Plight of the Haier JW-C55A

I drop my mind in the drum and break the washing machine as a result. I can see its pale, scrappy face, wedged like a wishbone into a crack in the bowl. I try to drag it out but it slips, laughing, from my fingers. Fine, stay there. See if I care.

Strung out, prisoner. Funny money, broken heart.

I once had wisdom. I know I did. I remember its mark on me, anvil-shaped. I wish I had known that wisdom was something you could lose, that it was not forever, once accrued. To think that it can be excised from you from one night to the next by a masked and gowned surgeon, scalpel at the ready, through the open window. New moon observing coolly at his back. Take that, tooth fairy.

Hopes, dashed out against the wall. Signs, whorls in the changing sand.

Forgive me, or don’t. See if I care. God, I do. Tech bubble, 2000s revival. My gummy, stained, red-ribboned childhood of Pax Americana, family faida. But still I cannot remember ever having been so crushed as I am at this moment. Following the perfect lines on the mats with my dagger. If I lift my gaze and find you there, who knows what my face could reveal. Never healing from the beating I took from your horseshoe.

Living large at Camp Century

Today in bad ideas.

Vomit on the train platform, there and back. Orange splotches on a hospital mask. Winter light, winter light. Waiting for a moment to fall on you. Emotional grammar of the traumnovelle. Don’t flinch. Do your best. As two fighters with a dangerous natural curiosity, I feel we may have much in common. I fear we may have much in common. There and back, winter light.

Hands in fists, I watch horror movies and then I lucid dream. I panic. I won’t meet my eyes in the mirror. Could I ever hold my own gaze with real revelation, as though I’d just caught it one-handed from a great height? Could I do that without feeling unlucky to have been standing where I stood? Get me a horse whose hide I can skin and tan.

I have to believe in you because the blood stains of the massacre were visible from space. Sticky red pools in the rows of wheat. Purpling flesh in wavy heat, plums split on the ground. I have to believe because a child has died, is dying, will die. I have to believe because we have overextended empire and now reap only the desert beyond. That horse I killed could have kissed my teary eyes over the dunes, but I never possessed foresight, did I? So I travel the sands alone, grains of scarlet caught in my cloven hooves. But wretched as I am I still believe that you are one of my own, and I, one of yours. In this interregnum of vomit and light, of comets and light, I must believe that I cannot leave this dream. Faith, rolling fruit in the grass. Roots, hacked off bluntly, trenches bored into apricot-blue ice, disproportionate. Female Fantasies, Volume 1.

Detrás de ti voy / Yo, que siempre espero que vengan a mí

True, that my spirit is broken in fourteen places; true, that my macros are excellent; true, that I like blood sport; true, that I have fallen in love. Fast-walking my Tokyo neighborhood, arms out like an exiled penguin, I ascend a puke-green bridge to admire the cars, their red lights at ash-strewn dusk like divine intervention, or at least divine warning. Chasing a high that is tragedy on tragedy on tragedy on tragedy on tragedy.

In my house, there are many rooms.

Don’t let your guard down. Don’t get your guard down. Above all else, don’t let your guard down. Feet and hands arrive together, in a lockstep that is almost intimate. Distance into overzealous touch and then back into distance. Fists like keys. Right leg, a pillar; left leg, sweeping for mines. Hand extended, pitifully. Come over here and let me hold you. Oh, but don’t let your guard down. Briefly blinded by flesh and rags. Lose your time, your eyes, your every single gilded treasure, but don’t let your guard down. A lanky, long-tongued dog appears in the corner of the room, scratching up the tatami, and oh my fucking God, I’ve just been hit in the face. The four brocaded walls of my cranium, rattling cylindrically. I said, don’t let your guard down! But struck once, a sequel is inevitable, and I receive this second blow dutifully, like a child at communion. Better than expected, worse than hoped. The shelter where I was hiding last night, under the moon in the black copse, collapses in one terrific go. You retrieve the bricks to then build the house I will die in.

In my house, there are many rooms.

I don’t have the moral courage to end this. Hamartia will groan from underneath me, sweaty on the bedsheets, and rise to devour me whole. Saturn and his son, you and my pearl. I take you with me always. Staring at the shy light bleeding out from under the edge of a dark rain cloud. Blue of a contusion, gold in scattered ribbons. Light stretching out, like a cat or goddess, onto the bedspread. I am filled with frightening joy, and not because this reminds me of anything or because it is symbolic of something or because I can craft a metaphor or story from its raw material. I am filled with joy at the observation, the sensation. Action of the sky, equal and opposite reaction of the heart. Translucent, eternal becomes, in me, dense, momentary. So much tender and idle beauty. Don’t push your punches. Don’t let your guard down.

