Tag: strawberry

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.

Girl of your dreams

At the start of the spring thaw, my mother, brother, and I go on a road trip up to the snow-capped Pyrenees. The family lapis lazuli Toyota ferries us resolutely up the incline, and at that altitude, each turn on the road reveals a new vista. Mountains jutting out into the sky, roughly pyramidal, mottled, and incandescent. It is nighttime when we arrive, and the wan glow of the stars reflected in the snow holds me in thrall.

We stay at a small local hotel, and at breakfast we toddle sleepily into the dining room amidst a crowd of skiers in bright, Pepsi-blue salopettes. The hotel owner–a small, elderly man with imperial bearing–cooks half a dozen (obscenely delicious) potato omelettes for the buffet before pausing to hobnob with the guests. He balks visibly when my mother asks if he is French or Spanish. Neither, he replies haughtily, clarifying for us instead that he is from Occitania, a historical nation associated with ancient Gaul, and whose modern borders are hemmed imprecisely into northern Spain and southern France. Later, I search for the region on Wikipedia and wonder about history and heritage. What does it mean to belong to a place, and people? I can define it only in the endlessly abstract: The accretion of time and imagination over the eternal landscape; those cumulative sensations of living (hearth, heart) pooling into a kaleidoscopic realization of individual, and communal, homeland. But, truly: what does it mean to belong to a place, the way the bee belongs to the honeycomb?

In Tokyo, lightning smears over the clouds, and submerges the day in sudden rain. I walk to the station; the rain droplets, sweetly saline as tears, collect on my eyelashes. Usually during this commute my gaze wanders to my smartphone, but today I try to pass the time by impressing the fragile aesthetic of my neighborhood in a storm onto my memory: the wet, crushed velvet red petals behind the chain-link fence, the cherry blossom trees stripped of flowers. Most of what I can recall about Japan, when I describe it to others, is based on images and colors: sunset-red, calcimine-white, gem-green. Flowers, kanji characters, and insects. Is there any substance to remembering a place purely for its appearance? Can the surface values–the RGB color codes, the indexes of light and shadow hovering over each pixel of the world–have significance beyond pure superficiality? Can this country be my home when I understand only how it looks, but not how it feels to move within it?

Surely, the home of my dreams must be something more than colors, chiaroscuro, and the occasional blossoming tree. The effect home has on my body chemistry must be something else entirely. But perhaps what I imagine does not exist. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been swept away by fantasy, and wound up smashed against the shores of desert of the real. When I imagine home, I think of awaking suddenly from eerily deep sleep, and hearing, in the impassive dark, the tiny noises Strawberry makes while he dreams. The comfort and joy rippling out from my heart to encompass my whole body. A chain of mountains, dappled with trees in bloom, arriving to shelter me.

A Winter’s Tale

At six in the evening on Monday, a woman in a blood red taffeta gown and a tiny white faux fur jacket sings “Ave Maria” with tears in her eyes. I’m sitting a few feet from the stage, in an underground music venue in Shibuya. Including me, there are four people in the audience. It’s two weeks before Christmas.

On New Year’s day, Strawberry and I go to the neighborhood shrine. Eggplant purple banners are draped over the eaves, moving slowly, but voluptuously, in the frigid breeze. I imagine the priests teetering on stepladders, arranging the banners with the same deftness as a young woman in front of a mirror, carefully parting her bangs to one side with a wide-toothed comb. We eat fried noodles, and then wait our turn to throw our five-yen coins into the wide, slatted donation box. 2019 is the Year of the Pig, and the wooden trapezoidal plaques that last year featured cherubic Shiba Inus are today decorated with boars snuffling through grass.

The colors of Japanese shrine iconography are painted in flat, matte tones, but the ultra-saturation of the pigments elevates the effect of their impression on me, achieving impossible divinity. So clearly unreal, but so carnally present: Imagine the Annunciation, and the young Mary dancing at midnight with a winged and haloed stranger. I could pray, I think, to any god if they came to me clothed in these colors: red as spilled blood, and white as the driven snow.

