If I wrote a broken memoir

"A Collection of Things About Men I Used to Know"

—

“A Collection of Things About Men I Used to Know”

Part One

–

How do you decide if you want to fuck someone or if you just can?

I'm not intoxicated by men, I'm intoxicated by my own intoxication reflected back at me through rising bulges in jeans that are rarely styled well. I'm horny for power just to give it away and resent you for your willingness to take it and not give it immediately back after I promised it to you forever and ever, amen.

I remember everyone's name, mostly, or at least where and why. Men sought out purely for lore are boring when recounted. Fucking a lanky Fin in a wood fired sauna seems like it should generate a good story but it's just friction in a new and exotic location. But I liked how he wordlessly bathed me in cold water first. The rest was utterly forgettable and I left before he finished.

Sex is not power except when it is. Which is most of the time, until decidedly it is not.

I've always wanted to kneel at the alter of contractions. Doling out sweat, saliva, and semen like a benediction.

My temple needs tending.

My collection plate is empty.

Couch locked Holy communion and smiley face flavored balloons on the dance floor.

—

My favorite break up was with a handsome, suspiciously hairless man with an almost six pack well into his forties and eyes a little too wide set.

After staring bluntly into his third eye and picking a toilet paper fragment off before whispering prayers I found my backbone.

I hated how comfortable he looked on my couch, arms spread across the back taking up too much space. I offered a hand to help him off my loveseat and pushed him to the door.

“You don't like me enough”

“Do you want me to like you more?”

“No, I want you to leave”

I closed the back door leading out from my kitchen, closed the blinds, and turned my music up. I don't know how long he stood there. I like to think he stayed long enough to hear what I was listening to, to see if it meant something; I'm sure I thought it did.

5 or 6 years later his most recent ex looked me up and called me. He apparently decapitated a rabbit and left it on her porch. I didn't get a murdered creature; I was right, he didn't like me enough.

—

Once a man left a pack of parliaments in my mailbox after he bungled our first real date: he showed up over an hour late, already drunk, we missed our reservation, and I ended up buying his drinks all night at a sports bar downtown. He had smoked a few of the cigarettes to make room for a short cut, wilted rose. He became my second ex husband 4 and a half long years later.

After I took him in like a shaggy, stray, grey dog I found it charming that he would j-walk across the street to the bar whose entrance faced squarely against my porch. He said he liked the free popcorn he felt entitled to, almost as entitled as he was to my groceries and bed that he fell into naked the Sunday afternoon he stumbled across the street from the bar to my doorway. Vampires only come in if you invite them.

After every ounce of tequila vacated my body the same way it entered I tried to seek solace in my bed only to find a man face down in his pasty glory. The backside of an Irish family.

Ever the gentleman, when he rose to find what else was lurking in the back of my liquor cabinet he cajoled me to bed, a woman shouldn't sleep on her own couch. After spitting simple syrup across my cheap vinyl, rented flooring he lapped at my adductor tendon with the eagerness of a man trying to please 3 inches in the wrong director. I found his ineptitude fascinating but his vocabulary was awe inspiring.

I snuck out without fanfare to teach my 8am class, still too drunk to be properly hungover.

On my drive back I prayed he was gone, although I sped home on the off chance he wasn't, equally excited and horrified by the possibility. It felt good to be drunkenly chosen as the best option across the street from one of the three bars in walking distance he hadn't been banned from yet.

I believe in true love. I believe in destiny. I believe in fate.

I mopped the sticky simple syrup residue loudly at noon until he rose from slumber like a pale waning moon. When I made him fresh bread he saw the love spell work sprinkled in with every grain of sea salt. But boxed pancakes couldn't be love years later.

Do you ever wonder if we were cursed from the beginning? If your soul—on some cosmic level—remembers what I confessed to you in bed, either just before or just after the tendon-prodding? Maybe your brilliant brain was too soaked in tequila to hold it, but your bones knew.

Our limbs, sloppy and tangled, like teenage girls whispering secrets at a slumber party. I told you I was in love with your friend. The one with the cool detachment, the curated aloofness. The one who never looked at me like he saw anything worth wanting.

A year before, I tried to kiss him on a dance floor after enough vodka Red Bulls to pretend it hadn’t happened. When he didn’t kiss me back, I decided to hide the shame in more mouths. If I kissed everyone, it became a quirk, not an awkward incident.

I swapped a kiss with a leather-clad dominatrix for a cigarette outside the club, then brought it back to our little trio like some kind of peace offering. I went back for another one. Not like a drunk girl who kissed your friend. Just a drunk girl who kissed everyone.

I’m grateful to you for your family's Catholicism—for bringing me closer to Mary Karr instead of God.

I once cried, all snot and sadness, in the middle of the pew during Father Paul's sermon on husbands being good to their wives. I like to think you bought me a donut after. Sometimes you'd spend too much money at Hy-Vee if I was good. But usually not, and usually mine.

You threw me into the end aisle for getting the wrong pancake mix.

