual shape and form, take on its own name.

You said, “What?” slightly irritated.

“It … it just … it just, doesn’t sound like you.” My words were delirious, like an old woman who is fighting the course of senility. I was shaking my head, beginning to fidget.

“What are you talking about?” The way you said it was condescending. Your words fell on my chest and left me aching there.

“I … don’t know. I just don’t know.” I could hear the train pass, distantly, on the tracks far to the west. It was carrying early morning passengers who would sit behind desks. I was pulling the blankets away from my body. They were beginning to stick to my skin. It was beginning to feel a little too warm. I placed my hand up against my cheek.

I placed the other in between my thighs. The phone was just resting there against my jawbone. It was beginning to acquire a layer of sweat.

I didn’t want to let on that I doubted you. I didn’t want you to know, but the words still slipped out. “Jesus, you’re starting to scare me baby. It doesn’t sound like you.

It … you sound like the wolf.”

“The better to hear you with my dear.” You laughed a little. It didn’t sound like your laugh.

“Stop it, baby,” I whispered. This time I was feeling really warm. I pulled further into fetal position. The blankets weren’t on me at all anymore, they’d been kicked to the

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very bottom of the bed and I was touching the cool wall, the cool white paint. I was touching my forehead against the paint. I needed its coolness.

“What the fuck?” you said, dead serious, “You’re telling me you don’t think this is me? We’ve been talking for the last two hours. You don’t believe me?”

You were hurting my feelings. You were making me feel real bad. I said, “That’s … that’s not true. I believe you. I believe you. I. You. Just sound strange.” The words were begging you, from someplace deep. And I did believe you. There was nothing else to believe. You were the one thing, to believe in.

“Why don’t you grab your teddy bear?” you hissed.

This was not something you would say. I do not have a teddy bear. You were really scaring me now. “Oh my god, baby.” I didn’t want to say it but I was thinking, I don’t think it’s you. I don’t think. My mouth just blithered, “Oh my god. Oh my … I think … I don’t know what’s going on but I have got to go, I have got to get off the phone.” I couldn’t tell why you were doing this to me--pretending to be you but with another person’s voice. I couldn’t tell why you’d do that. I wasn’t sure, but I needed to get off the phone. My head hurt. The geometry of my room was beginning to illuminate itself. Every angle was exact, every edge was sharp. The bed, the desk, the dresser; these were piercing. “I think I’m going crazy,” was all I said.

I entered a slow realization. One I was almost too scared to acknowledge. To recognize what was really occurring would be to ignore my intuition, forget everything I thought I knew, abandon belief. I would have to cease trusting any perception and accept.

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“What the hell?” you accused, shouting in a whisper. “You’re going to hang up on me?”

“No--I.” I wasn’t going to. I needed to, but I couldn’t. I loved you too much. This was still part of a dream, some strange final act. My roommate stirred. She seemed real at least.

“You’re going to hang up on me?” you repeated. In your questioning I heard your anger, the anger was yours, genuine. I thought, oh thank god, it is him. You said, “If you hang up on me, you know it’s over.”

I tucked my chin into my chest and lowered my voice, straining it. “But M--. God please. Please don’t do this.” I didn’t know this game, I hadn’t played this game before. I didn’t know why we had to play this game. This game was not very fun. I was pulling on my ears, and on the extra skin on my face, pulling it down with sweat. And I began to take strands of hair, chew them, pull them out of my mouth, chew them again.

You were still playing the game. “It’s fucking over if you hang up the goddamn phone. You can’t even trust me.”

I heard the words. I was sobering very quickly, the sun hot against my head, burning my pillow. I looked at the clock, it was 7:27. Your words terrified me. I was fully sober now. I didn’t know anymore. If it was you, or not you. To not believe you would have been betrayal; to believe you was more than I could give. And I couldn’t believe that you’d treat me this way, that your voice could be so ugly.

And yet I could believe—this is what made it so scary. It was as though I were seeing you for the first time. Perhaps you really were a monster and I was finally

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recognizing it. I remembered all of those nights of possessive interrogation, I remembered your manipulative negotiation over sex, and I saw that these memories might truly represent you, this person whom I loved. I had to acknowledge this behavior as yours, because if this game were not yours, it was someone else’s.

“Baby,” I said. I thought, I’ll play, okay, I’ll play. And I kneeled down, tied my shoes, stepped onto the black asphalt with my bright red ball and my hair tied back. It was like waiting for the cool kids to look at me so I could ask them, in the quiet timid voice, if I could play, too. I said it real gently, as gently as I could. “Just tell me about what it used to be like with us. Just tell me a little bit, about us back in high school. Tell me a little.”

You were the mean kid, you were too cool to be nice. “Oh I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me in a trap. You’re testing me, you’re testing our love. You--” “I’m not.” I pleaded, the desperation tearing in my voice. The shapes in the dorm room were very real now, they were alive and could all be named. I was beginning to cry.

There were hot tears falling out of my eyes. There was only one thing to believe. “Oh my god M--, I believe you, okay, okay.” I just wanted to get off the phone now, there was nothing else but to get off the phone.

“Okay, you believe me,” you said, but still you wouldn’t hang up.

It did not sound like you. It was. Not you. It was. It could not have been you. It was. You wouldn’t—but I couldn’t stop, because I didn’t know. I thought, these are my hands. My eyes, my ears. I think. “M-- tell me what happened when you got sick, that time I came over when you got sick.” I was still trying to keep my voice down.

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“I had a headache. I had a fever. I was nauseous.” You had relaxed a little, but you were uncaring.

“No, M--, no.” It could not have been you. “You had salmonella. You would remember. You would not forget. No. I think I have to get off the phone now.” The tears were blinding, it felt like a supermarket temper tantrum, all that raging sadness sweeping over me, much older now, but the same.

“Do you remember what I said?” your voice was digging, it was pointed. “Do you fucking remember? We’re over if you hang up the goddamn phone. You better not hang up the goddamn phone.”

There was a memory of your voice, and there were answering machine recordings and television commercials and talking heads. These voices were swimming around in my brain. I was sitting up, my voice rising, but my roommate was still asleep.

Wake up, please.

“What kind of sheets did you have on your bed in high school?” It could not have been you. But if it wasn’t you now, it hadn’t ever been you, and to believe that was to lose all sense of myself.

“You’re just setting a trap. You don’t believe me, you don’t trust me. If you loved me you would believe me. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Just tell me what sheets you had. Just tell me.”

“I had lots of kinds.”

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“No, baby,” I said, “you had the Snoopy kind, you had the Snoopy kind.” I was whispering an hysterical stage-whisper, tears in my mouth. “I have to get off the phone right now. Just let me get off the phone.”

“I will fucking leave you. This is the end. You better not hang up.”

“I love you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I hung up.

Then it was hot sun and I was screaming my roommate’s name, dancing over the floor between us, hopping onto her bed. She sat bolt upright in bed and stared at me in a shocked precognitive state of morningness, eyes half shut.

“Oh Jesus, this guy just called me and pretended to be M--, and I was talking to him. Oh shit,” I shouted, pulling my hair.

She said nothing.

I picked up the phone again and dialed your number. Your roommate answered and I said, “Where’s M?” Your roommate said, “Down the hall, in the bathroom.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Was he just on the phone? Was he just on the phone, Rob?” “I don’t know,” Rob said, unamused. “Do you want him to call you?” He said it like a bored waiter responding to a request for extra dressing.

I didn’t let him finish. “You don’t understand, get him on the phone right now, you’ve got to get him on the fucking phone.”

You were on the phone. And I said, “Did you just call me?”

You said, “No.”

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“Really, baby, I swear, no fooling, were we just talking for about three hours?”

“No. What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’re not going to leave me?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

I wanted to believe you, but at the bottom of my mind, I thought, it was him all along, he’s still playing a game with me. He’s just laughing now. He’s just playing another fucked-up game.

I was out of breath. I was in the room, but no part of me was there. They were floating--the parts were floating. My roommate was watching me. She was wide-eyed now and worried like a sorority sister, hip-cocked in fleecy plaid boxer shorts and King Pin Donuts T-shirt, pink from miswashing.

“So you didn’t call me?” I questioned again, in a foggy daze.

“No.” “I love you,” I said, and hung up.

I didn’t know which was worse—you or not you, you playing that game or him, some him. I couldn’t tell from your voice. The fucked up part was, it could have been you and I loved you more than ever. I had lost all sense of perception, and that was the end. I looked at the clock, it was 8:39. Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus, I must have thought, but we hadn’t been introduced yet.

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i'm sorry.

At first it was subtle and soft. There were conversations that had seemed rational, walks by the lake. When Ruth and M held each other, their arms were sincere. There was Virginia sunshine. The apology fell softly, like the lap of a wave on Lake Michigan. The lake is so wide, the wind so calm, that by the time a wave reaches the shoreline, it breaks, just like that.

They went to the high school for smart kids. Wealthy white kids who were the sons and daughters of politicians and academics, museum curators and lawyers. They had lived in quasi-communes in Chicago and New York and San Francisco but now drove luxury cars.

After school sometimes they’d go into the woods behind the football field and make love. That’s what they called it, making love, ever since the first time in between dropping her little brother off at summer camp and when mom was gonna get home. Well, that was really the second time. The first time M had fumbled with the condom and Ruth was so tight and so nervous that he couldn’t fit in. They tried for nearly half and hour but she wouldn’t budge, even though she wanted to. He pulled off the condom by the tip in one quick motion until it snapped, and then he sat on the side of the bed with his head hung like he’d be a virgin his entire life. She kissed him gently on the cheek and rolled back into the pillows. Her body sank into its own weight and finally relaxed.

The next time it worked, and when he finally made it inside her, it was like entering outer space. They both floated in a sea of blackness and lost track of everything

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but the smell of salt in each other’s pores. That was making love, they said, and M gave her a book by Hemingway where he’d underlined the passage when the earth moved.

Ruth couldn’t stand living with her family, just like every other kid, and hid in her room with her record albums and books and pen. She pierced her ear with a nail, just like other kids, and she once ran away—like other kids. She walked to a strip-mall about five miles away and then called him to come pick her up. They hid out outside the local library until midnight. Then he drove her back home. And when she walked in, her parents wondered casually where she’d been.

When she talked, she took long pauses to think of her next word, and when she thought, she closed her eyes. Sometimes her eyes were still closed when she began speaking again, and they might stay that way for entire sentences. It was those moments, he told her, that he wanted to kiss her the most.

Ruth wanted to learn the guitar. She never did. She was good at school but not great. She liked the woods and the idea of abandoning everything with only enough to fill a backpack—a pen, paper, a book, a few of her favorite record albums. He was the fat kid who’d lost a few pounds for high school but still struggled with his weight. He wanted to be a writer, but he’d only written a few miserable stories about getting beat up by the cool kids in middle school when he was still real heavy and his ears stuck out.

Once, they fell asleep out back in the hammock in the hot evening, way past the time she was supposed to be in. It was too small to hold them, so they mashed their bodies together and tucked their faces in, perhaps resting on an armpit, or under a chin. The fat of their thighs and the exposed skin between the tops of their jeans and the hems of their Tshirts puffed out through the diamond criss-crosses of the hammock rope. But they didn’t

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dare go in until morning, for fear of waking her parents. When they did come inside, they were swollen from mosquito bites that filled every diamond imprint on their pale skin.

They never questioned their love. Just like everybody else’s, it was different, it was the best. There was the adolescent routine of jealousy, and late night phone calls ending in silence or tears. And there were the confessions to respective best friends, and dramatic arguments.

They both went away to college—they didn’t abandon anything; they just went to school like they were always told to do. And they spent time in foreign countries and thought about each other, just like other kids. They began to have telephone conversations and letter exchanges that felt so much more mature, that felt so much more real, executed with so much more clarity. And they learned things about themselves, just like everyone does. And while apart in separate countries, in these spaces that allowed for isolation, M wrote her a letter, as a matter of closure. I raped you. I am sorry. The words were adjacent and naked, just side by side. This must be what transparency is like, Ruth thought. This must be what pure communication is like. To put words to complexity must mean that we are really adults. But there was something else, too, that she couldn’t entirely feel but knew as emptiness.

When they saw each other again, they had returned from travels, and they sat on a hillside in a new city far away from home, and they held each other. The city spread out under them for miles. They hadn’t seen each other much over the past two years, but in the physical touch there was no awkwardness. They both knew they would talk about the letter. She brought it up. M paused. He looked down sheepishly. She was sheepish too.

They talked about the word r-a-p-e, just casual like, because this is how these things are.

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People talk about their abuses over cups of coffee or while walking the dog. They say words like rape in a tone just slightly low; they swallow it in their throats. There was no anger, it was just a dull, distant feeling, but there was something else that ran much deeper. There was more than the letter, there was more than the question of fear, there was more than the question of trust. It went deep, she said, maybe deeper than you can ever understand. But she didn’t know how to put it into words, so she didn’t.

She only said, “the one thing that would be more devastating than what happened between us is if you found someone else and did it right. ‘Cause what about me? I’m your trial and error?” She paused. And then she said, “Or maybe the worst thing is that none of this matters. At all.”

He just nodded.

A year later, he told her not to contact him again. And she didn’t. End of story.

That’s it, that’s all it was. It wasn’t such a big deal. Not that different from anyone else or the ceaseless comparisons we use to invalidate each other completely.

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Dear Ruth.

I raped you. Yes, rape, brutal honesty. I can't deny using that word when that is the best way to describe it. Forcing you to have sex when you didn't want to. You know it, I know it, that's what happened. Rape, rape, rape. I can't be afraid of saying it if I'm even going to attempt an understanding. You know that physical intimacy is vitally important to me, as a tangible expression of love. You know that I use it as a way to reassure myself that things are okay, because it's easy to think things are okay when I'm kissing you, touching, ejaculating. But that doesn't explain it enough. I know, I knew, always that you love(d) me, independent Ruth, dependent Ruth, all Ruth. I knew (know) it. Sometimes momentary insecurity came in, but that's not enough to explain rape. I've been reading The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, maybe that's been influencing me. probably in some way. But I've known all this, deep down, for a long, long time. There was (is) a dichotomy for me between Ruth the body and Ruth the woman that I love more than anything. No, they're not clearly defined like that in real life, or even in my mind. Your body, your sexuality, is part of what makes you who you are--Ruth, the woman I love. But what happens is that when I am physically close to you, it turns into the Ruth the body, Ruth the beautiful sex object who makes me lose all control and sense of what is right, for you, for me, for us. Feeling your body close against mine, boom-an erection, boom--I need to get off, whether you like it or not. But I have to convince myself that you do want to--so I make your wanting to have sex as an indicator of whether or not you love me. So if you do want to have sex, then good, because you love me, and of course I love you, so my raging dick-driven inhuman farce is justified. But if you don't want to, then I can be righteously

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justified, because it means you don't love me, and then it's all your fault. Either way, I win, and I don't have to deal with why I created that situation in the first place.

So, Ruth, I'm sorry. Truly, deeply, sorry for forcing you to have sex with me, for raping you. I'm so, so, so undeserving of your love, your letters, your understanding, because I really, really fucked it all up a lot. I let you, me, us, love, down. And I do hate myself for it.

M

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dear M.

The one time, after breaking up with you, that I ever experienced pressure from from a boyfriend to have sex, my body reacted with violent rejection. I knew that neither my body nor my mind would let what happened between us happen again. I think it was knowing that I had to say something, that I couldn't be afraid this time, that finally got me to say, Please stop. Just like that, I said, Please stop. But just those words were so hard. It made me so upset that he wasn't reading my body language, that I had to utter words at all.

And I thought: Jesus, is this a pattern in all my relationships?

Do you know how hard it is to tell someone something they already know? To say, in not so many words, you're acting like a child, you're being blind, you're not respecting me. It's a fucking insult. And yet I was supposed to say it. Even though I was the one being disregarded. Motherfucker! Why is it my fucking responsibility? And how would I know that without my saying it that he (any man) would stop? So I said it, and man, he recoiled.

It was like a slap in the face. And it was just like I was afraid it would be. Even though he wasn't reading me, even though I was forced to tell him so, even after all of that, he slipped into silent mode and I had to waste my precious time and energy pulling him out of it. Shit! I get damned either way! So maybe it is just better to pretend I’m in the mood and put some guy's dick inside me. It doesn't fucking matter. Some guy’s dick in my vagina is not even close to reaching my essence. Turn yourself off, Ruth, I say. He's not really reaching who you are.

