My Mouth for Hers

For Astronomers

We love in sine curves and ellipses
measuring our algorithms against Descartes
and praying for the stars to align
in some kind of celestial hypnosis.

We speak magic rhythms of tribesmen,
long before Arabic numbers and false idols existed.
I count to you in Morse Code, numbers tapped out
against the darkness of the sky.
Watch as I switch beats, breath easy
under summer vowels.

You argued for linear algebra while I drew lines in the sand.

These days were never meant for static movements,
kinetic energy pulling us along side,
neither willing to face gravity,
nor able to keep our feet on the ground.

We are. We are, broken devolving pieces, untimely torn, histrionic, seismic, revolutionary. We are your thick blood, your thorny palms. We are your infinite abyss. We are your torn shirt. We are the sound of muffled fights. We are the depth of your bones. We are your painted void, your ragged breath, the scratches on your back. Your glacial standards. We are your untold stories and broken borders. We are your shuddering soul and your wandering lust. We are your hands. We are your uncensored thought, your burning ember. We are your unmatched desires and your riotous calm. We are your addictions. We are your carnal perversions. We are your climax, your collapse. We are your worst nightmare.

Untitled

I have never known the difference

between the measure of air in lungs or

the feeling of naked grass on skin.

It is long sequestered oxygen, compressed,

raging, pressing into my chest, hands in my mouth.

We soar in lines of blood across the sand.

She bought coffee off the street.

I am risking, you dare me to go beyond.

She touches herself. I watch.

Voyeurism is far sexier in foreign locales.

Her mouth was full of marbles,

her lips tonguing glass. It feels strange.

She’s come from Denmark, fields in her hair,

hands smelling of tulips from her layover in Holland.

Late nights, we tattooed words like “float”

in spindly lines across our bodies,

to remind ourselves, to resist forgetting.

Little sips, little sips of pleasure,

drawn into great gulps, slamming her down,

 forcing her closer.

I want to trace those words,

those permanent longings of her skin.

She hails a cab outside, disappearing into the night.

I bang on keys to keep her within me.

She runs down the drain, out of my apartment, underground.

I kiss the faucet and pray.

I can’t forget, I can’t forget.

The first time, and the way

her knees were bruised. I needed no explanation.

It would be years before I realized her truths.

She tied a red string around her neck,

one around my wrist, and promised,

and kissed me and promised again.

It has been years and I can still trace her words,

threaded against her long body.

“Love will tear us apart,” she whispered.

Truer words have never been spoken.

We tore each other limb from limb.

It began with unzipping,

the rapid departure of clothes from body.

She was one last chance.

I crossed my fingers twice for luck.

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I have always dreamt in Technicolor;
black and white has never been as gratifying.

You have been my Northern Lights,
my Aurora Borealis.
At night, I watch you above me,
moving as we learn the cursive of ‘together’,
the meaning of things we never said.

I have always patterned pages for you,
ink marks electric from my very touch.

Touch.

The word seems foreign now,
more longing than reality.
I have missed the way your body impressed
upon mine, how your skin felt, how you tasted.
You avoid it, but I have not forgotten,
Instead, I am buried.

I want to run my fingers through you,
to remember what it was like,
to remember how you made me feel.
I had forgotten my idealism in your long shadows,
but somehow I’ve retrieved it, still beating;
a pulpy mass.

The truth was, you were my Nosferatu.
You were my Helen of Troy, my Cleopatra,
my Siren, my Harpy.

I have not known strength like this
since before my fall, before the bruises and anger.

We have walked two divergent paths,
neither marked, to unknown places.
I’m not sure Robert Frost ever truly understood
what it meant to be lost, but then,
neither am I found.

I am an inbetween, a forgotten thought,
a whispered word.

I am the median, the sum, the measure.

Untitled

I begin mornings with coffee,

Tepid black rainwater, searing its awful

Catch, saccharine assaulting tongue

Washing the burn of the fortnight down the throat,

A reminder of a life I prefer to watch than live. 

I imagine you, in your burning bed, body alight, 

magnified, majestic and dismantled.

I want to smear your lipstick across your mouth,

 lines of red, a memory of your wounds. 

You’re all cigarettes and bones and sharp lines, 

and you don’t know just how beautiful you are.

We two, we have long moved in silence and violence, 

marauding night in magnetic spheres, wont with degradation.

 ”Do rude things to me. Please. I beg you.” 

I wish it were so simple. 

You have your baptismal fire, I, intense narcissism, 

a paradigm of seduction. Move me with your artifice, 

your quantified verbs, eroticisms in a cunning language.

Out of our suffering, we have emerged, strong souls,

 the most massive characters, seared with scars. 

Brutalised youth with a history of violence, but you, 

you have returned me to broken bits, 

shattered mirrors and drunken ramblings

whiskey on your red mouth, seducing with hard-earned stares and bitter tongues.

Fractured hours grow between our bones,

Reckless threatening, waiting to awaken form.

You have never been one to reveal true upheaval.

Loneliness suites you; you won’t have it any other way.

To Bear, To Carry: Notes on “Faggot” by Ryan Van Meter

My friend Tom wears eye shadow. He also often pins brooches to his shirts, just a few inches to the left of his skinny antique neckties. Both of us are instructors at the same university. On the evening after our first day of classes of this semester, we drank some wine and he told me about his morning. 