I don’t consciously choose resolutions anymore (other than the perennial “write more”), not out any disdain for the tradition, but due to chronic indecisiveness. I tend to hover so long on the precipice of a choice that the cliff crumbles artlessly into the turgid sea, leaving me suspended in the air, at a loss. But I’ve been reflecting recently on something Strawberry told me: though we are often instructed to envision “goals” for our future lives, sometimes it’s easier to re-channel that energy into imagining solutions to present “problems.” As an uncommonly anxious individual, I was immediately attracted to this approach; the melodrama of my mind is usually dominated by “problems” that haunt and never inspire. Maybe this is the family therapy talking, but even at this advanced stage, can I change the nature of the relationship between myself and the cascade of issues that follow me around? The cynical part of me wants to roll her eyes. But this year, I think I’ll avoid cynicism, and choose compassion.

Angel with a Destructive Personality

The circular grab handles on the Kyoto rail are made of glazed, lemon-yellow plastic; they hang from thick, sturdy fabric straps of the same color. I watch them sway back and forth with the movement of the train, like burnished, distracted leaves caught in the gentle stirring of an incoming storm.

Next to me, Strawberry sighs audibly. Between us, our relationship comes to life as an emergent property of our combined feelings; I imagine it suddenly externalized as a ring of citrine, like one of the train grab handles, dangled within my reach by a god of love and melodrama. “Take it,” he calls fervently, and the ring, as though suspended on an invisible string held by this god, shakes violently with enthusiasm.

I look up at the train’s ceiling; dark, forest green metal buckled together with fist-sized rivets, but curved like the inside of a church. The observation spirals, and a religion begins inside the train car. A statue of David shrouded in the the red, blue, and yellow of the route maps. A priest in a school uniform, playing Tetris on a cracked, gold Apple product. The gospel ringing out as we approach the station. Joan of Arc, dissolute, and drunk as a skunk. Lambs, leopards, and other sacrificial animals sitting mutely in the fetid, plush seats. I look back at the ring hung between me and Strawberry. Is it a flotation device, or an eject button?

It’s nighttime when we pull into the last stop. The laminated plastic is peeling at the corners of my train card, which I finger obsessively in my pocket. Outside, I am seized by a vision of summer in the depths of this autumn as tears well in Strawberry’s eyes. The yellow ring has followed us from the train, and it bobs expectantly in the air behind him, inside my line of vision. The temptation to curl a fist around it and yank it down reaches its apex. To be lifted up and carried away like a soul at the end point of a linear cosmology. The great escape. The ultimate fate. Instead, I fold up like a dried flower, and place myself in his arms. The righteousness of this decision I will never know; but at least, it is healing.

Low Tide

In the middle of the day, carried away by a wave of drowsiness, Strawberry falls asleep wearing his sweatpants and white undershirt. There’s a pillow arranged around his face to shield his eyes from the sunlight splashing over his chest. It’s difficult to describe what happens when I glance over at his sleeping form. Let’s just say: My mind registers his presence and is swept off into the ocean.

The cherries are blooming in Japan, a two-week event which alters the tenor of life across the islands as millions awaken to petals unfurling in one continuous wave. When the blossoms eventually do come apart, disassembled by the wind, they erupt over the roads in a manner not quite like snowfall, but something isomorphic to it. At times, the results can be spectacular. On one particularly memorable occasion, we drive straight into a gust of petals. The mountains adjacent to us appear almost a pixelation of mottled green, cinnamon-brown, and bursts of pink.

To celebrate my birthday, Strawberry and I do dinner and movie in Kyoto. The flowering cherry trees under the full moon are the visual equivalent of a song you can dance to: sultry, magnetic, but with a tang of sweetness that makes repeated tasting palatable. The movie ends right before midnight, and we have to sprint through the Gion district to make the last train. My skirt is hiked up around my thighs so my legs can move unobstructed. The soles of my sneakers strike the pavement like blows. Running like this reminds of how much I rely on my body, and on its trillion interacting parts. Eyes blinking in the darkness of night. The tension between muscle, bone, and tendons. Nerves aflame. Oxygen suspended in the blood. My hands, held against my sides and balled into fists.

In the mornings, we make coffee so thick and so strong that it reminds me of the Spanish hot chocolate of my childhood. Among other things, Strawberry has converted me to the worship of brewed coffee, and as a lifelong tea drinker I am less abashed by this than expected. Maybe adulthood starts when you begin to seriously configure your identity based on your beverage of choice. (This is tongue-in-cheek. Mostly.) Though he’s agreeable to most Japanese traditions, Strawberry has always been averse to tea ceremony, conducted with finely powdered green tea. He tells me, in his shy, charming way, that he thinks ceremonial matcha tastes like seawater (“like when the tide is low.”) It’s a comparison that would never have occurred to me. I imagine getting up from the bed, opening the door to his second-floor apartment, and feeling the froth of gentle, verdant waves lap against my ankles. A seabird carving a slow, wide arc over the surface of the water. Not quite holy ground, but something isomorphic to it.

