Conscience Round

The fact of the matter is, I overthought it. I overthought it, and then I oversold it. I trembled across the slim line between cop cars. On the highway, legs wet on the leather, I hit the gas. Unclothed, I dove into the shaft of freezing water and had to be pulled back up. Every second available to me, a pearl gasping in my hands. Every word available to me, a bomb about to go off.

Cliché of clichés. Red felt cloche in my baby photo. Chained to a man’s broken hip, I blow off work to lay on the two-seater and write a script of how to apologize to you. But though I know what I want to say, I can’t decide why I want to say it. Do I want to be vulnerable, or do I want to attempt vulnerability to force tender feelings in you? Come on, cries out the chorus, we know the answer. You can’t even listen to music without pretending you’re singing to an audience. So white-robed, white-socked, sleep-deprived, I stand at the metal table and pour out nectar, bleach, milk, vinegar, in different configurations. I attempt pools of craven magic, because what I want is not to be honest but to to generate a specific feeling in you. A magician’s assistant, or a control freak?

Underneath the eaves, you comment on the rain. On the evening train, you mention your dream. Off-hand, my spleen flung off-ramp. Is this a show of honesty intended to enchant me? If so, you’ve succeeded. You’ve conquered the cynic. You brewed a potion in a teaspoon and felled me for a lifetime. It’s hard to be so easily claimed when I know that you were not even trying, and that’s the way you won me. You’re like this with everyone and I resent it. I resent so powerfully the quality of yours that I most respect. It means I’m not special but come on, cries out the crowd: If you had been, you would have rejected him. Paradox of paradoxes. If there is a God, deliver unto me a box of white peaches, clefts ready for the sword. If there is God, deliver unto me a crate of wine bottles, so I can uncork them and refuse to drink.

Of course, I fool myself when I call myself a cynic. It’s no mystery. When Seneca said, life is long if you know how to use it, I cried. It’s not possible to overestimate the limits of my sentimentality, made all the more grotesque by sardonic indifference, which is somehow, in me, its conjoined twin. You don’t know catastrophizing until you’ve seen me do it on stage. Putting my blood-streaked hand into the black top hat and under the blinding spotlight, retrieving the pink cliché, the slippery paradox. I’m a romantic who wants nothing more than not to be loved.

The problem is, in my spoken parts, drafted on stolen laundry and overdue library books, written with sweat from syringes and blood that can’t congeal, I don’t say what I mean—only what I think you want to hear. No, not even that. The truth is, I write for myself that which I want to hear myself saying. I want to be the kind of person who’d say these things out loud. Can I dare to hope that this means that I do mean them? But it can’t be true because if you flinched, I’d take it all back in an instant. That’s how deep my pretensions go. That’s how fake I am. How fatal it is to perform because if you drew back at the intensity of a performance that went a little too far, that fell off the line, that forgot the brakes, that couldn’t come up for breath, I wouldn’t be able to talk myself out of it. Now that’s what I call an unforced error.

See through me. See me through. See the difference? You’re right, there isn’t one.

Don’t do too much, I say to myself, over and over. Take a deep breath and don’t do too much. Less is more and don’t do too much. Never give up and don’t do too much. Lock the fuck in and don’t do too much.

In the last abyssal crunch of empire, I am a blacksmith’s daughter. I am up early and ratcheting up the rat-catching. I am not repaying my debts. I am slamming my hand between hammer and anvil and lifting, with a rancid expression, the pulsing baby blue up to the last of the lamplight. You bought me then, lies and all. You fell for a girl so sour and so sweet. In our fight to the death, you reach for my face. But where’s the bill of sale? Reach into your pocket and find only a peach pit.

I am not perfect but I swear, an angel could have sweated no better. My mind ribboned itself and began to flow, like blood but better, in a quest to inhabit my body. Every drop of nectar knew where to go. Saturating every inch of skin from the inside, until I was sick with it, sick and jittery and living inside an acid battery of awareness. A woman so tenderly possessed, sucked in by a feeling that is really a place inside her.