“When I walked into the classroom,” he started, “And before I announced I was the teacher, one of my students called me a faggot.”

This has always been a fear of mine, a scenario I could imagine, and one I actually was surprised hadn’t already happened. I’ve dealt with faggot for more than twenty years; I vividly remember about ten different instances of the word being used on me - and know there are more I can’t as easily recall - and I doubt a similar count for any other word possible. I’ve imagined Tom’s classroom scenario, that is, only up to the moment when I would have to react. Tom didn’t know what to do either, so he just stared at the kid - the burly, cocky guy you’d imagine, sitting in the back corner of the room of course, tilted in his chair, his arms across his chest. Tom stared and then just introduced himself to the class, wrote his name on the blackboard, and handed out copies of his syllabus. 

“I can’t believe that’s something we really have to deal with,” I said, shaking my head, and my dear friend agreed. 

Then I asked him, “What were you wearing?”

“This,” he said, tugging the shoulder of his cardigan, wiggling his butterfly brooch. 

“I mean, not that it matters.” 

“Right,” he said. 

Later, I was bothered by my question. What were you wearing? Because it implied that the student might have a good reason for saying “faggot.” If Tom was dressed like one, then he was asking for it - or, if not asking, then at least his brooches and his cosmetics made the students word understandable, explained why. And certainly it bothered me that I was trying to justify the kid’s behavior. But what I most hated was this: even though I had asked the question in the unguarded comfort of close friends, the word still tricked me. If only for a second, I was guilty of looking at my friend the way I hated being looked at. 

My earliest memory of the word comes from fourth grade, when a book titled A Bundle of Sticks circulated among a group of snickering classmates. Drawn in colored pencil on the cover was a sheepish boy wearing a karate uniform, his hands clasped tightly together. I didn’t read the book back then, but I knew, because it was often talked about on the playground when no teachers were around that, somewhere in its pages, the boy in the uniform was called “faggot.” 

And actually, he was called “faggot” a couple of times; I’ve since tracked down the novel by Pat Mauhser McCord, originally published in 1982. Ben Tyler, the main character, had a reputation as the boy who hated fighting - a fact that made him a good target for Boyd, the school bully. After the bully taunts him, forces him to eat mud at the bus stop and kicks the Tyler family dog, Ben uses his karate self-defense classes to stand up to Boyd. But all that comes after this early scene: 

The class rocked with laughter. Dennis Matthews leaned back too far and tipped his chair over. Everyone went wild, and Miss Fletcher stood up, banging on her desk with a ruler. 

Boyd pointed at Ben. “Benjamin’s a faggot. That’s why he won’t fight.”

Ben felt heat rise into his face. He wanted to cover his ears and scream. 

Everyone in the class pointed at him and laughed, even John who had spent a weekend at the Tylers last summer and Cindy who had his name on her love list. 

Miss Fletcher then comes to Ben’s rescue by demanding that Boyd tell the room the meaning of “faggot.” When his definition (“It’s a guy who…you know…kisses other guys and stuff”) doesn’t satisfy her, the teacher sends Boyd to the class dictionary. And “faggot” it turns out, surprising Boyd, Ben, and the rest of the class, means “a bundle of sticks.” The author doesn’t describe Miss Fletcher’s face in this pivotal moment, but I’ve imagined her smug smile, and her high-heeled shoe tapping triumphantly. As she orders Boyd back to his chair, she tells the class that any definition besides the one printed in the dictionary is slang, and therefore not appropriate. 

I don’t doubt that the author intended for that scene to educate her readers and disarm “faggot.” Probably the bigger lesson was Ben could and should karate chop straight through his metaphorical bundle and splinter the sting of name-calling into pieces. But in my fourth-grade classroom, instead of becoming a word without power, “faggot” became a word anybody could say any time without fear of retribution. Girls were called “faggot,” boys were called “faggot.” If a classmate cut in the lunch line, if one boy splashed another with water from the bathroom sink, if one kid threw out another in the daily kickball game at recess, all of them were faggots. And if our teacher or some other school adult overheard, the defense always pulled from back pockets was something like, “What’s the big deal? All I called him was a bundle of sticks?” Instead of making the word obsolete, the definition gave it cover. Objections became groundless. Because it’s so simple that even a room full of nine-year-olds could figure it out: there’s a difference between how a word is defined and what it really means. 

No coincidence then that fourth grade was also the year when I was first called “gay.” One evening after school, a classmate who lived on the next street over called me into the dark tent of trees behind our houses. Out of his slick jacket, he pulled a copy of a pornographic magazine he’d swiped from his dad’s bedroom. We crouched together in the shadows, huddling close to the edge of the creek bank, as crickets vibrated invisibly around us. On the pages he turned for both of us, the women were naked and between their legs, quite unexpectedly, was hair. And I was so surprised by that strange secret of the female body that all I could say to my proud classmate’s grin was, “Gross.” But in my one word, more meaning than I had intended was revealed. The next day at school, during a group photograph of the class, I sat in the front row with the other extremely short fourth-grade boy. As the teacher and the photographer directed us, telling us to sit or stand up straight, to scoot in closer, fix collars and remove hands from pockets, this boy turned to me. “You’re gay, you know,” he said. “You’re gay because you think Playboy is gross.” 