Felix Culpa

Strawberry comments that Japanese chashu ramen tastes like a pig sty, and immediately I understand what he means: there’s something delectable, but undeniably disgusting, about the braised, slimy pork belly suspended alongside billows of flavored oil and shoestring noodles, in a slow-boiled broth that is fatty, sticky, and as richly gold as saturated urine.

I am nonetheless glad he makes the pig sty comment after we’ve finished our meal and are sitting lazily on the restaurant floor cushions. While he serves us both lukewarm water from a textured plastic jug on the low tabletop, my mind goes to a farmstead swathed in amber ears of corn, the porcine mewling coming from the muted red barn in the corner of “American Gothic.” I think about the scatological, the vulgar embedded in human lifestyle: underarm sweat trapped underneath my nylon rain jacket, pig lard emulsified in soup.

Outside, the first typhoon of the season announces its approach. We walk to the station in a rain like dust falling. I think of how cinematic this time of year can be: the leaves like August’s sarcophagus, the sudden darkness collapsing upon afternoons at five o’clock, a final, blazing amen from the fall. If I were a girl in a movie, this is where I’d rely on film-making’s deftness to produce feeling: the arrangement of a piano-heavy score, each note like velvet, coinciding with our steps against the pavement, the panning over the fragrant, lushly orange landscape. Cutting a take the way a gardener might labor over a delicately manicured hothouse flower.

Even when I find that the beauty created by the fine articulations of directorial input feels a touch too manufactured, I still am in love with it. Hopelessly, indulgently, and totally. For better or worse, I am a devoted patron of the manufacture of emotion. It’s the affectation encased in the part of me that wishes the replay of my first kiss came with artfully curated music, a shot of my face shrouded in airbrushed moonlight. Maybe the violins emerging in crescendo.

But kisses are, in fact, much more delectable, and infinitely more disgusting. The tongue trembling in your mouth. Sweat, glossy and acrid, building above the Cupid’s bow. The fleshiness of lips, slightly sweet and tender, like horse meat. Absolutely obscene. And that’s not even getting into the amount of saliva involved. But, truthfully, there may be nothing better than kissing in the mortal realm.

Life, defamiliarized

In the east, the apartment buildings rise into the evening. The multi-colored lights in their rooms blink slowly on and off like approaching airplanes. Against the intensely black horizon, their size reminds me of the gods from the Cthulhu mythos, but more benign somehow, quasi-angelic: a reversal of the fall of Lucifer.

Clusters of trees between houses, their trunks so tall and so slender that I can’t understand how they hold up their huge, unwieldy bouquets of diamond-shaped leaves. A tiny Shiba Inu dog lying on its side in a miniature Japanese town enclosed in trees. An orange tabby cat poised by a vending machine. Thickets of bamboo, so dense no light can make it through, and the vaguely mechanical sounds emanating from somewhere within. The dirty patina of old coins exchanged during purchases of yuzu-flavored soft drinks at a lonely convenience store.

The nighttime view from my window reminds me of a gloomy 80’s music video, slowed down fifty-percent; dark, melodic, glittery, soft, the cars visible as beams of light, moving at a steady pace, in and out of my line of sight. おつきさま, the full moon, penetrating through a field of clouds with the brightness of a switchblade.

Dimensions are altered slightly here in Japan. The cars seem designed for Polly Pockets, but the insects are massive. Cicadas, wasps, and moths flit through the air with gold thoraxes the size of human thumbs. Compound eyes unreal in their size. Animals crop up in uncommon circumstances, like omens from nature I don’t know how to interpret. A bone-colored crane motionless in the middle of a river. Monkeys close enough to touch, emerging during the autumn rain to crawl along the phone lines suspended above a shrine. A single olive-green lizard I’ve named “Marmalade,” found in a paper bag on my shelf.