And there’s one day with you that really sticks out in my mind. I remember your manipulative, “Ruth, I don't want to ruin the hockey game … Ruth, I don't want the whole

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rest of the day to be bad [because you won’t have sex with me].” You didn’t want to sit there in the stands, unrequited. You chose, rather, to make the hockey game hell for me. I sat there feeling utterly violated.

Jesus, I let that argument fly? I did? Man, I realize sitting here now that on the one hand I'm afraid of coming to terms with what it means to have had an abusive relationship with you (embarrassment) and on the other hand I'm afraid of not coming to terms with it ever--that you would find it all too easy to just say, “well, I guess I fucked that one up, but it’s time to forget about it and move on.”

God! How fucked up is that? As I sit here and write I understand my thoughtprocess better and it is so fucked up. So fucking full of bullshit that I can't stop swearing.

Can't get to the bottom of this murkiness I feel, the ugly poisoned feeling I feel. Violated by others and myself. Letting something get the better of me. And is this what I've called being in love?

Ruth

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it was hot.

There wasn’t any specific beginning to the sadness, it just felt like years that she had been sad. To herself Ruth would say, yes, there was something about M, about us, that was not right. The next day she would say, there’s something else, something larger than him, something much more worldly than this measly high school first love. But she couldn’t wrap her head around it.

It was toward the end of college and where Ruth was living it was hot. She was living in a contained location, Managua, a temporary respite from regular life. She wouldn't be leaving any time soon. She was separate from her real life yet living her life.

And there were times when she’d look up and realize, oh, I am alive, this is my body, it is hot today. I am wearing shorts, I have on a tank top, my hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail. I speak mostly English; my Spanish suffers. I am supposed to be studying, I am supposed to be connecting with this community. The world is my classroom, or some shit like that.

On this particular day, she would receive two letters. She had picked them up at the school office where they kept mailboxes for the American students and she would stuff them in her bag until she had a chance to read them. Now she was riding a bus. It would go on forever through the market. It was the largest outdoor market in the western hemisphere. It was seedy, containing things she had never imagined. There were endless repeats--tortillas and chickens and fresh vegetables, soap and plastic dishes and fake leather shoes. She was riding alone as she often did, preferring to explore independently than to associate with a crowd.

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She had managed to get a seat. She had negotiated out the window of the bus for a plastic baggy full of mango--costing her the equivalent of two US pennies--and her fingers were still sticky from mango juice. She had eaten the fruit in two seconds flat and then rubbed her sticky fingers through her hair, making some of the blond ends stick up into the air. The idea of this mess excited her with some strange sensuality.

Receiving two letters in one day was unusual. She opened the one that was thin first. It was a blank card from her mother with a Georgia O’Keefe flower on the front. Her mother had written on three sides of the card in long angled cursive. That was distinctly her mother’s style. I'm fine. Your father's fine. I got your dad to go to therapy with me. I think I'm going to make it work finally. Ruth read the words and stared at the page blankly.

It was hot; her thighs stuck to the seat. Her knees hit the seat in front of her.

She refolded the letter awkwardly, barely able to move her arms. Her elbow felt the doughy flesh of the woman next to her. The woman was wearing a flower print dress and she kept staring straight ahead as though Ruth and her elbow did not exist.

Ruth went back to her task. The next letter would be torn open, the envelope disregarded. It was from M. Her fingers shook. She had not heard from him since being abroad. She had written him once with a vague request, saying merely, I remember the hockey game almost everyday of my life. She expected that he would realize that she was requesting something much larger than a recollection of the hockey game, but she didn’t know how to ask. Because all the hockey games together still left ambiguity in her bones.

This letter appeared to be the response she had been looking for. I raped you, he began. Her heart raced. She scanned the rest, searching, avoiding. I'm sorry, he concluded.

Ruth looked at the letter and the words were suddenly stale, vastly disappointing. And yet

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terrifying. She glanced at them as though they were ghost-writing. She tucked the letter neatly back into the torn envelope, this time more graceful with her elbows. Strangely, with the letter back in the envelope, the event was very tidy, to be expected. Like receiving an RSVP to a wedding invitation. Will you be attending our wedding? Check box yes.

She reopened her mother's letter. I'm fine. Your father's fine. I got to get your dad to therapy with me. I think I'm going to make it work finally. For some reason it was those words that caused her to break apart, silently, so there were tears falling out of her eyes and on her cheeks and down onto the green seats. These seats were the elementary school bus seats she'd ridden on with a violin case and a girlfriend.

She sat there, head bent over her mother’s letter, her right hand gripping the top of the seat in front of her. Minutes passed and the bus left the sprawling market entirely. It screeched angrily around a traffic circle, a statue of Christ claiming it majestically, and Ruth realized that the next stop was hers. The papers were still a mess in her lap and her backpack was attached awkwardly to her chest. She grabbed at the letters with her left hand and crumpled them into her front pocket. She stood hurriedly as the bus slowed to a stop, suddenly aware that her hand had been pinned down against the top of the seat in front of her with a warm brown hand.

Panic was the first thing that struck her. She had to leave, she had to get off the bus. It would be a matter of pushing through a sea of tightly packed bodies and she had to go. She began to pull her hand away but this hand wouldn't let her. She looked up with terror in her eyes. Who was this person who wouldn't let her leave?

She stared up at him expecting some harassment or confrontation. The tears were still clear on her cheeks, but getting off at the stop felt drastically important, like when

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you’re lost in the supermarket and finding your mother is a matter of life or death. But as an adult she had learned to put on hard eyes and mask her fear with anger. She looked at him with those hard eyes and they asked him, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?

But when he stared back at her, his eyes startled Ruth with their warmth. She wondered how this man, a stranger, had so much compassion. How was it that he seemed to understand what it was that those letters contained? How could he have a sense of their magnitude beyond the words on the page? He kept smiling at her sincerely, as though to tell her that he could see simultaneously the insignificance and depth of her experience.

Then gently he took his hand away and Ruth pushed towards the door of the bus.

She jumped down the steps and didn’t stop running until she reached the door of her apartment.

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story that repeats inside my head.

There’s a story that repeats inside my head. It goes like this. When I was thirteen, we were having dinner in the blue and white kitchen and my brother was very young, still an infant. He was probably in the highchair. We were feeding him the food off our plates that we had placed in a plastic grinder. I might have been wearing a hooded sweatshirt, my hair still wet from swim practice. What did we talk about in those days? The telephone rang. We would not usually answer the phone during dinner, but someone must have that time. My mother took the phone. She was silent for awhile. She must have said yes at some point, but I remember her being almost entirely silent. She walked away from the table for a moment and the curlicue phone cord pulled taut and demanded she come back.

When she hung up the phone she was crying, and she asked my father if he would go out with her for a little while. They left my brother in his highchair, walked out of the house, and got into the car. They left for several hours and didn’t return until late into the night. My brother would not stop crying, and it was the longest night I ever spent with him. I can say that during those hours, for the first time, I understood Shaken Baby Syndrome. But the idea that I could empathize with that moment of surrendering to abuse was both terrifying and exhausting. And very real.

I fell asleep; I do not recall being with or without my brother there next to me. My parents finally arrived home, and my mother came to my bed and sat down next to me in the darkness. I was drowsy and dreamy but intent on displaying my anger by refusing to look at her. Instead I stared at the wall covered with shadows, crying silently, all the while intensely relieved that she’d come home.

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“You aren’t even going to tell me why you left?” I asked her stubbornly.

She paused for a moment and I could smell her familiar perfume. I turned and crept closer to her. “Well, my friend’s husband called me in a rage. I had advised my friend to leave him, which she did, and he was furious with me. That’s all, honey. It was just hard to hear from him.” Her voice was soothing.

I remember thinking, before my mother came home, I bet she has cancer. So her explanation of what had really happened calmed me, and I fell asleep peacefully that night. But kids sense things. They hear snippets of words here and there and put things together. I began to hear something about my father’s bicycle being where it shouldn’t. I heard my mother talking in hushed tones over the phone to her best friend. I even snooped in her journal and found nothing concrete except evidence that she was very unhappy.

At some point the truth came out, someplace between a buffet dinner in a strip mall and endless passenger seat conversations. Staring out front windshields we didn’t have to look at each other as we spoke about our real lives. The man who called my mother on the telephone that night had said to her, “your husband is having an affair with my wife; I just thought you should know.”

I’m not sure if it’s a result of the way I was raised by my family or the way I was socialized as female, or a combination of both, but I didn’t hate my father for what he’d done. I was embarrassed by him. It was shame that kept our secret sealed and deterred me from telling my friends what had happened. It also disallowed me from understanding just how normal our family was.

In G-rated movies, men have affairs and then they beg their wives for forgiveness.

Instead of being repentant, my father became increasingly verbally abusive towards both

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my mother and myself. It was as though a new man were living in our house. What he appeared to have turned into was so illogically unfamiliar to me that I could do nothing but hold my mouth open, gaping, and take a swallow. As for myself, I was also new--a growing young woman with new body parts and feelings and a burgeoning sense of self.

Simultaneously, a new baby had joined our household and had momentarily distracted us all from ourselves.

My anger appears in fact to have been reserved for my mother. And shame of this anger grew larger than the anger itself. It was my mother who I could not pin down, box into some kind of recognizable space. I remember, vaguely, a period of at least a year during which my mother created deadlines for my father to change. I still do not know exactly what that entailed. The first deadline would be the end of the affair. The second deadline would be for the arrival of the man we thought we knew. Otherwise my mother would leave. But it never quite worked. Deadline after changing deadline, my mother never filed for divorce. And I was furious with her for putting up with his abuse and not following through.

My first feminist heroine was slipping from that place of power she occupied in my mind. My mother was a woman who I visualized marching in bare feet or typing out newsletters in the dark office of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Organization. Yet she reacted to my father's behavior by acquiescing to his complaints. She appeared to believe that she was the cause of the affair and that the means to transform the relationship lay within her. When my father told her he didn't like fat people, she tried harder than ever to lose weight. When he screamed at her about being married to her job and that he wanted dinner on the table at six, she came home early and had dinner on the table at six.

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There is a story that repeats inside my head. And I remember that I am a woman who was born into the loving hands of a female-centered family. I understand myself to be a feminist primarily because of female love, power and autonomy; secondarily as a result of male abuse or misbehavior. It is with female love and support that I am most familiar. I walked in a trail forged by seven strong women ahead of me--my grandmother, my mother, and her sisters. And it was their strength and beauty that filled me with a sense of empowered girlhood and later, womanhood. Yet few of them seemed to find empowered relationships with men.

My mother, who otherwise was a successful professor and consultant, was called mindless, unfocused, and unorganized. These three stand out to me. Yet she never left my verbally abusive father. I imagine that she was angry, afraid to leave a comfortable life, and above all, hurt. I thought she could stay storybook true to those feminist tracts she thumbed through under the lights of a college library in cold Chicago. But sitting there in Northern Virginia with a teenage daughter and an infant son, all of those words and theories must have fallen away.

There is a story that repeats inside my head. There is a story that repeats. There is a story that repeats. There is. There is a story that repeats. It goes like this. A woman grows up with a single mother in the midwest and her father has an affair and she goes to college angry at him and every other man but she gets married at twenty-three, has a kid by thirty, and the same thing happens to her. There is a story that repeats, there is a story that repeats. Repeats. There is a woman who wants the same for her daughter because she’s afraid to imagine anything outside the story that repeats in her head. There’s a story that repeats in my head. There is a story that repeats in my head. After years of diet plans,

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therapy, frozen dinners, and exercise tapes, my mother was still fat, and when I was thirteen, my dad found somebody else to fuck. There is nothing exactly momentous in this story, nothing more than any other story we know how to tell and reproduce.

Perhaps this is why I am terrified of gaining weight. I diet, I run; I pull at the flesh around my thighs and think of taking a scissor to it. Perhaps this is why I am terrified of deception. I wish I could guarantee that the truth would be revealed in every instance of interaction, in the minutiae of human contact. I am terrified of denying myself power and agency through the weakness of this terror. I am terrified of the terror itself, of its reproduction, of the things that cause the terror in the first place. I am terrified that terror dictates me.

I never fantasize. I play stories in my head on endless repeat. I stare out of trains and buses, I wake in the morning and there is a body next to me but I am retelling a story in my head and the body is part of the background set. I lie next to it at night and I continue to replay these stories, as though if I played them one more time I could see something I had never seen before, as though the lies would fall away and one truth would be revealed to me for the first and last time and all the terror would stop.

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sunken in.

“Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus,” Ruth says aloud. It is four-thirty in the morning and she awakes with an urgency to speak these words. “Alfabus,” she says again, rolling the word around on her tongue.

The window at the head of the bed is open just a crack. She tilts her head back towards the sill and breathes in the air. She smells California like the first time she smelled California, toxic flower blooms. Rolling onto her stomach, she looks out through the crack under the blinds. There is still deep blue over the horizon of hills. She wonders why they call them hills; they seem to rise out of nowhere and eclipse the sky like mountains.

Ruth remembers the words that come to her each morning. I raped you. I'm sorry.

I'm so in love with you. I love to hear you sing. Did you make him cum in your hand? Did you? Are you lying to me. When I masturbate I still think about you. We’re not having a conversation; you’re the only one talking. I can't be close to you because I'm still attracted to you. Don't contact me. She remembers these ten phrases as though they are the only words to remember.

“Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus,” she says now. This must be the eleventh phrase.

“Alfabus,” she pleads, “release me from this.”

She is not unfamiliar to this routine, of waking and wanting. She awakes each day with the same words on her tongue, the same feeling of anxiety, the desire for something chaotic to steal her from the parallel strips of light and dark, perfect blinds across the windows. She sticks her nose further out through the crack in the window, hoping to slide through.

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It is Señor Alfabus she has not felt before, right next to and all around her, strangely comforting in his darkness. She knows he is there as surely as the man she sees walking down the street below with a brown bag bottle. And she knows his name.

“Señor Alfabus.” She acknowledges him as though she has been expecting him all her life. Perhaps she has. He is terrifying and familiar all at the same time. He asks nothing of her, he merely moves through her as though he were already a part of her.

The warm body lying next to her stirs. This is her boyfriend Adam, a comforting lump in the bed, half in and half out of the covers. In his sleep he hears her and his arm reaches out involuntarily to stroke her face.

No one has warned Ruth that this would happen. It just does. The morning is just as strange and foggy as any other. At least today there is something tangible about it, a figure with a name.

“Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus,” she says again, still looking at the parallel blinds of light and dark.

She awakes each morning in a room that startles her with its anonymity. It is not the room's fault. It is her fault and she recognizes that. She cannot remember where she has come from or how she has gotten there. To wake in that room is starkly real and somehow solitary, though she wakes each morning with a warm love lying next to her.

She cannot remember what life she has lived to get her there but she is there somehow.

And yet it is only a room and it is not so very scary at all to anyone else who could peek in.

Adam turns and strokes her face, eyes still closed and body sleepy.

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It was not always like this for Ruth, for a long time it was less pronounced, this sleepwalking state of living. At first the transition was not obvious, it was just like loving someone a lot; the aching was just aching. Then it collapsed into a black hole. At first the depression seemed uncomplicated, it seemed to be about a boy. Then it seemed to be about women and men, about language and mothers and legacies. And the aching became cavernous and Ruth's body was swallowed into it.

She knows Alfabus is there. He is everyone she has loved, who has loved her, consumed her. Perhaps she should struggle against him. But, no, she welcomes him. He must love her very much. He is a moment of relaxation, he permits her to sink deeper. It is very calm. With him, there is no test; she indulges herself and gives into him fully.

Metamorphosis of the insomnia into something real and alive, focused. It breathes into her, and she into it. Señor Alfabus might let her dance again, dance out of the empty forgetfulness she lives.

Death permeates her thoughts. She wonders, after years on this earth, how she could find this world so strange. One would think she would find it familiar, that it wouldn't evoke fear. That she could master it somehow. And yet she finds herself feeling paralyzed. She lies there in the morning light, still. She finds herself straining against slipping into the listless black void. Afraid of slipping, conscious of the fear. And yet she has slipped there. She can pinpoint that.

“Goodmorning, Señor Alfabus,” she says.

Anxiety and sadness wave through her like a relentless nausea. She aches to vomit.

The breeze feels as though it would deliver her but it’s so illusive. She can barely touch it.

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She sticks her fingers out through the window, longs to capture it. Alfabus envelopes her with his darkness and her eyes close softly, her hand still resting on the window sill.