I decided to go looking for “faggot” myself, to know what those voices are really saying when they snarl it, to uncover its violence inside. In the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Clarendon Press in 1989, nearly three pages are devoted to the word and its many derivatives. The word isn’t as simply described as it was in Miss Fletcher’s fictional classroom. I scribbled down some of the definitions of the noun and verb forms - surprised there’s a verb form at all. 

noun: 

1. A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees bound together: a. for use as fuel. 

a. With special reference to the practice of burning heretics alive, esp. in phrase fire and faggot; to fry a faggot, to be burned alive; also to bear, carry a faggot, as those did who renounced heresy. Hence fig. the punishment itself. 

b. The embroidered figure of a faggot, which heretics who had recanted were obliged to wear on their sleeve, as an emblem of what they had merited. 

a. A term of abuse or contempt applied to a woman. 

     b. A (male) homosexual. slang (orig. and chiefly U.S.)

verb: 

1. 

1. To make into a faggot or faggots; to bind up in or as a faggot. 

c.To bind (persons) in couples; also, to bind hand and foot. 

1. To fasten together bars or rods of iron preparatory to reheating or welding. 
2. To set (a person) on the faggots preparatory to burning. 
3. To carry or wear a faggot in token of recantation; to recant. 

The tightly-packed black columns were almost dizzying. As I stand over the book, thick and worn and split-open under my eyes, just one of several volumes of OED, I think that more than any other, this word has probably been the biggest of my life. I’ve feared it; when I’ve heard it, it’s caused the most instantaneous effect on my body, and it still 

does - the same heat rising to my face like the character in that fourth-grade book. And it can still trick me, as it did in that conversation with my friend. 

So given my history with the word, I can’t help but read phrases like “fry a faggot” or “to set (a person) on the faggots preparatory to burning” literally. This is what I want - the threat, for the word to be dangerous and not just feel that way. And certainly it’s melodramatic, but I suddenly can’t help but consider every time I’ve been called “faggot,” and think that person wanted me burned because of who I am. But at least in this dictionary, in these uses, burning a “faggot” doesn’t mean a gay man. 

Do I reach too far into the idea of burning when I wonder about the joking expression, familiar among gay people, “a flaming queen?”

On the shelf beside the OED is a lineup of etymological dictionaries. In one, Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories, published by Wellington House, in 1999, I find this entry for  “faggot”:

Middle English - Faggot was first recorded in the sense “bundle of sticks for fuel.” It comes from French fagot, from Italian fagotto, based on Greek phakelos, “bundle.” Toward the end of the 16th century, the word came to be used from dialect as an abusive term for a woman; later in the 20th century, it was applied as offensive slang in US English to a male homosexual .

Especially the French and Italian threads of origin (the Italian actually means bassoon) disappoint me. I wanted to see in print the connection between burning sticks and burning gay men. I pulled down book after book, hunting through pages for proof. There’s no denying that violence is carried inside it - centuries of burning heretics alive and “abuse” toward women - but I hoped to find actual documentation, validation of my feeling. Something like the smoking gun, instead of just smoldering handful of sticks. 

And I’m surprised that the word was first used as an insult to women, four centuries before homosexual men. I’m surprised because I’ve always considered “faggot” as implicitly misogynistic, so finding this proof - however disturbing - is heartening. To call a man a “faggot” is to brand him as too effeminate, too feminine. Which implies there’s something wrong with being feminine, especially for a man. So doesn’t hating a man because he acts like a woman suggest some hatred for women, too? Or, at the very least, doesn’t it demand some neatness to our categories? That goes there and this goes here, let’s please keep everything tidy. But the reason behind such tidiness - why we comply and keep everything and everyone in their separate boxes - and whether that reason is always already ingrained in us, seems too impossible at the moment to root out. 

I have only ever been called “faggot” by men, never by women. 

In middle school, I stopped wearing dress shirts with that small sewn-in loop of cloth on the back beneath the yoke and between the shoulder blades. Boys would snag their hooked fingers on this loop, yank it and yell “fag tag!” Some even tried tearing it off, as if saving you from something dangerous, like a wasp you didn’t see clinging to your back. I never told my mother why I suddenly stopped wearing half of my wardrobe; I just said I didn’t like them anymore and hoped she didn’t notice the tiny feature the unwanted shirts had in common. 

So with the single syllable fag, I began to fear and hate a small inch-long strip of cloth. But why was that thing called a “fag tag”? Because only fags would want shirts with such unnecessary embellishments? Or because the loop is like the string, ribbon, or cord bundling all those bundles of sticks? I look for the actual name of the cloth loop, but find nothing on my own. I ask a reference librarian if there is such a thing as a fashion dictionary, a garment glossary? I tell him I need to know the name of a certain part of a man’s shirt. The librarian says there might be apparel guides for this kind of information - which part am I looking for? 

“It’s the loop of cloth on the back of a man’s shirt, sewn under the yoke, in the middle.” 