Speaking of which—

In my house, there are no rooms. I’ll wait for you tonight instead at the park, perched on the rusty rungs leading up to the red plastic slide. You say jump, I say how high. Come and meet me and let us fight and draw only a little blood.

Tower of lessons; hole of punishment

I don’t want to be told yes. I don’t want to be told no. At the Moonlight Hotel in the Petaling District, the concierge looks me up and down and then directs me, with the solemnity of an archangel delivering the burden of the inevitable, to the bar across the street. Looking down as I dart across the tar, my mind is briefly netted by the streaks of dark red light that swim in the gutter puddles. Drifting, garnet tadpoles. The metabolism of the red and tender, that is, the glimmer of the other than affirms contrast, scarlet to my baby blue, that promises togetherness despite difference. To be so entranced is to know I still have some vital force left to me. Right? I still have some life left, however meagre? The staggered lines of cars watch me, a bowed and penitent shadow against the headlights.

I’m deep inside the grotto of the bar—far, far too late to back out—when I finally notice him, the man I never dated. It’s the iris of my id that recognizes him first: the straightness of his back, perfect posture to the last. Then I feel, like the yank of a rope around my waist, the pull from the cratered gold moon inside his torso. His gravity catches my breath like a fish on a hook. I wriggle pointlessly, a spotted mackerel with a split of red on my gilled neck, a sprig of parsley and lemon wedge against my solar plexus. Then, to my horror, I register another feeling: the relief of a return from exile. Hunted through a crevasse by a masked killer but thrilled to be caught, delighted to have my heart extruded by Azrael himself. Oh no. No, no, no.

Wait, yes. Now that I’ve recognized him, now that there is no going back, I am no longer capable of treading carefully. I stare like a freak. I take him in like a long drink of saltwater. The feeling trickles in, brines my organs. Jar burial, early formaldehyde. Later, I will retch like I am dying on the floor of the ruined temple. I can tell from how his fingers move that the frosted glass between his hands is lightly wet. Gentle, transparent petals of touch left behind. He doesn’t have a buzzcut anymore. The hair curls at the nape of his neck. Pinkish tan line just under his collar. Vines on the wrought-iron balustrade. Imagining myself in Romeo’s green tights, that I were a glove on that neck, that I could announce my desire in dramatic pentameter. Outrageous. At this slanted angle, his eyes are to me seeds of wheat, cast over the watery delta. Sleepy eyes, but secretly alert, cat-like, as yellow as I remember, trained on the amber grain of the table. He hasn’t noticed me. A disappointment, sure, but also a major mercy. I don’t know what I would do if he was looking at me. I used his name as my email password for ten years and had a panic attack every time I entered it in.

Everything about me is wound so tight, so suddenly. Coiled, forced, rewired by a map of undercover copper that has chosen this moment to activate, to hobble and kidnap the dreams of my life, my presence of mind. But then again, did I ever have dreams, before this? Did I ever have a mind? I am clenching my fists, the muscles in my thighs, the teeth in my mouth. Iron on my gumline. Stick me hard and I’ll drain out, obediently. A pewter tub of pus, marrow and love. Frantic, supercharged. Every cell ripening to burst. Every bone, a gold-handled steak knife, pointed in one direction. No, a crowd of tuning forks, all vibrating in one low voice. Threaten to play my chords in your order and I’ll cry out, no hesitation. Ouch. The cardinal I have raised from infancy is pecking at my breast, flighty even in the feeding, and, unsatisfied, he takes bloodied wing. I am mortified to think of the expression on my face and the injuries it communicates. Both those I feel and those I could rise to inflict.

