Tag: alvin

Visits from the spirit

Compromise is a good word, but compromised isn’t? Stripping the sheets off the bed. The bowl has to be washed first, but it’s too big on the rack. Shadows in my brain like shrapnel. They didn’t do anything wrong, except for everything. Why do I always have to be right?

Can I talk clinically about how much I love you? Can I stand in the center and scream it out loud? I’m special, but only when I put in the effort to be. So am I really special at all? Feels like such a thing should be more effortless than it is. Did your bidding, but I shouldn’t have. You saw my face and knew it too. I hate that you put me in that position—or did I do it to myself? That’s why we aren’t friends, in case you needed that information. Strawberry is abroad and I would feel better if I could explain this to him. This man has lived with me and understands that my pettiness is a spirit I need to periodically expel and jar, like a snotty growth behind beveled glass. My pantry, a curation of every minor hatred, floating in apricot jelly.

It’s my brother, that angel, that inherited all the family sensitivity. I could never be like him, no matter how much I tried and still try. I know in my heart that beribboning my helix is only the infamous mean streak, so I intend to make the most of it. At first I hesitate, screening my reactions through a sieve, thinking, be gentle, if only because you will regret it later if you aren’t. Then my killer instinct kicks in and seizes the remote, changes the channel. No, be surface-level. Reveal enough to seem real, but keep your feelings to yourself. Preach authenticity, despite having never practiced it. You are the perfect politician and your agenda has only ever failed when you did not follow your instinct to be as fake as possible. It’s survival, and it’s also a desire you have, which you must honor. Admit it, you love this. You love the delicacy needed to pull off your artifice. You treasure the artistry involved in making people feel like they know you, like they have some special insight into you, like they can talk to you like no one else can. You love that first phase almost as much as the second, when you flip the script, cool off, pop open the lid to show a brief flicker of irritation, but always plausibly deniable, scoot away from the table, leave them holding knife and fork, still flushed, now questioning everything.

Only to Alvin, walking together on the sidewalk by the wetly red parade of hostess bars, in a moment of weakness or strength, do I admit to this, to the unforgivable: I’m good at performing. It’s the only positive thing about myself I’ve ever said to him. He smiles so tenderly that I realize that he either really gets it, or really, really doesn’t. I’ll never know which one. One thing is for sure, and that’s that he understands the risk he’s taking. But do I?

I want you to love me, and then hate me for it. I want you to have a good time that I planned out perfectly. I want you to yearn for my respect. I want you to push past the other pupils, burning for me to teach you something. I want you to live out my lessons and for your gratitude to be tinged forever with the pain of my indifference, which you intuit but cannot prove. I want you to guess at what I don’t say, which is that I would never trust you with a single real thing. I want you to suspect that I only humor you. I want you to love me with every figment and bone, want you to see me in every piss and dream, want you to fear me in every single segment and dimension, want you to hate me so much you’d destroy me in a second, as violently as you could, and all this while holding your phone with both hands, trembling with adrenaline, lost in a pack of endless ice, thinking maybe it’s nothing personal, maybe I did just forget to text you back.

Intent but not intention / 合宿 / 顔色

Give me a little more credit. Big clouds, wave skimming with easy light. You don’t let me finish my thought. You don’t let me process the feeling.

Telling Alvin I’m trying. Feeling lost. Streaks on my calves from the knee-high grass, pebbles under my nails from the charcoal in the sand. Flashlights, dark sides, crossing the road to the wettish purple against the rocky cliffside. Performing for an audience and selling it, until I don’t. Choosing you, over and over, until you won’t. Soaked through my shirt, in different formulations.

Crying on the train, because I’m happy. Fluid blisters on both big toes, under the skin. Sorting through a bag of fireworks on the front steps. Laughing out loud as they explode, briefly explore the columns, and then die. Overexerted, overtested blades of light, their spluttering waking up the shades of heaven. Four meals, cold-hearted. Can’t find a balance. Don’t want one. Pale, sparse cornflower blue from the windows, and there it is, dreamless, seamless, already living in the mourning. Sorry, but I insist on having a life. Sorry, but this is enough. Sorry, but this is what I want. However ruinous. However overdetermined.

Hard to write anything but fragments, these days. The bigger the feeling, the sharper, the smaller the shard. Digging painfully into my body when you put out your left hand and I don’t take it. Or did I imagine that? How much have I imagined out of the convenience of desire? Only the torched rings in the sand know.

Ears ringing when the master approaches. He looks into my face and I am not sure what he sees. Sit down, he says, which I guess answers that question. Later, Alvin finds me.