“Well I know the rude slang term we used in school,” he says. “But that probably doesn’t help you.”

And it turns out there isn’t any one agreed-upon term for that loop, even in apparel dictionaries, though in one clothing company’s catalog, my librarian does find “locker loop.” Even so, the most common name for a nameless thing is a hateful one. 

I thought of that loop of cloth when I read one of the obscure definitions of faggot, the one about heretics having to wear “the embroidered figure of a faggot…as an emblem of what they had merited.” The small embroidered figure I imagine is cartoonish - half Boy Scout badge, half small-green-alligator sewn on polo shirts. It’s a symbol simultaneously of the crime, the punishment and the confession. We’ll let you go, says the little patchwork bundle, but always remember what could have happened. It’s another enforcement of rules - but whose? 

So it feels impossible for me not to pull together the persecution of heretics and the hatred of faggots, that is, homosexuals. Some have suggested, I discover, that because homosexuality was a crime punishable by death, homosexuals became known by the same name as the sticks that fed their fires. Burning at the stake was a common method of execution because it showed criminals the kind of suffering they would soon endure in Hell. And it was surely spectacular, as public executions go. But this theory has been disproved because, at least in England where most of the burning of heretics took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period when “faggot” referred to those burning bundles, homosexuals weren’t executed at the stake, they were usually hanged. 

But I’m just not satisfied with the coincidence that one word has so many violent connotations over several centuries without any connections. Especially when I can string them together, however naively. “Faggot” is the bundle (noun), the burning of the bundle (verb), setting a heretic upon the bundle and the burning of the heretic (verbs); it’s the small cloth picture of the bundle as a sign of recantation and the recantation itself; it’s the action of bundling together sticks, or iron bars, or hands and feet, or people - all being tied down and into place, which makes me think again of those tidy categories, and of power, specifically the misuse of it. And the little patch of the faggot worn on the sleeve makes me think of the pink triangle patches worn on the shoulders of homosexuals when the Nazis shipped them off to camps. Which makes me think again of persecution, heretics, and witches; of witches, mostly women, burned at the stake, and of faggot as a term of abuse for women. Persecutions of homosexuals, of being hanged. It is gratuitous, then, to see the noose wrapping around the neck as a  kind of bundling? Because later in the dictionary, under “fag,” I find from the fifteenth century, this definition: “a ‘knot’ in cloth.”

More words to consider: As I write, I begin to question how I place “faggot” into my own sentences. Should it be “to call a man a faggot” or “to name a man a faggot”? The root for names comes from Latin nomen, which literally means “name.” Not much help. “Call” comes from late Old English ceallian, which comes from Old Norse kallōn, and means “summon loudly.” There’s a difference, even if it’s slight - naming a man a faggot means to identify him as a homosexual man, albeit by using a hostile “name”; calling a man a faggot, remembering the root, means the caller (loudly!) wants the attention of the man, even wants him closer, as in come here, you faggot. 

When faggot meant “to recant,” it wasn’t a name, it was a command. And by recanting to stay alive, the heretic complied, guilty or not. 

Maybe because I am a gay man, or maybe because I’ve never actually used the word against one, I realize I’m not even sure why we are called “faggot.” When I try joking about the word, I always say, “Don’t they think we know?” As if the reason to shout out “faggot” is because gay men need reminding - reminding that they’re gay, or maybe that they’re hated for it. And there’s something there too about the need to categorize, to put everybody back in the places where they supposedly belong. But. There are “gay” and “homosexual,” and other words to distinguish us, after all. These are the “real” names, but ones rarely shouted out, or used as taunts like “faggot.”

I understand the reason why a straight man would call another one “faggot” - which isn’t to say that it’s any less offensive. But the suggestion that the man in question isn’t really a man - he’s soft or weak or effeminate, etc. It’s a jab at his manhood, at his gender but also his masculinity - that mysterious concoction of biology and swagger and toughness and ease that is nearly impossible to fake. I’ve tried. But - and I’m assuming this, that’s all I can do - because the man is straight and because he know’s he’s not gay, he feels the word differently than I do. It’s certainly insulting, and possibly threatening, but there’s some essential difference in the intention that carries something more demeaning for gay men. 

But isn’t calling a straight man “faggot” always still an insult to gay men? Conservative writer Ann Coulter tried denying this fact in March 2007, after she implied during a speech in Washington that senator and Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards was a faggot. A few days after her remarks, on Fox News’ program Hannity and Colmes, she offered this defense: “The word I used has nothing to do with sexual preferences. It isn’t offensive to gays. It has nothing to do with gays. It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss.’ And unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it is not applied to a gay person.” She’s right on only one point - she didn’t call John Edwards “gay.” Calling him a “homosexual” would have been toothless. But with his $400 haircuts, bright smile, and lovely moisturized skin, calling Edwards “faggot” actually bites - which is why the story had so much traction in the media in the days following the slur. Because she’s not saying that John Edwards is sexually attracted to men; she’s saying he passes for a man sexually attracted to men - also implying such slippage disqualifies him from politics. We all know of his marriage and mistress but that doesn’t make him a man, and only a man can be president. And yes, it is a schoolyard taunt, but not one that simply means “wuss,” and that was clear in fourth grade. What’s also clear is calling John Edwards “faggot” is perceived as an insult to him because it’s an insult to gay men - straight men don’t just laugh it off; they fight back because a faggot is someone already pushed aside and trivialized. Even in A Bundle of Sticks when our hero Ben finally stands up to the bully, he defends himself by asking, “How can I have a girlfriend…if I’m supposed to be a faggot?” But defending yourself against the taunt when you’re actually gay doesn’t come with any such reliable escape hatch. 

