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.)