I meet the bartender’s eyes. He smiles knowingly, with such infinite pity that I could kill him. I have to choke down the urge to go up and admit everything to him, my plainclothes confessor. Everything that was dead is alive, and I am seeing symbols everywhere, I’d say. You only just got here, idiot, he’d reply. What is with your generation’s obsession with symbols? Blue heart, red shirt. Chapped lips, drilled lock. Silver cross and my shattered faith not only reformed but taken to an unnatural extreme. Makes me want to drive along the rocky coast for forty hours, at careless speed. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. I don’t even know where the brake pedal is. But isn’t that obvious? Just you wait until I break apart and all my diamonds are cast on the waters. Maybe I am a masochist after all. My hand was once his hand underneath the sheets. You have no idea what I imagined by the crush of blue and scarlet moonlight. The pure excess of fantasy that began as smoke but that solidified, perversely, finally taking real, wriggling, pained shape. Lost media, in the broken vein of scrolls dug out of the black, salty sediment of a coastal cave. I park at the shoulder and begin to dig. I believe, not that it happened, but that it will. That it lies waiting. A vividness of amphibian life—half-passion, half-punishment—that I cannot locate in the fossil record, no matter how I dig through sable sands, so I defer instead, trowel falling from my hands as I get to my knees, to the ultimate paleness of the sky. Do the clouds accept my prayer, do they reclothe into omens? You have no idea how stupid I could be just to belong to someone who doesn’t want me, and never did.

It’s happening now, in real-time. My heart is pulp, is polymer in a press. I am watching him stand to leave. Palm on the grimy surface. Wrist flexing as he turns. He is going to face me. He is going to see that I am there, that I am older and less pretty. One rotation of the violet planet. The jaundiced satellite, trembling in orbit. My vision goes dark. They say passion is red but really, it’s the darkest black imaginable, once you’ve fallen into its hole. The ritual starts. Justify that trance. The puddled candles, the discarded pilgrim’s shawl, the succubus summoned for romantic counsel. You serious, girl? Do you not see you will be punished for this willingness to believe? But I am already rationalizing the way I anchored myself to the flood of ichor, to the bridge over the abyss. Obsessing over fragments in the dust. Puzzle of bones, maze of desire. Chanting poorly from haunted gospel. Seek his permission, you, the independent woman. Betray your code, you, the rational actor. Offer your flesh like a tray of deli meat. A grade-A calf, fuzzy ears clipped. The succubus, sitting on the bar, sharpening her horns with a nail file, looks at me with contempt. Nothing in the world could stop me now. Scratch out the compass rose over your heart. Bloody, festering mark. Repress and then explode. Don’t say yes, and don’t say no.

Don’t you know it’s a privilege to be loved by me? So why don’t you act like it? God damn it, why don’t you act like it?

Checking out of the Moonlight Hotel in the hour before dawn, the concierge gives me a long look. I’ve realized too late that he can read my ego like a neon marquee. From the tall windows, I see the wide-eyed cars, the garnet tadpoles, the school of mackerel pass by. They are at a loss for words and so scream into the light instead.

The last great story

I stop, mid-walk, to watch a king preside over a flower. I get close enough, breath held, to examine his tightly wound, shiny, hairy face. The proboscis dangles, then descends. It hovers, then it lunges, needling the center of the flower, with less precision and much more urgent confusion than I had imagined. Is the terror I see only my projection? A tear in that wobbly eye, but would a butterfly cry? For the first time, I understand clearly that feeding is fighting. I need you to eat, the wings beat out in frantic code. Orange flower, October late-comer, your petals are limp, your nectar thin and insipid, but I need you. I need you to live.

On my way to practice, in the tunnel under the road, I spot Menelaus again, wings splayed permanently, in a cobweb. The next day, I see three of him, lined up in a neat row in the gutter. I stare a long while, though I have a place to be, to keep this picture in my mind. In the darkroom of my brain, I slowly immerse his body in fixing liquid. Gloved hands, itchy in latex. Upside-down butterfly, crushed against the wings of my corneas and then the web of my cortex. I’ll keep you perfectly preserved, I promise. I’m loyal like that. I mate for life.

Flashing from the traffic lights, cracks in the pavement along the sewer. I take fistfuls of the grillpill. I salt the meat of my soul. I grow muscle. I stop reading books. I gag when I hear the news. I choke down the memories. The cypresses on the horizon are black triangles against the red sunset. I stare at them until it feels like my head is on fire. My arms drip candlewax like an ancient saint. I ache like a mistake.

Ah, if I were a holy saint, I’d wear a gold hair net and deliver cynical blessings. My color palette would be stone gray, slate blue, clay red, piss yellow. Take heart, I’d say, bending over a broken woman, you will never be a mother. Your body will nourish no life but your own. Take heart, I’d whisper to my ancestor, you will never be a father. No son of yours will ever disgrace the Earth. Not a holy saint, then, but a holy fool.

