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.

Ars nova, ars subtilior

You don’t know what to say to me. You don’t know what I’ll understand. And if you do say something, you don’t know how I’ll take it. So you say nothing. You decide it’s not worth the risk. Your mood changes like moonrise over dirty latitude. You raise a blade. You tighten your grip on an edge hard as unreturned love. You didn’t expect that when I resurfaced, I’d be smiling through wet hair. You got me good there, then you got me bad. But though I blow you off, it’s all pretend. I pray for you to land your gaze on me like a rocket ship, settling into the red dust of a ridge on an aching planet. But when the astronaut radios back to Houston, Houston says, go fuck yourself. Cut the bullshit. Drop the line. Oh, judge me all you like. Old habits, new passions. Stigmata freckling my torso like stars, wheeling. Punish me all you like, with everything you say and don’t.

You don’t know why I am the way that I am. You don’t know what I’ll misunderstand. And if you do try to get through to me, you don’t know how I’ll take it. So you do nothing. You tell everyone what you think you know about me. You try to protect me, or is that wishful thinking? I giggle like an idiot, my mind barking like a panicked dog in the backroom. I couldn’t grant you the satisfaction of knowing me even if I wanted. Let’s play a different game, then. Stop examining me; the body comes off the stretcher, grabs your wrist and shoulder. What are you? Who are you? When your mask comes up, stiff as I am soft on you, where do you go? Tell me everything, damn. Play me a piece of unsubtle music. I will cease my circling and, like a tame beast, come to sit in your lap. Then, like a bride, I will bite your face off. Last of the good ones. First of the bad.

Wounded by a good friend

Feeling, today, the mediocrities of my life press down hard on me, crushed flakes of butterfly between pages of leatherbound. Feeling, today, like I am boring and predictable, that is, the fate expected for everyone, except for me. See how deep my ego runs? At least I’m honest about it? Or am I? Don’t believe everything I write. I sure don’t.

In the shadow of a man, in the shadow of a tower, in the shadow of a misunderstanding. Trying to be sincere, but not too sincere, you know? I know that would only push you away. Trying to be cool, but not too cool, you know? I know that would only pull you in and I shudder to think at the things you could see, at such close distance. The self-pity like a twinkle in my eye.

Always on my own, and always fighting with myself. Lying in bed, wounding the same place over and over. Break a bone and then break it again, because it’s easier the second time. Cross a line and watch it blur to nothing. Do I have a body, or only its iterations, shaking to life every half past eight and bleeding out at four in the morning, forty minutes before the pink light, that first filter. Slouching to the breakfast table to see your letter against the butter knife. Oh, please invite me to dine so I can shudder with the pleasure of rejecting your offer. Rejection runs deep in me. Every individual layer of blood and tissue, I have already examined threefold, in search of the tendernesses of the spirit. Everything I’m not satisfied with, I chuck out; the pile could rival Mount Olympus. I see you run to try to save the pieces. I reject you, and them, again. It’s a futile quest. The more you insist, the bigger the thrill from pushing you away. Laws of physics, baby. You throw up your hands. You think only a higher power could get through to me. But there is nothing any god could grant me that would restore dignity to the flesh that I myself have scrapped for the fire.

All this anger but if you met me, you’d find me boring. You’d see me smile like a child and see nothing or, worse still, see everything. I look up “how to get a powerful kick,” over and over, in different variations, fishing for another result. Opening the fridge and summoning only my own purpling head on a bed of lettuce and radishes.

Cry, baby

Thank you, velvet ribbon of time, for finally ending April; I cry more in that month than in any other, and it is piteous, and awkward, and a defeat for all of my senses. Cruel month for a cruel girl in a cruel world. Walking beside the tall wire fence between the dirt path and the diamond, the whip-like crack of the cowhide is like a petal drifting through the air. I pause there, held fast, sneakered toes against the wet grass, hearing the scattered noise from the game. Did you know that here, in this exact spot, two-hundred years ago, the lord commanded his servants to plant a tidy square of purple-and-white irises?

