Conscience Round

Waiting at the ruby diadem of the traffic light, scarfing down a bread roll so soaked in industrial-grade butter I can feel it insta-coat the inside of my mouth, a sudden film of fat across the entire tooth-studded half-sphere, and this doubling of sensation—the meaty, constellated texture of my inner cheek, now coupled with this cow-jolted, oiled, palatable surface—forces a vivid realization, that I am just a thing with many openings. Holes, you could say.

A hole for dirty looks, another for the gag reflex. A bicyclist with no lights on hits me at ten in the evening, screaming as he makes contact. For weeks after, I feel a phantom pain in one half of my body, though I have no memory of the impact. Here, open your hand, and take this experience of the accident as a misguided analogy for my lovesickness. He didn’t even look back in his rearview. He didn’t even look back! Making up my mind though I already made my bed which is to say, my fate is sealed. Will the doctor see me now? Tapping a ballpoint to his lips, rotating like a gas giant on his spinning chair, he diagnoses me with a zero-sum game called depression, which is then followed by joy, and then depression, then joy, on and on, forever and ever until my looped guts run out of good bacteria and finally give up the ghost.

My heart is a place with lax immigration policies. Porous borders, and I let anyone in, quivering all the while, quiver of arrows haphazard across the desk. But I know that’s not right, not when I’ve slammed the window closed on at least three well-meaning individuals for unclear reasons. It’s not looks or smarts, guys. It’s not charisma (something I profoundly distrust). You just didn’t have it. You need certified, registered it, and I will ask you to open your briefcase, to reveal if it is stamped across your documents, like Diarmuid parting his hair to reveal his spotted forehead, before I deign to let you through.

Waiting for the train to come, the screen flickering red and blue with incoming information, I feel the tears stand at attention in my eyes and I turn immediately so you can see that three-quarter view of my sparkling profile, wanting you to register the panic of my vulnerability. Yes, you can see me cry. Do you perceive that this is the greatest privilege, for the princess to get on one knee like this? It’s performance, sure, but I don’t feel guilty about it later, so I know it was, at least partly, made of real intention. Drawn and quartered, this gun to my head. Open up a new hole in me, the squad rushing in with their probing lights, their spotted camouflage. Bend down low, all the better to kiss me a new puncture wound, when you open fire.

You point out where you live on a map app but I already knew the name of your neighborhood because I tracked what direction you took from two different stations on two separate occasions and triangulated the likely location of your house. “Oh, interesting,” I say, breezily, taking mental note of the exact door number. My hair, out of its typical tail, is a loose curtain over the magic glow of your phone; I resurface through the smoke and make sudden contact with the newly gentle, off-guard tilt to your lower face. My heart cracks a little—you feel so innocent to me, despite everything—and almost I decide to take pity, but then I don’t.

The morning after, walking to the drugstore before the coming storm in my pajama shorts, I can feel the sting of sugar on my incisors. I need to brush my teeth; I need to eat more fiber. I need to perform three sets to failure. I need to diversify my intake of amino acids. I need to take my imported rounds of magnesium glycinate thirty minutes before bed and no earlier. I need to make a clafoutis with seasonal fruit. I need to be better than your last girl. I need to forgive, for real this time. I need to not do the bad thing, rather than simply doing the bad thing and then doing elaborate penance for a week, rinse and repeat. A cleansing ritual; steeping in shameful bathwater. Flowering osmanthus, now out with a vengeance. I am a sine wave; I am vaguely diarrheal. I wake up fully alert, face pressed against the crook of my arm, and smell the sticky press of honey on my skin. Cup bearer, lone shepherd on the hillside.

Your voice drops two octaves, vapor in the air, when I reference some incidental thing I am pretending we have in common, which I knew to drop mid-conversation because I heard you mention it, six months ago, to a third-party while we were all queued for the bus after a shared activity. I’ve learned to wait a good amount of time for this sort of oblique referencing; from personal experience, deploying information too early does nothing but arouse suspicion and even, sometimes, annoyance. But I can tell from how you react that I’ve waited long enough; you are pleasantly surprised. You perceive this reference as natural, as a sign of further commonality, rather than the duplicity it is. Thoughtful attention, even dishonest attention, can so easily fill a specific shape, and this, when we pour it out into a puddle on the sidewalk between us, we call intimacy. Did you know Orion was conceived when the gods pissed into the hide of a bull?

You tell me to get closer under the umbrella as the typhoon rain comes down and I seize a little in response and it isn’t a game this time, not exactly. I can feel my reaction from outside my body, like a traffic light turning colors in the periphery. I can still see, though not manage, my silk lines like a puppeteer. This is veering into dangerous territory; I am getting defensive for no clear reason, I am pleading my case excessively. I see a shadow cross your face. Maybe some protective instinct, some long-ago inoculation, activated. I can see, in the coming future, the moment in which I lose your attention, and then your interest. There’s a line and I have to stay behind it.