I got both.

Both were wrong.

The desire to show love through pancakes was wrong. I hated you. Pancakes were the best I could do. Cooking isn’t love. Love is love. But I didn’t have any to spare—only pancakes.

The organic cereals heard my whisper, asking you not to do that in public.

Optics are very important.

The stray bullet that broke the window a week earlier wasn’t the last straw, just a quaint little story about my chain of thoughts: four feet to the left would have saved me a lot of trouble—do I have enough in the bank to replace the double pane—now we’ll fight for a week about needing to move, but not before sharing a plate of bad nachos on the couch beneath the ricochet hole in the plaster.

Maybe we slept in the same bed that night. I can’t remember. I was busy trying to find love or pity or both.

I pretended to sleep with my jeans on and boots next to the bed. You did carry my suitcase to the truck and cried crocodile tears, the last time I saw your face you asked me three questions: were you cool? Was your dick big? Was the sex still okay?

I lied poorly with deep sighs, disgusted by how small you seemed.

The cats and I left in the morning after finishing your Harvard Fellowship application—the one you had no chance in hell of landing.

After ghostwriting your diversity statement beautifully, but decidedly in my own voice, a love letter to the man you should have been.

After one last romp.

After one last trip to CVS, eleven hours away.

I crossed myself in the car as I gulped.

Flushed your last chance at legacy down the drain.

I had a very stiff drink with very poor gin and a squeeze from a plastic lemon to settle my nerves. Later, a nip from the bourbon kept behind Grandpa’s toolbox for a decade after he died.

Holy Grandfather’s cheap bourbon—transubstantiated into liquid courage, just as he intended.

Liquid courage helped slide my grandmother's ring sheepishly off my finger. I'd begged my mother for it after he proposed to me while I was crying in my bed.I can't remember what made me cry. Probably something about drinking or money, those were usually safe assumptions over what started the water works in the early days.

I paid to fix the vintage settings by sliding my own credit card to the jeweler as he looked anywhere but at our eyes. I signed the receipt without looking up either.

Actually, it's really quite feminist to pay for your own engagement ring. I was a trail blazer. I pioneer. A liberated woman. Equality feels great. I'm putting my Gender Studies degree and countless copies of Bitch Magazine to good use.

Mom says I can wear it again for my next wedding. We don't need to tell anyone.

I wish I were more of a drinker, but I can’t crawl out from under my own mythology.

You called your other ex-wife on your way to the booby hatch and told her I was having a complete psychotic break.

I was too busy sneaking pumpkin into the Thanksgiving macaroni and teaching the girls to shuffle bridge with the old UNO deck.

Maybe it was insane to be normal.

Mom and I came back to the house on Christmas Day to perform an HGTV exorcism.

She got out of the car with wasp spray, hoping to blind your beady little ice-blue eyes.

I hope the new one trims your wild eyebrows. They don’t hide the scar you’re so insecure about.

Ugly glasses do a better job—I do like the new ones.

If it was me? I’d be more insecure about your collection of varsity letter personality disorders.

You wear them well too.

I still think of you.

I type your name like a prayer into the search bar, waiting to see your résumé swell and collapse under the weight of papers scribbled and stacked precariously, dusted with powdered sugar from gas station donuts.

Mostly I wait for the day you’ve spent all my retirement money so I can buy another domain out from under you.

.ORG sounds better anyway.

–

I thought I fell in love with you smoking cigarettes fully clothed in a small bathtub in a 5 story walk up with a good view of the art museum.

I loved the cigarettes and the contrast in the dark beer bottles.

I used to tell you that you were the best thing I ever found in an alley. That was a lie, my urinal painting pulled from a dumpster 10 years before was always better, even when I did love you. I knew I loved the unattributed painting more. I cherished it more.

Men always hate that painting. But they hate it less than the mammoth photo of a limp dick against milky thighs hanging in my powder room. They hate the painting second most.

You confessed your sins incrementally but waited until my eyes had been rolling back in my head and bass rumbling my chest. When fingers and thumb were unable to coordinate compression enough to fill a water bottle.

I tried to confess my undying love to you on the dance floor.

I tried to convince myself of my undying love on the dance floor.

Mostly I was mad we left early.

In bed after a lazy bump you tried to tell me your true darkness. I was bracing for you to tell me you were a pedophile, you said you weren't, I still think you might be.

Addicted to a drug I had never heard of.

How peculiar and pathetic to get addicted to a drug from gas stations. I respected you more for the conviction to just be a heroin addict, that took commitment, effort, and creativity. You excelled at drugs. Drugs didn't ruin your potential, drugs highlighted your gumption if you wanted it badly enough. Unfortunately you only wanted drugs and whores enough to put your best foot forward.

I'm now skeptical of every man with an affinity to travel to South East Asia. I still suspect you developed a taste for under ripe fruits there.

I googled your photo and decided to seduce you before I arrived. Your callous hands and heart were my mount everest. My greatest summit. My story of low mountain conquest.

