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1000 students walkout after 48 hours and evening is all Outkast, like the shirt I will wear for the rubble, this song is for laughter although most people are not finding it funny; I pick out my clothes for the last days, a tee-shirt that says “Provincetown—Eat Me,” this is the kind of logic I find phenomenal, that would blow your mind: a call at three AM inviting you over for a cookie, finding your name and the names of all the people you’ve loved in bad, short erotica, laughter in procrastination about ways to fuck yourself: eating, and emails, and sex on the phone. On Monday I saw a girl laugh in small clothes that showed spring and skin. It was the first day. My stomach could not be filled and I ate dinner three times. Cheese sandwiches too early to fill, overcooked screwdrivers for Purim, and at midnight falafel. Monday became one day that was forty-eight hours long and when it ended there was Wednesday and there was war and I moved onto dessert. I ran into an old teacher on the street the other day and he wrote me soon after to say running into me was sheer joy. I tried to recount the things in my life that had maybe been sheer and joyful. They were few and certain, one was ten degrees, and beer, and a bed, another, swimming without clothes in water reflecting the sun, so clear it was the sun, and my skin young and permanent, last, going down a river in a crack of rock in Colorado and believing the crack closing and closing my eyes. I want to have some sheer joy. I want to be opened like the flower looks on the cover of my book and be fucked that is the same as made love to and I want to experience some shock and awe which is not just the image I have made in my head of cocks flying and dropping bombs of jizz. The outside is cold because I left my jacket on inside and walking someone home I take his arm. This arm holding makes us want to be closer together, and this makes us want to fuck. The music in a car stereo is so loud I feel it vibrate off the sidewalks and other cars and this is the bombing I imagine because I have to imagine the bombing. Later it is 5:30 before the sun, I hear birds chirping, and this is the bombing too. A friend of mine tells me that what he hates of kissing is that you have to pretend to be in love and I bring this up to him a few nights later when we are kissing and in this break I feel a pang of my carelessness and pointlessness. I wanted to tell him it was okay, he was one of the people I loved, I found his name in bad, short erotica, but I didn’t tell him anything and instead went home to write love letters to someone else, and to worry how this was all more present than the actual shock and the actual awe, which I blink to see, which is something that connects my mother to hip hop to the birds to masturbation to beaches that were clear and the skin I saw. From my computer screen I see a blurred reflection of brown hair, the image is not as clear as water sometimes is, it is more like newspaper resolution. The New York Times went color and we wept, The New York Times printed the colors of the bodies, and the colors of the flags and we thought, “See, the resolution still isn’t completely there.” Newspaper was one of the things we talked about at a march against a war from Times Square to the village. I was with my mom and other people I loved some to different degrees, but almost all in the same way, which is not so bad, not as bad as cocks dropping out of the sky or as bad as undermining the real thing by thinking of cocks dropping over the sky. And the people I was surrounded by, we did things like hold hands, stuck on pins with words, and screamed expressions and anger, and while screaming admitted that these things, conjured only birds and car stereos. I am against a
thing bigger than myself, and if I knew biblical stories I would talk
about the one with David and I would talk about how no matter of things
big, I have a pussy like that orchid on the cover of that book, and I
have a taste for things that are large because probably these are the
only things which can shock you and sheer you and joy you all at once,
like winters, and oceans, and canyons. I am against a thing big, if it
could be known this is not something that surrounds but consumes and eats
dinner so many times a day it is always eating dinner, and already I am
lost in the actions I could not see, and cannot even redeem by saying
I felt, or only felt like a hand staying on a back for a moment long enough
to wonder if it was longer, or a trace of something in the black to wonder
about dying matter, or if your eyes were just too heavy to tell at all. Fucking For
Virginity:
I laugh and say, “Yes, I am,” while considering that Anna is preparing to spread hot wax into the crack of my ass. “You have a nice butt,” she says, “You should wear a thong bathing suit.” I laugh again and tell her, “No, not for me.” We agree thongs are not for most women. Although I think I am one of those women, I appreciate her saying so. I wonder if she says so to all the girls. Anna, whom the woman on the phone referred to as “AHna”, is very good, they say. She is also very popular. I picture her waxing all week, as Brown girls line up on the Main Green to have AHna shape their pubic hair into neat triangles and rectangles. Spring break pubic hair. For my spring break, I underwent my first Brazilian bikini wax. I had my “bikini” waxed once before. Later I called my friend and told her I had done two things that week that had hurt more then I expected them to. She guessed the other thing and, laughing, we agreed it wasn’t for all women. Anna re-positions one of my legs and sprays lotion onto my once private parts. I blush because her touch as she spreads it is surprisingly gentle, surprisingly sensual. I stare at this ceiling, lit warm and yellow, wondering what the hell I am doing here, and before I can stop myself I wonder how we would escape if a bomb fell through it. The small room is below street level, below the women getting their highlights done and the manicurists with their soft, lotioned fingertips. I picture rescue workers digging through all those women and magazines to discover Anna and me as we are now. Me lying with spread legs and wax stuck to the edges of my vagina, and Anna standing, holding in her hand a cloth resembling the pelt of some small, balding animal. Earlier, while waiting in the lobby, I saw that the cover of the New Yorker had reproduced a section of Guernica. I saw Guernica in real life once, when I was in Spain. Being in Spain was a dream that had come true, but the painting was a nightmare come true and I was unprepared for its impact. I had never thought I would understand the painting the way I did in that moment, seeing that he had painted how it felt. I never wanted to know how that painting felt. As Anna moves around my body, I decide I am doing this because I am going to Miami. In Miami I plan to kiss a lot of boys. I can think about this even though I have a boyfriend because we have given each other permission to share our bodies with whom we choose. We have done this, been open before, but this is the first time I initiated it. I wanted the permission to be selfish. Really I wanted the permission to be superficial. I saw in the newspaper the other day a photograph of two women who were beautiful in a way that reminded me of Spain, of the women there who oozed sexual confidence and always wore the perfect shoes. These women were holding a sign that read “Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity.” I am going to Miami because I want to be fucking for virginity. I want to wax and flirt and ignore duct tape for sale and men posted with assault rifles in the subway. I got wildly drunk the other weekend and danced around the streets, but later I could feel my nerves stretching, my fear building. Sometimes I just want to be beyond all this. I want to be giving interviews to my kids when they do an oral history project on 9/11. But even then, it will be Guernica again. Even then my chest will tighten and my kids will get scared because they’ll see tears collect in my eyes. I know this will happen because I remember that day with my whole body and I can’t seem to escape it. I knew that the morning I woke up and couldn’t see Manhattan across the river would create a before and an after for all of us. But I didn’t see that day for what it was, a beginning, not a culmination, of violence. More than a year has passed and bombs will be falling by the time someone reads this. I want to be able to say I am as afraid for the innocent civilians abroad as I am for my family in New York, but I can’t. To whoever is keeping a tally, I’m sorry. Anna tells me to roll over and laughs, saying, don’t worry it won’t hurt, and so I know it will. It does. I wonder if any other person in the world has ever seen my body in quite this way. My blush is my answer, but soon after, I am finally climbing the stairs to leave, feeling absurd but very smooth beneath my clothes. Now almost two weeks later, I’m still asking why and the papers are asking what happens after we win. Now, Miami is already a whirl of color that I have reduced to a few simple memories. The night when we…The beach where we… Already, the skin
Anna waxed bare is sprouting small, dark roots and the army is closing
in on Baghdad. |
copyright © 2002, The College
Hill Independent
last updated 04 10 03