The key to the hydraulic press in my torso gives its regular turn. There’s a breeze coming off the river below and because only it sees my face, only it knows I am a coward. Oh, clearer waters, be tender rather than fair. I stand on the castle walls, bleeding like a stuck pig. I sow dissent now but when the soldiers return, a bannered column at the foot of the mountain, I will say anything if it means I will keep my life. I will cry blood and then toe the line with the passion of a martyr’s best and most idiotic disciple. Is there anything worse than a changeable mind? Lanterns floating in the fog just before midnight. The swallows, insufferable in their cherubic beauty, in their precise and carefree flight. For the first time in a long time, all my dreams are bloody. I wake with the guilt like tartar on my gumline. Some things, even the holy powers of the tenderest river will refuse to cleanse.

This site needs JavaScript like I need a hole in the head. I play stupid games, like watching the sunlight glaze the rice fields from the airplane until my corneas burn, breaking my own heart over and over. I fantasize about everything that feels like it could be third nature. Good, bad, and some third thing? Right, wrong, but some third thing? Spared you, during the last afternoon of our sparring, just to then feel your fist like a hammer against my C7 when my back was turned. But how I can be angry when your only crime is to have interpreted the signs correctly? I did not hurt you, though we both knew I could, and you recognized that this restraint was nothing but the mask, sword and robes of pity. Yes, fine. I could put on that red sackcloth and sermonize for hours about it. Don’t try me. Don’t test me. I’ve won this game before and all it took was the full betrayal and destruction of myself, plus everything I presumed to call a principle of the faith. I would do it again for even the smallest and meanest prize.

Stitched ball arcing through the air. Swallow in its nest of muddy gray pellets and curly hair. I still remember being a young girl in the security line, shoulders hunched from the weight of my carry-on, mouth dry and tongue burned, face set forward like a flag. Crossing through the gates, walking stiffly through the scanner, collecting my bag and my ticket at the other end, tears standing at attention in my eyes. A ribbon in my ponytail. A broken stem in a field of irises. “It’s okay,” I told myself then,  “You won’t always be alone.” How could I know then that the division was inside me already? That even at my best, it could not be avoided—I was born severed? Oh but back then, I expected to come home someday. I thought that this was everyone’s destiny, even those of us who are cowards, soldiers, priests, or all of the above. I didn’t know then that no matter where I was, no matter where I went, no matter what I had or didn’t, one part of me would forever be a stranger to the rest.

Best, your loving peptide dealer

Against my best judgment, I am sending you a message. I hope you are proud of yourself because I don’t send messages to just anybody. But yes, you insulted my vanity and no, I am not able to let that go.

Oh, you don’t believe I’m the real deal? Buddy, believe it. I’m selling a peptide formulation that will change your life. But don’t try to find me. I’m not selling to you. Definitely don’t call me to say you’re in Tokyo and want to meet. Do not come to the mangled cherry off Ameyoko after sunset and expect me to be there. Do not come to Friday night karaoke at my local dojo and tap me on the shoulder from behind. Interrupt my 80s song covers at your peril. Don’t try to induce me to accept you by offering me your blood as payment; we don’t take American currency here. And most importantly, don’t you dare use my inbox as your personal dumping ground. If I wanted to hear your life story, I’d take your mother to dinner, and I hate your mother.

OVLE-13 will break your spirit. Why would you want your spirit broken? What kind of question is that? Don’t you know about spiritmaxxing? NRSH-97 will remind you that you never forgot how to fall in love. Hold on a minute, don’t get excited, you’re repulsive when you’re excited—I’m not saying you’ll get the experience. I mean, my guy, I’ve seen more charming specimens. I’m just saying that NRSH-97 will remind you that you can steal a fawn from its parent, you can bury its body in the desert, and with all that, you still deserve love, not because it is your birthright but precisely because it is not, and that it is necessary to seek out because the abstraction of it is worth more than any actuality, yes, even the stock market going up. But you never remember that lesson, do you, my friend? Even I force-feed the NRSH-97 to you through a tube. Pump and dump is all you know how to do. Hope springs eternal though, or it can be made to do so with RHME-44.

Do I have favorites? Naturally, I do. INST-55 will harvest microplastics from the paddies of your capillaries and concentrate them into a plastic pellet you can pass in your stool. I like that. Practical shit. On the other end, you’ve got the delicious combination of FNL-34 and SGE-88, which will FUCK YOU UP, bud! But only if you’re into that! And by “that” I mean betraying your meagre potential in favor of theoretically infinite pleasure. But, I mean, what could be better! It’s not wasted if it’s transformed! It’s not lost if it’s denounced and defiled!