I tried on every face I had to entice you.

80s music video girl with a sudsy bucket and conspicuously wet t-shirt sitting several inches above the waist band of freshly cut off shorts?

Nope, he's too deep for such frivolities.

Dirty farm hand with a mechanical aptitude and a wry smile curled around a cigarette?

Nah. He's older, skilled, and embodied. He knows I only know a few tricks to get by.

Gracefully aging punk with a biting sense of justice?

Definitely not. Too much like his ex? Too intense? Too much trouble.

Nurturing gourmet domestic with enough grilled eggplant dripping with olive oil for everyone plus a neatly packed lunch just for you to take the next day?

Surprisingly, no. Mommy issues? Doesn't want to be mothered? Mom's aren't sexy, right?

Erudite academic with an encyclopedic knowledge of Tom Robbins and strong opinions about which is the superior Coltrane?

Closer. He's never gets his chance to flex his intellectual might and no one else appreciates his NPR tiny desk taste in music.

Midnight drinking buddy that would hand you beer after cheap beer while casually and calculatingly nursing just one listening to your sad, sad stories?

Bingo.

So we drank together or I pretended to. Night after night I plied you with cold beers and a sympathetic ear until I straddled you at just the right moment of weakness. You passed out while I was running my tongue up the side of your neck where the three day stubble caught every crystal of salt and dirt.

I reached to feel if the beers had softened a hickory branch into a pliable willow switch. Your sleepy hand tenderly grabbed my wrist.

I braced myself with excitement and the anticipation before being thrown off of you and fucked on the dirty floor with my wrist pinned over my head, skinned knees to make up a fabricated story about falling in the gravel when people asked the next day. I wrote a thousand possibilities in my head about what bed to sleep in and if I could find the coffee maker in your kitchen to bring you coffee in bed until we slunk back staggering our arrivals so no one would be suspicious.

Instead you gently removed my hand without fanfare. I stood up and announced that it was getting late.

No knowing glances of longing no matter how seductively I draped my bare leg across heavy machinery. No peak over the glasses as I turned pages licking my fingers with intention. No lingering hugs goodnight.

Just as many beers. Just fewer with me.

The less important you are, the longer the passage. The details, the stagecraft, the orbiting extras, the soundtrack are more important.

On our third date we met in the desert.

I sat in the mass produced macrame swing hung at an awkward height with my legs sticking out at strange angles while Carol Cole played on the cheap all in one record player. He was somewhere else inside doing something I found very unimportant.

You will always be on the other side of the world, even if that world is in your own head.

I kicked at sand gathering on the concrete and stared directly into the sun to try to burn my tears away.

I wept because my Venus is in Gemini, my attachment is “disorganized,” and I am my mother's daughter.

My mother once followed a man to the desert too where she gained a penchant for beaded belts and layered sterling silver bangles.

I got too high and tried to find jack rabbit dens in the yard. Wandering in a circle trying to move the earth faster so this would all hurry up and get to the good part.

Climbing and disappearing behind massive smooth boulders you took pictures like you were afraid I would disappear– which I did– before scolding you for sharing intimacy publicly you were never willing to show privately. I liked being seen even if only through your digital lenses where you keep all your feelings.

If you zoom in on a photo I wonder if you can see the grimace of pain building in my guts. Not my body tearing itself apart from being forlorn but because I had to take a shit and it felt sacrilegious to explode trying to hide beneath a Joshua Tree.

I couldn't laugh or shit for three days.

–

I pretended to be impressed as you overcooked my eggs one by one with the sluggish pace of a man that never truly worked a day in his life. Dwindling eggs marking how many times we've done this dance where you ‘contribute’ and I appreciate your decency to make eggs while tiny finger print bruises blossom below my collarbone. I'm petulant and refuse to eat. Not just because your eggs are shitty but I want to reject any offering besides utter devotion.

Watching the timid way you cut raw chicken after cleaning every possible surface twice over that chicken liquid wafted near and poked at it with a fork and a tinge of disgust as it cooked slowly in the pan never with enough heat to brown I'm not shocked by your aversion to sticking your tongue into the depths of a woman.

I should have demanded satisfaction earlier instead I lowered myself spiritually before my knees hit the linoleum.

–

I was a desert fuck oracle.

On our last full day we visited some hippie alien revival tent. Over-priced kombucha and spring water conveniently located at every exit next to the expensive, ugly earrings I convinced you to buy. You thought I was a gold digger angling for your money, I just wanted to make you waste it and wear the overly feminine earrings yourself as I tried to leech your masculinity like a succubus. The day before I broke your phone screen on accident when your delicate fingers couldn’t find the correct orientation or the latch for the top of the massive Jeep. Your fingers always struggled with orienting themselves blindly.

My internal monologue was screaming through the sound of singing bowls and ayurvedic breathing. On the aurally perfect silent square in the center of the mecca I looked again into the desert sun for clarity. He had a heart incapable of love beyond simple niceties, which still felt like a mechanical cold, dead, fish.