When she awakes Adam is no longer in the room. She raises her head and sees the sun low in the sky; she must have slept the whole day. The breeze coming through the window is still mild, but her body is burning. The blankets around her are wet with her sweat and she casts them off irritably. Alfabus, she remembers, but cannot place whose body this is which appears to belong to her. It is naked, uncovered and instantaneously chilly outside of the blankets.

She gets up robotically and, looking around the apartment, sees that Adam is gone.

On the floor of the bedroom are a pair of her jeans and she pulls them on. She is tired again. Too much sleep she thinks, sinking into the bed once more, face down. She lies there and the phrases dance into her again, from nowhere. I raped you. I'm sorry. I'm so in love with you. I love to hear you sing. Did you make him cum in your hand? Did you? Are you lying to me. When I masturbate I still think about you. We’re not having a conversation; you’re the only one talking. I can't be close to you because I'm still attracted to you. Don't contact me.

“Alfabus, deliver me,” she says, smiling to herself, yet with absolute faith.

She does not move. The sun sinks further and disappears, a colder breeze comes through the window. Ruth's hand slides forward and closes the window, while in the same movement she pushes herself up and stands in the middle of the room, pants on, no shirt.

She looks around for other clothing she has recently worn--twisted bra, wrinkled black shirt. She throws them on. She knows there is a piece of paper somewhere with important information written on it, the number of friend x's work and the direction to the club where

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friend y will be playing, the number at friend z's home in case she decides she would rather not attend this party friend z wants her to go to. The note is in her jeans pocket, but she can't seem to find it.

When she tries to remember where she put her keys or where she put that important note she made to herself, the memory of that action is not even stored in her bones. It is totally gone from her system. There is the consciousness of this that clicks on and off, editing and correcting the disassociated body that sinks into the nothingness space. It periodically redirects the body run askew.

She is already late; she has put on her mascara and her lipstick and has done her hair, but she is late. She would rather take the bus, but there is no time. She is not sure where the bar is located or how she will get there. So she walks out the door casually, not exactly grasping how she feels or what she is doing. Then she is biking and, for one moment, conscious of biking. This is she, her body, biking right now, and then she slides in again, sinks in, underneath where she doesn't remember anything but the ruminations in her head. Somehow, she negotiates the road and the car doors that could open on her. She is conscious of something.

She pounds down the cement steps of the subway station, bike in hand, and sits by the tracks. Her eyes glaze over. She is falling asleep, not the lulling desperate sleep after a long day, the narcotic sleep that slowly fades out and in, brings dreams. She thinks it may be the alcohol, but she can't be sure. She only had one drink. Or was it more? Or did she drink yet? Coming home or going out? She cannot remember because moments waiting for subway trains all begin to look the same when she is sunken in. For a moment the consciousness kicks in and she feels someone's gaze. She gives them a hard stare.

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Ruth sinks into the cement floor of the subway station. To touch it with her body feels good. It makes sense to her. She deliberately touches the ground to feel the dirt that must live there--urine, gum, the filth from the bottoms of shoes. A train arrives, and she sees a boy with a shaved head, cheek to the glass. His eyes are still and calm, searching into what must be blackness. Ruth can see him clearly in the light, though perhaps he cannot fully see her. She is a mirage of light reflections. Ruth imagines herself to be that boy. In his stare is an anonymous traveler, directed, calm, isolated. She longs for this. He is going someplace and he needs not a destination, only a direction, He is utterly, beautifully unattached. Perfectly aloof.

Ruth rides trains and buses as though they were drugs; she has to get her fix. When she becomes the boy traveler she is able to see the world as something positive, as something that will contain unknown adventure. She is open to possibilities that she will encounter as an independent woman, whole and unattached. When she leaves a train she feels deeply sad, unable to grasp the positive spin she wove during the train ride. In this optimism there is something that makes her feel that she can accept loving M, know the beauty of that love with some genuine truth that puts a crooked smile on her face.

Sometimes life can be viewed like this, in these positive terms. But only the riding of trains reveals this.

The train blinks a warning and she scrambles now to pull herself onto the train.

She floats into the car and lands in the nearest seat. She does not remember where it is that she is going. Her body will tell her. And if it does not, she will not care, she will get off at some stop, and that will be some place that she is at, just as any other place.

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In Ruth's mind it is a short moment before the train pulls into the station. The doors slide open. Her body slips through the crack. She puts the card through the slot at the subway ticket machine, picks up her bike, feels pain shoot through her wrist, and walks up to San Francisco, or walks up to Oakland. She can't be sure which. She is sunken in.

She is biking again and the wind is cold, this much she feels for a moment long enough to know that she is indeed biking. She knows that Street B will cross Avenue #2 up on the hill and that will be where friend y is with her friends, and they will be laughing about something and friend y will be instantly awkward when she walks in and that will be strange and set her ill at ease, although she would have already been ill at ease, or not at ease, or pretending to be at ease, or completely unaware of any ease or lack of ease. She creates writing in her head as she lives her life, she is writing about it without writing it down, composing her own life until she becomes conscious that she is living. And in what order does this life occur? She cannot remember.

She finds the club where she is supposed to meet these people that she knows, takes the lock out of her backpack and locks her bicycle to a parking meter. She takes her hands together and blows on them, hot air to warm them. Then she sticks them in her pockets and fingers the piece of paper she meant to find earlier. It does not matter. She approaches the club and sees people milling about the entrance, goes for her wallet to pull out her ID but stops before she brings it out. The bouncer has a strange grin on his face; he is magnificently disinterested.

She can't make herself go inside. Instead she turns a corner and sees a pay phone, which she walks towards and leans against as though casually. She picks up the telephone, holds the cold receiver to her ear. Then dials her mother collect. She will talk to her right

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now. She would like to tell her mother something very specific and not so specific at all.

She cannot use language and she cannot say this or that, not exactly. It is a game and she cannot use the word rape because she is afraid and ashamed. She is afraid to say anything because of what her mother might think. If she tells the whole truth, she might appear cowardly to her mother. I long to tell you this but you cannot understand; you can understand too well. This is why I cannot tell you. She hangs up the phone just as the operator is asking her mother for authorization.

She leaves the phone hanging and escapes from the club and the pay phone without her bike. Her feet pound on the cement sidewalk of a city that she has walked but cannot remember. She moves forward and does not stop moving, her arms and legs feel like they must know something she does not, she will let them keep running ahead of her and into the night she'll follow them. She sees dim candlelights on tables inside a shotgun brick building, a tiny Italian restaurant. She walks in and chooses a small table by the front window. “Just a cup of coffee if I could,� she delivers flatly to the waitress when she comes.

Ruth does not take note of the waitress’s face or her body. She is sunken in.

The coffee set in front of her, she drinks it quickly and motions the waitress back for more. Again, this one she drinks quickly. My brain will not wake up. She calls the waitress back again, this time observing her with glazed eyes that cannot really see. There is a group of people her age laughing in the corner about something, another couple close to her adamantly discussing the movie they have just seen. She sees a man in the far corner of the restaurant and wonders if she looks pretty to him. She cannot remember what she

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looks like. He appears to smile and she thinks about what it would be like to sleep with him. The idea is strangely calming with its absurdity.

She drinks another cup of coffee with desperation. I'm not there yet, I need to be there. More coffee. On this sixth cup she finally begins to feel its effects, not with a clarity of mind but with a manic power that motivates her body to move. It raises her level of attention. She pays the check. Then she exits and her body shakes involuntarily from the caffeine, not the cold.

Behind the restaurant there are dumpsters. She finds herself longing for the ground as she had in the subway station. The ground makes sense to her, cement spilled with sticky soda, crumbs from potato chips, cigarette butts and plastic wrap. If she could just touch all the parts of her body against the unnaturalness of the cement. She imagines the dirt of the road mixing in with the hair on her scalp. This makes sense to her: she, clothed in synthetics, pressing her body against the plastic earth, a cement earth and a cement body. To be part of it somehow is lovely and right. She can almost drink it, all the filth of urbanity. She wants to own it fully, imperfect and unclean.

She presses herself against the parking lot, frantically. She once loved the world that was natural--she still does. One part of her, perhaps, loves the flowers and clay dirt, the green. But whether that natural Ruth is more pure, or more clean or even better she does not know nor care. This part wants to lick the asshole of this city and let it linger on her tongue. She imagines the taste of it and it thrills her.

She sucks her fingers with her coffee stained mouth and feels their warmth against her vagina, sticks the saliva up inside her. She lays all the way down on her stomach, hand in front of her, feels the oil and dirt of the asphalt on her chest. She lets her hair fall

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forward and dip into the gravel. She puts her lips against it, feels warm as her body. She wants to be this close to the road. She imagines someone coming up behind her and how sexy I must look. She projects the voyeur; how dirty and sweaty she is, how fuckable. She knows she can become anybody she believes herself to be and she believes herself to be the sexiest thing she had ever seen, cement and plastic body of filth. She images herself a hollow vessel for any aesthetic. Life is aesthetic and life is constructed in her mind. It is a matter of letting it enter her and become her. If she believes it hard enough, she would sink into the earth and become one with the ground, she could disappear into it.

Here by the dumpsters she remembers Alfabus. She is not sure whether to tuck herself further into the earth to hide from him or whether it would be better to present herself. She is afraid and engrossed, alive and shaking. Go away, Alfabus, she thinks of saying. Alfabus will make her stay awake all night. Help me, Alfabus, let me sleep.

Her hand still up inside her shakes with power and fear and faith in the desire to sink further. She hears footsteps approaching, a busser from the restaurant out back for a cigarette break. With the reality of his imminent presence she remembers just how dirty and ugly she is and scrambles to her feet, but the scrambling makes noise. She sees his face taken off guard for a moment, and she knows that he realizes she has been lying there.

Her cheeks burn with shame so she ducks quickly back around the corner of the brick building and comes out onto the street. She passes back to the spot where her bike is locked, notices her front tire has been stolen but hardly registers it. She turns around and walks in the opposite direction.

Looking at her watch she sees that it is almost midnight. She walks five blocks towards the bay, past the highway overpass, until she finds a bus stop. When the bus

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comes, she hops on, doesn't think about where it will go, just hops on and hopes it will take her somewhere else. It is well lit inside and this fluorescence is comforting. She leans her head against the window, watches the wires spark above, and Ruth becomes the boy that she wants to be.

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throwing bowls.

One night I came home to my apartment, entered the living room, and began to dance. Adam had some music on at a moderate level but I went over to the amplifier and turned it as loud as it could possibly go so that the floor began to pulse with deep bass.

When I dance, my body takes over, not only the functions of its movements, but the functions of my reality--it creates for itself its own reality. It can become anything it wants. Looks are inconsequential; it can appear any way it desires. As long as I believe it, as long as I imagine it, I can make it real. Sometimes my faith is so strong that for those moments I do cross over, I really think that I do, I step over onto the other side and I am able to embody the other reality.

I smelled of restaurant grease, the thin residue left on the skin and the grit that stays underneath the fingernails when one cleans tile tabletops with a wet rag, a rag meant to clean every table, but which merely smears more grease on each of them. And when I danced, I became the sex goddess. When I become the sex goddess, I no longer know what my body actually looks like, and it doesn't matter. When I become the sex goddess she takes it. She loves to get fucked, and her entire body is torqued towards the expectation of sex as though it were her only purpose. And yet she’s aloof as though she could take or leave anything or anyone. She's allowed to operate completely for the sake of pleasure and her nonchalance allows her to encounter any situation with the least of all possible resistance. Hers is a perfect recognition of basic physicality. Anything besides physicality does not enter into the equation.

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My body began to dance. It danced alone, letting go of itself, taking over its own action. My body has more power than meets the eye. It demands. It can manipulate itself and everything around it, until they, those, are slaves to it. And they'll do what the body wants. The fact is, the self is the slave. Mind and spirit are subordinate to the body.

Subordinate. That's exactly what makes her the goddess. Which is exactly why I wanted to be her, could be her, do become her. I long to be that masochistic. And I still want to sacrifice to her. She demands me. That I know her. Why she exists.

Before I knew the sex goddess, I used to think I was having good sex. But once she was named, I knew. I realized. The line of control is so thin. This body is so heavy with control. Heavy both with the knowledge of how it is to be controlled as well as the ambiguous desire to control. But the sex goddess, she knows. She knows about control.

When I found out just how much--just how much control the body requires, sex requires-that is when she acquired a name. Only with the force of my anger did the sex goddess become visible. Materialized into my vocabulary.

I began dancing out the anger because it was incredible to me how strong the rage was in that moment. One punch, M. This is for raping me. Two, this one to the eye. This is for apologizing. A third, to the stomach and you double over in pain; this one for walking out on me when I needed you the most, and worse, in the name of your best interest. A scrape of my fingernail down your face-drawing blood. This one is for my best interest. I said these curses quietly, under my breath, because I thought someone might hear my words. I thought someone might find my notebooks and how sick they’d think me to be.

That is a sick girl, look at that sick girl's diary. Read every line.

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Dancing, I was wearing a red dress and red high heels. My dancer body was. I was drowned in the music and it made me feel impenetrable. I could see nothing but the movements of my body, the image of me in the red dress, and an encounter with you, M, over and over, endless broken record. M, M, M. An encounter with you, M, M, M. The encounter with you, M. It was deep, pumping, raunchy, dirty and I was dancing the way I always dance, as though I were a stripper and you were the only man in the club. Thighs were thick as I leaned back into my ass, stomach pulled in tight, an expression of breathlessness, of exhaustion. Tears were in my eyes. I was giving everything, M, as though I'd been punched in the stomach and I'd come back for more. I was that hard. This was the image. Me dancing for you M, in the red dress.

There was the assumption of your gaze in the way I moved. There was the assumption of your judgment in my facial expression, the snarl on my mouth, the pained wrinkle in my forehead. There was the aloofness as I stared away from you, and you, I assumed, stared at me. Sweat beads on my forehead, greasy strands in my eyes--I brushed them away. The red dress rode mid-thigh. It was gaudy with gold flowers and glitter. It was silk. My arm brushed the fabric and the glitter sprayed like mist off a wave. It was my sweat, the mist, the wave, and the glitter tumbling out, salty, bare. You could see all of this--not just me in the red dress, but the assumption behind the red dress, the aloofness, the guise of the aloofness, the terror, the anger, the history to every curved, controlled, movement. Sex goddess hatred. Sex goddess hate. Hate goddess. Sex. Hate.

Adam was just in the other room, but for me he was not there. For me, there was no reality except the one I had created out of you. There was the woman ‌ she ... me in the red dress and then, as I danced, Adam became the cowboy, a cowboy in a white suit and a

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white cowboy hat. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me across a wide street, right in front of two lanes of traffic that had to screech their breaks to stop within inches of our feet.

The woman in the red dress and the cowboy. I ‌ she ‌ glanced back at you. The glance was a flamenco dancer, mid twirl. It was utterly alluring. It was fleeting. It contained a magnitude of confidence, a nod to the judges. We left you sitting at a cafe, the kind with sidewalk tables, and in this version of the story, you lay sprawled across the tiled cafe tables, raw, bloody and humiliated. That was one version of the story. In another, a glance said everything. A seduction in one tiny look; no violence, no words, just a look. The cowboy and I glanced back at you, and you were motionless, staring back with a flat expression on your face. We turned away and disappeared behind a building.

In a third version of the story, the red dress fell away, and I was stripped bare, huddled naked in the corner. A spotlight would not stop shining on me, though I had stopped dancing. The spotlight was selecting, exposing. In this darkest hour I murdered you with a knife.

Still dancing, I tried to push this story to the back of my brain, but I recalled out of nowhere our high school coach. M, don't you remember, we thought he was an asshole?

We made fun because the only thing that loved him was his dog, Cuja. That was a female version of Cujo, who starred in a B-Grade movie about a killer dog. We once saw it on LIFETIME. Irony of the lover and the killer, M. Only we didn't know that then. This man was a typical male athletic coach: overly concerned with the fate of his team; lacking in human emotion, even libido, or so we thought; yet still sexually intimidating. I didn't know he'd finally married and had a child until I heard the news: His wife stabbed him in

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their suburban home. It was postpartum depression, their ten-week-old baby lay upstairs, unharmed. She was depressed, they said. She killed him.

When I was dancing, I thought of that woman, and I thought of the knife and I thought of blood, blood like my dress, and I imagined something horrible. Embarrassingly so. I felt the embarrassment then, as I was dancing. And the embarrassment pulled me into reality just slightly. I looked over and noticed Adam standing there in the doorway, and I was filled with irritation at his being there, at his breaking down my walls with the reality of his body.