Take this key, open that door. You were better than expected, but not the best, not the brightest, and you never were.

Of course I tolerate ambiguity, of course I’ll campaign for nuance, but the way you hold contradictory thoughts in your mind and pretend they’re both true is a coping strategy. Just admit you have no courage. Just say you can’t decide and want to leave an opening for plausible deniability. I’d take you back, then. Honesty really gets me going. Just say you will hold back on the decision until the collective tells you what to believe, you jackal of the city. Once the banners go up, only then will you know what you believe, and you will claim to have always believed it. Turn to me and say I don’t know, and I don’t care, I just need to feed. You and me both, sinner.

The test

A band of purple clouds moves over the sun and floods the room in blue. I whip the sheets off and hit the floor. I haven’t slept in three weeks. I’m emotional but I’m cool about it. God, I’m so cool about it. I could bottle this feeling up and peddle it as antifreeze. Would you buy it from me? Would you buy anything, from me?

The air takes an ovoid shape around me. Veined petals of gritty blood, wet on my forehead and on my greenish chicken claws. I close my eyes and wait. Soon, I know, the bells will chime. The pounding will begin. This speckled eggshell will crack into shards, and many calloused angel hands will clamp around my waist and chuck me unceremoniously, like a poorly pitched ball, into the current of current affairs, the flood of the flood.

I try my best, I do. I try my best until I don’t.

My thoughts of you are a talisman from a temple. Your hand on the handle, and then into the wound of the conventional. My thoughts of you are so replete with terrifying potential that I think I could summon you, as though through a pentagram. You emerge, head first, from the center of this star.

You shadow me through the banality of the light and you have been everywhere I have been. You were there when I skipped an afternoon meeting to walk the beach, feeling my heart fall to my feet and surge and break like the surf. Both baby-blue sneakers hanging from the fingers of one hand. At the bridge, you sent your messenger, a brown-eyed stray, poised, pert, expectant. Seeing him there, I trembled and returned the way I came. Humidity dripping in tears down my back at Rama IX Park. Under the tulipwoods, you were there, cast in shadow, pressing play on one song over and over, rubbing its chords into my brain like marinade until every strip of lace in me ripped with agony.

Enough is enough!

In a moment of bravery or cowardice, I bite you back. But you bubble up again like fat off a broth, foam off a fountain and suddenly I am shit-scared and three seconds from breaking down at the Linjiang Street Night Market. Light glancing off the water of the bay like a blow. The sunset over the rail line, pinking the wrinkled silk of my emotions. Your breath, hot at my back as I wander the market. I whirl around but I am alone in the maze of stalls, surrounded by strangers in the purple twilight, only a girl of two-hundred bones cast haphazard on an altar.

What’s the lesson at the end of this story? I bust a blood vessel in my finger and find blue, fig-shaped, under the skin. Tape the middle and index together in a white cross. Tongue-tied, you cross my mind. Cross my heart, hope to die. Body heat so hot off me, I could boil the ocean. I say nothing but I radiate this pain like a belt of moonlight. Meteorites pinballing a path through my stomach, knocking hard against the pulp of my hips. I am as proud and as ignorant as ever. I look up at the suffering of a shooting star and try my best to sympathize.

User error

It’s confusing to be told not to give up. Give up on what? Surely not on myself. I may be a cynic, occasionally even a depressive, but I have never doubted that I know my own mind like a best friend. No, what they mean is don’t give up on us. Us? Us! The people, the planet, the pastiche, the thousand blistered pantheons, the torn paintings in pastel, the pastures with their peonies, clouds and horses. I can’t respond to this because I don’t know how. I mean, could a drop of water give up on the ocean? Could David give up on Michelangelo? I can’t give up on us any more than my shadow could give up on me. But maybe I’m told oh, Emma, don’t give up so often because my desire to run away is so obvious on my face. My desire to summon a wave or a scalpel to cleanse, to cut myself away. The desire not to belong, to separate, to be distant, to be chemical isolate in the bubbling char.

I look up how to fix an old piece of technology and find a review condemning me: This issue is just user error. I laugh. What else could I apply this to? Is my pain just user error? I broke my life apart but a smarter user would have known better. Lacking in the appropriate technical acumen, I did not plan, I did not optimize, I did not buy the optional protective case, and I failed in a way that is not just permanent but also eternal, because the manufacturer doesn’t even make this item anymore.