Yeah, okay, I know what this is really about. I know what you’re about. You read what I wrote and saw yourself there, in between the lines of mines. But you don’t know that I saw you there too, your greasy face marking the windowpane like a wild animal, and I recoiled. I cannot abide your fictionalizing of me. I cannot abide your desperate need to be friend to a fictional character of your own design. And like, imagine caring so much about what a fictional character might think? Couldn’t be me, baby. Couldn’t be me.

If you are my true fan, then I insist that you insist upon inconsistency. Dress your dish with fennel and sage. No ovule untouched by time. No reason unnourished by rhyme. No crime that you could commit that could make me love you, though I do pity you, and I am sorry I called you repulsive. It’s hard but ever since I decided to hate myself, I see nothing but my own eyes and fingerprints in every stranger, and to admit you or to defy you is the only choice no peptide or AI chatbot could be induced to make for me.

声をかけて

“Lock in, bitch,” I think, squatted over the public toilet. An improbable can of Mountain Dew perched on the ledge behind me; its original contents, it occurs to me darkly, are the same yellow tone as piss, as citrus veined on the branch. I rinse my hands and then exit, to the pink line, over the cherry blossoms in decline, creased suburbia. I change, at the dojo, into my uniform, beside a screen window next to the tracks; how many Tokyoites see a flash of my hairy pit, my laser focus?

Talking myself down from the diving board. Talk me into staring into the mirror, then watch as my reflection talks me out of it. Eleventh of April, a perfect day. Sweat like goodbye. Bleed like hello. Knuckles rubbed so raw under my gloves, I can feel my spirit beneath. “You communicate without speaking,” he says, of fighting. Maybe I’ve talked too much, my whole life; maybe it’s time for fists to do the talking. Something makes me think they will never run out of conversation. Easier, anyway, than wrestling with my mind, with its blues, its colts and vows.

Could there be a love song about this? A chorus of Foley sounds, using ordinary objects to mimic strikes on canvas, blood splattering, feet sliding against mats slick with sweat. Fragile heart, you will try to sing but can hardly bear to listen. But that’s it, that’s how you know it’s real love. You miss it while you are still there. You feel it in your whole body but won’t even look it in the eye. Out the window, locked onto the view of the leaf-studded lake in early spring, pretending to ignore praise that echoes like a kiss, already in its telling a memory cherished deeper than the flesh itself.

Spring thriller

20,000 steps in Seoul again, with a pulled hamstring, and in a melancholy mood. But I don’t mind the melancholy much these days; it keeps me from looking at my phone.

Still simmering in a main meal of feeling as the sky outside goes from clear blue to the peachy green-pink of child vomit. I go up five flights; the staircase in the store is organized in a tight square inside a windowless white column. I am crying on and off for the first time in years, because I nearly [REDACTED] to the [REDACTED] with my [REDACTED]. Oh but don’t get me wrong. I don’t love that it happened but I do not feel any real remorse. In fact, had I been able to get away with it, I think I would have hurt her more.

Sit at the panel, tap the sheaf of papers against the teakwood table. Adjust your glasses and examine the typescript narrative under unnatural lighting. She used physical advantage to push me toward and against a wall during the spar; I was annoyed at this attempt to prove with aggression what she could not with superior technique. I saw an opportunity to reply overearnestly, to go a little harder than I knew she could stand. To punish a beginner for thinking they could get the better of me. A sour, savory, aromatic taste of ego, crumbling like oil-wet, salted lemon focaccia in my mouth. We kept eye contact the entire time and I swear to you that if she had cried out or otherwise signaled pain, I would have stopped. I swear it, I do.

The irony is I had tried my hardest, previously, to befriend her, though with a level of almost panicked interest that was inversely proportional to my actual liking of her. No, I never liked her. I find her dramatic, gossipy, fake, performative, criminally pitiable. I tried to quash these uncharitable feelings by attempting to submit them to the pressure test of friendship. The top blew off under the obvious artifice. But I still could have taken the path of self-restraint. Still, I could have let her imagine she bested me. But when she got me against the wall and then smiled (or did I imagine that, in an effort to bolster my version of things?), my charity was blitzed, in a whir, to mixed mush. I could not cope with the outrage at my failed minion. I have a recurring fantasy in which I protect the weak but when push comes to shove, I have shown that I have the drive of a mediocre predator.

Maybe this is altogether too melodramatic. Maybe I am just an average person with the totally average desire to cast all my average instincts in the worst possible light.

