What You Plate When You Move So Fast (from another era)

 

Hiding out.

What were you learning in the workshop today, she asks. Amused and vaguely waiting for my lips to answer.

I waver. Not feeling taken seriously. Is she asking to know? Or is she asking to watch my mouth move. 

There was a lot covered.  Most interesting to me was that the presenter detailed out how to look for and recognize language elements that may denote language deprivation versus a situation where there may be psychiatric reasons for disfluency in the language. 

(pause)

I don’t like pushy people. 

I don’t like when people talk shit on avoidant attachment styles as a sneaky way to try and pressure you into being closer to them than you feel comfortable being.

 

(pause)

 

I know her relationship with her mother.

I know her relationship to her father.

I know how her father died.

I know what her uncomfortableness with him was. 

I know her relationship to a brother.

How her last relationship ended.

How long her relationships have lasted in the last year. 

Her poetry from college:

From high school. 

From a few months ago.

Her diagnosis of her last girlfriend.

The books her last girlfriend published.

The foods she can't eat.

How she felt as a child. 

I know her dreams.

Long term.

Short term.

It had been 7 days. I had seen her two of them.  

All she knows of me is that I am slow burn.

The lick of a candle flame at night.

 

 

The expediting of closeness is a product of capitalism:

 

She is breakaway gym pants

 

And I am Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils*. 

 

 

 

Be well; be loved,

 

K. 

 

*= This version of it. But extended. (Rita Hayworth's version is a bit too spectacle and appropriative, somehow.)

(image: Salomé, Jean Benner, 1899.)

The Sound of the Bell

 

And I'm a lioness when it comes to you

If they say a word, it'll be the last mistake they get a chance to make.

                   -- Forgetters; Too Small to Fail

One of the things I have a problem with is being overprotective of my friends. 

Not in the parental "Don't do that! It's not safe!" type way, but in the way that inclines one, immediately, to remove the fucking face of anyone who hurts or messes with their friends. Even when it is completely unasked for and said friend, arguably, does not need protecting. 

Is it a bad trait?

My inclination is to say that it is. The polite me says that advocacy is listening to what a person has explicitly stated needing, and then moving toward that goal. To do otherwise is to lack boundaries, meet fire with fire, to - perhaps- be a brute.

I get away with it more because of looking like a thin white lady. I always have. When a guy in high school sent a girl friend of his to beat me up, I pushed past her to go at him.  When a girl in middle school was picking on a friend of mine that was half her size (and still taller than me…), I stole my brother’s rings, wrapped masking tape around the base of them so that they would fit on my fingers, and walked directly up to her with my ringed fist hidden behind my back and told her to pick on someone her own fucking size. (It was such a corny thing to say. I had obviously gotten it from some after school television special. It did, however, work.) When I got into a fight in elementary school with some girl who was being a jerk, we grabbed each other’s forearms and dug our nails into each other. Then I kneed her in the box and she went down. Game over.

As I moved into adulthood, I recognized the legality of such an approach and moved my crosshairs elsewhere. It didn’t take much, really. I hung out with 99% men and apprenticed by watching their covert-yet-scary-as-shit threats of sliding into a person’s car when they weren’t there, cutting their seat belts, and leaving. I know that women get a bad rap of being cunning and malicious, but I will tell you first hand that you know nothing of the inner world of men like I do. The only difference, anecdotally,  is that they don’t tend to talk about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve gotten all four of my tires slashed at once before. I’ve had people put up fliers with a list of names of people who should kill themselves (My name was on it. What can I say? We were organizing something women-centered on the cusp of the 2000s. What did you think was going to happen?)  If I deserved it seems debatable, but I would never play entirely innocent.  I know what I’ve been up to.

But is it a bad trait?

Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes when I’m here, sitting in the proverbial penalty box with a proverbial split lip, I’d say it’s worth it. Sometimes I overstep, and that is obviously not cool. So I sit in the penalty box and wipe my lip with the back of my hand: In part to rid the blood; in part to hide the smirk of satisfaction in knowing that that motherfucker will not mess with my friend again.



Be well; be loved,

k.

(image: Colin Farrell on the set of Alexander in 2004)