We learn our names only by being called them. 

I was most recently called “faggot” two months ago. I was riding my bike in my Midwestern college town, late at night as the bars were emptying. While I pedaled through an intersection, a young guy, probably a student like one of my students, called the word out to me. I just kept riding. I’ve never found a good enough comeback. There really isn’t an argument because according to the dictionary, it’s true - I am gay, so yes, I am a faggot. 

There’s something else going on underneath that I wish I could ignore. Once, as a very closeted undergraduate, I was at a party with my two closest friends, a straight woman and a gay man. In those years, when I was being honest with myself, I knew I was gay, but I was trying desperately not to be - bargaining with God every night in prayer to help me stop thinking that way about men, and occasionally even dating women. Before the party, we had some drinks and, after arriving, did shots together in the kitchen of the too-hot house. As we wiped our tingling lips and shook off our quick jolts of vodka, I looked across the living room and a single face stood out. 

He was the best combination possible of pretty boy and those cliched chiseled features of tall, dark, and handsome. Except he wasn’t that tall - he was about my height with the veiny, tight skin of a runner shown off by rolled up sleeves. Lovely clean-shaven cheeks, short brown hair, a jawline as sharp and solid as a table’s edge and big, soft eyes. I couldn’t stop staring. 

And in my drunkenness, I forgot myself, and kept staring. I forgot I was pretending I wasn’t gay, and forgot too that not all men appreciated adoration from other men, confused, innocent, or otherwise. After a couple more hours of drinking and gazing, on our way out the front door, stumbling behind my two friends, we passed this man, and as I looped my eyes toward him to snag one final glance, he leaned a few inches from my face, and sneered. “Faggot.” 

No one heard it but me. My friends and I walked outside and got halfway to the car before I said anything. “Some guy just called me a ‘faggot,’” I said, nearly chuckling. “What?” asked my gay friend. I repeated, and he was incensed, certainly fueled by his own relationship with the word. 

“Who?” he asked. 

I shrugged. “Some guy by the door.”

He marched back toward the party, leaving me and my other friend standing in the street. “It’s not a big deal!” I called out, but he kept going. Of course I’d left out the most important piece of the truth. And it makes me wonder if there are moments when gay men might actually deserve scorn - at that party, leering at an obviously straight man, was I being a faggot? 

If I’ve known since fourth grade that what is intended by the word is not how it’s defined, then why does it still burn? There must be violence and hatred carried in it, even if I cant locate the satisfying, definitive connection on paper. If it isn’t to voice a desire to destroy us, then why call gay men “faggots”?

But even after what I’ve uncovered, I’m unsettled because words aren’t simply good or evil. Shouldn’t I feel inspired because as I writer I need words to be beautiful and even powerful, as well as ugly and dangerous? Shouldn’t I of all people know that a word’s potential for comfort or harm rests in how it is used? So if the letters themselves are innocent, if the meaning isn’t in the word, or just in the word, then it’s us carrying around those threats and violence. Like a recanting heretic, I am the one complying with the word’s hatred, and allowing it to bear down on me - the way it surely will until I harden myself against hearing it. Such a revelation is both startling and obvious, and I’m stuck here, bound up in that original trick of the word: When I wince at its sting, I share its intention - if only for a second. 

8.29.11

I am sitting in our bed, the bed we had together. The bed where we fucked until we came in a sweaty mess, the bed were we have fought, where we have held each other, where we have fallen asleep, our arms and legs in a tangled pile. We have professed our love for each other in this bed a thousand times and in less than 48 hours, this bed will be gone, it will cease to exist entirely. Maybe one day we will have it again, but not for a long time. This I know. I have no sense of closure. On Tuesday, the frame will be removed, taken ten blocks away to a space that will be my own, and the mattress, your end of the bargain, left here on the dusty floor. I leave you my sheets, until if and when, you choose to return them. Tomorrow night I will sleep in our bed alone for the last time. You are thousands of miles away. That wasn’t the plan. I do not know when we will sleep in the same bed again.

12.29.2009

I have never known the difference between the measure of air in lungs or the feeling of naked grass on skin. It is long sequestered oxygen, compressed, raging, pressing into my chest, hands in my mouth, between her legs. We soar in lines of blood across the sand. She bought coffee off the street. I am risking, you dare me to go beyond. She touches herself. I watch. Voyeurism is far sexier in foreign locales. Her mouth was full of marbles, her lips tonguing glass. It feels strange. She’s come from Denmark, fields in her hair, hands smelling of tulips from her layover in Holland. Late nights, we tattooed words like “float” in spindly lines across our bodies, to remind ourselves, to resist forgetting. Little sips, little sips of pleasure, drawn into great gulps, slamming her down, pressing her further into me, forcing her closer. I want to trace those words, those permanent longings of her skin. She hails a cab outside, disappearing into the night. I bang on keys to keep her within me. She runs down the drain, out of my apartment, underground. I kiss the faucet and pray.