What’s my problem? My problem is that my father has the pride of a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and my mother the fanatical vulnerability of a martyr, and these qualities have not mixed well in their daughter’s helix. My problem is that my brother, infinitely more sensitive, infinitely the better version, is proof that I cannot be so bold as to attribute all my issues to the uncontrollable forces of nature. Something went wrong that cannot be blamed on another. User error. My problem is that I left my heart behind at a convenience store. Even the promise of care of the manufacturer under warranty could not have fixed that.

Jean, who I do not speak to anymore, once compared a piece of writing to a block of ice. Clear, powerful as ice, she said. Instantly, I saw her vision in my mind: Massive, perfectly rectangular, sat in a small cool pool of its own transparent blood, the reddish light of the sunrise slicing through the blue body. I wished I could have communicated to her how much I loved her description. As it was, I was only able to smile idiotically and say wow, cool repeatedly. Maybe my most significant problem is that, as my brother once said, my soul won’t fit through my mouth. Instead, my spirit seethes in time with the beat of undistilled and uncommunicated feeling. So many people have left my life through a door that won’t open again. So many people have left my life through a door that I myself locked behind them, and I called that independence, I called it victory, instead of giving up. But still I think of her, still I retrieve the thought of ice from my pocket when I need to remember what it is to be clear and perfectly legible, to be honest and forthcoming in that honesty, that is, to be true. To be ice unrobed into liquid and then back into the red.

Truth or dare

I am seeing pilgrims constantly at practice. Butterflies racing through the air. A beetle, hopeless on the tatami. Briefly, a wasp. On my knees, wiping down the floor, I notice a segmented copper coin with two twitching antenna. Tonight, I am come to your rescue, agent of the swarm. Tonight, even I am foreign here, though I am not a third as holy as you.

When I am not at practice, I am thinking about practice. In my heart, a constant and painful double-take. Everything reminds me of moves, stances, positions. Feet forward, backward. Hands up, then down. Soul, on and off. Going for a run in the rain, I start to dream again. Blood in my roots, down my chest, I can feel shame grow petals in my shadow. For God’s sake, hold it together. You must have a life outside of practice. But could I?

At night, along you come, red messenger. You have taken a new form this time but of course I recognize you. You emerge from the foamy surf with rusted hands. Trailing rubies from the dagger between your fingers. Over the sand, I will follow you, half-frantic, first running and then falling to crawl on hands and knees. I will fight, mouth filled with gold dust, to pick up the necessary speed to match your stride though I know I cannot catch up. Only when you reach the top of the dune do you take pity. You turn to look down at me through the mirage and you declare, with a laugh: Truth or dare?

Moving through forms on the mat, I again fantasize about being stabbed, because then I would have proof of a body, proof of sacrifice. The symmetry on both sides of the photograph tells a terrifying story. The passion I am holding in my chest like a poison pill. The faith that lies in the fallow field, featureless only on the surface. The belt, tightening around me. Truth or dare? Either way, just tell me your name. I know your future already; I saw it as I closed the door, crossing my path. Hand on the hilt, fever in my face coiled like a snake, I met your eyes in the mirrored glass. Never before have I been so chained to a single blade of grass.

I cry for no reason. No, there’s a reason. I feel like the Little Mermaid. No voice, only tears that bead on my face and then evaporate on the sand. Truth or dare? If truth, machete open your mind and kneel for me so I can stand on tiptoes to peer inside. If dare, forgo the blow and tell me everything yourself.

Blister the night / 合宿

Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. I check my body for damage but other than the rift in my chest, from which every piece of broken silver has already been plundered, I am disturbingly whole.

To be uninjured is such a disappointment. I’d love to lift my arm up and show you all the blood gushing from me. Geyser from the armpit, lava lacquering the snow fields and olive trees of Mount Olympus, sticky plasma gunking my hair, clogging the joints, flooding the mechanism. Alkaline red pooling at my feet until I am bled dry. Maybe then I could stop trying to prove how much I am trying.

The heat, an intrusion. I am afraid by what’s in front of and behind me, so I look up. Green and aquamarine, blessing of a breeze and call of the cicada on the staggered stone steps. I imagine turning on a dime, splitting from the group, sprinting out of the parking lot, my plastic flip-flops loud on the hot asphalt. I imagine disappearing into the siege of the trees. What version of me, what story of mine would follow me over that line?