On my birthday, tears swim as I sit on the toilet. It’s raining outside; a warm and cold rain. I miss my brother. I miss the life on the other side. Springtime looking to summer through the window darkly. I hate to tear open the cardboard packaging, the glued-on plastic. I hate to smell green mango and ruby kiwi. I hate to see the pink daisies, stems tightly wound in rubber bands. I hate to eat the frangipane filling, the spindly and anemic microgreens. But if you insist, I will. Black spill in the strait, light, sweet and crude.

The better me 101

I know I was born to play the drums. I read the “Personal Life” section on every Wikipedia article. I spin around in a carnival teacup. Skin catching painfully on the scalloped edge when the rotation stops abruptly. Born in the same year as me so technically we could have dated. Died in the same year so technically I could be him, reincarnated.

Traumatize me with something we call love. Draw up the plans. Dotted, gridded, disciplined, bladed in cheap linens. Throw a pebble, sew a shroud. Draw in repeating concentric circles of crowds. Draw the cards and then, theatrically, show your winning hand. Boom! Pow! When it’s all said and done, draw down the intervention and, stepping limberly over arms and legs, say that drawing back was always the goal. Fragment and defragment. Grade and degrade. Seeing this flood of bits, I know heaven to be tragedy, farce, impossibility. Cutesy, even. Kitsch, even.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so attached to practice. That’s a lie. I know exactly why. Fanatical self-improvement is one solution for shame. There was a time that art would have been the obvious solution but maybe the darkest part of this is I’ve lost both the touch and the taste for it.

Saw you in the mirror and knew from the set of your mouth that we were soulmates. But it’s too late, I already have my person. Saw you in the bloody pool and knew from the look in your eyes that you were my clay mold come to life. How can you dare to not know me when I built you from spit and scree, Galatea? But I’ve grown too cynical to try and live happily now and in a fit of self-pity I slap the surface of the water repeatedly until every surface of my life has gone to waves. I am a hairy, gnarled, black-boned tree emerging from the cliffside, dribbles of salted sap from my ripped bark falling into the hole below. It is meagre solace—maybe even twisted vanity—but know that it broke my heart to refuse you in the way I did.

Love to see the shadow of a crow against the shattered pattern of the leaves. Love to see the moon and its light-limned rim, during this rain-wet mise en abyme. On the train to Ueno, a very drunk man in an elegantly pressed blue felt jacket crouches over me, smiling a little too broadly, his hands moving to cup my face. I look up and see him there, hovering over me, close enough to kiss, for a blue-red instant before he turns away sharply and vanishes through the opening doors. God, the way my blood rose to meet the air, slattern and cold. Catullus, say your last goodbye to these shores.

Notes on being impossible

“Life is nasty, brutish and long,” quips Strawberry, and I laugh and think of every tender, doggy thing dead in a ditch. Dear darkness, I much appreciate your work and would like to know, do you come in many forms?

Spending an uneasy hour pulling my mind out like a silk scarf from a magician’s top hat, then wringing it out like towel soaked in blood. Spending a bloated day watching, unblinking, as the blue thunderstorm sweats above the field of green wheat. Ten seconds until I scream and don’t stop.

Annoyed at my boss and then annoyed at myself for being annoyed. Spending my life as though time were infinite, as though the balance would never know red. But please understand, this is the end conclusion of a girl in a world with no future. Sat naked and cross-legged on the scale, I am weighed against a feather and found wanting, but know this—I already took a look around and found myself wanting more than whatever this is. Let me frown at Anubis in his loincloth. Let me give him a taste of his own bile-black medicine. But picking out nuggets of tail meat from the bone broth, I wonder: Would it grant me peace of mind to give him a piece of my mind?

Planning a surfing vacation and thinking, I could fall terminally ill at any time. Golden pellets of PFAS could swim up my veins like so many tiny smiley fish. I could be a cute casualty of modernity. Anything could shatter the shadow of the law. Any girl born of man knows what prayer is for.

Walking an hour and a half to practice, three times a week. Writing lines in my mind that fall under the gears and then blur to smears of oil in my shoes. Examining the pools for tales from the grain. Crack open the diamonds, grind them back into blood. Thank you for your letter, so lovely to hear from an admirer. In response to your query, what are the forms of darkness? Oh baby doll, there’s only one.