In Kyoto, with Strawberry, I walk through the nighttime, along the bridge straddled by a sprawling bamboo forest. It is late into the evening on Sunday, and we are mostly alone in Arashiyama. A typhoon warning has prompted an exodus of tourists and the shuttering of the cat café, the tea parlor, and the kitschy smattering of Edo-style souvenir shops dotting the main road. Immersed in a darkness that arrived swiftly and unexpectedly, we linger by the river’s edge, the mountains close enough that I feel their figures present as third parties to our conversation. Strawberry leans against the railing and his eyes, though stripped of color in the dusky conditions, gleam with an authenticity untouched by artifice. After a lifetime of cultivating a suspicious nature aimed mainly at my own behavior, I am thrown by how deeply and fully he believes in an idea, a conjuring, of me, that I myself have never trusted.

A tiny bookshop open in the hour before midnight, where I flip through pages of a Japanese fairy tale, a butcher called “Fishery and Chicken Tanaka,” an eggplant-purple subway train leading back towards the city proper. The night like pitchblende. Aphrodite in the foam. The wind, felt and not seen, from the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon.

How important is shared sense of humor in a relationship? How important are common priorities and visions for the future? Under his clothes, Strawberry’s skin is like almonds split open, in color and odor. The sudden protagonist of a folktale à la Oscar Wilde, guided by a lark of silver, a witch in disguise, and a god clothed in peach blossoms, I arrive at a final miracle. The birds outside, lost in a song of autumn. The once-green leaves, shedding in whirlwinds, a shallow tide of amber, orange, and watermelon red. A twin-sized mattress, moved to the floor, and fitted with navy blue Mickey Mouse sheets. How likely is it that Strawberry might be the one I’m writing about in all my stories?

Blueberry Boy Bait

In springtime India, a woman in my hostel splits a pomegranate and hands me half. (Insert that mythological chestnut about Proserpina here: her blue velvet gown rippling behind her as she falls.) Broken open, the pomegranate spills its globular, wine-colored contents. Each individual seed plays with light like bodies of water do, the single white grains refracting with the glamour of pinky pearls. Past the initial tartness, pomegranate tastes faintly of meat, a gamy umami flavor that reminds me of sex, or monosodium glutamate. (This is not the first time I’ve made a comparison this vulgar, and trust me, it won’t be the last. Nothing better than a tradition of metaphors that encompass both fruit and fornication.)

Months later, while on the road to Damascus, Strawberry and I split a serving of fried rice, Bayou Bourbon chicken, and existential anxiety in the food court of an American shopping mall. There’s something so fatally unreasonable about being twenty-three and thinking you know anything about philosophy but eh, fuck it. Strawberry is always a willing audience to my demonstrations of ego, a catalog that includes plagues, absurdism, and the separation of the body and mind. If he notices how badly I’m trying to arouse his interest, he reveals nothing. It occurs to me that he could easily decide to embarrass me, but in the next beat I recognize, with a punchy breath of fondness, that it just isn’t his style.

In love, I have encountered a syncretism of ego and insecurity that manifests itself in incremental contradictions. I am possessed by the desire to be adored and, conversely, abandoned; to be described as charismatic, but diffident, bratty, but poised, empathetic, but unyielding. On more than one occasion, I fall into the “cool girlfriend” trap, going along with nearly any proposition in an effort to construct a facsimile of relationship perfection. This attitude would be untenable if it were not so typical: a girl trying, passionately, but pathetically, to be impressive.

In the Florida Panhandle, we have a dinner date at a pho restaurant in a strip mall. The interior decorating captures an aesthetic that is halfway between elementary school cafeteria and airport waiting lounge. We face each other over a table surface laminated to resemble oakwood grain. A plasma screen television mounted on the wall above the counter plays an endless loop of Vietnamese music videos. Squirming on emerald-and-burgundy upholstered plastic seats, I look at Strawberry’s impassive face as he scans the menu and feel the sudden horror of inaccessible emotion. I realize that I don’t know how he feels about me. An accompanying realization: I don’t know how I feel about me. Only the idea of me seems real.

When my moodiness over us feels pathological rather than circumstantial, I retreat to the supercut my mind has assembled of the past year: the nacreous, drunken flush across Strawberry’s cheeks, the ancient forest in the summertime, the midnight in May spent crying together. I think of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou,” a framework for human relations that feels like buried instinct rather than improbable theory. (Yes, I too am rolling my eyes at myself. Bear with me here.) To communicate as an “I” with another “I,” the world of the free, and the genuine. My misreading of Buber reinterprets the theory as a mechanism for emotional exchange between souls. But what is a soul? What is Strawberry’s soul, which I imagine to be the human core stripped of everything extraneous? Without his green eyes, his rounded, Slavic features, his soft spot for folk songs, his particular combination of shyness and charm, his blasé, sometimes evasive attitude, so impossible for me to decipher?