Internal fires took a massive intake of air to burn everything down within the confines of the sandy compound. I was determined to chaos. Music and light spanned across the yard, I danced wildly, cackled loudly and burned the leftovers leaving the oven unattended to arm wrestle at the quaint little kitchen table. Refusing to admit defeat. Scientists long struggled to determine when squid were mating or trying to tear each other’s many limbs off. I spat ink in your aurora the next day. But not before wandering naked into the dark nearly starless night to soothe my aching muscles in the hot tub you refused to join me in yet again.

In the gentle morning light my astroprojection, sound bath experience worked like a bad Alex Grey painting. With a body filled and the transcendental high from gasping to breathe I was a desert fuck oracle. I bored viper holes into the places that hurt the most to touch deep in your soul. Your money, your father, your desires, your phony dreams, your lack of legacy, your wanderlust, your inability to pick up a fucking phone. I spilled prophetic truths telling you how your life would unfold in a raspy voice from a trachea squeezed too tight. My lips moved independently. My eyes never closed. You gave up. My fire sucked all the air from the room leaving you fighting for your own oxygen for once. I will always be a desert fuck oracle.

—

On a circuitous route to the airport I was determined to find genuine human connection.

There was a shy, handsome young man with a new tan cowboy hat and a well placed dribble of bbq sauce on his forearm as he tended to the large grill pit. Leaning over the old-timey fence I asked him to light my cigarette for me on the open flame. I leered, sucking on my cigarette watching him work and blushing. He was too timid to meet my eyes a third time.

The waitress and I walked in together giggling and clasped each others hands as I slipped her cash, apologizing for your shitty tip.

An older man pulled up on a motorcycle to the highway attraction, I jumped from rock to rock asking about his life and travels. Sitting cross legged and spritely I listened to him with rapt attention and the humility of humanity.

I had lost you again metaphorically and literally. Perched like a regal bird halfway up the graffiti strewn boulders, your crown of long, slowly greying locks framed your striking face perfectly. It was hard to stay mad at something so beautiful. Until we tried to scramble down together. Our hands clasped like brothers and I lowered you down before me. You looked at me with the same tinge of disgust you gave the chicken when I asked for help in turn to slide down smooth rock. I’m, in turn, disgusted with myself for looking for strength within an unending chasm of someone else's weakness.

Turning down a sand road that looked more like rapidly breaking waves than traversable road I sang songs just for me and an excuse to utter more prophetic verses of namelessness aloud to you. Spending my last few hours in this alien landscape alone in the unfortunate company of another.

At the end of the road the sands opened up to a giant boulder that divided both halves of America. One side was ATVs and massive RVs flying American flags, the other pressed closer against the rocks of the cliffs were women in flowing, floral dresses and generators for DJ equipment.

I brought the last of the uneaten groceries and half a bottle of gin to a woman, it would be the second time I clasped the hands of a stranger that day starved for tenderness.

I asked her to tell me everything that was about to happen, what was I going to miss? Joy and freedom mostly. Still holding my hands the desert siren asked me to stay with her before she asked my name. Instead of replying I looked back to you with genuine affection for the first time.

“I will never see that man again”

“Why?”

“Because he will never be able to love me the way I deserve to be loved.”

Gently, she pulled me against her, our arms wrapping around the others shoulders. “That’s okay.”

A slow smile spread across my knowing face. Clarity delighted me. Being right delighted me. I sucked in more hot air and floated to the Jeep.

Uncharacteristically quiet, although I had learned to be quiet here. Smiles and soft laughs expanded and contracted and I skimmed the wavy sand road back to the highway like a speed boat grazing the tops of the waves and destroying someone else’s suspension. I refused to share our sisterly secrets and sped with a vengeance toward the airport and the rest of my life without you.

–

12 hours after you boarded with your first class direct flight ticket north I emerged from the back of the plane, sun speciously high in the sky.

I sat bleary eyed watching my bag go around the carousel over and over moving forward and going nowhere. I wanted to sit in that. Partially too tired to will my legs to move, partially because sitting keeps me in liminal Airport stasis too.

I have soreness in my muscles and tenderness in places less easily soothed to conjure images and meld them into memories to be stored and inspected periodically.

You say you seek magic but I think you've figured out by now I see things--deep in my core. I spoke the truth. I told you this would happen.

I feel mirrored in my own contradictions there: blazing sun yet cool air, hot and cold, hard people hiding soft hearts.

I should have just gone to the desert to find myself with my own truck and my dog. I missed my dog.

—

“A Collection of Things About a Version of Me I'm trying to kill”

Part Two

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Diddion

I'm honest only to the dog.

“I think your mom is depressed again”

And I just bought a new motorcycle.

I thought I wanted to be softer. That softness would be the key to happiness. That a man could love me if I let myself become a warm cashmere sock.

Growing harder seemed impossible—any harder and I’d become a diamond.

Or, more likely, coke.