The nighttime, a sweetness. After the typhoon, the evening clouds are pink and black. Store-bought fireworks by the seaside. The dark sand, grit in my underwear. The moss on the cypress saying a prayer and the waves joining in. I wait by the pillar and, though I have never had faith, I look down to find that I am pressing my hands together. As the air trembles and cools, I watch the shadows race one another across the upper floor. Horrifyingly, I reexamine my hands to find that the little courage I first mustered has grown by itself into a bonfire. What am I supposed to do with all this new bravery? Where do I put it?

When the light moves, I don’t see where it goes. Alvin comes out and asks me what I’m doing and dumbly I say, “I wanted to see the sky.” Later I realize that though this was not the truth, it was no lie.

Sitting in rows to eat. Eye contact from across the room. Riding the bus down the bridge that spans the bay. So steep, it’s like flying. Water like a sheet of pressed steel. Hammer me down so I remember who I am, so I can stop this longing for a place I have never been. From the window, mountains, denuded. Sweat on me as though I were clothed in it. Sparring is a relationship and I get dumped each time. Every breath, a live wire. Every look, a cardinal direction and I follow it obediently until I am knee-deep in endless salt flats. I don’t think. Me, not think? But I have never been more myself. A beckoning hand and I die inside. But I go down with no bitterness. Every single soft spot is dear to me now. Where is that girl who nursed every cut so vindictively, who held every grudge against her chest like a phantom limb, like Kali chucking her skulls with four arms? Has it always been so easy for her to step aside?

Clear your mind like a rag over a blackboard. Stand in stance. Power through. Hit hard. Head swims. Briefly, I meet God at the meat market and tell him it hurts to breathe. He is unimpressed, but I hardly expected or wanted more. Fish in a net. Fluid blister on my foot. Blood on my gloves, from a wound no one can see. From the open doorway, a butterfly and then a crow. Aim true. Clear your mind. Close the distance.

I thought you should know that the ice in the set of your frame has the tightest possible grip on me. It wakes me like a thump in the night. It pushes me to a place beyond the orange-barked cedars. When the ice returns home, like a green-scaled salmon upriver, to the delta of your jaw, it fists the moonlight in me and cracks it hard, robin’s-egg blue. It melts me down to the clay.

Two streaks of red on my white boxing gloves. Where’d that come from? You won’t hold my hands so, when you tell me, meet my eyes instead. Where’d that come from?

Want what you have

What happens is this. They say they want money, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want the truth, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want to make a difference, but they don’t. They want love. They say they want attention, but they don’t. They want love. They want love. They want love. They want to possess it and then, once possessed, to discard it.

I like the pain of contrast. I like putting different ideas side-by-side and observing how they behave. Animals at dusk, in the glade of the vanities. Under the lights, masks on stage. Vassals kneeling on the studded battlefield. Do they rise to circle each other, warily? Do they reach for one another? And when they touch, do they then flinch from the blaze of contact? Or do they ignore each other, pallid and impassive? If it doesn’t rupture immediately, does the connection deepen? Do they whisper about me, do they form an alliance? What then? How long until the threshold is crossed, the seal broken, the contract shredded, and they turn on me?

O crassa ingenia. O caecos coeli spectatores. The stars must think us perfect, paranoid fools.

What happens is this. From the tiled floor of the fun house, my neck cuffed in a ruffled clown collar, I pick up a long list of horrors and I train my gaze on them. It’s an earnest effort, though it has the blush of voyeuristic perversion, the blandness of stupidity. The mirrors spin around me. I rotate the pages, I flip them over, I stare at the typewriter script, but still I cannot get my brain to understand what I am reading. In the long shadow of that incomprehension, the animals, the masks, the vassals are totally still. They wait to see what I will do. Some part of my heart lets out a long shuddering breath, as though trying to keep from crying. Gamely, I continue reading, but that part of my heart resists, that part stays sheltered in place, and I never have more contempt for myself than in that moment.

The most heroic thing I have ever done, the most cowardly. The loveliest photo of me, the ugliest. It’s all in the angles, isn’t it? But which one was me? How closely have I been captured, to the degree? Both, neither, you say, but that only leaves me as the bruise in between, where I can be heard but I will possess no meaning, like noise, where I can be seen but I will occupy no space, like smoke.