Little Weirds(13)
And yes, that would confuse me, because he would sound just like me, even though he wasn’t me and had never had any of my experiences or experiences even much like my own. I was now in a position of being a hypocrite if I didn’t “honor his experience of my experience.” In an effort to be helpful, I had revealed the terrible secret, and I guess it made the man feel so scared and defensive that all he could do was to appropriate my whole experience as his and then accuse me of starting the problem.
My eyes were still rolled back in my head, which was somewhere on the floor, so I couldn’t see it but I heard him say that he felt “unseen.” It is hard to even describe what it’s like to have someone use your own revelation of suffering as a way to accuse you of being cruel.
And it doesn’t even matter because my head fell off and I’m dead now, but I must say: I really did not start it. No woman started it, by the way. I can say, safely, from the comfort of the great beyond, that Patriarchy and Misogyny are neither the fault nor the invention of women. Get out of here. Get out. Get right out of my life with that and get the hell out of my death with it. Let me rest in peace and quiet.
Where was I? Oh yes yes yes, so then, even though my head was lost on the floor somewhere and the thoughts had spilled out, some of them were trying to jump back up to me. But in general it was a poor showing and the thoughts I got ahold of didn’t seem to really go with each other and I gave up. But just when I was about to surrender to the whole experience and accept that my head had gotten away from me for good, I realized what was happening. I took it seriously, and from my head on the floor I screamed, “I see that you are trying to kill me! I see it!”
And then I saw the whole of the thing that had happened, not just to me but to so many people, and I…Well, honestly, it was so incredibly overwhelming that I just stopped caring about what he thought and I went right ahead and felt around and finally found my head and I cradled my own head in my arms. My face nuzzled into my breasts and my hands stroked my own brow and I comforted myself, in pieces. I looked up past my heart and past my former headspace and into the sky, and my mouth still had a voice and it murmured to my heart, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
And then I died.
And actually I have no idea what he did. He might still be talking, so if you are alive out there, I’d advise you to try to keep your head.
Beach Animals
We were on an Island. The two women arrived by plane, dressed in matching joke outfits that they’d bought in the city where I used to live, where I was born. I thought about how they’d had a discussion somewhere on the other side of the bay and decided to buy these raspberry-colored outfits with their own money. They’d taken off their normal clothes and changed into these new things, not just to please me, but to jostle me with this ridiculous surprise. I saw them and I saw their faces watching my face to see if I liked what they did. I experienced a celebration inside of myself, like I remembered what it was like to win something.
The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago. Seeing them always felt like a reunion even though we didn’t have a before before this. Hearing them say anything, hearing either one of them reveal something specific about herself made me feel downright ecstatic. It is not wrong to say that something was happening. I drove them in the car and we were all exploding.
We all went into the store and got groceries and it was so good that I almost passed out.
We barreled down island roads and screamed in each other’s faces, “I want a man who can say beautiful things. I don’t want to go out with anyone who says my condo instead of my apartment!” One of them referred to a man we know as “a ham sitting in hot ham water and the water is getting cooler and he is just the wet pink pork.” We were on vacation! We looked at our normal lives and at some of the letdowns and we just cut the fat for each other. Nobody in that car needed to worry about a pot of hot ham water. We made that clear and final and we just left it in the dust.
It was the early afternoon and the day had been too chilly for outright swimming, but it had been perfect for being outside. We walked to a small beach. On the beach, we talked about our art and some bad boyfriends and sex and then nice boyfriends and how we felt about horseshoe crabs. I looked at the jellyfish while another woman looked out at the ocean and was so obviously full of her own useful inner combat that it seemed like she could have thrown her head into the sea as some sort of challenge. The third woman was somewhere farther down the cove, squatting over something that had washed up, laughing to herself.
The planet itself saw us. I saw it see us, I think. I think it saw us while we were doing exactly what we wanted, and then it was happy. I watched my friends walk around on the sand. I would look up over the top of my book and see a woman pop up in the water. I would crane my neck to look behind me and one of them would be using an old camera to take a picture of my butt. The three of us were intensely bright in our desire for each other’s adoration and gaze, and in our appetites to be set free as a small roving herd.
I could feel it but I didn’t want to say it out loud because my friends were new friends and they were younger than me—so maybe this freedom and wildness was how they always felt and lived and I was just kind of a repressed dorky square—but either way, I felt us all slip out of and step right over a shroud of rules that often drapes me in a fine chainmail of oh no you don’t.