Adam walked towards me and turned off the music.

As soon as I could no longer hear the music inside my head inflating my imagination, the reality of the silence was utterly intolerable, cold. Frigid. I couldn't breathe, couldn't bare to pull myself into the moment and relinquish this created self.

There was no breath left with which to breathe. In my wrists, elbows, knees, there was the rage. This more irrational than the image of a murder. That had been controlled. This was much more powerful. If Adam had known, he would have been terrified. Because I felt terrified at what I could do. But he didn't know. And I just stood there and screamed at him to turn the fucking music back on.

Adam looked shocked and I could see plainly that he wasn't the cowboy at all. He wasn't wearing a white suit or a white hat and his face was tired and even a little sad.

“Ruth,” he said, “I love you, but you're going to wake everyone up in the building.”

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I could hear Adam, but I couldn't register his words. It was as though I were hearing you, M, and you were telling me to turn the music down. It was as though you were saying to me, Ruth, I'm so in love with you, and I would have been sixteen or seventeen years old. I can't remember when exactly you started and stopped saying that to me. It was as though I were hearing my best friend Lisa say she'd fallen in love with me.

Like when we were eighteen years old, parked in front of an electric Border's bookstore, crying in a rainy strip-mall. It was as though my friend James were saying it, like the first time, sometime in October, on the carpet, sitting down, in my dorm room in college. When he grabbed my arms from behind and said, I'm so in love with you. Not looking at my face.

Looking, rather, at the back of my neck. In a letter I received from him later he said, I fell in love once, only once. “Turn the fucking music back on,� I yelled at Adam, thinking about the morning when the sun came through the window and fell on the photographs hanging above my bed. How Adam was just about to leave on a plane to New York. I was lying on my stomach and he was sitting on the small of my back. I'm so in love with you. He whispered it in my ear.

I have known all these bits of language. All these are events and people and smells and split-second moments and rapid heartbeats. I think it bizarre that in all these moments, despite their contradictions, intersections and parallels across the vast expanse of people's lives that these characters speak the same language. Because each word signifies some distinct meaning with an independent history and future. And I am barely a small part of this huge web of vague yet passionate attempts at expression.

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On the one hand, it could all be rendered meaningless, that this collection of people chose to use the same, mundane words. But I place the highest meaning in words.

So are we allowed to slip? What happens if you begin to say, you're the love of my life to ten others--to Fred, the doorman, after coming in from a rainstorm, to the alley cat when you throw him some scraps, to your husband in the morning when you bring him coffee, to your lover while you fuck him. There is something slightly awkward about using the same superlatives with two, with three persons--it makes me shift in my seat for a moment. Thinking. What do I mean here? Do I hate myself for being contradictory? Or will I forgive myself for perpetuating the paradox of the human condition?

Adam stayed by the stereo and wouldn't move. The silence settled around us and I hated to keep staring at him, he was calling me back into reality and I couldn’t go there. So I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. I removed a blue ceramic cereal bowl and in one movement, threw it on the floor and let it smash apart, as though I had done this many times before. And once I started I couldn't stop. I grabbed another and another and smashed them on the floor and watched them break apart. I listened to the noise they made against the tiling.

Adam watched me calmly as I emptied the cabinet of its bowls, and his calm enraged me more. When I was finished, I took the broom from behind the refrigerator and began sweeping up my mess. Immediately. And the rhythmic motion of the sweeping pulled me back where I wanted to go. I recalled a memory of my mother that I had completely forgotten--not a memory of her exactly, but of the sweeping up of bowls that she had thrown on the floor, the newly refinished floors. How good that had felt as a girl to

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collect them, how strong that identity had been at that moment, and I was suddenly a little girl dancing a beautiful dance with a broom.

It felt right, it felt right, to sweep up the bowls. My mother was throwing bowls on the floors, and I swept them up, all the while thinking, this is so dramatic, this is so me, this person who sweeps up the bowls. This is so me, the child who matches her mom's anger to get her attention by screaming at the same volume: please stop!

When it was all over, my mother would hold me in her arms and she would say, I love you so much, I love you so, so much. And I would think, this is so me, this little girl who gets loved so, so much. I am loved so much.

I must have fallen in love three times. Once with my mother, once with my father, and once with M. I was a loved little girl, a loved little girl who sweeps up bowls. And I would think, this is what it means to love and be loved. When I fell in love with M I wondered when I'd be able to sweep up bowls.

Adam finally grabbed me by the wrists and said, “Ruth, please stop.�

I looked at Adam’s kind face and part of me wondered what it would be like to abandon the little girl who sweeps bowls. To let go of that image that lived and breathed through me. I imagined what it would be like to live in a place free of rage, to raise a child in a house with love and openness and compassion. It would be so beautiful, I thought, to love a child, a partner, in that way. To have time, endless time. It is this Ruth, this Ruth whose essence, not identity, was joyful, not a dancer, not a goddess, but joyful. Which I suppose is what true love, or being in love is.

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But I could feel you, M, and Alfabus, too, alive and real inside me. And I couldn’t let either of you go, nor the little girl dancer with the bowls. And my frustration just grew, because I looked into Adam’s face and wanted to let go so badly.

I had to find some way to explain it to him, so I found myself sputtering, “a man, a boy, really, raped me. They say, I love you, I love you, I love how you look, I love to hear you sing. And yet they do not ... they rape me, they abandon me, they hate me for anything that is deeper than this body. This entirely wretched, imperfect, body. And I will become a mother who will teach her daughter these things, and my husband will do the same, and hers. And I will abandon her as I have been abandoned.”

I laughed inside myself, accepting the body again momentarily. I put the broom down and sat on the floor, legs in front of me. I could sense my body’s thickness, its shape. I rested my hands on its thighs.

I think it was something about those words because I was able to feel Señor Alfabus drop out of my body and I was suddenly bolt awake. Adam was next to me on the floor holding me. My eyes were two inches away from his.

“Ruth, what's going on?”

“I'm gonna be a crazy mother, Adam,” I said.

“Ruth,” he said, “you don’t have to be a crazy mother. I don't know you as crazy.

That is not what you are to me.”

“The truth is that I am a lying ugly bitch. Never was raped, just had a normal boyfriend, just had sex. Just opened her vagina, just inserted a penis. Just had a father, who inserted a penis in a woman's vagina. Just. Came home and read me a story before going to

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bed. If I asked. Just said a few words, some made me cry, some made my mother cry.

Once, after those words, I pushed him down the stairs. This is how families talk sometimes. Just had a mother, who sometimes said some things, nothing that can't be ignored, nothing that families do not say. I am a lying motherfucking bitch.”

Adam was silent as I stared at him.

“Adam, when was it that I became so ill?” I asked him.

“I don't think of you as ill, Ruth.”

“Thank you for that,” I said, holding on to him for dear life.

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i went to the bay.

I hopped on a bus headed west and didn’t get out until it hit the bay. Then I jumped out and found myself running towards the water. It was as rough and windy as ever, and as I approached the shoreline, my jacket flew loose from around me. The fog was thick; I could feel it in my nostrils. Stepping haphazardly on the rocks, I slipped almost immediately and caught myself with wet palms. Holding myself there, I noticed how my feet and hands touched the cold black stone and connected my entire body back into the earth. I could barely see the colors of the sun beginning to set over the water. The fog horn sounded. Waited. Sounded again. Frozen, stooped over, I listened to it. Its strange regularity was familiar and meditative on one level; sterile and intrusive on another.

My mind began to slip into the replaying of memory and I recalled the last time I’d been to that part of the shore. I had lost my favorite skirt, not that that really mattered, but it’s hard to lose entire articles of clothing like skirts. I had come to the water intending to take a walk with M, but it would be the last time we would speak. We stayed in the car to talk, it was Adam’s car, and I was in the driver’s seat. M told me that he was finally in love with someone else, that he no longer wanted to see me, even as friends. He was still attracted to me, he said, and that was complicating matters.

In response, I exploded, childlike, into a fit of tears, so that I couldn’t even bring myself to hug him goodbye. I was aware of all the damage and sadness and wrongness of our relationship and yet I still longed for it, inexplicably. M didn’t comfort me, he just climbed out and left.

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The only thing I could think to do was shed myself of everything that felt weighty and tight next to my skin, as though I could shed some of the words he had placed there on me. I raped you. I'm sorry. I'm so in love with you. I love to hear you sing. Did you make him cum in your hand? Did you? Are you lying to me. When I masturbate I still think about you. We’re not having a conversation; you’re the only one talking. I can't be close to you because I'm still attracted to you. Don't contact me. I wanted to get rid of them all, and they were all I could remember of M. I took off my skirt and my shirt and I didn’t care who saw. Then I sat there in the car naked, staring ahead at the bay for three hours, barely blinking my eyes. I watched the sun go down and finally I drove home. I realized only after I’d parked that my skirt was nowhere to be found. During my time at the bay, I must have opened the car door for air and the skirt must have fallen out--though I don’t recall doing this. In any case, I had to run, ridiculously, from the car into the apartment complex with my shirt around my waist and my backpack around my chest. This actually granted me some amount of perverse pleasure, because at that time in my life I enjoyed physically embodying the wreck I was inside. I told my mother later--After growing up with endless social masks, I hate having to hide on the outside from what is going on internally.

I unlocked the door to the apartment I shared with Adam, my haphazard outfit sliding off as I did so. I went and sat in the bottom of the hall closet with the light turned out, feeling suddenly determined to spend the night in there with a stack of blankets and a pillow.

Adam noticed I’d come home and came over to the closet.

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“What the heck are you doing?” He asked gently. He didn’t seem angry but his face told me he thought I was being silly. He’d also seen this behavior from me repeatedly.

“I’m just gonna stay in here,” I said, beginning to cry.

“Oh, c’mon, Ruth,” he said.

His capacity to put up with me was what I could never get my head around. I thought that he must have been either unbelievably patient, severely disillusioned about who I was, or robotically bereft of emotion. Probably none of these are true. He might have just been exhausted, responding with extreme calm in relation to my hysteria.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

He didn’t crack. He moved towards me and knelt down, gathering me into his arms.

“I can never love you like I loved M,” I said, tears flowing harder as soon as the words left my mouth. Perhaps I was testing him; perhaps I believed myself. But I said it regardless.

The miracle was that he must have forgiven me instantly, because he took me out of the closet and made me stand up. I don’t even remember being alive then. I was so broken that I couldn’t feel my feet moving, but he walked me to the bathroom and put my body in the shower. The water was running off my hair. I knew that it was running. I sensed that it must have been hot; steam was rising, but I could feel nothing.

Adam stripped naked and got in the shower with me. He lifted my arm above my head, took the soap, and, starting on my right side, ran it down my body into the wrinkles

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of my navel, along my leg, and to my toes. I could see the water running brown. He touched my feet with the soap and it tickled me. I could feel that.

“I can’t ever love you like I loved M,” I repeated. The words felt starkly true at that moment, and that was the cruelest part.

He just said evenly, “What did he say to you that made you so upset?”

“He said he was in love with someone else and he doesn’t want to see me at all anymore.”

Adam didn’t say, but does he know you’re in love with me now? He just let that part go. It wasn’t until later, anyway, that I would be able to say those words to him.

He said, “Why does that still matter to you?”

“That wasn’t even the worst part,” I said.

“What was the worst part?”

“It was that he said, ‘I’m in love with this woman, and I don’t want you in my life, but, you know, when I masturbate, I still think about your naked body.’”

Adam didn’t say anything, he just moved his hands over my stomach. He kept washing me with a precision and an order that was almost mechanic, but it wasn’t. His touch was too soft.

“That’s like the last fucking thing he’ll ever say to me, as though, somehow, it’s a testament to his unconditional love,” I said bitterly.

Adam didn’t say, well, you do have a beautiful body, no wonder. He didn’t stoop to clean between my legs, right at that moment, like I might have expected him to, kind of playfully like a joke. But not a joke. He didn’t say anything at all. He just stood upright

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and began washing my hair, careful that the shampoo didn’t get in my eyes, though my tears were blinding me anyway.

When he finished, he took me out of the shower and sat me down at the kitchen table and combed out my hair until it was completely straight and flat against my scalp. It took nearly forty minutes because my hair was so long and fine that it knotted even just from washing. Then I sat there in my towel and stared out the window not really seeing anything at all.

The next day I cut off all my hair and dyed it black. Adam never quite got over it.

Somehow cutting my hair appeared to be more of a betrayal than any of the insensitive things I had said to him that night.

Several minutes must have passed while I replayed that memory in my head, but I only noticed that I was still stooped over when my lower back began to ache. I felt rusty.

A couple passed behind me, looking athletic, and a sudden wave of nausea rolled over me.

Was this what I was headed for, walks together by the bay, dinner on the table at six, merged identities and matching sweat suits?

I dragged myself back to the bus stop and waited far longer than I had hoped. I was chilled and damp from the salt off the bay and when the bus finally arrived I was shivering.

I got home and only the kitchen light was on. Adam was stirring pasta sauce on the stove. I went to him and touched his hair and then retreated into the bedroom. I began packing my orange suitcase. I threw in everything I had worn in the last week, everything

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that had been lying on the floor; hadn’t even made their way to the hamper. I grabbed my camera. Then I emerged.

“I’m leaving,” I said, taking the car keys off the countertop. “Do you mind if I take the car for a few days?”

“You only just arrived,” he said, clearly hurt. Then he tightened up his mouth and just looked at me, nodding his head slowly. “Where are you going to go?” He finally asked.

“Anywhere. Someplace hot,” I mumbled. “Then I might go home for a bit.”

“Right,” he said, dry as bone. He was staring into the bubbling pot on the stove. He knew that home was my last resort.

“Listen,” I said, “Something’s about to break. I can feel it. I’m just going to leave and see if I can take it alone. I’m finally starting to let go of M, I can feel it. I can feel it coming. And as soon as I do I can be free and then we can ...” My voice was speeding up.

I was getting ahead of myself.

“I know,” he said, with an edge. “I know, you're free--you're free. I'll set you free.

You’re so busy being free,” he said, recalling one of my favorite songs. He enjoyed subtlety. “I just wonder if I'll ever love something that doesn't want to be set free from me.”

“My uncle is dying,” I answered, as though it were an appropriate response. At that time our conversations were like this: disjointed, coded. I could say something that, in any other discussion, would be a total non sequitor, but between us it would symbolize a thousand unspoken thoughts.

“I know,” he said simply.

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“I don’t know, Adam, you’re one of the only people I’ve ever loved who is entirely sane. You’re entirely sane. And I’m perpetually overboard.”

He looked at me, then shook his head in disbelief, perhaps because he knew I didn’t entirely believe myself. He began chopping an onion.

I turned and went for the door, glanced back for a moment, hand at the knob, but he hadn’t watched me go.

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i have started to write in numbers.

M

1. I have started to write in numbers. Because in numbers I can order events and thoughts. Keep track. How many thoughts in a day. How many thoughts in this head. How I can create you from a collection of numbers.

2. It has been ten years since you last spoke to me, which is longer than I have ever known you. Or has it been ten minutes, ten months, ten days. The days are as long as years, the minutes are as long as lifetimes. Ten lifetimes. Since I have known you it has been ten lifetimes, ten fortnights and ten days. Fortnights, as they used to say in olden times. Se単or Alfabus comes to me often now, sometimes in the shape of you, sometimes in the shape of my father, sometimes all of them in the shape of me.

3. What would it mean to eradicate the significance of self, time, order, events, sequences, locations, and cardinal directions? Without time, events will collapse into themselves. Today I have abandoned all sense of time and self and begun to live this life in concurrence. Which means that today, we make love for the first time. Which means today we awake from a long sleep. Which means today will lose sexual control. Which means today we claim it again, for the first time. Which means today we begin to feel ill. Which means today our fathers tell us we are sluts. Which means today we are r-a-p-e-d. Which means today, we lie alone. Which means today, we conflate sex and mathematics.

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4. Since this story is about identity, I will tell you that my lover is playing with my nipple. It is irritating but I don't tell him so. This is how he speaks love to me, by touching.

Though he does not realize that everything he touches is you. That my nipple is you, that my mouth is yours, the words it forms--yours. When he makes love to me, he makes love to you. When he says he loves me--it is actually you he must love. I cannot find her, the me that exists separate from you.