But some days, terrifyingly, it doesn’t work. I start the sequence, reaching in to find my mind paved over like a parking lot. I can only play me like a performance, then play me like a con artist. Backed up at the chokepoint. Itchy with the memory of all that forward momentum. A pervert’s princess, dethroned. Head rolling a red line down the cobblestones. But don’t do too much, I remind myself. You’ve haven’t wanted anything so much in years but don’t do too much. You’ll never sleep again if you don’t get there but don’t do too much.

I wanted you to like me. I wanted you to hate me. I wanted you to resist me, then desire me. I want to be your first and last contradiction. You looked at me and saw it all. No, that’s only my projection, because I have this expectation that my mind can be read like type, interpreted like an animal cry. I tried to make it easy for you. I cracked the runes like eggs in an effort to simplify. I got on one knee, balancing the lambskin sword on both palms. I broadcast the message through every wet surface, every instance of failed artistry. I met your eyes instead of running my mouth. I met your eyes the way they do in the dark, in the cheap seats, on the end of days. Tears, illuminated. You looked at me and saw nothing. You looked at me and said, don’t do too much.

Afternoon, Tokyo. A big red car called Rubicon crosses my path. What exactly did you win and die for, Julius Caesar?

A nightmare in which a lesser woman wins a grander prize. Wait, I was awake when that happened. I spend an hour reading Seneca to try and forget my jealousy. A fantasy in which a greater man settles for me. His feminine signature on the forms. A lesson radiating through history in slowly expanding rings. Apollo, take this gun and whip the sun to pieces.

Morning, Tokyo. So many passerby in the crowd. Spittle in the imbroglio. Molecules in the storm. Staring into faces and thinking, uncountenanceable countenance. Reading a magazine article about death. Watching a world champion perform and crying like a firehose into my phone.

Make no mistake. I know how you would opt to describe this, but my love for you is not maternal in any way. I do not simper. I do not whine. I am not obsessed with your presence and your absence. My love is unstructured, undisciplined, inhuman. I love you like the twilight loves the pines.

Night, Tokyo. Losing respect for myself and others. But rest in this muddy puddle with me. Don’t rationalize this. Don’t explain this away.

A fair fight, a sentence to death. In the center of a sniper’s sight, I miss you already. An apparently humorless man, but still I saw you, when you turned away, smiling at the way I stood there with the wet on my hands. Later, in bed, I wonder if I make you proud. Shocked, to want that, for the first time, when even my progenitor’s pride horrified me. No one’s fault. Just a stain I could never parse. Parallax of the heart. Forever a side-sleeper, and I turn away, towards the wall. Inkblot on my upper arm, misread by an army of therapists.

Getting a spam email and thinking, no way, I’m still in her address book? Yes, way. Wayfinding into heaven and finding myself just as lonely there. Peachy, plummy skies turned to a carpet of frothing stars. Looking up: how to say “I wish you could see yourself how I see you” in Japanese. Looking up to see the planet directly opposite my front door. Seize this now, this sparkling deepness in time. I’d let you kiss my hand if you wanted. And that’s not all.

Out of the blue, out of the amber. How many people who knew me for only a brief time still remember me, years later? Hear my name and know it as my name, and not just a mess of phonemes most popular among depressed parents of girls? Recognize, in the milling of the crowd, the habits that I don’t and never did, because they show up in motion and not in the mirror? See my eyes in the pockmarks of the bark? Look at a tone, crushed crystal on the stand, and then recall the tremble and slant of my hands? The way I smiled when I thought, incorrectly, that I’d managed to conceal the obvious?

And when they see the pockmarks, the eyes, the hands, the name, what then? And when they send the email, how many deep breaths? On your marks. On your guard. I’ve been told that I am dangerous, that I am strong, that I am cold. And that’s not all. So when you recognize, in the staggering of the clouds, the signs of my predator’s drive, do you rush to hide your herd?