Ares and Aphrodite (April and August)

Awkward, to be developing an affection for Alvin that is not romantic nor absolutely platonic, and as a result feels abjectly transgressive. But, by God, defer your judgment of me for just one moment. Let me plead my case. Remove the cuffs from my wrists and drag me, on bloodied and knobby knees, in front of the pigs at the trough. In the long rectangle of the shaky spotlight, I say: Please, it isn’t my fault that there isn’t a good name for a relationship with a man twice my age with whom I can barely say I share a language. There isn’t a good way to say the truth, which is that when he moves, I see something inside the movement. I see something inside, represented.

I cut my hand and he loosens his grip. He twists his hip and I tighten my grip.

Awkward, to be developing an attraction to Alvin that is not sexual but not solely intellectual, and as a result feels impossible to understand. I can track him around a room without looking, so there is, at minimum, some level of physical magnetism. For what reason, by what instrument, by whose hand have I been pulled into this orbit? Viola, or wrench? Virgin, or wretch? Long is the shiver of the satellite existing in the exhale of the unknown. Relationship like ritual, community like circle. For the first time, I believe in past lives, in tiny cogs of fate that rise and fall in the vast mechanism. Floor-to-ceiling curtains billowing in the breeze, hiding half a crying face.

Okay, Emma. Okay. Keep it light. Don’t make this heavy.

I don’t have a template for nonsexual mentorship from a man to a woman. Not my father, not my husband. Not friendship, not entirely designed as a relationship of equals. That’s what trust is; relinquishing the upper hand, graciously. That’s what trust is; knowing it go either way, and not needing faith or transaction. In a world where we all have a valuation, he reminds me I am worth nothing but a handful of aniseed. In a place ruled by the petty simplicity of give-and-take, he has never asked for anything from me.

Awkward, to be developing an attachment to Alvin that is already fated to end, and not necessarily well. Awkward, to be so fearful of overstepping, but more fearful still of being forgotten. It’s just, only with Alvin do I feel understood. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it is only with him that I do not feel alone. And yet, all this must coexist with the evolving laws in the distance, beyond the train doors, in the lathe of lightning. Okay, I know already. I know that I will lose him to the crowd. Put the cuffs back on me and drag me back into the dark. A stripe of red on the concrete, I do not protest. Just grant my only request. In the time left, let me do what little I can. Standing manfully by the mirrors of the lighthouse, let me protect him with all that I have.

Beach girl

I spend two weeks at the beach and in that time my lifelong suspicion towards the water tightens into a ball of wiry dislike. Gummy in my mouth, spat onto the cement. Yes, the ocean is like a metal plate, like my grandmother’s left eye, like a bubble bath. Yes, the ocean is like a washing machine, like darkest romance, like a parking lot reflected back. A typically ugly girl, I despise its effortless beauty with all my might. I cling to the surfboard, saltwater gurgling powerfully around my feet and legs. I appeal, a little panicked, to Poseidon’s better nature. A typically insecure girl, my immediate reaction to danger is to placate the aggressor. I say: This is unnecessary. To destroy me, you only need to grow old with me. The waves meet me where I am and respond, cheerfully, with all the straightforwardness of the truly self-assured: Never. This is a place you do not belong. This is not a place where you will be wanted and loved. Come out further than waist deep and see.

I meet a man in a hotel lobby and within an hour, he is telling me things I don’t think even his wife knows. I sit and blink empathetically. You might think this is some sort of layered feminist statement but it isn’t, I have always understood this role and I play it with equal gusto for both men and women, but it’s mostly men that really need it. I’m convinced that the rabid dogs on the beach are angels fallen from heaven. They race into the embrace of the waves and defecate onto the warm sand. They open their mouths and because no blessings come out, they must bite instead, but I know it is all a misunderstanding. I just have that kind of face, the kind you want to say things to. I know it when I see the foamy, omen-studded fangs. For a scintillating, shit-stained second, I am ready to let the world go in a flood of blood.

Facing this, I think, unoriginally: It doesn’t matter and it never mattered. It doesn’t matter how pretty you are, how quick-witted. It doesn’t matter how many men you comforted from across the table. It doesn’t matter how many times you told a lie, how many times you hurt a child, how many times you chose right, whether deliberately or inadvertently. It is only the teeth and then the water that will decide the life you have left. For this alone, I have sworn to always hate seventy percent of the Earth. I tell myself that this is not fear, that it is honest risk assessment. But if I only learn the difference ex post facto, did I ever?