5. Since this story is about my body, I will number its parts. I make love to a woman today. Entering her is feeling inside myself. She has breasts just like mine and an ass and a stomach, a little paunch. I taste her and she tastes just like me. With her, I can no longer remember what I look like. The definition of my body exists relative to your eyes.

Without the definition, my body ceases to exist. Or this is what I have learned. I cannot remember. Learning is undone. You, or some other man, having filled me for so long.

6. Since this story is about abuse, I will define it, and it will be bite-sized for you to chew and swallow. I will analyze it and spit out an answer about whether you did or did not fuck me up. If or if not, r-a-p-e or not r-a-p-e.

7. Tonight I fuck a man. I am riding my bicycle down the street and he is walking in the opposite direction. 'Scuse me, I yell. Do you want to have sex? I am saying this to you as we make love. You do understand, how we can make love and separate ourselves.

That I will make love to you and a thousand lovers tonight and it is only this mind which

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experiences the compartmentalization of events, people, emotion, body. It was you, remember, who first taught me how to do this. And I have practiced so well.

8. Simple mathematics. Number one is the linear conversation, conversed over the course of a lifetime. Number two is the compilation of various truths. I will sit with them in front of me, glue stick and scissors in hand, hair a mess, and put them in piles--on the right is love and support, on the left is hate and abuse. It is fun to operate in dichotomies. I speak in jest of course. Do not take me so seriously, love. Put the piles on a scale, just for fun, like a child's game and you'll see they are weightless. Insignificant. The number three, my love, the number three, is that our eyes will meet, not like two mirrors reflecting each other, but like windows. And we'll let each other into something that transcends the rationality, the simple mathematics and the child's game. Not that I can use this word child or you, man. Our conversation is an entity of this childhood and the window that will allow us passage.

9. Once I thought that I was crazy before but now I realize that I am crazy now and that I am crazier than I was then, but the lucidity that illustrated that to me is striking, it is so striking. I've started writing in numbers. I never knew it would be this hard to put you to rest. I never knew you were the blood that ran through my veins. How strong you're written onto my body. What does the body know? My body knows your words. Is every man's story written into every woman's body? I try to die to it every time and I can't. I will keep eleven memories of you and that's it, number each one and pick it out just so. Then all the other memories will fade into the distance and become unrecognizable. We will no

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longer remember together or apart. Which memories will I choose? Will they tell the story I’m so in love with you or the story I'm sorry or the story I raped you. Or--I love to hear you sing. Which story will I tell to keep you alive? My god, M, you are slipping out from under my feet. Cannot find you anymore.

10. I have begun to send you magazine pages, replacing magazine pages with my body. Perhaps to force the sexual envelope, you will understand the irony, the extreme sarcasm. The installments will be numbered and will arrive in order and they will tell you a story. A story you already know. These installments will number events. They could number body parts. Could number kisses on body parts. Or assaults on body parts.

Boyfriend number one. Boyfriend number two. Aunt number one. Aunt number six.

Mother number one. Father number one, Father number two.

11. Tonight I became untethered, unfiltered, uncontrolled and disbelieving.

Untethered. I have heard that my uncle is dying. This is significant, and yet you do not know this about me. You do not know that I have since started eating scrambled eggs. I never used to like scrambled eggs. You do not know that I no longer look like the girl you are supposed to remember. Please see for me that her hair hangs long. That's the way I remember her best. Hair no longer hangs long.

R

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this morning waking.

This morning waking. This morning is every morning I have ever woken. This morning waking I am writing the longest love letter I have ever written--she is as long as every moment I have lived on this earth. I confine my experience within the walls of this cold blue computer screen. There she is, Ruth, floating there behind glass. She has a head and a brain and lips and breasts and two legs and imperfect skin. She looks like my body.

She is written of the flesh of my body, she is written of every word that has fallen from my lips, of every firing synapse in my brain. She is every intonation my ears have ever heard, she is every word my eyes have ever read. This morning waking, she is a letter that is the entirety of me.

In truth I have never written anything other than this love letter to you, M, though it is dark and obsessed. This morning is where I will begin to tell this story so that I may lay it down. We make choices when we tell stories. We choose a beginning and an end; we choose middle parts that fill in the blanks and round it out. I will work backwards in a neat linear fashion. I will work forwards from the day you first touched me. I will work around in a spiraling circle; your body at the center. This morning waking, where exactly do I begin?

I ask myself one question, attempting to find the correct point of departure. When was it that we became ill? I ask. When was it? Was it after breakfast this morning, or before? When was it that we became ill? It could be you, it could be me, it could be some woman I have never known, will never know. What authenticity is there to this illness?

Was it yesterday when we watched that movie? Or was it when our fathers told us we

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were sluts? Or was it earlier when the gym teacher liked to hold us on his lap? Or was it in high school when we were date raped, or was it last week when our male coworkers put their hands on us but never listened to a word we said? Was it yesterday when the radio disc jockey said there would be no beautiful women in this world if there weren't any women with self-esteem problems? Was it in-between tea time and time for bed? Was it when we began bleeding? Was it a black hair on our breast? When was it that we became ill?

Some of us have been vomiting out the filth our whole lives. Some of us cannot stomach a meal without vomiting it out. Some of us will not stomach a meal at all. I cannot remember what it was like not to be ill. There must have been a beginning. Was it when our husbands beat us? Was it much earlier, in the womb, when our mothers endured their husbands' infidelity because their pregnancy was not sexy? Or our grandmother’s endurance of this? When was it?

There are some clear origins anchored in my mind. One is scratched in a journal, age thirteen: Be true to yourself as a woman. But then the truth got lost, or confused, muddled under complex layers of punishment and reward, or flat out contradicted.

I could choose you, M, as the beginning. Waking age seventeen and you've forced yourself on me again. And I love you more than ever. I remember being seventeen and my father explaining that the reason your mother treated me coldly was because I was sleeping with her son. It was a hell of a lot of power both to bestow upon, and take away from, a seventeen-year-old girl. He did not say, exactly, you slut, though he made me to feel sufficiently guilty and dirty. You were the boyfriend who, before we went out on dates, would jab me lightly and say, why do you wear those come-fuck-me clothes? To

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which I’d respond with a giggle of embarrassment, not outrage. You did not actually lay a hand on me and say, you bitch, you fucking whore, slapping me across my face. Growing up female, in my experience, was always more a series of gray areas than a multiplechoice test.

This morning waking, I am twenty one years old and I have received your letter, written in your handwriting, signed with your name. You have chosen our vocabulary. I raped you. I'm sorry. It is a curious juxtaposition. I read it through once and then I do not look at it again. I let it stay emblazoned in my memory; I let it become mythology.

This morning waking, I will take the letter out again, and inspect it. It is so strange, this word r-a-p-e. I pick it up like a moon rock and examine it for the very first time. Hold it out at arms length and think about getting back in the spaceship and leaving it for eternity. Or maybe it is a lucky penny; will I put it in my pocket or will I leave it for someone else to find? I think I should be more than what I am to claim it; I think I should be more bloody, more crazy, more damaged, more. You melodramatic bitch, Ruth, you weren't raped.

My cheeks burn red, and yet thank god someone finally said the word r-a-p-e. But then, why couldn’t I have said it for myself? Is it true I am rendered speechless without your vocabulary? Is it true I exist only relative to your existence? Should I be grateful to your powerful subjectivity that named my illness--four in the morning--obsessing over origins. r-a-p-e. Give me some language. I am ready to retire from this love affair.

What now? Am I allowed to be a feminist or am I merely a weak enabler? Am I suddenly part of an exclusive group of women? Do I belong to them; they to me? Those

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women, those statistics--those women whose lovers abuse them. They leave their abusers and yet they come back, six, seven times, time after time. Those women.

I knew a woman who was raped by a band of paramilitary men, one by one, she and her daughters, with bottles. I knew a woman--my best friend--who was raped by her brother's best friend. It was his finger that raped her. That was rape, she said, she called it rape. I saw a woman on TV who was raped by an unknown attacker and then killed. There were men who tested her, examined her corpse for traces of semen to verify that she had been raped. Her boyfriend had to testify that he had not had s-e-x with her earlier that day.

There were women at universities who were raped by boyfriends and dates and random hookups and they might not have known until someone from Take Back The Night told them they had the right to stand up and talk about it.

I let myself utter the word (quietly, shyly) only in isolation. Confessions feel forced. I part my lips and my throat feels dry, the words come out all peculiar. Like, what are you trying to say, Ruth? Are you speaking the truth or is this trash coming out of your mouth? The self-doubt is overwhelming. Defensively, I scream at those women who are able to confess. I can't hear you, you won't hear me, I can't hear you. I won't. Lisa was molested by her brother's best friend. She called it rape. She started from rape. I can't hear you I can't hear you. I won't, you won't hear me. What gave her the right to identify her pain? I hate her more than I hate M. I have to write that in small letters because I'm so ashamed of my own hate. And this choir of women seems to scream back at me. Love and rape cannot coexist.

This morning waking I cannot deny this love letter. I won’t, though I cannot explain it. This body is a love letter--is it crazy cosmic love or is it a sick manifestation of

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abuse? Is it a baby's unconditional love for its mother, ripped from its umbilical cord? I am madly in love with the man who raped me. I search desperately for him through crowds. I trace trails of blood searching for my missing limb. M. Where are you?

I am a girl who was raped, when I was not exactly raped; dysfunctional, when I am not exactly dysfunctional; an insomniac, when I’m not exactly an insomniac. I am depressed, but not clinically; whatever that means. I’m ill, floating like an untethered balloon, and I feel nauseous everyday of my life, but I’m not exactly suicidal. Or maybe I am, exactly, all of those things.

Rape or no rape, the nausea will not cease. And there are no other words to start from. No word strong enough to reclaim this body. And no one else to do it for me, no one can give me power. Though it would seem possible, on the contrary, for M, or some other man, to take it away. Maybe I became ill when I no longer could remember how to be true to myself as a woman. Maybe I became ill when I discovered that there was no beginning to this illness, and no one right way to be true. Or maybe that is where I will finally became well again.

Sometimes I wake up to the gray. This morning waking, I take back the streets, the gray urban streets of this love letter to you, M. I see the roads stretch out far behind me and even farther ahead of me. I peer down them and think, isn't this enough already?

Haven't I arrived yet? This morning waking, I will wake up and the point of departure will be this moment. It will be the clearest morning I have ever woken.

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hegemony works like this.

Ruth can no longer recall the instance itself, only the feeling of the instance, only the repetition of vague phrases that have been committed to paper. It was the beltway and route 66 and there was going to be traffic and there was the hockey game to get to and they were going to be late to the hockey game. There was M's split level house and the idea of an exit. There was a plush wall-to-wall 70's carpet and room and space to compromise. He was on top of her and they made acts of negotiation. She was in love with him. He wanted her to have sex. This would happen over and over again.

She can’t replay the phrases in her head any longer. There is the truth of being an immature little girl. She can just be sorry about it, admit that it was all her fault for being an immature little girl and then she can move on. But something about that doesn’t feel quite right. Then what? What will make the nausea stop? Perhaps she can understand it all objectively, she can apply some magic theory. If she can understand it intellectually then this story might be more true than ever and it would be the right truth and she could put it on a shelf and lay it all away.

She looks back and sees how loving M meant that she lost all control. She believed that being in love meant her capacity for pain, hate and anger ran as deep as her capacity for love. This seemed to be the recipe for passion. Both that rape, which she had not yet seen as rape, and that love implied a loss of control and identity, agency and autonomy.

And both rape and love were supported by institutions and values which women had taught her to cherish: marriage, which supported ownership and possession by men; monogamy, which informed her it was important to find the one and only man to be with;

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heterosexuality, that told her that being in love was the union of man and woman and that if she were to jeopardize that union, she might end up old, unmarried, childless, and above all unhappy.

So she stuck M’s dick up inside of her and did it many times again and it was not the only dick that would be stuck up inside her physically or symbolically for the rest of her life.

Ruth remembers that there was the next day, that the story, if one were to compile seemingly related events, continued. The next day Ruth sat on her kitchen countertop talking with M, quite academically, about the hockey game. There have been many kitchen countertops in Ruth's life. There was the one from which, when she was six, she asked her aunt if she'd ever had sex. It was a question which illuminated and symbolized for all time this aunt's role as the woman those other aunts would not want to be. The woman our mothers warned us about--childless, husbandless, depressed and overweight.

A projection of their fears and a symbol of what one is not. The truth of that difference was irrelevant.

There were the countertops of her mother's picture-perfect home; the tangible expression of successfully balancing work and domesticity. There was the countertop of learning to make food with her mother, in preparation for the woman Ruth would become, with her own countertop and her own family home. Or the lack of preparing food, the lack of a future countertop.

It was her mother’s countertop that Ruth sat upon, M leaning into her, forehead to forehead, when they were eighteen years old. It was the day after the hockey game and Ruth and M were young, intelligent children of intellectuals. They were rational and

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learned, they were headed for America’s best colleges. They took privileged elective classes in their high school for smart kids were they debated the merits of abortion rights and drug legalization.

And yet it took Ruth all of her inner strength to look M in the eye and tell him that him that he didn’t listen to her body and he wasn't respecting her desires. She didn’t raise her voice, this would be like the debates at school, rational and learned. M responded that this was a “normal” situation all couples deal with.

Ruth raised her eyes, dissatisfied, yet wanting to believe.

Then he looked at her with a furrowed brow and asked, concerned, Do you want to take some time off sex?

She was silent for a long time, debating, weighing, what does this mean? What does he mean? Is this, will this, change what happened? Is it a matter of not confronting sex? No, honey, Ruth finally said, it was my fault, for not being true to myself. No, it was me who was not true to my own desires. I should have been more clear about what exactly it was that I wanted.

So they didn’t have sex that afternoon and somehow that temporarily sated Ruth’s need for power.

Hegemony does not work like this: fucking bitch, don't you fucking move, don't you fucking move, holding a gun to your head with one hand, pulling your hair with the other. Hegemony works like this: I love you so much, I love you so much, I love you so much don't you please please want to have my dick stuck up inside you. I will give you a set of tender choices and each will guarantee your decision to have a dick stuck up inside

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you. So you are complicit; you feel powerful that you have made a decision to have a dick stuck up inside you. And ultimately you have.

Which begs the question of whether or not Ruth was raped at all because we all want to believe that rape is not about hegemony but is something definable, black and white, executed between strangers in dark alleys. We would like to believe that the institutions and movies and artists and world that we love were not built on an iconography of which the word rape is a part. Even Ruth would like to believe this. After all she is a product of all these things and people and places.

The story goes on. There was a later, an afterwards when there was no hockey game and no M and no countertop discussion of whether or not this is a thing that normal people do. This time Ruth was lying in bed next to Adam whispering, whining, just fuck me please, just fuck me. She had initiated sex and he wouldn’t take the bait. This had happened repeatedly, and Ruth thought it ironic. Just fuck me please, she said, which was to say, just make me feel loved, because the two were one and the same in her mind. She had learned that they were. She remembered the hockey game, the idea of an exit, her body acting as the machine, and the way in which she would be a receptacle for male desire in the name of love. And that experience lying in bed evoked the hockey game because she felt suddenly like the machine whose parameters of sexuality were defined by the male body lying there next to her.

Juxtaposing these two events, Ruth can see how her consent to M was not only the result of insecurity and emotional immaturity, but of learned narcissism; the idea that M's sexual satisfaction or dissatisfaction was held entirely in her hands, dependent on whether or not she let him “have it.” In truth, M satisfied himself sexually elsewhere without

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informing her. In the words of seventeen-year-old Ruth, the bastard cheated on me and he lied about it! Had he told her, he would have jeopardized his power over Ruth, the girl who thought of herself as the sexual linchpin. And Ruth has to admit, she would have felt jealous and insecure that she couldn't satisfy every part of his sexual appetite. So perhaps M was right, sexual violation was a normal part of sexual relationships. Take what you can get or let it go.

In Ruth’s experience, love is given and taken away based on her performance or non-performance of sex, even by men and women who claimed to desire the separation of love and sex. Relationships are said to be not “about sex” or “built on sex.” Yet when she has stopped sleeping with her partners she has often found that she’s lost a large part of their emotional support. Maybe not the next day, but a few days after that, as though holding someone through their tears were dependent upon fucking the night before.