I can’t forget, I can’t forget. The first time, and the way her knees were bruised. I needed no explanation. It would be years before I realized her truths. She tied a red string around her neck, one around my wrist, and promised, and kissed me and promised again. It has been years and I can still trace her words, threaded against her long body. “Love will tear us apart,” she whispered. Truer words have never been spoken. We tore each other limb from limb. It began with unzipping, the rapid departure of clothes from body. She was one last chance.

I crossed my fingers twice for luck.

3.25.09

I tell you someone will remember us in the future. 

I love the sensual. For me this and the love of the sun has a share of brilliance and beauty. 

You set me on fire. 

That night, you kissed me, with a tongue of gold and silver, your lips parting mine in the half-light of the musty living room in a moldering, shingled Cape on a summer island whose name now escapes me. We were young then, university students treading water and taking our time. Your kiss was like no sweet fruit I had ever tasted; my senses converged and synapses fired too rapidly. It was heady, ethereal. I write to remind you, to bring back the pomegranate taste of our mouths together. How easily you forget the shape of my sleeping body; I have memorized yours fully. Perhaps this letter will never arrive at its destination; you have disappeared from me, to lands I can only begin to imagine. So instead I will write; a letter a week for all the years we have been apart. And maybe one night, a reply will arrive, clothed in spicy scents from a far away land. I can only hope that you have begun to forgive me. 

Order was important; a disorderly bookshelf could only mean one thing about a person: a disorganized academic who would rather bury their nose in a book than look you in the eye. Bacall stood back and admired her handiwork, a full set of pine shelves, lined carefully with her collection of literature, poetry, textbooks and various trinkets, all in a state of composed organization. She looked around the small room, at her impeccably made bed, the framed art on the walls, the silk embroidered curtains with tiny mirrors that she had brought back from India. Bacall had never understood what was so difficult about decorating a dorm room; with the right lights and accents, cinder block boxes could be converted into bohemian wonderlands. 

She had arrived a week before classes began, just as she always did. There was something calming about an empty campus, and arranging her little room in preparation for the year to come. Assured that her room was in proper order, Bacall ventured across the empty quad toward the campus pub. The most she could hope for at this hour was a greasy sandwich prepared by a bored grad student and a table in the corner all to herself. 

There were a surprising number of people occupying the darkly lit basement pub. A haggard looking waitress pulled pints behind the bar, while some pervy undergrad flipped burgers by the grill. Bacall slid into a plastic seat at one of the corner tables. She liked the corners; it gave her a sense of gravity, of privacy, her back protected, facing a wall. Elbows propped on the dirty table, her chin resting in her hands, Bacall surveyed the room. 

Almost every table was singularly occupied, students with their heads buried deep in books, taking care not to drip grease from their dinners onto library property. One in particular though, caught Bacall’s eye. She could see from where she was sitting that the girl was wearing a ragged pair of Nike Dunks, reading Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. Impressive, Bacall thought to herself. She sat watching the girl for a moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of her face if she ever looked up from her reading. Bacall had begun to eat her dinner when the girl spoke to her from across the room. “Hume is over-rated,” she grinned a Cheshire cat grin over the top of her book. Her teeth were nearly perfect, save for the bottom row, which overlapped in the most endearing way. Her blond hair was short and cropped close to her head, but her cheek bones were so high, her lips so perfectly shaped, that there was no mistaking her femininity. She smiled again and returned to her book. Bacall was transfixed. She forced herself to look back down at her half eaten sandwich, which lay forgotten on its paper plate. When she looked up again, the girl was gone. Sighing, Bacall tossed the rest of her sandwich in a rubbish bin and headed for the door. 

Standing in the shelter of the portico, she inhaled deeply, taking in the cool fall air. Something shuffled the leaves beside her. It was the girl from the pub, her rakish grin now obscured slightly by a lit cigarette. “Kenley,” the girl said, extending her free hand and exhaling smoke away from Bacall. “Bacall.” They shook, though Bacall noticed that Kenley held onto her hand longer than one ordinarily would. They made small talk: what they were majoring in (Kenley philosophy, Bacall art history), what dorms they lived in (the same one as it turned out), and all the other sorts of inane things one discusses with a perfect stranger. Eventually, Bacall excused herself; she had an early morning call with her father who was traveling in Thailand. The two girls exchanged good nights and as Bacall turned to leave, Kenley called out after her, inviting her to a small party in her room the next evening. Kenley grinned to herself as she took the last drag of her cigarette, stubbed it out and wandered off across the grass. 

Do you remember the night we met? The smoke from your cigarette and how I was enamoured with you from the start. The way your long white fingers fit in my hand, how you held on just a second too long when we shook. I wished you would never let go. Do you remember our second meeting, how we had a bottle of wine apiece, because your friends had decided to go to frat row instead? We lay on your bed and our words flowed from within us; it had never been so easy to speak as it was with you. Your room smelled of lemon verbena. Despite being a student of philosophy, you still had a soft spot for Faulkner. Drunk, we counted on our fingers the times we had kissed strangers in dark clubs, me never, you once too many. I watched the way the corners of your blue eyes crinkled when you laughed, how you held your wine glass with those long fingers I would come to love so much. Do you remember, how the day you left, I grabbed those same fingers and begged you not to go? Another letter for another year we’ve been apart. 

