You point out where you live on a map app but I already knew the name of your neighborhood because I tracked what direction you took from two different stations on two separate occasions and triangulated the likely location of your house. “Oh, interesting,” I say, breezily, taking mental note of the exact door number. My hair, out of its typical tail, is a loose curtain over the magic glow of your phone; I resurface through the smoke and make sudden contact with the newly gentle, off-guard tilt to your lower face. My heart cracks a little—you feel so innocent to me, despite everything—and almost I decide to take pity, but then I don’t.
The morning after, walking to the drugstore before the coming storm in my pajama shorts, I can feel the sting of sugar on my incisors. I need to brush my teeth; I need to eat more fiber. I need to perform three sets to failure. I need to diversify my intake of amino acids. I need to take my imported rounds of magnesium glycinate thirty minutes before bed and no earlier. I need to make a clafoutis with seasonal fruit. I need to be better than your last girl. I need to forgive, for real this time. I need to not do the bad thing, rather than simply doing the bad thing and then doing elaborate penance for a week, rinse and repeat. A cleansing ritual; steeping in shameful bathwater. Flowering osmanthus, now out with a vengeance. I am a sine wave; I am vaguely diarrheal. I wake up fully alert, face pressed against the crook of my arm, and smell the sticky press of honey on my skin. Cup bearer, lone shepherd on the hillside.
Your voice drops two octaves, vapor in the air, when I reference some incidental thing I am pretending we have in common, which I knew to drop mid-conversation because I heard you mention it, six months ago, to a third-party while we were all queued for the bus after a shared activity. I’ve learned to wait a good amount of time for this sort of oblique referencing; from personal experience, deploying information too early does nothing but arouse suspicion and even, sometimes, annoyance. But I can tell from how you react that I’ve waited long enough; you are pleasantly surprised. You perceive this reference as natural, as a sign of further commonality, rather than the duplicity it is. Thoughtful attention, even dishonest attention, can so easily fill a specific shape, and this, when we pour it out into a puddle on the sidewalk between us, we call intimacy. Did you know Orion was conceived when the gods pissed into the hide of a bull?
You tell me to get closer under the umbrella as the typhoon rain comes down and I seize a little in response and it isn’t a game this time, not exactly. I can feel my reaction from outside my body, like a traffic light turning colors in the periphery. I can still see, though not manage, my silk lines like a puppeteer. This is veering into dangerous territory; I am getting defensive for no clear reason, I am pleading my case excessively. I see a shadow cross your face. Maybe some protective instinct, some long-ago inoculation, activated. I can see, in the coming future, the moment in which I lose your attention, and then your interest. There’s a line and I have to stay behind it.
What if I’m not nearly as manipulative or as calculating as I’d like to seem? Why do I even want to seem this way? What if I am so preternaturally shy that I’d rather develop this elaborate shell of an attitude? So that any rejection that comes my way only wounds my ego as an actor, rather than my pride as a woman? What if you know everything, already? What if you are drawing me in with your own tiny expressions of vulnerability, your own evasions in the dark? What if that softness in your chin, wobbling like gently-set custard, which I read as innocence, as an opening, is just the hyena piecing together my frame in the night?
Oh, but there’s a line in my blood and I itch to cross it. There’s a wolf in the valley, staring up at me, or at the crook in my hands. There’s a polyhedral bug in my gut that will kill me one day. On the application papers, I read: If you have been found to have misrepresented yourself, you will be treated unfavorably in the process. If you look at a sphere straight on, it may look like a two-dimensional circle, but it has never been that and it never will. Eyes up here. Catch and jail me, fine, as long as you later catch me when I fall.
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