(Coal refined into economical fuel through heat and oxygen deprivation. I’m partial to both—oxygen deprivation and the party version of the namesake.)

I ate too many Fritos and sublimated my rage towards the men slipping through my claws by bossing boys around and making unnecessarily biting comments about teenage boys with bad haircuts, worse entitled attitudes, and fake mirrored oakleys perched atop punchable faces. No booze to blame for my bad behavior and squalid, sober honesty. I'm perfectly capable of being an unpleasant handful while raw dogging reality in the asshole of America. I told teenage girls wearing matching white dresses like mini Bachelorettes at a high school graduation party the key to happiness was: your own money and no men. I stand by this advice even if I only abide by part of it.

I think I'm only narrowly avoiding a manic diagnosis by not telling the truth.

–

It was easier to be cool in your twenties but fate often decided early which camp of cool you'd build your legacy.

Option A:

Option A was only really an option if you had a foundation rooted in being at least somewhat conventionally attractive. Once an attractive baseline was determined you had to skew in an equal and opposite measure. A moderately attractive girl needed at least a nose ring and a few bad tattoos to signal she was too cool to care about such frivolities as hegemonic beauty standards. A very attractive girl could dress up as a carnivaleque bearded lady for Halloween to demonstrate how little notice she gave her perfectly upturned elvish nose, amble pert tits, and naturally fiery hair sprouting from everywhere including her armpits.

After subtly rejecting their innate beauty with one hand and applying a perfect flick of winged eyeliner with the other they must adopt a few quirky traits and accessorize their art school mystique. Cigarettes and fixed gear bikes were a given. A few vinyl records to spin while rolling fat cones on the floor was a popular choice. Displaying your drug addled boyfriends extensive vintage playboy collection was a move for the bold, liberated, and discerning. These girls would scream Dead Kennedy's lyrics while jumping on your bed when you failed to consummate after leaving the dive bar together.

Option B:

Ugly girls that refused to shrink their waistlines redefined the unfuckably cool strata. These girls played their acoustic guitars better than the boys, aced their papers on Bourdieu, had port wine stained birthmarks, and a curiously extensive knowledge of American serial killers before the advent of true crime podcasts, which they flexed while sitting in the front row of a gender studies class advocating for the other truly abject people of the world.

It was crucial to the ecosystem that Option A girls collected a few Option B girls to absorb their interests and amplified their own cool just with a higher probability of P in V.

Coolness is often stolen valor, once you break up with someone you're free to cherry pick all their good tastes and adopt them as your own. A penchant for punchy New Yorker fiction, the steady hand to perfectly filet a catfish after bludgeoning it to death, a smiley hanging from a bandana to swing against train yard bulls, a passable knowledge of microtonal guitars and Pro Tools. I'm bitter seeing someone ride away on my old motorcycle, I'm sure others are bitter watching me pass their tastes off as my own.

37 is an awkward age to be cool, the fibers are woven into bone no longer a fleeting exercise in new costuming but worn, comfortable, and perfectly broken in selvedge denim. At 37 you risk appearing like you're trying too hard to hold tight to youth, effort is and will always be the kryptonite to cool. Cool is easier at 47, everyone else traded thrifted corduroy for Ann Taylor pleated khakis and blunt bobs. Coolness, like color theory, is all relative.

The third time I bought the same King Crimson LP to replace, yet again, what a man took after I threw him out I didn't even want to listen to it. But I couldn't stand the thought that he was taking my own stolen valor and packing it into a milkcrate. He didn't even own a record player.

Slogging through another decade, watching my ass slowly creep towards the floor and my cool friends elect for comfortable balcony seats and slightly more sensible shoes, I redouble my resolve to hold onto cool through the ‘trying too hard’ phase before resurrecting as cool again but at 47. I'll have to start sliding into option B, unfuckable but also unfuck-with-able.

–

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37? Or are you just manic?

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37? Or are you just a little batty from losing the ability to do anything other than exactly what you want?

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37? Or are you just a shitty neighbor that plays music too loud with all the windows open so the whole block is the background to main character moments dancing in the kitchen?

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37? Or will the neighbors across the alley eventually call the cops when you miss judge your aim and lob another wad of wet clay with a slingshot and hear a conspicuous splat, probably dinging the Tesla parked without a garage. How do they charge their 67k cars with no garage, no EV hookup, and they've got balls to park two in the alley of a working class neighborhood. I hope they have a few giant bird shit looking clay and newspaper splats across the hood.

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37? Or are you just myth making in the presence of others not for their enjoyment or character development but so you can revel in your own reflection in their wide eyes.

Can you still be a manic pixie dream girl at 37?

–

I want to be a difficult woman. I want to order drinks with exacting precision: Kettle One Martini, bone dry, extra olives. I want to send drink after drink back until it is just vodka with a whiff of vermouth and enough olives to count as an appetizer then only eat half. I want to eat hot wings rabidly punctuating the good parts of a story told in a posh accent by dropping half cleaned wings on a dirty plate.

