So Much Better When It's Done, or, The Pebbles Placed Under Your Knees as You Kneel

 

One of my favorite feelings is pulsing through my body tonight. I'm unsure how to describe it other than the feeling of pure want. When something as simple as water dripping down your chest from your hair fresh out of the shower can feel like a finger tracing down your throat to in between your tits. 

I've been thinking of jealousy lately, and how rare it is that I experience it.  Not because I think I am cool or above it in a pompous way but, rather, because it becomes a kink of mine. A past girlfriend had a friend who would jokingly call her daddy. I didn't like it. It felt sloppy. Bad boundaries. But how do you explain that to a field of vanilla?  You don't. Instead, you picture your girlfriend's friend and jerk off to her over and over again- you fucking her until she calls you daddy. But beyond that. You fuck her until she begs you to tell her that's she's a good girl. And you make her wait. And you fuck her again and again and again until one day, you tell her she's a good girl. And after that?  You don't care so much that, in real life, your girlfriend has a sloppy friend who mumbles words she does not know the meaning of.

*

Tonight I'm getting dressed for a party. My nails are a black cherry and my tongue swears it can feel the same fruit inside my mouth to play with while socializing. 

Have you ever had someone's words make your breath hitch? Like you've asked them to spin you a fantasy and they do. You figure you've heard it all until they start spinning their tale. And by the end of it, with no touching at all having happened, you can feel your body opening up more than it has under the fingers of any number of lovers.

k.

(Image: Maxime Ballesteros @Iconoclast Germany, 2014, Japan)

I Could Clean Up Good For You (1800s Remix)

 

If I could tell you, I would.

Yesterday, while sitting in a hospital for eleven and a half hours for a reason having little to do with me, I read a book on Jewish meditation by Aryeh Kaplan that was given to me easily a year and a half ago. 

It takes a while to get back to oneself. To go within. To go without. To recognize the feeling of the texture of the walls within ourselves, but also to fall forward into a dimension unknown.

I'm thinking a lot about the things that bring me back to myself. But also how my self is shifting.

Something between listening to piano of the late 1800s and Tommy Richman's Million Dollar Baby. 

be well; be loved,

k.

 

[image: Nicolas Régnier, Saint Sebastian tended by the Holy Irene and her Servant (1626-1630)]

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)