Strawberry orders two bowls of soy sauce ramen in Kansai, Japan. Outside, the hoods of cars parked alongside the rice fields gleam like Tungsten. In silence, I break apart a pair of disposable chopsticks and examine the textured strips of seaweed, the delicately soft-boiled egg, the helix of flavorings, as though reading our fortune like a millennial witch. I think, not without shame, of the night before: a baffled, semi-sweet fumbling, a faked climax. The unbearable melodrama of my pronouncements. How what had started as an impulse, a brief encounter, had culminated in entry into an underworld, loving and not dangerous but mysterious nonetheless, and I was buoyed up through it by him, my heart turning over in my chest with Prosperina’s brew of anxiety and exhilaration. Seems about right, for a first time.

Baby Barracuda

The name “Mangoes Marina” has the steamy, kitsch sensuality of a strip club; with the terms inverted, I imagine it could even be the alias of a playfully comic online writer of erotic fiction. But the marina is a tamer location than its name suggests: a white-and-chestnut dock framed in floral trees and liquor stores, where the boat remains docked for two days and a night in fecund mid-May. We refuel, empty the trash, fill up the jerrycans, and do the laundry. I tag along as this sequence of operations is performed, ostensibly as an assistant but more accurately as an observer. The entirety of the trip, really, has been characterized by observation — mainly of my boyfriend, who won’t be named in this text (a decision made out of consideration for both his privacy and my heart, which cannot bear to type out his name without squirming in sudden shyness. But because he does deserve some manner of identification, let’s call him “Strawberry.”)

Scenes from the Bahamian sky: On my first night, the clouds appear in a triptych of blues, each superimposed upon the next in tones of increasing lightness. A visual voyage from dark, lavish navy to semi-opalescent bleu celeste. At twilight, they are often bulbous, pulpy, arranged on a background of glowing rose. My favorite clouds are enormous and grotesquely fast-moving, possessed with an energy that borders on life-like, and, as they void themselves over the textured sea water, they rouse in my mind the most passionate ideas in my memory: the physicality of ripe fruit, the mysticism of witches, the divinity of thunder. I remember most vividly the rain at night; awakening on the deck to the sensation of wetness across my breasts and toes. Maybe I love Strawberry because our reunions coincide so often with rainy days, which are to me an experience in ecstasy like that of Saint Teresa. (Near the end of my visit, on a magnificently rainy afternoon, he dresses me in his waterproof jacket and watches as I roam barefoot in the puddles in the parking lot.)

Strawberry’s father describes the waves and foam as fields crested by sheep: a metaphor that makes me want to laugh with pure and unexpected joy. The surface of the sea behaves as though Epicurean, non-Newtonian, Dionysian. At times jagged, massive, and at others finely milled, nearly imperceptible, the waves between cays capture a spectrum of form. I understand now why so many nymphs copulate in these waters, and why the representation of the sea in oil paintings is extravagant, enigmatic; I picture Boucher’s “Arion on the Dolphin,” the titular character clothed in waves, hugely feminine eyes cast at the heavens.

On the islands, Strawberry and I walk through streets lined with Bahamian pine, Surinam cherry, and coconut palm trees. The rental homes are painted in a palette of flushed pastoral colors: baby blue, pale peach, lime green, sunshine yellow. Tiny flowers immersed in grass, picket fences straddling Man-O-War from shore to shore. I think of maximalism, the art of excess: hibiscus, frangipani, hurricanes descending.

My tan lines start at the base of my throat, and end at halfway between my hips and knees. Nut brown to olive-veined cream, the contours where colors change are studded with hickeys. The royal blue bathing suit I bought specifically for this occasion ends up being a size too small, much to my embarrassment and Strawberry’s delight. There’s something inescapably sexual about this landscape. Even the names of local restaurants have a coquettish purposefulness: Nipper’s, Grabber’s, Papa Nasty’s BBQ. In the shade of poisonwood trees, we drink sumptuously overpriced beverages made from pawpaw, guava, banana (the lusty, aromatic fruits.) The “Goombay Smash,” a cocktail indigenous to the Bahamas containing coconut cream, rum, and pineapple, features prominently in one of our best afternoons.