What if I’m not nearly as manipulative or as calculating as I’d like to seem? Why do I even want to seem this way? What if I am so preternaturally shy that I’d rather develop this elaborate shell of an attitude? So that any rejection that comes my way only wounds my ego as an actor, rather than my pride as a woman? What if you know everything, already? What if you are drawing me in with your own tiny expressions of vulnerability, your own evasions in the dark? What if that softness in your chin, wobbling like gently-set custard, which I read as innocence, as an opening, is just the hyena piecing together my frame in the night?

Oh, but there’s a line in my blood and I itch to cross it. There’s a wolf in the valley, staring up at me, or at the crook in my hands. There’s a polyhedral bug in my gut that will kill me one day. On the application papers, I read: If you have been found to have misrepresented yourself, you will be treated unfavorably in the process. If you look at a sphere straight on, it may look like a two-dimensional circle, but it has never been that and it never will. Eyes up here. Catch and jail me, fine, as long as you later catch me when I fall.

The fact of the matter is, I overthought it. I overthought it, and then I oversold it. I trembled across the slim line between cop cars. On the highway, legs wet on the leather, I hit the gas. Unclothed, I dove into the shaft of freezing water and had to be pulled back up. Every second available to me, a pearl gasping in my hands. Every word available to me, a bomb about to go off.

Cliché of clichés. Red felt cloche in my baby photo. Chained to a man’s broken hip, I blow off work to lay on the two-seater and write a script of how to apologize to you. But though I know what I want to say, I can’t decide why I want to say it. Do I want to be vulnerable, or do I want to attempt vulnerability to force tender feelings in you? Come on, cries out the chorus, we know the answer. You can’t even listen to music without pretending you’re singing to an audience. So white-robed, white-socked, sleep-deprived, I stand at the metal table and pour out nectar, bleach, milk, vinegar, in different configurations. I attempt pools of craven magic, because what I want is not to be honest but to to generate a specific feeling in you. A magician’s assistant, or a control freak?

Underneath the eaves, you comment on the rain. On the evening train, you mention your dream. Off-hand, my spleen flung off-ramp. Is this a show of honesty intended to enchant me? If so, you’ve succeeded. You’ve conquered the cynic. You brewed a potion in a teaspoon and felled me for a lifetime. It’s hard to be so easily claimed when I know that you were not even trying, and that’s the way you won me. You’re like this with everyone and I resent it. I resent so powerfully the quality of yours that I most respect. It means I’m not special but come on, cries out the crowd: If you had been, you would have rejected him. Paradox of paradoxes. If there is a God, deliver unto me a box of white peaches, clefts ready for the sword. If there is a God, deliver unto me a crate of wine bottles, so I can uncork them and refuse to drink.

Of course, I fool myself when I call myself a cynic. It’s no mystery. When Seneca said, life is long if you know how to use it, I cried. It’s not possible to overestimate the limits of my sentimentality, made all the more grotesque by sardonic indifference, which is somehow, in me, its conjoined twin. You don’t know catastrophizing until you’ve seen me do it on stage. Putting my blood-streaked hand into the black top hat and under the blinding spotlight, retrieving the pink cliché, the slippery paradox. I’m a romantic who wants nothing more than not to be loved.

The problem is, in my spoken parts, drafted on stolen laundry and overdue library books, written with sweat from syringes and blood that can’t congeal, I don’t say what I mean—only what I think you want to hear. No, not even that. The truth is, I write for myself that which I want to hear myself saying. I want to be the kind of person who’d say these things out loud. Can I dare to hope that this means that I do mean them? But it can’t be true because if you flinched, I’d take it all back in an instant. That’s how deep my pretensions go. That’s how fake I am. How fatal it is to perform because if you drew back at the intensity of a performance that went a little too far, that fell off the line, that forgot the brakes, that couldn’t come up for breath, I wouldn’t be able to talk myself out of it. Now that’s what I call an unforced error.

See through me. See me through. See the difference? You’re right, there isn’t one.

Don’t do too much, I say to myself, over and over. Take a deep breath and don’t do too much. Less is more and don’t do too much. Never give up and don’t do too much. Lock the fuck in and don’t do too much.

In the last abyssal crunch of empire, I am a blacksmith’s daughter. I am up early and ratcheting up the rat-catching. I am not repaying my debts. I am slamming my hand between hammer and anvil and lifting, with a rancid expression, the pulsing baby blue up to the last of the lamplight. You bought me then, lies and all. You fell for a girl so sour and so sweet. In our fight to the death, you reach for my face. But where’s the bill of sale? Reach into your pocket and find only a peach pit.

I am not perfect but I swear, an angel could have sweated no better. My mind ribboned itself and began to flow, like blood but better, in a quest to inhabit my body. Every drop of nectar knew where to go. Saturating every inch of skin from the inside, until I was sick with it, sick and jittery and living inside an acid battery of awareness. A woman so tenderly possessed, sucked in by a feeling that is really a place inside her.