I want to tell stories about getting cat called well into my fifties and how one mugger stole my purse but the real tragedy was that the wheel of parmesan I bought with my rent money went bouncing down the street and I chased the cheese not the wallet.

I want a loft in a rent controlled apartment in DUMBO with my studio across the hall. I want a claw foot bathtub in the living room overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge before they built a massive apartment blocking my view but never taking my fire escape to sneak cigarettes on in the garbage scented summer heat. I want orange five gallon buckets collecting rain from the ceiling to fill my bathtub.

I want to master the Irish goodbye and leave when everyone still wants me there. I want to take black and white photos of the city on the drunk walk home alone.

I want to have a long term partner that uses the same subway stop but never stays the night. A man everyone knows theoretically exists but curiously never met nor can ever remember his name.

I want wildly expensive shoes and thrifted dresses that house a stray scorpion stowaway from a year spent at a residency in Rosewell, NM.

I want to secretly speak Italian and have another life for 6 weeks once a year and tell stories just because the words taste good in my mouth.

I want to make everyone choke on my success that I wear so gracefully.

–

I never understood why people would say I am intimidating. I'm just a prickly pear. A little cupcake with frosting that turns your tongue black. But for a moment I wanted to feel like a lady.

Clean the rust and grease off hand hands, take what my mother calls a whores bath. Put on a casually slutty (thrifted) dress, heels or boots, heels or boot? Sandals. Backwards hat in a tomboyish way to hide the sweat. Just an hour to feel like a lady sipping a beer and watching my dog run around the park. Maybe talk to a much younger cute boy.

Instead I sat on the crones bench in the shade to indulge in the novelty of the lives of others. The dumpy, grumpy, queer polycule(?) With ancient, half dead dogs in their usual circle. Men staring into phones. One with a whole WFH station- and a wedding ring. A plastic woman in a matching athletheleisure fit and two tiny tea cup dogs with pearl collars. A beautiful blonde giggly woman in a bright red spaghetti strap tank top and perfectly cuffed shorts and some generic man fortunate enough to have her attention. I watched their flirting unfold taking note of how normal people interact. A comment and silence. Chat about the dog. More pauses. Knees slowly turning to each other and comments quickly become a conversation. I stare at the split running up her thigh muscles and touch my own wondering if my legs look the same. Her arms are thinner, her smile is more gentle, her laugh is more coy, but her tits are not subtle either.

Another crone joins me in the shade, we instantly share our mutual disdain for the amount of doodles, poodles, and goldens. People do always match their dogs. Our chitchat inevitably turns to men - we aren't obeying the canonical rule of feminist cinema and I don’t know her name.

“I don't know why people are intimidated by pitbulls”

“I don't know why men say I'm intimidating”

A gun in the first act means shots fired in the second.

Before the beautiful woman and lucky average man exchange phone numbers he heroically hears a cat crying and notes it as odd before offering to buy her another beer, they dont have light beer and she politely declines. My new crone friend identifies the car it is stuck in. Before I know how or why I hop over the chain link fence leaving my beer on the bench next to her sculpted ass.

The hood is open and my moment of girlhood is over, grease covers my arms again, my hand is burning on the engine, little floofy ears stuck at the bottom. I call for action and no men move. No men own tools, a lesbian comes to my rescue with pliers and screw drivers.

“I'm going to jack up your car and pull your wheel well apart because if this cat dies I'm going to have to kill myself.”

I might have asked for permission but we all knew he was obligated to comply. Orders are barked at no one in particular, people generally do as told.

After much turmoil, distress, heat, grease, and frustration a single kitten emerges and is rushed into the bar for water. I apologize for throwing tools around and ask the spectating bartender for a cigarette, he says he only vapes and says he can ask around.

“The men here don't have tools, they aren't going to have a cigarette”

My back hurts either from crawling around under cars or when I had to help two men dump the cowboy swimming pool after a dog pissed in it. At least I can spend the day recalling how useless men are.

Divine comedy, cosmic timing. The gun reappears for the third act.

My tire is slashed open by poorly placed metal. Insurance has free roadside so I'll try again to be a princess and watch a man change my tire in the rain.

Tornado sirens rage and I beacon the young man inside. Princesses still have manners. The rain subsides and I implore him to finish the job, his truck is blocking one of my studio assistants in and I'm pretty sure I'm still paying them to be here.

We watch from inside as he raises and lowers the jack. Trying to break my tire free. Running flat on the rim back and forth.

My Valkries take flight with me outside to survey the situation after I let out too many sighs. He said he used to be a photographer, that was the first warning besides his truck without a job box. Again my hands are covered in grease inspecting his failure. I send one of my Sybils to fetch a sledge hammer while the man in a yellow roadside vest pulls up a YouTube video on how to remove a tire. While he watches his phone we pound kneeling in the water. Tire freed. I give him the dignity of putting the spare on but inflate it myself as that step slipped his mind. My Three Graces resume our girlhood just a little dirtier than usual giggling in a huddle.