While snorkeling, an activity Strawberry’s mother adores, I discover my favorite fish species: the parrotfish, which comes in queen, princess, stoplight, and rainbow varieties. It bumps clumsily against the coral, nibbling audibly at its surface. The colors of the parrotfish possess that surreal beauty used by Creationists in support of their beliefs: neon, hypnagogic Creamsicle orange, aquamarine layered in a gradient, fuchsia so glitzy Ariel in the Atlantic clutches her scales in vicious jealousy. Runners-up for the prize of my love include the trumpet fish, the hogfish, and the squirrel fish (entirely on account of their names, which add a dash of flavor from the carnality of land animals.) In an instant of prodigious coincidence, a green turtle glides by within a few feet of us; I feel caught in the depths of sensation, like watching wind move through the boughs of trees.

Brown Eyed Girl

When one occupies a female body for over two decades, maleness acquires an exoticism and mystery that is less about eroticism and more about difference; the thickness of a man’s wrist, the distribution of weight at the crest of his hips, the texture of the skin on his face, chest, and groin. Watching a man get dressed, I assume the charisma and focus of the protagonist of a television fragrance ad; my head propped up by a palm on my cheek, and an elbow against the mattress, I feel languid, luxurious, and casually powerful, as I observe Mars rise and prepare himself for the day.

With all the hubbub about the divine feminine, you’d think I’d feel more attached to my breasts, like Apollo to the pallid bosom of his Daphne, or to the monthly bleeding that recalls allusions to moons, taboo, and sisterhood. But my chest, truthfully, has limited glamour, which is not a statement made out of self-deprecation but rather natural feeling: to me, breasts possess only the same rustic, venereal charm as babyish mangoes, or animal meat. And with regards to my menses: there is very little pleasure in lowering panties bought in a Florida Walmart in the early spring air and observing a fat stripe of clotted, phlegmatic russet and rose from seam to seam.

And yet his body, now entering a slow camouflage in torn cargo shorts and a faded fraternity shirt, has all the gracious, unattainable romanticism of a sweet-eyed Old World princess. I feel as though I’ve been transported to a boudoir, both our identities remaining intact as the expectations for our genders reverse, and I marvel lazily at the male vessel: its gradient of color, from warm brown and green to bruised purple and pink, its pleasantly and distinctively rich and sour odor, its gamut of textures extending from throat to gonads.

What I admire most about the body of this frat bro, perhaps, is its effortlessness in retaining and exuding a charm that has eluded me in all but my most labored attempts at beauty. I am familiar with how to play my own figure to its best advantage; for instance, I know to tilt my face slightly for the camera, so the light catches my upturned eyes, and to stand with my arms behind my back and my knees held apart, trembling like a fragile doe. But these aesthetic performances are not natural, and are instead almost purposefully deceitful, relying as they do on the exploitation of archetypes: the readiness of onlookers to buy into the myth of women born in the age of the Internet. Ultra-feminine, but simultaneously alluringly androgynous, filtered through blurred, tonal layers of milk-white and lavender, posed in a foreground of palm trees and gas stations, decorated in chokers, bandannas, and itty bitty Spandex underwear. My practice of female expectation has always been a disavowal of this standard and a form of tacit cooperation, stimulating in me both satisfaction and shame.

But his form, I realize, has no such preoccupations for me. The transformative power of our closeness has elevated him beyond considerations of physical beauty. His smell, shape, weight, height — all those supposed imperatives in the complex equation of human attraction — become wholly immaterial when challenged by the reality of my love. It is only here, in a bedroom shrouded in subtropical trees and thunder, where the pressures of ontology die and are replaced by veneration and pride. Impossibly strange, to have discovered self-love buried in romantic love, to encounter one’s soul in its exchange. Stranger still to say this in words but: it was embracing his body that revealed the ability to understand my own as a composite of muscle, fragrance, scatology, eschatology, flesh, fat, melancholy, pus, and devotion. All of it devoid of human notions of innocence, corruption, virtue, or even femininity and  masculinity. (I feel like there was a thesis to this when I started writing? But now it has devolved into a pool of lukewarm, dazed emotion; what can I say? I love him, and his body, like I love me, and my body, and it is an attachment both sexual and asexual, aesthetic and functional.)

My favorite set of lines from “Winter Syntax” by Billy Collins read: “The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it / it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning / outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon / in a corner of the couch.” Like moons, bicycles, and dogs, there is something about sitting together on the couch, both in our bodies, that invites eloquence. A fluency of feeling that is closer to echolocation than speech, a realization of presence that consumes all the senses.