The conflation of those two terms, sex and love, is so ingrained in Ruth’s experience of being female that it looks like this: It looks like the very fact of being born a girl child, constantly cornered, coerced, controlled. It looks like sex, sexuality, body. It looks like Ruth’s body. To let go of that conflation would be to understand her female self from scratch, to start again. It would mean to quit living in relation to men as well as in relation to the perceived experiences of other women--the women around Ruth, the ones in her head, and the images of projected self. And it would mean changing her definition of falling in love. She would have to create a space within all of her relationships--and her sexual relationships most especially--where she isn’t actually falling at all, but where she is valued for her dynamism. One where she permits herself to be dynamic.

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She is angry that she has learned to conflate love with sex. Sex has so often evoked fear and hurt and jealousy and loss--not love at all. She is angry about that. Angry about intellectualizing, theorizing her emotions. Being told that she is silly and politically correct when she does so, of being stomped on when she doesn’t. At times she wonders if it is impossible just to feel, just to walk outside of her house and feel, not come armed with a theory. How will she theorize this objectification? How will she configure this kind of love, this kind of advance? How will she finally disassociate the two?

She is angry; she is angry. And she is tired of being told that she is just an angry girl. Soon enough, get over this phase. There are words written across her body and every woman and man she has ever known have placed more there--you should be this way, you should love this way, this is love, this is not. This is control, physical chastity belt of control over you if you do this it means this, if you do not you are fucked.

Fucked.

She is only just beginning to forgive herself. Learning about forgiving and accepting and loving herself in relation to that little girl she was and the woman she imagined staying true to. She looks at her mother and sees she is a protean woman; just as Ruth is.

There is a woman living alone in an apartment. Her name is Ruth. She walks down hillsides and wonders what it means to stay true to herself. Sometimes she feels Ruth flutter down inside her--true Ruth self. Other times she feels powerless and unsupported, hopeless and indefinable.

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She has found that as she’s tried to share these explorations with men, they have only gone so far with her. To go further, she has been asked, by one man, to walk with shoes on. With another, to walk barefoot. With another, to leave her hair long, with another, to wear it short. This one wanted to run and walk down those hillsides with her.

When she chose yet another path--she once again betrayed him.

She cannot put her finger on it. She is walking down hillsides through the green grass and the dirt roads, and she can see all the way to the bay. She realizes that for every time she has watched the sun set from this place she can think of a man with whom she was standing. She wonders what it would be like to watch it set alone.

The strange thing is, she is an independent woman. She lives alone. She bikes alone. She pays for things out of her pocket. She would like to be something different from what she is, and yet she likes herself better today than she did yesterday and she knows she will like herself better tomorrow than today. The strange thing is is how uncomplicated it all is.

She remembers that and laughs, and it sets her free for a moment.

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ghosts.

Ruth lies in her mother’s house. Under the thin white sheet, naked. Heat is stifling, dries out her lips and her throat. She is staring at the ceiling and it is 2:30 AM. The bedside light shines into her eyes, but she refuses to turn it off. Her insomnia has not retreated. She moves slightly, airing the sheets at the bottom of the bed, allowing her sweaty legs to breathe. She turns to her side and tilts her face to the window. The tip of her nose just barely feels the draft. She can see the cold wind fighting angrily at the glass. It is curvy, imperfect glass, and as she stares into it, she thinks about the drive home from the airport a few days ago.

The sky had long since grown dark, and Ruth’s mother slept in the front seat. Her father lit a cigarette and cracked the window. They rode silently on endless highways.

When they pulled into the driveway, her parents slipped inside to escape to their beds, and Ruth hesitated in the coldness, watching Orion’s Belt in the winter sky. She felt a familiar sadness deep inside herself, and she longed to ground her body to the earth. She knelt down and touched the ice-covered driveway with flat palms. The ice burned but she pressed harder.

There were reasons Ruth had not come back to the house in many years. She could not face its silence, its coldness, its dark. They induced a meditation into the past. The house was an emotional intersection of what now appeared to be disjunctured points-friend x, family member y, boyfriend z. Not to mention that it reeked of M. The same old

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phrases filled her as she made her way to the door. And his was just one of the ghosts that haunted.

Upon entering, Ruth climbed the stairs and walked quietly down the hall, avoiding the loose floorboard just outside her door. Entering her bedroom slowly, she noticed the excruciating heat. The heater had been turned far too high, leaving the air stifling. Pretty white roses from Ruth’s teenage dances were perfect as bones. The lace curtains were still pulled aside from the windows, tied up in childish knots. Ruth let them out and dust fell at her feet. She felt the strange familiar feeling of disturbing one’s space. She couldn’t remember who had lived there.

Ruth turns again, opening her eyes to the intense lamp light. She sees through squinted eyes. There is a photograph of her posing for a dance with M. What if, she begins to think. What if I had been stronger. What if I hadn’t let him, not even once. I wouldn’t feel like this, wouldn’t be here. And in that same instant she thinks, what if I had acquiesced better, with less conflict. What if we had never used the word rape. Perhaps he would be lying next to me, perhaps I would be married, have a child, meet approval.

She places a pillow partially over her head and wraps the sheet like a shawl around her face. She wants to be entirely enclosed, as she has since childhood. This thin layer of sheet will guard her against any evil spirits that wander in. And yet, even with the protective layer, she cannot turn out the light. She is terrified of what she might find and hear in the absolute dark. So she sinks into her own sweat, accepting it fully. It drips down the side of her face, onto her chest, in between her breasts, and finds itself tickling the side of Ruth’s stomach.

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Ruth has long been aware of the presence of the female specter, though she never felt confirmed in this belief until her mother also discovered her. After Ruth left home for college, her mother began sleeping in the room to avoid lying with Ruth’s father, and it was then that Ruth’s mother also felt the woman.

Later she would ask Ruth, “did you ever sense that, in your room, there was ...” and Ruth would nod earnestly.

Ruth watches the four tall windows buckle, banging in the wind, as they feel the trees in the forest to the north. Ruth can sense the woman’s presence. She vibrates between the fireplace and the mirror, sweeping periodically across the foot of Ruth’s bed, a vulnerable island in between these two portals. Ruth peers into the mirror, and imagines this woman’s reflection slowly revealing itself. The fireplace, behind her, pulses with a strange energy. Ruth feels the shape of the woman entering her.

Perhaps that woman died in this room long before, she thinks. Or lost her virginity, or gave birth. Perhaps, she is the ghost of my own girlhood. Perhaps there are several women, Ruth thinks, and their presence fills her with sadness. These women are ancestral strangers to her, and women she will never know; they are Ruth's mother, and her mother's mother. It is as though they have occupied not only her room, but Ruth's very body for a lifetime.

All of these are women who say to their daughters, I am a crazy mother. All of them who say, my mother was crazy. Who say, my mother's mother was crazy. She has heard it so repeatedly that Ruth feels she already knows, what it would be like to be a crazy mother, and the aching fills her more, to think, what would it be like, to be this crazy

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mother. The gravity of this responsibility terrifies her. How to be the model woman. How to be a perfect mother.

“I cannot sleep in the dark.” She mouths the words. “I cannot sleep.” She begs the insomnia to leave, but in this house, its power overwhelms her.

Ruth feels as though she and her mother speak in riddles. Entire letters are written underneath each word. They have never been written, they will never be sent; they are letters locked inside heads. They exist underneath, covered, and they yearn painfully to be brought to light. Every word is in fact a point of departure, each one rendered to symbolism for a larger unutterable. If allowed to depart, these words would take flight.

Ruth imagines finding the letters in the closet. The door would creak open and the letters would be waiting there for her, in a cedar chest. Or perhaps hidden for some time underneath a flagstone in the hearth of the fireplace, they would be lifted out, dusty, to be read during these hours of insomnia. They would be long letters, written in her mother’s own scrawled handwriting, explaining every angry word. They would explain every moment of aloofness, every inch of sadness in her soul that had kept her, at one moment to another, from being less than a perfect mother. Perhaps her mother would be revealed as a hopeless romantic, hopelessly in love with her daughter. Perhaps her mother’s mouth loved the name of her daughter. Dear Ruth, she would write, dear Ruth. Ruth. And her letter would create a union of writer and reader that would finally bind them together again, mother and daughter.

Ruth refocuses her eyes and reaches her hand under her bed, brushing with her fingers the box of letters she has collected throughout childhood. Every time she returns home she manages to reread those letters. They convey the idea that somehow everything

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can be named, categorized, titled, and packaged. M, lover and abuser. Friend x, the one in law school. Mother, the professor. How is it that these people are just named and laid away? she thinks. Their words lay half alive in this stifling box, in a room still haunted, in a room she cannot bear to visit. Ruth replays the events of the day. The hidden messages, pleasantries, lies.

She had awakened that morning as if in a strange hotel room, her mouth unbearably dry from the intensity of the heater. She had dragged herself to get ready, to get dressed for church. Going to church as a family carries a particular significance, and however one chooses to respond--with resistance, reverence, or apathy--it is a sacred tradition nonetheless. Not to mention that it is an affirmation of propriety. It may be an affirmation of the family itself. It looms.

For close to an hour she had stood in front of the mirror deciding what to wear, grooming herself, examining her body carefully--its thin parts, its fat parts. Her thighs.

She pulled at them, exposing celluloid bumps on the back. She pulled up the fat on her buttocks, slapped it and watched it jiggle, disgusted. Then she pulled on her hose and tucked all the fat neatly inside them. She chose a dress she hoped would be conservative enough for church, sucking in her stomach as she straightened it. She hoped her mother would not think it was too wrinkled.

Then she attended to her hair, a newly acquired short black mess. Somehow the color and the roughness matched her interior more than had her long blond hair. With a palmful of gunk, she ruffled her tangles into something stylishly imperfect. Then she applied mascara, eyeliner, lip liner, lipstick. These made her feel temporarily complete.

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Stepping down the wooden stairs, Ruth entered the kitchen and saw her mother with a blue dish cloth over her shoulder. She looked up from preparing a roast and Ruth could see how her mother’s eyes betrayed her displeasure. Still, she attempted to disguise it with what she conceived to be a genuine and tender look of confusion.

She said, “your hair is quite interesting today, Ruth.”

“How do you mean?” Ruth asked, lightly, though she knew, she knew what her mother meant.

Ruth’s mother side-stepped sarcastically. “I’m wondering if there is a generational gap that’s preventing me from understanding the way your hair looks.”

Ruth knew what her mother wanted to say. She wanted to say, comb your hair. Her mother had said it to her many times before in her life. She would say, comb your hair. Or, you need to comb your hair. And before she was old enough for the command, there were screaming sessions when her hair was combed for her; Ruth screaming at the top of her lungs and her mother slapping her ear.

Looking at her mother, Ruth felt that ancient anger begin to snap. It had taken next to nothing, and yet she could feel the violent rage tumbling out. That it could come so easily after all this time scared her. She remembered years of screaming in that house-dinner conversations that ended in her mother’s tears. Pushing her father down the bottom stairs. His face as he fell. Her mother in the car, speeding dangerously. The terror Ruth felt at their precarious mortality, her lack of control. This anger was her own, her father’s, her mother’s, her entire family’s, passed through generations.

The idea that this anger could be triggered stood in stark contrast to Ruth’s adult reality. As an adult, Ruth had learned that she could choose with whom to live. She had

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learned that she could awake with someone lying next to her who would say, I love you, Ruth, good morning. And though she had fully separated from childhood, as the child of her mother, the seventeen-year-old that lived inside of her had become active that day. Her door was knocked on too early in the morning and she came out, all pissy.

Closing her eyes, Ruth thinks for a moment about this separation of mother and daughter. She thinks about how it must feel when the life that is an extension of a mother’s life suddenly becomes a life unto itself, divorced. And what if it bears a weight of displeasure, a sense of bitterness of having been attached or associated with its mother’s life? Ruth had so much anger built up, anger that her mother couldn’t leave her father, be something different, stronger. The entirety of a woman’s life--the decision to marry, to move to a new home, to become pregnant, to bear a new being into the world and to raise it, cautiously, with love, Ruth thinks, could be swallowed in the forceful eyes of this new life. And this new life could be so damaged and irreverent, regardless.

Ruth feels the women pass across her bed, and her eyes flutter open. She has so many aspirations to raise a daughter. She wants so badly for this child to have a good mother. The gravity of the responsibility shakes her, terrifies her. How to protect her daughter. How to be the model woman. How to be a perfect mother.

That morning, instead of letting the incident about the hair go, Ruth had pushed forward, asking, “What are you trying to say to me?” Underneath the words was a pleading cry to her mother. Mother, Ruth thought, I just want you to stand next to me and tell me everything in your heart, everything that you could possibly feel this morning, and

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the next. It has nothing to do with your complaint about my hair, it is not even that you have said this to me for years. It is that you have said this to me for years in lieu of other words, words that have meaning. It is all of this sludge that I cannot plow through.

Ruth’s mother said, “Well …” and paused.

In the word “well,” Ruth imagined that her mother’s thoughts contained: I have waded in too far, already, too far in. Again another conflict and yet all I would like to say to her is, how beautiful you are. How I love to look at you, how I love your profile, how I have loved to watch you grow into this woman, separate, from me.

But still Ruth could not let it go. She said again, “What exactly are you trying to say to me, mother?”

Her mother said, “I am not trying to say anything. Only that, well, perhaps you should comb your hair.” She said them, the words she had always said. Comb your hair.

In Ruth’s half sleep state, that of her insomnia, she thinks that underneath those words, comb your hair, her mother has written a letter, perhaps in the form of a poem. And if she could read it, it would say:

Ruth, you are so beautiful, and this is a thing that women should learn to do--to comb their hair.

When we enter the church, as I have entered it for years, child of a minister, sitting in the front row, we must have combed hair.

I, the oldest child, must make sure that my brothers and sisters have combed hair.

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Mother is too busy playing the organ; must make sure, that we look acceptable.

Must play mother.

Perhaps if these younger siblings had their hair combed, father would not be ashamed.

Father, big man minister father would not have left mother, would not have began to love this other woman, would not have left to marry this woman with the long, combed hair.

Perhaps if our hair had been combed, this would not have happened.

[Though, it was this woman with the long, combed hair, who first supported me as your mother, confirmed that strange new identity.

Not my mother. My not-mother.]

Ruth sits up in bed. She takes her pen from the bedside table and writes the words of the poem into her journal. She looks at them emblazoned there. Recorded. She longs to hear this poem fall from her mother’s lips. And yet Ruth knows it is a transparency that she herself fabricates, that the poetry lives unconfirmed and the transparency unrequited.

She thinks again back to the conversation, to her desperate push for more: “Do you not like the way I look?� In the question Ruth meant to address the poem, the poem that she imagined to be engraved into their collective minds. Mother, she thought, is it really

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that you are worried about my physical appearance? Are you afraid of what I might represent as your daughter? Do I not represent you as I should? Are you ashamed of me?

You have talked to me about your shame before. In the shopping mall as a child, you begged me not to make a scene. You wished that the argument, which had already escalated from terse whispers to screaming could be contained, reversed, pulled back in.

You begged me, please, not to make a scene.

But Ruth’s mother only answered again, “It is just that I think you should comb your hair.” And Ruth imagined that her mother’s poem continued:

mother shops at Montgomery Ward, shameful shopping store, poor family shopping store.

After the church collection charity bag mother will shop for the good coat at the poor family shopping store Going to church in this cheap store coat, going to church coat.

Church clothing, collection for charity bag, church coat, poor coat.

Will not shop for my kids at the poor family shopping store.

Will never dress my kids like orphans, hair will be combed.

Ruth records the rest of the poem. She can feel the women float into the mirror and hover there, blinking at her slightly. She puts the pen down and slips under the sheet again, enveloping herself. The words of the poem must contain something of what makes her

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mother real. She knows this history, and yet she doesn’t. The words are only guesses, letter locked inside heads.

Ruth answered her mother sarcastically, “Thank you so very much for informing me.” Her anger contained the years of arguing and cursing. They contained the words, I'll take that into consideration, you mother fucking bitch. Look at me, insensitive little spoiled brat bitch. This is my rage--wanting you to be close to me.

“I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,” Ruth’s mother responded. And Ruth imagined that her mother meant, Ruth is always the sensitive one, which is why can't I say what I mean. It's just that, I want the best for her, want life to be easy for her; for her to float through life. She does not understand, that with combed hair, she will float through life.

“You didn't hurt my feelings,” Ruth lied, “I don't even give a shit whether you like how I look or not. I just wish you could talk to me directly.” But there was more flooding through her--a history of power that couldn’t be completely uncovered.

This haunts Ruth as she lies sleepless in her room.