You say it twice because you think I didn’t hear you, but I did. My instinct to deflect your compliments is as strong as pain. I think I might sooner take a bullet than praise. So shy, but I don’t want to be boring. Plan the murder of your inner child. Life comes back anyway. It always does. Quiet, my show is on. I break open a door and confront my stalker. I yell at him to explain his fascination with me, in the frame of the open doorway, this girl broken out of the wooden horse, and he is sat in a desk chair by a dark window, not as hideous as I wanted, briefly speechless.

Draw your own conclusion. Fine by me. I can’t control how I’m perceived. Die in your own dream and leave me to mine. No, wait.

He starts talking, agape and eros and I think, oh no, he knows. Nacre heart on my neck.

Never were, never weren’t. The issue is, activism is embarrassing. The issue is, you save lives by inventing fertilizer. With your yellow-tinged and square-shaped glasses, your physical abuse of your wife. I can’t watch this happen, but I can live it. I can bear to have you stare at my breasts at the beach, in the cold rain.

I couldn’t have been more vulnerable if I had said I love you. Are you interested in my point of view? Are you or aren’t you? Garbage in, garbage out, and you and I, in the middle of the chute, with our mouths open. Agape, even. The frame, the painting. How can this sunscreen have probiotics in it?

AI-generated poetry is preferable to human-written poetry? Oh, we are actually done for. The authors describe the reason in the results: The AI poems are more accessible.

My house is full of cowards and I can’t stand it. Your only crime is working hard for your family and I hate you. You are boring and your mind is the deadest thing I have ever experienced. Soggy-eyed roadkill could be no deader.

These roads are filled with animals and I see the confusion in their eyes. Your only sin is trying to look up my skirt and I love you. I’m convinced your mind must harbor something of interest. The fault lies in me for not finding it.

Access, enter, probe. Crossing a threshold. It’s deeper than we realize. Meatgrinder is the operative term.

Pylon, python. Ready with a wet rag. An impression of me, between sheets, humidly, on glass. My desire is to write the book on you—poised, perfect, candlelit—while you struggle, at my feet, to scratch the surface of my smile. My desire is to be cool, inaccessible, while you flounder, vulnerable, plundered. Imagine my shock when you put your paws on my lap and transform; the ice of my arrogance shattering under the diamond of your total understanding of me.

Yes, this, all along.

Hand me over to the force, pat me down gently. A kiss between the eyes. Palm me off to a man who will not dare to love me. Scratchy trumpet sound as two typhoons make impossible contact. Defy tradition but more than that, defy categories. Single me out. Watch me leave. Sit on the train and think of my brutality. Small-scale, accruing until it explodes in a profusion of petals. In a fictional city, you hold my hand as I hop the fence, as we cross a border.

Shit, what now? What then?

False, that I walk through a gray Tokyo evening, arms out like a windswept umbrella, crying to Jeff Buckley. False, that I have fallen in love. False, that my abs won’t show, no matter how long I plank on the ribbed mat. False, that I choked on a mackerel bone. Fickleness that knows few bounds.

I reread my writing and wonder how I got so angry. These feelings don’t fit comfortably against such a soft, impressionable heart. These feelings compress me into arrest. I keep throwing my body against the barricade and refusing to flinch.

I need to say that I hate nature and I love cityscapes. I love neon ripples reflected on glass. I love knitted telephone wires. I love concrete heaving hotly in the sun. I love greenery only when it grows, panting and emaciated, out of the tar. I’m mad because no one will ever love me like Michael Mann loves the American city. Through close reading, with passionate understanding. Some men get one half but rarely a second.

Ref, do something!

The rain falls apart on us when you see me differently though I have not changed. I don’t understand why my feelings aren’t a pillar inside me. They reshuffle for a joke, disintegrate. They do everything but stay the same. How can they change so much? And so quickly? Dealing thunder, dealing red and blue. Bushel of nectarines, capsizing.

I write and post this too quickly because it scares me.