But some days, terrifyingly, it doesn’t work. I start the sequence, reaching in to find my mind paved over like a parking lot. I can only play me like a performance, then play me like a con artist. Backed up at the chokepoint. Itchy with the memory of all that forward momentum. A pervert’s princess, dethroned. Head rolling a red line down the cobblestones. But don’t do too much, I remind myself. You’ve haven’t wanted anything so much in years but don’t do too much. You’ll never sleep again if you don’t get there but don’t do too much.

I wanted you to like me. I wanted you to hate me. I wanted you to resist me, then desire me. I want to be your first and last contradiction. You looked at me and saw it all. No, that’s only my projection, because I have this expectation that my mind can be read like type, interpreted like an animal cry. But I tried to make it easy for you. I cracked the runes like eggs in an effort to simplify. I got on one knee, balancing the lambskin sword on both palms. I broadcast the message through every wet surface, every instance of failed artistry. Then I met your eyes instead of running my mouth. I met your eyes the way they do in the dark, in the cheap seats, on the end of days. Tears, illuminated. You looked at me and saw nothing. You looked at me and said, don’t do too much.

Afternoon, Tokyo. A big red car called Rubicon crosses my path. What exactly did you win and die for, Julius Caesar?

A nightmare in which a lesser woman wins a grander prize. Wait, I was awake when that happened. I spend an hour reading Seneca to try and forget my jealousy. A fantasy in which a greater man settles for me. His feminine signature on the forms. A lesson radiating through history in slowly expanding rings. Apollo, take this gun and whip the sun to pieces.

Morning, Tokyo. So many passerby in the crowd. Spittle in the imbroglio. Molecules in the storm. Staring into faces and thinking, uncountenanceable countenance. Reading a magazine article about death. Watching a world champion perform and crying like a firehose into my phone.

Make no mistake. I know how you would opt to describe this, but my love for you is not maternal in any way. I do not simper. I do not whine. I am not obsessed with your presence and your absence. My love is unstructured, undisciplined, inhuman. I love you like the twilight loves the pines.

Night, Tokyo. Losing respect for myself and others. But rest in this muddy puddle with me. Don’t rationalize this. Don’t explain this away.

A fair fight, a sentence to death. In the center of a sniper’s sight, I miss you already. An apparently humorless man, but still I saw you, when you turned away, smiling at the way I stood there with the wet on my hands. Later, in bed, I wonder if I make you proud. Shocked, to want that, for the first time, when even my progenitor’s pride horrified me. No one’s fault. Just a stain I could never parse. Parallax of the heart. Forever a side-sleeper, and I turn away, towards the wall. Inkblot on my upper arm, misread by an army of therapists.

Getting a spam email and thinking, no way, I’m still in her address book? Yes, way. Wayfinding into heaven and finding myself just as lonely there. Peachy, plummy skies turned to a carpet of frothing stars. Looking up: how to say “I wish you could see yourself how I see you” in Japanese. Looking up to see the planet directly opposite my front door. Seize this now, this sparkling deepness in time. I’d let you kiss my hand if you wanted. And that’s not all.

Out of the blue, out of the amber. How many people who knew me for only a brief time still remember me, years later? Hear my name and know it as my name, and not just a mess of phonemes most popular among depressed parents of girls? Recognize, in the milling of the crowd, the habits that I don’t and never did, because they show up in motion and not in the mirror? See my eyes in the pockmarks of the bark? Look at a tone, crushed crystal on the stand, and then recall the tremble and slant of my hands? The way I smiled when I thought, incorrectly, that I’d managed to conceal the obvious?

And when they see the pockmarks, the eyes, the hands, the name, what then? And when they send the email, how many deep breaths? On your marks. On your guard. I’ve been told that I am dangerous, that I am strong, that I am cold. And that’s not all. So when you recognize, in the staggering of the clouds, the signs of my predator’s drive, do you rush to hide your herd?

You say it twice because you think I didn’t hear you, but I did. My instinct to deflect your compliments is as strong as pain. I think I might sooner take a bullet than praise. So shy, but I don’t want to be boring. Plan the murder of your inner child. Life comes back anyway. It always does. Quiet, my show is on. I break open a door and confront my stalker. I yell at him to explain his fascination with me, in the frame of the open doorway, this girl broken out of the wooden horse, and he is sat in a desk chair by a dark window, not as hideous as I wanted, briefly speechless.

Draw your own conclusion. Fine by me. I can’t control how I’m perceived. Die in your own dream and leave me to mine. No, wait.

He starts talking, agape and eros and I think, oh no, he knows. Nacre heart on my neck.

Never were, never weren’t. The issue is, activism is embarrassing. The issue is, you save lives by inventing fertilizer. With your yellow-tinged and square-shaped glasses, your physical abuse of your wife. I can’t watch this happen, but I can live it. I can bear to have you stare at my breasts at the beach, in the cold rain.

I couldn’t have been more vulnerable if I had said I love you. Are you interested in my point of view? Are you or aren’t you? Garbage in, garbage out, and you and I, in the middle of the chute, with our mouths open. Agape, even. The frame, the painting. How can this sunscreen have probiotics in it?