Tag: strawberry

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.

Feeling and Not Thinking

The French call twilight “the time between the dog and the wolf,” but, over text, my French-speaking boyfriend tells me he’s never heard the phrase before. He adds in a little wide-eyed typographic emoji, two small-case o’s with a period between them, and I feel my heart clench in response to this childlike glimmer from a boy who is otherwise maturity incarnate. Dating him, someone with actual emotional wherewithal, has thrown into sharp relief the occasional inadequacies of my own character: my tendency to obfuscate, to conceal and obstruct, to indulge in an appetite for vanity rather than truth. As it approaches his, my own heart shifts, like a celestial body grazing another thin, silvery orbit, a chiaroscuro of space and light; so this is how a woman who was once level-headed and balanced can become frivolous, taxing, demanding, petty, and passionate.

Lately I’ve enjoyed these words: gibbous moon, peach melba. The first term is the moon with a crescent taken out of it, and the second is a dessert of fruit and vanilla ice cream. At night, I feel these words up with the same involved gusto as the palate savoring salt or honey. It functions as a distraction from the darkness, which continues to be my most acute source of terror. When even wordplay can’t end the fear, I think of my French-speaking Libra, his unassuming, girl-next-door charm. The memory of him has the same appeal as leaving a movie theater in the evening: the feeling of a fable emerging from its confines, extending and expanding into the real world. That particular, rarified breath of dusk, streetlights inundating the moody purple shadows with amorphous, chestnut-gold halos. Like youth, twilight is casual, commonplace, an experience shared by many, but its familiarity does not preclude it from an adventurous, audacious nature. It is performed repeatedly, but singularly each time, by the moribund, pink sun, the veil of misty, maturing stars.

It’s been almost a year, and still he asks for my consent to kiss me when we reunite. I think of an evening, at the cusp of last summer, the boy on the floor, reclining against the side of my bed, chin up and head lolling, his gaze trained, attentively, but leisurely, as though admiring a watercolor painting, at something in the distance. Maybe it was the sentimentality of the coming night, the sensation of being shot through by desire, caught between the illness and the antidote, but just those eyes crippled me totally. God, the recklessness imbued in that umbral second. I would have let him lay waste to my entire life. It was later that I realized that the decision to breach the gap between platonic affection and intimate love was never made consciously, but rather experienced bodily as an inevitability, as certain and binding as the movement of the moon, during that time between the dog and the wolf.

You and Us

The love in my body doesn’t understand the white bees, dark stars, and ships of hyacinths that Neruda knew. My love doesn’t understand his metaphors of twilight shadows, lavender kisses, and sea foam. My love has chosen, instead, the bloodied half of the moon. The visceral side of the soul: bile, breath, bowels. Very occasionally, emanating from the breast: blossoms.

There’s no beauty here, in these feelings for you, trapped and droning like house flies. I think of how little I deserve your virtue, your hands that are as guileless as the wind moving over fields. Forgive me. My love doesn’t live in the real world. Honestly, it builds nothing of purpose. The perversion of the empire of my love by the coast, made from mist, muscle, and magnolias. It exists half a mirage away from collapsing into the saltwater.

Did you ever suspect that I hid so much dominating energy within this body? Neruda would have recoiled at how much I desire–so shamefully–to see you sob each time I leave. He would have warned me against this decadence. This gambling of suffering, paid for with your purity. But there is still time, isn’t there? So much time, yet, to dream thoughtlessly, and to inflict those wounds that can be cured only by nakedness.

Oarsman

The perfect plum sits in the palm of the hand like a flushed cloud
during sunrise, or a bowling ball of decadent purple hardwood.
Sliced into half-moons, the meat, fibrous and dense like pork,
starts a deep red, lightening into a blend of rose, orange, and bronze,
before finally pooling into a core of soft blonde. The skin pulls off easily
with teeth, thin as lily petals but firm, and its taste fills the mouth
with brine that recalls the sea, with the final promise of sweetness.

The perfect boy drags me into the intimacy of a dark place, and his hips move
over me like the revving of a engine running on blood. In a blazing corner
of my mind, a rifle goes off. The shot strikes Eve in the heart and returns
her, instantly, to dust. Later, he tells me I touched him as though begging.
Both too tender and too calloused, this body, both too ashamed and too
proud; how to describe the violet shadow that’s beaded over me, like sweat, seeds
of pearl, the reminder that summer’s heat will make maggots of chopped plums?

Biking Across the Pacific Ocean

Every morning, from Monday through Friday, I stagger along on a borrowed bicycle through the pale green pearl of the rice paddies. The commute to school takes me past the local bait and tackle, a Yamaha dealer, and a luminous river that leads into the largest lake in Japan. Before this month, the last time I rode a bicycle I was fourteen, and though I am older now I am just as ungainly, and more distracted than ever.

Danger tracks me, as always, through the trees, in the moonlight, but her manner here feels unusually, charitably benevolent. I pass her on my bicycle, resting on her haunches by the red gates of the neighborhood Shinto (神道) shrine, and yell out, foolishly, daringly: Can I assume I am immortal until proven wrong? She rolls her eyes but it’s a lenient gesture, like she understands, and forgives, the cockiness of girls like me. In a parallel universe half a degree away, she knows, I collide with a chrome Honda, slide off the slim country road and tumble, head over heels, through the fragrant grass. The clouds, massive and supernatural, continue to cast their shadows of dark lilac over the water.

Adult life–or, rather, the expectation of living a convincing adult life–arouses the bitterest courage in me; like all emotions revealed when dislodged by weakness, it starts behind clenched teeth, moves to the soul, and erupts there. Self-assurance still doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t know how it’s possible to be simultaneously so afraid and so determined to never be afraid. Was there a young adult seminar on this topic that I missed? “Fear, fearlessness, and the twenty-two-year-old who isn’t a child anymore”?

Thank goodness for this landscape, its green-blues, and especially for the mountains. Even while inside the classroom, I think of them constantly, and their vision in my mind expands and pools behind my eyes, thick as slick gore. During a field trip to a Buddhist monastery, we practice zazen (座禅) and I imagine the mountains emerging, painlessly, from my chest, ribbed and gray-gold, and my breath traveling, zig-zag, over them. Where these images come from, I cannot say, but somehow they don’t belong to me, and never did.

Maybe the imagination isn’t some proliferation of my jellied neocortex, but a thousand-armed body, loaned to me only temporarily, accompanying me everywhere, and eternally sick of my shit. I hound after it until it sighs: God, what do you want now, Emma? Well. I want a great many things, but right now I want you to open that hand that houses my memory of that night. You know which one. When the rain chopped through my teflon jacket, soaking everything–from scalp, to nape, to the elastic band of my underwear–until the coral-red fever of my own breath and the smoke of his eyes on me were all I could feel, and we were both lit only by the bloodless duo of Venus and the moon shredded by clouds and the sudden flashes of snowy cranes in flight.

Recently, I was passed at an intersection by a young man in sportswear and muddied white-orange sneakers. His forearms were resting atop the handlebars, neatly folded, his hands cupping his elbows. His weight was shifted forward in a way that seemed to elevate him a foot off the asphalt, like an angel, exiled to Japanese suburbia. I can still picture his total stillness, broken only by the circular movements of his exposed calves, pushing against the pedals in a constant, gentle motion.