That day her mother had been the fifth person to comment on Ruth’s hair. Two comments were endured by older men, friends of the family, twenty-five years her senior, whom she had not seen in years. They had not seen her since blond hippie-girl high school days. Upon seeing her they asked, “why did you cut your hair and dye it black? Why?” That is to say (though they did not say), why did you choose to abandon this blond life?

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The blond life is so much easier and we also liked you better then. We wouldn't have said so, but we kind of liked you, in a secret little way. Not that we would have ever touched you, but when we played chase your mother let us tease you, little blond-haired girl.

Ruth stares into the fireplace, reflecting on those words. They mirror her internal conflict. Her selves fight with each other over which self is most authentic. The blond believes that she is the real self, and the brunette is the bastardization. What do I have to be, she thinks, what color hair, what length; how often must I comb it, what shade of eyeshadow must I wear, to be loved? Her insecurity turns into panic as she touches her hair, the ends just off the side of her ear. What happened to this real me, this blond girl M loved, flying like a bird, singing freely? She can feel M say it--Ruth, I love to hear you sing. His words tingle on the strands of her hair. They feel like rough wool, like crude rags against her head. She pulls at them desperately and cannot bring them to her mouth, like she had in high school. What to be to be loved? She panics. Yet she is aware that this blond self is imposed, fabricated, imagined.

These men, she thinks, cannot touch, my hair, cannot touch. My self. I am not betraying myself. Nothing to betray. The judgemental voice arrives and shames her for feeling so sensitive, for caring at all.

“Why did you cut your hair and dye it black?” these men asked.

To one of these men Ruth did not smile sweetly, did not act as though there were no history of domination, of violence.

Instead she said, “Because I think it's hot,” forcing the sexual implications.

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What if she had been so confident with M, if she hadn’t let herself be taken, if she’d abandoned him and blond hair that very day before the hockey game?

But Ruth was faced with silence from this man because he knew nothing of her context, or of the context of his words; he perhaps thought nothing of them. Whereas Ruth’s mind began to race. What is it then, sir, are you worried for me? Thank you, sir, are you worried for me now, what will become of me, will I find a husband, will men find me attractive? What will I do now that my hair is short, not long?

Ruth’s heart thumps. She pulls the sheet off. Her nakedness reveals itself to the ceiling, to the spirits floating there. She can see the top curve of her body in the mirror merging with the shadowy women. Ruth imagines that her mother’s fear is deep, like these mens’ fear. That with this uncombed, short, black hair, she fears that Ruth will not find a husband, or worse--not care. She will become a lesbian and have no children.

Perhaps Ruth’s mother believes these things can be avoided if she combs her hair.

Lesbianism will lead to no grandchildren, to escaping, to becoming something outside of familiar life. Uncombed hair. Avoid it at all costs. Ruth knows the fear is real. When Ruth moved out of her lover’s house the first thing her mother had said to her was, what, no wedding bells? She did not say, I am so proud of you. You are so strong.

Ruth turns again, her eyes stinging with tears, her throat thickening at the memory.

All of these thoughts, this letter, had pounded through Ruth’s head earlier that day during the conversation about the hair--the non-conversation about the hair--and yet none of these words were uttered.

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The conversation with her mother had ended with only a weak, “I really have no idea what to say to you, mother. I really have no idea.” Ruth’s voice was thick with frustration and indecision. She sat down and felt her aunt grip her hand as a few warm tears gathered at her eyes. Ruth felt ashamed that they were falling. I do not care what she thinks, she told herself, I don't care.

Her mother said, “I didn't mean to put you on the spot.”

Ruth thought that perhaps her mother meant: Where does Ruth’s anger come from? My mother was a crazy mother and her mother, and hers. My mother left me when I was in high school, always too busy to be a real mother. I am doing the very best that I can. This life, that I have given my daughter, is so much more than I received. Why can she not see that?

“Ruth,” her mother continued, as though nothing had happened, “please set the table so that it will be ready for supper when we come back from church.”

Mechanically, Ruth went to the antique cabinet to unlock the good china which lay inside. As she gently removed the plates, the smell of generations before her wafted out.

Ruth mother’s reminded her as she always did, “These are the china plates that Grandma gave to me. These with the brown roses on them. For years she saved the Betty Crocker coupons off cereal boxes and then traded them in for a set of china for each of her grandchildren. One day I’ll save enough Betty Crocker coupons for you.”

She took a step closer to Ruth and, taking one of the plates out of Ruth’s hand, sunk into her shoulder and suddenly began to cry. The blue dishcloth over her shoulder smelt moldy.

“I’m sorry I am not a Betty Crocker mom,” Ruth’s mother said.

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Ruth stared ahead blankly and remained silent. From where does this shame stem?

Has my father imposed all of it, driving it in with the affair? she thought. And what is this shame about? That my mother is not a model housewife? That her house is never clean enough? That the neighbors will find out she’s just a poor kid from the Midwest? Ruth couldn’t explain that having a supermom was meaningless to her.

In their silence there were no more words to understand. There was no way of reaching each other through all that thickness: words, thoughts, history, denial. Maybe it is all her, Ruth thought, maybe these are all her issues, maybe she has projected her entire body onto mine, so she is blind to me. Or maybe it is me who is unable to truly see her.

Ruth blinks, insomnia still there. 3:57 AM . She lets her mind go blank. She pulls herself off the bed and goes to the mirror. She can see a woman’s eyes dancing in the rippled glass. Mother. She looks down at the poem she wrote lying on the bedside table.

The words on the page appear suddenly out of focus. Is this all I can see of my mother, this two-dimensional face in the mirror, this fuzzy scrawled writing on the page?

Ruth slowly opens the door to her room, the fresh air strangely disquieting. She looks carefully outside. She can almost hear M calling to her, Ruth, we have to get to the hockey game. The air in the hallway is notably colder, the air moves through her until she shudders. Reaching out she places her hands on the top of the banister. She can see herself as a child, listening through the slats. I hate your body, dinner is never ready on time, you’re so disorganized, but I won’t leave you, she hears her father say to her mother. I masturbate to your body, I’ll cum all over it and then I’ll leave you anyway, Ruth hears M say to her. Or is it Alfabus booming down there at the bottom of the stairs.

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I still love you, she can hear her mother say. I still love you, she can hear herself say. Ruth’s pulse quickens, grips the banister more tightly. This is what we do, my mother and I . She sees it clearly. There are no standards below which our beloved can fall. Or we confuse abuse with love, or--what is it exactly?

The thought sickens her. Her heart quickens and she runs down the steps. Jesus Christ, get me out of here, she thinks. I have watched too many times, too much anger, too many things unsaid and misunderstood. In her sock-feet she slips on the bottom stair and falls against the front wall of the house, spilling a photograph from the wall.

This photograph has always been there, to the left of the front door. In the photograph a woman in a long flowing white gown is pushing her daughter, a prim little round-faced girl in a French school uniform, out the door. The photograph has always evoked an ethereal and frightening sense of tradition. Like the ghosts of the women in her room, like Ruth’s mother and the line of women before her, like Ruth and the women she has grown up with, these women in the photograph are terrifyingly powerful.

Ruth kneels down, childlike, and grasps the photograph with both hands. She sees in this young girl herself at seventeen, the empowerment she must have felt to step out independently and decide to have sex for the first time in her young life. She must have felt righteous and mature. She remembers a bit of the irony, underneath all the layered truth. The decision to have sex with M had once been powerful and mutual and planned.

They had been two innocents, “going steady” for over a year. She called Planned Parenthood herself from a pay phone in the high school hallway and got herself on birth control pills. Her mother knew nothing about it, gave neither her permission nor advice.

Ruth had felt autonomous.

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Ruth stares down at this photograph, sees its chilling whiteness, this woman sending her daughter out into the world. She sees in them these women keeping guard here, in the house, next to and around her. Her mind races. Somehow I have grown from there to here, from young feminist to this obsessed and sunken-in wreck. And my mother has gone from feminist activist to wanting-to-be Betty Crocker mom. Or is it that simple?

Is it really worth wasting the time judging and berating? Are some choices braver than others or are all the choices we make just as brave as any other? Ruth she lays the photograph down, leaving it there on the floor, and walks back up the steps. She almost pulls herself up the banister. Then she reenters her room, her skin stinging at the blast of heat.

Ruth lays back down in her bed, calmer now, and sleep beginning to take over. The clock on her bedside table says 4:30 AM and out the front windows of her room, the moon begins to rise. It is the most beautiful moon Ruth has ever seen. It illuminates the room so that finally, she turns out the bedside light. Eyes still staring at the moon, she suddenly wishes her mother were there next to her, close enough to smell the sweat on her skin, that they could cuddle like they did when Ruth was small.

Ruth decides to go get her. As though drugged, she floats down the hall to her mother’s room, enters, and stands over her. She sees her mother’s calm body under the sheet. She believes she sees it for the first time.

Ruth’s mother sleeps lightly, so she opens her eyes almost immediately.

“What is it Ruth?” she asks.

“Mom, you have to get up and see the moon. It’s incredible. It’s right out front my window, you can’t see it from here.”

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Ruth’s mother pulls herself up silently. She is exhausted and apprehensive, but she follows Ruth down the hall and stands next to her by the front window of the house.

“It is beautiful,” Ruth’s mother says.

They don’t touch, the two of them. They just stand there in silence while the specters move about in the silver sliver of the moon. Ruth think of words she might like to say, but she doesn’t.

She might write them down, in the form of a letter. Put it in an envelope. Send it.

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dear mom.

We long so desperately to be loved, you and I. Perhaps with your privacy and your masks you defend yourself against those who would find you imperfect. And I, with my need for transparency, believe that if others could see all of my imperfections, they couldn’t help but love me--because in my mind, to know fully is to love fully. I think we long for the same things, you and I, just differently.

I realize that men have made these marks on our lives, controlling what we view ourselves to be, what we should look like. All along I’ve been wishing you to be stronger, while I’ve been torn down by those same self-imposed pressures. I see this now, mom.

That anger I felt. It’s like I knew objectively these feminist ideals, the meaning of “strength,” of “womanhood,” of a “healthy relationship”—what your friend should do in hers. I knew feminist theory. Practically did a goddamn term paper on my life.

But even after realizing objectively that everything is so fucked up with me, still— still! I couldn’t change on a personal level. Mom. You. Feminist. Role Model.

Relationship with dad. Me. Feminist. Analytical thinker. Reader. Writer. Fear. How do we all reconcile these things ever? Mom, give me some kind of guidance here—I’m trying to guide myself but I’ve already fucked up so badly.

I know there’s just no time left. We can’t compromise our sense of self for men--or for women who would hate us for not being that empowered woman of feminist ideology.

It is just as hard for women to say yes as it is to say no! It was just as hard for you to stay with dad as it would have been to leave him. Whatever choice, it must be brave. Maybe even every choice I’ve made has been brave?

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Mom. Listen. I know it’s not true. Feminism and objectivity have nothing to do with it. And I love you— R

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don't contact me anymore.

Ruth is wearing tennis shoes, jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and a gray hoodie. Her hair is undone. Sometimes this is how she likes herself best. She looks down at the dry and broken ground beneath her, kneels, and touches it. As she stands again, she deliberately brushes her face with hands that are now covered in a thin layer of California earth.

It has been close to a year since she’s climbed this hillside. Her steps are deliberate and her gaze floats upward to the line where the brown dirt of the path appears to touch the blue sky. The image sends a chill down her spine with its beauty, as though it were the very first time she’d discovered those striking bands of color juxtaposed.

Breathing deeply and concentrating on her ascent, she reflects on her long week. It had only been two days ago that she’d been in a room with her uncle, waiting and loving him as he passed on. And it had only been yesterday that she’d boarded her flight back to California, as though life should go on as usual.

I am riding the plane home now. Up in the air, my body knows something it does not know on earth. For some reason, each time I fly, I reach a place of calm where I realize that my life has been so full that even if it were to end today, if this plane were to crash, I would have lived a complete life. These flights are the moments of passage during which I most clearly accept that which has terrified me most--the idea of death. Flying is an unexpected and joyful deflation of all that fear.

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She knows that life will not go on as usual. She knows that in fact each flight she has ever taken coast to coast has signified passage from two entirely separate worlds, from one state of mind to another. After making passage, she has never exactly been able to return to the person she was. This has been true since the very first time she made the trip cross country, from east to west coast, when she left high school, her parents, Lisa, and M behind for the first time. During that flight she entered a hypnotic state and fell, like Alice, through the rabbit hole. That was the first in what would be a long series of flights she’d take across the country. Each provided a necessary transformation for her. Each a symbolic passage.

Yesterday’s flight was no different. It was marked by a very particular event--the death of her uncle. In a beautiful way, the experience of watching her uncle die had helped her to realize what she’d been told before but had never witnessed--that death is much like birth. It is another miracle, another part of life, and a natural part of a cycle that is ultimately right and good. Watching her uncle’s body die had somehow allowed for Ruth, also, to die to an old self. It was the plane ride home that sealed that transformation.

There is an old women next to me now laughing loudly at a sitcom. She has offered me a piece of fudge. I eat it and go back to my writing. When I am an old woman I will offer young people fudge and I will laugh loudly at sitcoms. Yet here I am sitting in transit: mid-air, mid-life. Conscious of the greater context. There is ground below me and millions of galaxies above and around me, and I am not yet an old woman. I have so much to learn. This death is not the last one I will endure and even this death itself may not even be final. Yet I am not still a child. I have already died to old selves, much has already been

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discovered, so many passages have been crossed and explored. I am conscious of my inability to control my positioning in life’s continuum. Today on this plane I will forgive myself for my innocence, acknowledge it, and celebrate what knowledge I do possess.

“Good evening,” a man with a dog says to Ruth as she climbs.

“Hi,” Ruth answers back, and the cheerful voice that comes out surprises her.

“You should turn around,” the man says. “The colors over the city are incredible.”

“I can’t,” Ruth declares, joyously. “Not until I reach the top of the hill. I promised myself to wait it out for the very best view.” Ruth’s voice reminds her of the romantic novels she loved as a child. She smiles internally and the warmth of her smile floods her eyes so they dance.

“Well you better hurry up, you don’t want to miss the sunset.”

“I won’t.”

Sometimes I imagine telling my life in relation to an object. You give me an object, at random, and I’ll tell you a story containing only that object in relation to my life. And the strange thing is, it will be just as true as any story I tell. Coffee cups, you say? Well, there was that first one, with Lisa in the Metro in a thick brown speckled mug ... Plane flights, you say? Sunsets? Men I’ve fucked or loved or both? Banisters I’ve watched through? Let me tell you, I’ve watched through too many. When I say I’ve watched through banisters, I mean to say not only that I spent my childhood listening to screaming

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and yelling from my parents downstairs. I mean also that I have spent my life witnessing men and women screaming and yelling, heard countless stories of abuse--this woman raped, this one hit, this one made to feel less than what she is. If it were not so pervasive perhaps I would stop writing about and thinking about those banisters.

Still focusing on the line where blue and brown touch, Ruth increases the speed of her steps and settles back into her head. She knows that the Ruth self she died to was the part that had been inextricably linked to M. But how was it that watching her uncle die had helped her see her own life, especially in relation to M, more clearly? Perhaps it was the relative insignificance of her loss relative to the greater loss of that beautiful uncle, father, husband, brother, son. Perhaps participating in this ritual of death had provided the physical embodiment of another death she had been unable to witness. With M, there had been no terrifying phone call, no obituary, no funeral, no body. M had walked, voluntarily, out of Ruth’s life and she had been left with the strange amorphous absence of him but gripping still to the context of his larger life. M, like Ruth, had so much discovered, so much yet to live. He still lives. But to Ruth he cannot. Today she will lay him down, let him die, so that she can finally live.

“How closely can she embody paradox, how closely?” Ruth asks herself, smiling, poking fun at her own formality. “I’ll speak in riddles if I want to!” she exclaims, smiling even wider and looking around to see if anyone can hear her.

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I want to talk about all the banisters that I have watched through but it is not as simplistic as talking about numbers--frequency of disempowering or abusive or violent interactions experienced by women from men. That would somehow be too easy. Though it is difficult at the same time, to deny the patterns. To both get outside of the expectation of routine--that I and all my children will have to experience it--and yet not to deny that every single woman who raised me, who was my mentor, who taught me what it is to be woman, has experienced these interactions, and that they also watched through banisters at their own mothers experiencing it. This one berated for so-called financial incompetence, despite being the house financial manager and dual-income winner; this one beaten; this one possessed; this one molested.