The school year began a week after their first meeting. Both girls became mired in their class work, and only saw each other passing in the halls for the first few weeks. Kenley arrived back at her room late one night to find a note tacked to her bulletin board. She snatched it, fell through the door and collapsed with exhaustion on her bed. Lying on her back she read the note, though she already knew who it was from. Bacall had invited her to pop by later; she had some wine and wanted to see her. Sleeping suddenly became far less appealing to Kenley than it had been less than a minute ago. 

The two girls quickly came to realize how similar their tastes were: they both shared a passion for eclectic Spanish films as well as Ranier cherries and Patti Smith. Bacall admired Kenley for her tenacity, sardonic wit and outrageousness. Kenley admired Bacall for her quiet fervor and fantastic organizational skills. They spent equal amounts of time in each other’s rooms, and even more time sitting on the grass in the quad, laughing at jokes that existed only between the two of them. The fall was turning to winter, with dry leaves crunch beneath students’ feet as they hurried across campus, when Kenley asked Bacall to come on a trip with her. “I’m going to my parents’ summer house, and I want you to come with me,” she said. The house was an ancient one, facing the ocean, its shingles weather-beaten and sun-bleached. 

They spent four days holed up with down comforters and cups of tea, sitting on the porch in creaky rocking chairs, as the winter wind blew in off the ocean and whipped their hair into a frenzy. Kenley cooked lavish meals on the antique stove and served them to Bacall in front of the fire. Sumptuous potatoes, stews with whole bay leaves, succulent vegetables sautéed to perfection, sweet meats, hard boiled eggs, toast with just the right amount of butter and cups upon cups of tea. After dinner, they lay on the threadbare couches, Kenley with a cigarette and Bacall with her camera. Bacall had convinced her friend to allow her to take her photograph. At first Kenley had been shy about it, as most girls who are exceedingly pretty but don’t know it tend to be, though she soon warmed to Bacall’s quiet approach and subtle nature. 

Emboldened by wine one evening, and noticing Bacall training the lens in her direction, Kenley slipped the straps of her tank top off her slender shoulders and allowed the shirt to pool around her waist. She could hear Bacall inhale sharply and practically heard her pulse quicken. Kenley pulled the duvet up around her middle and continued to undress. Bacall realized that she had been staring and quickly fitted the camera to her eye. Kenley spoke, so quietly she could barely be heard from the other side of the couch. “Come to me,” she whispered. 

I doubt you forget, darling, how I ran my fingers over your shoulders, fragile collarbones and jutting clavicles, how I learned the way your bones were connected. I watched your lips, their beautiful curve, their full rosy length, wondering how long it would be until your mouth was mine. I didn’t have to wait long. I can still taste the smoke on your lips, and feel the warmth of your willowy hand on my cheek. We became the sum, the count, the measure. And as you kissed me harder and we learned the Braille of each other’s bodies, marks were made to remind us of our touching in the morning. You were my Nosferatu. And when I woke to the dull winter sun trying to filter through the salt-flecked panes, I photographed you, still sleeping, your short hair conforming to the shape of your skull, the gentle line of your spine reaching under the blanket that covered us. I still keep the negatives, lest I need to reproduce you, that never changing twenty-year-old self, with limbs and skin of fine china and eyes that read of infinite wisdom and passion. When can we finally begin to integrate the old selves with the new? 

Winter passed quickly into spring as Bacall and Kenley melded and shaped each other’s souls, their soft words and light caresses gently folding the other into a fine specimen of passion. Kenley cooked while Bacall photographed; Bacall organized while Kenley smoked. They made love at odd hours in unconventional locales, but most often stayed in bed, testing each other’s waters, touching and tasting and feeling and learning. Bacall had never experienced anything quite like Kenley, with her long lithe body and a voice that seemed gravely and sensual all at the same time. She hadn’t been looking for love the night she went to the pub, merely a sandwich to sooth a late night hunger, but in that blonde feline of a girl in tattered high tops, she had found even more. 

Kenley was not one to fall in love easily; she was skeptical of passion, of lust. She felt that emotions blinded judgment and while she had no qualms with anonymous sex, no part of her trusted it. Love, on the other hand, had always seemed like such a cliché. Love was not a philosophical debate, in her mind. But Kenley was wrong. Everything about love with Bacall was philosophical. She was an epistemological phenomenon, which even a philosophy scholar like Kenley found difficult to grasp. This only made her love Bacall more; she was a mystery that Kenley found both intoxicating and intriguing. It seemed to Kenley that every question Bacall asked was loaded with double meaning, her nimble mind weaving concepts of passion that Kenley had only begun to imagine.