I had my own cigarettes today.

I have a habit of breaking up with men in scenic locations: the isolated beach cottage in Michigan, midsummer in Iceland, at night atop of Stone Arch Bridge, and careening down a desert highway. I look back on the relationship more favorably than when we sit on couches and floors with a pile of laundry between us, both crying or yelling watching as our entwined lives slowly implode.

I gave a sweet man in New Orleans a message in a bottle to hold instead of throwing it into the northern most headwaters of the Mississippi River hoping he would find it four states away where the muddy river emptied into deltas and brackish water opened into the ocean. “For all the love that surely would have been.” He gave me a DVD I never watched.

On Stone Arch Bridge I drunkenly ranted at a man who's natural scent -while not wholly unpleasant- felt acrid in my nostrils, my head was never comfortable on his pelted chest inhaling him. He had the audacity to ask about my best Christmas as a child while taking in the Minneapolis skyline after leaving a restaurant I couldn't afford. I snorted. Fuck that, tell me about your worst. His worst Christmas wasn't even comparable to my worst Tuesday in three weeks. I never went back, but I did learn to recreate the Pappardelle with hare sauce. Hare is quite difficult to find in the cities.

15 feet in the air straddling a welder strapped to a forklift via an emoji. His name never felt good in my mouth, too many letters and formalities. An overly dramatic deathblow meant for the girls to cackle over later.

I haven't permitted a man to end things with me since I was sixteen and I've -somehow- avoided needing penicillin for anything besides strep throat. My ticket is bound to come up any day now.

Slither and strut down a mountain highway past ski lifts closed for the season, second homes, and boutiques ignoring the clearly marked trails because Google maps said to just take the road. More successful, beautiful, slightly older women expand and contract discussing all our mutual kin. I analyze their foreheads for signs of botox trying to decide when it is my turn under the needle. They say I look like Chloe Sevigny. I think that means stylish in an odd way with tired too big eyes and that look of someone who is slightly bored of the whole thing but also a bit of a handful. You can always tell who has a past based on how they flick their sugar packets.

I'm supposed to be boy sober, I'm settling for California sober. I'm the best version of me when I'm performing. I'm usually always performing.

Be a chameleon, smoke the roaches from a recent or maybe not quite yet divorcee next to a dumpster, offer to review portfolios and dole out career advice, clear the plates of septuagenarians and see past her advanced age to her personhood, her girlhood, her possibly wild artist past. Complimenting her pants was an honest gesture. I want to be seen as a whole woman at 75. I wanted to be seen as a whole woman at 35.

Wear the bikini, read Kathy Acker in the hot tub. Swim laps alone. Float on your back so the patio bar patrons can make eye contact while I back stroke and do flips trying not to lose my bottoms with more tattoos than they've seen outside of their porn searches. Win the teacher of the week award even if the competition is only your head.

I went to the rodeo alone in leopard print pants to find a cowboy. I found four, maybe not all cowboys but one did lend me his hat while I was roping dummy bulls next to sticky, costumed children. I didn't pay for drinks and don't remember anyone's names. My hand was kissed. My thrist was quenched. My spirit is full. I shared a menthol with a cowgirl and stayed behind the bar after they closed to the tourists and ate the salty potato chips out of someone's hamburger boxed staff dinner. I'm learning to leave when I really want to stay. Trouble is best when narrowly avoided.

I left my bag with mascara in the shop and sauntered into the morning sun with a bare face and the smile that only comes from secrets. Slugging coffee and eating yesterday's desert for breakfast in my quiet corner alone.

“How was the rodeo?”

One raised eyebrow and an uneven smile. Only the left side of my face emotes and betrays me. I can't wait for it to be a frozen scowl although I do have a penchant for a quick flash of eyebrows.

“Did you still go?”

“I had a wonderful time.”

Girlish giggles and a quick hug with heads touching - even though I had to lower mine to reach her grey short shorn hair.

One last joint by the dumpster gathered around nothingness but gravel doling out wisdom you aren't sure you have. One last walk up the hill to catch the village bus, hopefully not the same driver that caught the silver side of my tongue hours earlier. Hitching a ride with a wiry, young intern and a genuinely warm hug goodbye. I see them at 26, all green and hopeful with strong arms and ambitions.

I used to want a soft landing, now I just want to enjoy the fall.

Forward. Fast. Feral. Focused.

Speeding at the top of fourth gear getting lost down country highway between expanses of alternating corn and soy. Trying to find twisted roads to corner too fast, Lean too hard until my stomach drops out and I squeeze thighs clad in men's Levi's hard against the tank and feel my asshole pucker and sucked up inside my body. Cackle when you don't die. One hand stuck straight to the side commanding with a pointed finger to overtake a station wagon or mini van. Squeak between cars and beat them off the line in the wrong lane. Sing and scream and have conversations with myself playing both parties. Chambray denim shirt flapping in the wind like wings exposing a bony shoulder and caressing the tank the way I wish lovers touched me. Entertain the flirtation of an older man and listen to his opinions about economy fuel, punctuated with playful ‘baby girl.’ Turn fully around to make eye contact with another bike leaving one hand on the throttle and test extending both arms wide welcoming wind and sun on your chest. Speed viciously towards a cherry dipped soft serve cone eaten messily alone on a bench with quietly ringing ears.