Notice how I used “ex post facto”? Am I cool or what? Notice how I called myself both ugly and pretty in separate paragraphs, as though trying to split the difference between humility and confidence? Do I want to eat my cake and have it too or what? Notice how I’m doing a weird fourth wall break here, as though to speak directly to you, yes, to you? Yes, yes, you, you?

I come back after two weeks to practice and when I half-bow through the door after the flight of stairs, I am shocked to see the relief on Alvin’s face. Tossing and turning in the night, I’d told myself he would not notice I was gone. Tossing and turning in the current, I’d told myself he didn’t care enough to notice. In the long summer of the opening door, I finally catch that wave. The water surges and pulls me in, but I wash up on the sand, greenish spit across my smile, sparkling foam on all my limbs. In the end, as always, the only one I was fooling across the table was myself. I wake up at four in the morning again, after fourteen days of perfect sleep, and I think, yes, there it is. I was never where I went. I was always here, embedded in a glittering lucky prism I do not deserve and cannot really understand, but where I am wanted, yes, where I am wanted.

Come to dinner / 合宿

At the low, chestnut-colored table, trying to philosophize in my broken Japanese, I realize that eventually you get old enough that your goals become memories. You didn’t mean to leave them behind, on the rusted road, but there they are in the rearview: monkey masks on monkey faces, the missing left leg of Christ of Nazareth. The knotted rope that could have been undone, with the right application of pressure. But then again, there’s always the sword.

Alvin says, “Everything takes reps.” I have received this revelation before. Habit, the bloodiest and (therefore?) truest God. Alvin says, “The point is to do two things simultaneously.” Ah, there it is. Nothing is one thing. At minimum, two; usually, a hundred billion. Alvin comes out when I’m on the bench in the blue afternoon by the white and yellow irises and asks, “aren’t you cold?” and I reply, cheerfully, in the negative. I’ve been tracking one puffy cloud in the sky all hour, all my life.

During my favorite kata, there’s a moment in the middle when the practitioners all stomp their foot in perfect unison and it stops my heart every time. How to describe this in a way that will land? Brined in seed oil, chicken tender. Step on the face of the pietà and break your faith but prove it at the same time. Scar the knife with blood, knife the scar with intent. Two things, human and divine. Two things, soft and strong.

Hand injury

In silk boxing shorts, flung into the air. Blood in a diamond under the nail of my ring finger. Leg cramping like heartache.

Why couldn’t I be like this before? The thought pursues me up the road, nipping at my heels. Why couldn’t I be like this before? I turn and scratch it behind the ears. Maybe I was not ready to give what I needed to give. I can still feel the elastic membrane in me, showing me where I have left to grow. But for the first time, when I probe inside, I also feel the slim cylinder of iron that holds me together. No, it wasn’t always there. I extruded it with time, through the press of my mind. I grasp it as though taking up a sword. I grasp it and let go. Won’t Alvin be surprised, when he turns the corner in this seedy motel and sees me surrounded by arrows?

Associate me with citrus, with pine needles, with injuries to the hand. Sentence me to a lifetime and then to another one. Don’t let me die before pain has left my bed. Clothe me in white moonlight, in wayfinding that streaks the water in blonde. All this, because a loser wanted to feel important. Good luck, class of 2025.

Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too?

Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Oh, it hurts but I’ll say it again: Pain has been my teacher, but could love be my teacher too? Relentless, the disappointment of expectations rendered to fatty string. Fruitless, yellow moon hanging limply from the vine. Telephone cables in the purple night. I look up and feel a churning in my chest like crying. Is forgiveness friend or foe? Based on how she feels inside me, I hardly know. Surrounded by black leather sandbags and broken wreaths of laurel, at the center of my soul, where she rests in the toilet bowl.

Truth was not able to set me free, so will fantasy work instead? I cannot make the right turn—foot across the body, scraping the floor—without trembling. (I pray that Alvin doesn’t notice but he meets my eyes and I see that he does.) The next time I try it, I hold my face in my hands and I say: Your body is a pillar of iron, you cannot falter because it is not in your nature. Then, when I make the turn, I do not fall. Oh, shock of faith, a psalm dutifully read though not even fully believed. Sashimi in the display case, red fish blood pooled at the green plastic corners. Remix me, run to me. To think that the scene of the crime is also a place of light.

I have always been a problem but I did not realize I could be my own solution. I took myself for what I was for so long that I forgot I could be something else entirely. I am closer to the Great than he was to the pyramids, but I cannot know if I am closer to my death than to my birth. History in the amniotic fluid, the future, the gilled girl in its belly. When my name came out bare, neither of us flinched. (Now I realize that every lesson pain taught me, love would have willingly taught me three times over—)

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?