Intense passion though, despite love, can be misleading. Souls are like elements, volatile and when mixed improperly, can lead to explosions of epic proportions. As the school year came to a close, Kenley began to sense that Bacall had withdrawn into herself. The fire in her eyes when they made love had somehow diminished; her spirit seemed to have escaped through her pores and in her sweat. Kenley couldn’t quite put her finger on what had happened to her lover, but she knew that if Bacall didn’t come back to her, their love would soon begin to crumble. Bacall herself wasn’t sure exactly what was happening inside her; the world suddenly seemed too much to bear. She knew that Kenley worried, but how could she explain something she didn’t understand herself? 

How could I tell you, my love, of the unhappiness I experienced? How could I even begin to explain, that as much as I loved you, and despite how happy you made me, that there were demons inside, pulling my world inward upon itself? I never intended to break your heartstrings, merely tune them, but even then I seemed to have failed. How I wish I could have offered my heart to you, a pulpy mass, still warm and beating, a testament to my love. I would surrender my vital organs to you. Even now, I am numb too often; my limbs freeze and my blood thickens and I become nothing. But now I know, it is you that I long for, the thought of you that keeps my head above the waves. Each loose eyelash becomes a wish for your body and heart to be mine again. Will you be my anchor, will you pull me out of the woods? Perhaps too much time has wedged its way between us to make that kind of plea.

The summer was not kind to Bacall and Kenley. Despite Bacall’s withdrawn state, they had leased a house together off campus, in an attempt to build themselves, brick by brick, into the people they once were. Long periods of silence would slice between them, leaving Kenley bleeding inside, wishing there were a way to coax her tear-stained lover back. Each time she touched Bacall, she tried to trace her veins and muscles, to remember the woman she felt had disappeared from her. Each caress was a grasp, as Kenley reached for the Bacall she knew was curled up inside the husk her lover now inhabited. 

For Bacall, there was no solace in the hours, waking nor sleeping. Each moment was hard fought for breath, from the weight that threatened to crush her small frame. At nights, as she passed in and out of consciousness and her dreams turning quickly to nightmares, she could feel Kenley holding her thin body, rocking her, soothing her. It was nights like this that scared Kenley the most; it seemed as though in one swift moment, the beautiful, terrified girl that she held and kissed and tried desperately to wake from her night terrors would vanish, blown away in a fine dust. During sunlight hours, Bacall was withdrawn, hardly speaking, crying at odd moments, holding her hands to her face and blinking in the light. First she stopped eating the delicate meals that Kenley prepared for her, and eventually stopped eating at all. Still, Kenley did not know what to do. All she could do was watch as Bacall wasted away, refusing to move from bed, staring with vacant eyes, as if she no longer even saw her lover sitting in front of her. 

Bacall was numb; there was nothing anyone could do to remove her from the silence that settled on her like a heavy cloak, unshakable even in the brightest of weather. Summer had always been her favourite season, but even the rays of light heating her body and sneaking through the long windows couldn’t shake her from her icy reverie. It was as if the strings between her mouth and brain and heart had been cut; she was untimely snipped from the world. Bacall could not remember a time when she had felt so dislocated, so ruptured. Kenley could not stand to see her lover fall deeper and deeper into the depression that threatened to sink her from stem to stern. And so one day, she climbed out of bed, kissed Bacall on the cheek, whispered her final I love you and walked out the door. Bacall grasped at her hand, begging her not to leave, but she was already gone. 

My mother always told me there is no such thing as a good excuse, but I have never been one for following matriarchic advice. I write today, my fifth letter, half as many years as we’ve been apart. At ten, if I have not received a reply, I will know that you are forever lost from me, and thus, I shall cease and desist with my forlorn and one-sided notes. The day you left, it took all that was within me to even lift my hand to yours; it is impossible to even begin to understand the catatonic nature of my sickness. It is an excuse, but one that I could have avoided had I only taken care of my soul. You were already the keeper of my heart. Each morning I wake to an empty bed, and yet I reach out to the empty space beside me, feeling only soft cotton sheets rather than your smooth back. My journals are filled with thoughts of your skin and your body and how you touch me, the way I now touch myself, to keep the essence of your caress imprinted on my skin. Come to me, my love, the way you once whispered the same phrase in my tender ear, years ago on threadbare couches. 

The silence in their once-shared rooms was deafening, as Bacall shifted from one room to the next, taking stock of the wreckage of her relationship, her life. Without Kenley surrounding her, there was no stability. Bacall didn’t know where her sorrow ended and life began. Everything reminded her of the woman she had lost: a certain scent, the model of Kenley’s car, gas stations, foods, articles of clothing. They were artifacts, no longer used items that only served to remind Bacall of Kenley. Each attempt that Bacall made in contacting her seemed to fail; she would not answer her phone, and Bacall had no idea where to find her. Every night, she would fall into the same despair that she kept herself busy enough all day to avoid. 

It has been ten years, and I have always wondered where you went, what you have done, who you have grown up to be. I have waited for the day to come when I answer my phone and it’s your sweet voice drifting across the line, or open the front door to your older, but still striking face. And yet nothing. No letter in the scrawling hand I always have admired so much, no call, no knock on my door. Perhaps you have found another lover, though I try not to entertain such ideas; the thought of you with another woman is too much to bear. All I can say is I will wait for you, but please come back soon. 

I couldn’t write for you; I was too happy.