She reaches the top of the hill and finally lets herself turn around to see the wide bay and the ocean beyond, past the city. It is worth the wait. As she turns, light hits her face with such strength that a cry of joy shakes her from the inside and leaps out. The sun is just beginning to touch the horizon line. With each setting sun Ruth can think of a man with whom she’s stood in that exact spot. If not in reality, then symbolically. Ruth has spent passages of time with men who have shaped her almost more than she has shaped herself. But today, this time, she is finally alone, in reality and symbolically.

“What will I do today?” she asks herself aloud.

She hasn’t allowed herself to ask that question before. Her words hang orphaned in the air. Ruth is afraid they might leave with the next gust of wind. Not afraid exactly, but almost anxious for them to leave, because they hang there, threateningly. They are asking

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Ruth to ask herself, and she has never asked herself that question before. What will Ruth do today? It is unattached to anyone other than Ruth, an organic question apart from any woman she has ever known, any image she has seen before and any man fucking or loving her.

I am reminded of these women of whom I speak because I stood next to them and together we held hands and watched my uncle die. Experiencing our loss that day and remembering their past losses, I see that we must constantly prepare for death. That is, in life we must live a constant preparation of death. Or we must die each and every moment that we live. Every morning upon waking we must affirm ourselves and affirm the loved ones around us. And paradoxically let one another go completely.

Ruth stands there on the hillside looking out. Her feet know the dust underneath her like her feet knew the Virginia forests built on red clay that she was born out of. As she peers out at the bay, her fear falls away. Today she might find another true Ruth self there in the dirt, or she might not. Either way, she will be exactly the most true and exactly the most contradictory and conflicting and new Ruth self she ever has been. Not a rebirth at all but a real love of a woman who will always and never be reborn into anything other than her true self. The possibilities are endless.

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final letter to M.

We house ourselves within the confines of rules that we long to break. Then we break them, we do. We inflate them and break them, and inflate the breaking of them. And we leave turmoil in the wake of our secrecy. Lies. Deception. Pain. You know that I am terrified of deception.

The moment we select language to describe our experience we settle for a less complex interpretation of life lived and commit to a narrative that is inherently fictive. At this point the question of fiction or nonfiction becomes irrelevant. The experience, or life itself, becomes what I call the fabricated art project, a place where experience is given a storyline and fact/fiction are inflated. Ironically, it is this inflation that opens a passage to deflation. The fabricated love affair art project involves love letters, photographs, phone messages, meetings in cafes, watching stars, dirty wine glasses, mix tapes, notes to secretaries, flower deliveries, illicit emails. By naming each of these things I render them insignificant. Once I utter them aloud, they lose their power.

I think about what it means to “practice little bits of love,� but I realize that to practice love does not come down to a question of little or big. This would assume some kind of hierarchy to particular types of loving, and perhaps give precedence to sexual, romantic relationships. On the contrary, I think that to practice love means that we love each other in ways that don't have to be arranged, planned, thought-out, or infused with cryptic meaning. We love in each of our interactions. This loving includes, but is not limited to, kissing, sex, cuddling, hugs, conversations, long emails. The basic premise of the practice is that no one person can fulfill every aspect of another person. So that the

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love we provide each other doesn't have to be thought of hierarchically. We simply love and provide things to each other in different ways that fulfill various aspects of our various selves at various times in our lives. Each relationship makes us that much more whole. So the art project ‌The art project strategically objectifies our various identities in order to deflate them and take away their power. By naming our identities and stories in our own language we pronounce ourselves as powerful subject and our various constructed identities and stories as objects. We deflate their power. We are in fact objectifying those identities that we once thought of as our selves. When in fact they are our not-selves.

The fabricated art project is a place where we acknowledge the deliberate inflation of fact/fiction, and admit that by choosing this particular language to describe experience our reality has been inflated to the level of mythology. This acknowledgement is ultimately the very thing that allows for the deflation of the experience, of life lived, of our selves, and our various identities. So that we approach a point where we can take our contradictions--our facts and our fictions--a little less seriously, and begin to love others-and ourselves--more seriously.

Ruth

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an open letter to my women friends.

Today I struggle with how to describe events and passages and tones and moods in all of their complexity, communicate full knowledge of the contradictory emotional responses that we have in reaction to the events in our lives. For those women who are not living with me in my direct community, or even for those who are, how do I achieve full transparency? I long to be known, in all of my contradictions, I long to describe the truth of my life as I see it, that it is muddled and conflicting and yet joyous and beautiful and expanding and enlightened relative to each day before it. Not relative to the other women I know, because each of us are different, follow different trajectories, but relative to myself.

I am growing each and every day relative to myself.

I strive for transparency because I think that in order to create effective communities of support for each other, it's necessary either to know each other fully, transparently, in all of our nuances, or to assume them. What I mean by assume is this: If we are only able to see the outcomes and effects of a friend’s decision because we live outside her community, we must agree to assume that this friend’s decision-making process was conflicted and complex. We must trust, to a large degree, in the rightness of their decision, even if we would have made a different one. Since we are different women, we cannot project our own experiences onto each other and we will never live the same life. On the other hand, that’s not to say we should never challenge each other. We can-and must--find the common ground of our similar experiences and emotions in order to effectively respond to each other’s pain and suggest methods of coping.

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I think our most important task is to challenge and support our women friends without accusing each other of “selling out” while taking into account that we have each lived distinct trajectories. I hope for you that you've never experienced powerlessness as it relates to men (or women) in your life. That certainly hasn't been the case for me or for most of the women that I've known and been influenced by. I could trace a legacy of conflating love and abuse--or permitting these to coexist--in my family alone. I’ve also come to realize that I am part of that legacy. I’ve been made weak by the very men (and women) who have empowered me. Yet, even if I were to spend the rest of my life wrestling with this paradox, I would still say that I have lived an entirely blessed life and I do not for one moment think of myself as weak-willed or as a victim of disempowerment.

I am linking this issue to gender because I think it's important to consider that as women we are different from men (most especially in the way in which we experience oppression) as well as similar to men (to the extent that we internalize oppression). I raise this because it's been important to my own development to dichotomize men and women less than I have. For too long I viewed my relationships with women as friends, basically divorced from sexuality, and all males as sexual predators, divorced from friendship. If the borders between friendship and sexual relationship break down, so too do the borders between male and female. So on some personal level, men and women are not separate entities at all, and I have seen how both men and women have reproduced the cycle of oppression as well as been its most strident opponents. So if women are both capable of reproducing negative stereotypes and unfair competition for our sisters, like men, but also recipients of a history of oppression different from men, how do we engage each other, specifically as women, to create effective networks of support?

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I can't say that my experiences with men have always been more disempowering than some of the negative experiences I've had with women. I’ve seen how some empowered, feminist women, having studied their own oppression, have judged other women for their decisions almost more harshly than have men. I am one of those feminists. Yet I have often compromised some idea of true self or true philosophy or true intention in order to give myself fully to the moment. In other words, I’ve compromised my beliefs. In fact I view this as one of my most positive attributes. The relinquishing of some of my personal truths has shaped my truth(s), revised my sense of self, and at times threatened my sense of self. I do long to let people in, to open up to people. I will let so much of them in, even the very worst parts, because I know that each of us contain those very worst parts, and they are the products of the very society we ourselves have shaped.

The question is, how much bullshit do we put up with? How many compromises do we make in our lives, especially as women in relation to men? How do we decide where the boundaries are between a loving relationship and an abusive one? And what happens when we inevitably disagree with each other about where those boundaries lie, especially when the hierarchies--this is worse than that and that is worse than this--are not identical? How do we get support from those that would disagree with how we have decided to compromise? Is it really true that some of us never compromise at all? bell hooks suggests that we completely revise our definition of love. In her definition, love is not present when any form of abuse exists. But my definition is hard to unlearn when love and some form of abuse have seemed to coexist my whole life.

Perhaps more to the point is, how do we define abuse? I think that each of us would disagree with some of the boundaries others have set for themselves. That is, they

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wouldn't be our boundaries. Each of us have heard what we think of as outrageous stories from women friends about what their partners have said to them, possession and jealously they've been subject to, and the irrational and ridiculous behavior thereby produced in their partners. How do we challenge our friends to reject abuse and recognize love? How do we know which battles to choose?

I want to speak specifically about relationships that aren’t overtly abusive, because I think these are most common. If we do experience some questionable instances of abuse, how do we communicate those negative instances to our friends and still receive support for the relationship itself? I think that some women are afraid to relay negative experiences they’ve had with their partners because they’re afraid (sometimes rightly) that their friends will be angry that they’ve stayed in the relationship. I also admit that it is equally challenging to hear about abusive instances that our friends have endured, most especially when one woman repeatedly experiences them in a single relationship. But if we cut lines of communication we risk making our friends feel they can’t come to us if and when they need us the most. One of the most important questions to ask ourselves is this: In what ways have we disempowered each other as we attempt to “save” each other from disempowerment from and by men?

Somehow we have to love each other even better during those times that we disagree most with each other. From what I've seen, all of us have at one point played the woman who has made a decision based on a man that we love, have adopted new styles and interests because of men in our lives and have at times pined over or even made the decision to spend more time with or be with men over the women in our lives. I think to get entirely outside any kind of compromise as it relates to men, we would have to cut men

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entirely from our lives. Some of us may choose to do this. What I know is that Adam was often my biggest support, more so than my female friends, when it came to juggling how I felt about rape.

Somehow he accepted that I had juxtaposed love and rape. Yet he also challenged me to let go of M completely. I had grown up to believe that we often love that which has both loved and abused us--partners, parents, friends. As a result, I made some poor decisions, perhaps compromising my self too much. I am changing and correcting past mistakes, learning how to prevent future ones. And I don’t think of myself as having failed. I don’t want other women to think of me as having failed. I suppose the truth is, I want to be recognized as a strong, independent woman almost regardless of my decisions.

I think each of us want and deserve this. We must continue to make this happen.

With all my love,

Ruth

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fabricated love affair art project.

She once lived on the streets, went into hiding and danced under the bridges.

Wouldn't let anyone find her. Didn't talk to anyone for years, slipped into the underworld of dancers and magicians, poets and writers. Couldn't talk to anyone about her injuries, about her sadnesses. About her abuses. A dancer walking the street. What does the body know? What does the body know? A dancer in hiding, a streetwalker, the woman sleeps with many women, she sleeps with many men. She asks them, mumbling, what does the body know?

The dancer has traveled for years, dancing as different women. A strip dancer and a flamenguera. A dancer on Soul Train and MTV. He followed her everywhere, they she, she them, she her. Followed her. Jimmy don't I know your name? I am too tired now to dance much longer. I'm folding up my dancing shoes and I'm placing them in a box. No more. Philadelphia Big City. The red shoes? I am dancing out your name, I will tap out your name forever, sweat it out through my pores, rid you from my bones until they break, you forever gone.

What does the haggard dancer do? What transcends madness? Fabricated love affair art project.

I can't believe you let him stick his dick up inside you like that, they’d say. I can't believe it. Living out life like a performance art piece. As though life were that easy.

Living out life like a performance art piece. Better watch out, it might come and get you.

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Old lady mumbling, fabricated love affair art project. Fabricated love affair art project.

The couple turned around to stare. When I was an old woman, I made jokes wherever my dancing feet could carry me. Fabricated love affair art project, she shouted to the lovers. In their car and the breathing went quieter, fabricated love affair art project.

Don't stop, don't stop, loving. Oh, said the young man in the cafĂŠ waiting for the woman, I didn't know you could escape it all.

Yes, you can, just escape it all now. Begin to live your life. How will anybody live this out?

Whispering, she said, I danced a silly little jig in my day.

She wandered down the narrow alleyway and her feet became dirtied in puddles of collected rainwater and motor oil, even though it had not rained in days. There were rainbows around her wrinkled, muddied toes. The old woman left scribbled notes on the table. They said, fabricated love affair art project.

What does the body know, she said, what does the body know. Shooed her out of the strip club; what does the body know. Even though she used to work there. The couple was sharing a cigarette over the red-clothed table. When they came close they touched and kissed each other and knew it was real. The woman said, life is so beautiful, life is so incredibly beautiful that we can rub noses like this.

Don't even fool yourselves, she says, fabricated love affair art project, don't even fool yourselves. The art project involves love letters, mix tapes, dirty wine glasses--

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She got up onstage and pushed the stripper aside. The young men and women sitting with their faces at crotch level booed her off. Get off the stage, they said, get off!

What does the body know, she retorted, what does it know.

Get her out, said one of the women watching by the stage; scream her out, said the owner and he pulled at her feet. One of the dancers jerked her aside and led her by the arm.

What does the body know, darling?

I don't know for sure, ma'am, she answered, escorting her out.

Fabricated love affair art project her cardboard sign said. Come to this side of the street, underneath the grating. Fabricated love affair art project involves love letters, photographs, phone messages, meetings in cafes, watching stars, dirty wine glasses, mix tapes, notes to secretaries, flower deliveries, illicit emails. What does the body know, the old woman dancer said.

Here's how the art project goes, she says, give me two minutes and I'll give you a piece of the love affair, that way you can know what love is. You want to give it a try, she says. The couple laughs and walks away. Too bad she doesn't know we're having a real love affair here. Here's what the body knows the street punk said and he raised his arm to reveal a scar that slanted from his underarm down along his torso down to his bellybutton and tore into his flesh. He jumped off the arm of the statue and landed in a dry fountain, ducking out of sight behind its high walls. How else will I know what the body knows?

At the end of anger, if you get beyond it, there is laughter. For the first time, she could glimpse it, the laughter, taking over in the moments that had been daydreams of violence, knives and blood. It had been a red dress and a snarl, it had been an aloof and

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tired look, fiery deep inside and red hot. There was a tangible way to understand the laughter. It was the laughter of the woman in the ragged brown sweater. It was this laugh, that overtook her, and it was something new, something that, up to this point, she had never known before. Now it was like an endless bay, it was like the inevitability of fog rolling in. There was a peaceful resignation to it. It was like watching the sunset from the top of the hills, and the moment when it finally hits the horizon line you turn to your lover and say, well, shall we? Shall we go?

First there had been depression, then it had been anger. Then it had been the border of insanity, a thing she knew objectively and yet also defined her. It was incredibly bizarre to say it like that. To say, on the one hand, I know insanity, and on the other hand, to be insane, because the recognition should somehow negate the existence of it. But in this new laughter, she could visualize their coexistence as she transcended both.

The depression was lost, and without home. The anger was mad at the world, the anger at a world that has screwed them into oblivion. The laughter, that came later, when the air deflated and there was literally nothing left to do but laugh. And the laugh was not unkind, it was not heavy. It was not ironic, nor sarcastic, but light, light joy; like taking off. Oh, oh world. Then comes the laugh.

It was like that in her laugh. That in its entirety, the scene, the images, the personalities, were so ridiculous, that they were beyond ridiculous, they were beyond insane. They were absolutely inane. Back so soon, you little goon? she imagined saying to him, if he were to reincarnate himself. The rhyme was grotesque; it made her laugh. But this time the laugh lasted for more than a moment, for more than a smile to herself; it was a deep, endless laugh. Like a knife waiting in the wings for the final scene. Or had this

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knife actually deflated? No one else would laugh that long. It was letting go of any pretense of taking oneself seriously, and it was begging for him to do the same, for the image to do the same.

She cannot sleep when it is dark, she cannot sleep. In the light she wants to be asleep again. Is it because she has always been afraid of death?

The dancer comes home and takes off her shoes. She lies there in the dark and feels the coldness of it fighting through the thin window. It bites at her and she stares back squarely.

In the new bed there is no lover lying there, and no one rapping at the door, it is just her alone, unabashed and sure. She hears the music coming off the street and she begins to dance. What does the body know, she says, what does the body know, and she lets her arms glide through the air and come to a moment's rest at her side. They gleam and float and they are silver like air. They are cream cotton and pink lace. They are moving rapidly and they begin to knock down all of the items on the desk, the computer and the piles of paper, the stacks of letters and the photographs. The pins and trophies from dancing, the tutu and the pretty porcelain figurine.

Her arms are her wings and she twirls on the round wooden floor. Her feet glide as she sings, what does the body know? And the mirrors reflect her each part and into the night she sails, her arms knocking down the books which pile up at her feet. What of women's writing, what of women's words, what of this narrative I have lived out and under, swimming here in this body and this crazy, crazy dance.

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