After doing shots at Hooters and a failed WNBA game I rode dark streets through fireworks exploding in every direction. Downtown, a pack of men on Japanese piss missiles each had a woman scrunched up on the back of their bikes, clinging to them like baby monkeys. While trying to decide whether to run the red and catch them my stomach felt like hot bile at the thought of being ornamental on back. Instead I rode around the city alone feeling the darkness cool the air still thick with humidity whip through my clothing and stick to my skin. A woman and I made eye contact across two lanes as a huge smile spread across her face and extended to mine. Kindred smiles in seeing the rugged wholeness of being seen by no one but yourself and strangers but to be wholly seen.

I think ultimately I just want someone to share my GPS location with that won't nag me for speeding but also care if I die.

Once I eject a man from my life I erase every shred of their existence, every gift, every reminder except three items and the slew of artworks produced that I swore up and down weren’t about them:

an exorbitantly expensive Marina Abramovnik book
a slightly less expensive Louise Bourgeois book that was left in messy wrapping paper to find on Christmas propped up on the record console table, miraculously he left me half of the PJ Harvey LPs I bought anyway.
a thank you/break up card I keep hidden in the bottom drawer of my Grandmother's 1970s jewelry box recounting how happy he was when I threw rocks at his window- he also gave me the Abramovik book, maybe he knew me better than I thought
A single, almost nice crew sock i found on the floor the next day hung around for a few weeks to sheath my vibrator in. A reminder I wasn't destined to be a warm sock for a man. I eventually threw that out once I no longer needed the reminder.

Unfortunately, I love bloodsport. I want to break and rebuild, I want to put all my crazy in a big box that turns into a dance to the death that everyone knows is coming. Tigers flicking tails each knowing the rules to an unscripted game.

Until then -and probably after- I'll take summer very seriously. Eat 5 day old Thai peanut noodles mostly naked in my kitchen, the hacking of a cat about to vomit drowned out by too loud music. Or subsist on nothing but donuts, protein shakes, and problematic amounts of coffee for days and work until my hands can't grip and spend summer evenings gently washing grime from the day off in urban rivers clearly marked ‘no swimming’ while baby ducks and children babbling in foreign tongues swim downstream where I just peed.

You can't accept the swooping arm wave of a Westside biker gang and get absorbed into a downtown stunt show when you really just went for a ride back to work because you're a mess and forgot your wallet if someone is waiting at home. You can't be in the thick of wheelies in front of cops or drive the wrong way down the highway towards a Shell station -still without your wallet- and Cash App a stranger for $5 in gas when you have dinner plans. You can't ride a mechanical bull with your girls or slow dance with your neighbor when someone wants their towels folded a certain way. You can't go on a hungover ride with your motorcycle mechanic with kind eyes, a playful swagger, and about 10 years too young for you if you're supposed to be doing Sunday morning grocery shopping. You can't let a casual cruise turn into an 8 hour warm summer rain drenched day if you have kids to take to soccer practice. You can’t go night swimming on a Wednesday if you follow everyone’s rules of order. You can't live waiting for another but you also can’t let spite ruin a good thing.

Fear has left my body. The hot flush of shame seldom comes anymore. I aspire to be an old woman in the same boyish clothes and long grey braids with more tattoos on sagging arm skin that I refuse to cover. I only fear domesticity, boredom, and losing my wildness.

The manic pixie dream girl doesn't die at 37 withering on the vine. She's sovereign, the most dangerous man in the room with nothing to lose besides a freedom she protects with cloak and a dagger tattooed down her sternum. A trickster to test and disrupt her own narrative arc.

Writing and recording is dangerous, living every moment like a trailer for A24 cinema is dangerous, observing the world in full spectrum colidiscopeic color is dangerous.

But sipping black coffee with the shop owner, a tidy fan of outdated motoGP magazines between us is glorious. Sweat and sunshine and secrets only I know is glorious. Freedom, above all, is fucking glorious.

Not everyone is built to softly flicker like a welcoming porch light. I'm blazing like a comet, screaming towards the horizon line, thrilled by anticipation of the crater that I'll leave my body behind in. The ferocity by which I consume life without chewing in ravenous gulps can only last so long. Its a coin toss as to how my life burns out: a fire drifting slowly out to sea until it disappears into new storm clouds or like a star imploding on itself creating a black hole that sucks all the life around it into the darkness.

I'd rather be rare than regular. I'd rather ride alone wrapped in my own joy. But I might try to quit smoking this year.

Joyce Caroll Oates’ short stories that end during the final climbing action, before the climax are my favorite. You are fairly sure you know what will happen but she leaves you guessing if you're right.

(End)