I’ve seen the way men look at me. For a moment it’s as if they are found. Like they’ve found something rare and gentle. Like I were their only hope. But what I love is the grip of their hands around my neck, I love it when I’m overpowered. When I feel as though I have no choice and I’m moaning and they won’t stop. I wonder what it would take for him to hear me. Must I bite his ears and scratch him?Must I scream with my voice that won’t carry, until I finally have the guts not to speak?

It’s taken a while for me to arrive at this, to admit that I’m so willing to be destroyed. It contradicts my posture and my love of literature. Though I may marvel at a twig in a stream or take pre-caution with my skirt through a breeze, there is no grace in my desire. There is no art in how I love.

So before you fix your burning eyes on me or imagine my body bathed in milk, understand that I am not a gentle thing. I am intense and vulgar. I rolled in the mud as a child and I was forced to take a shower.

It doesn’t take much to know a person. A small effort would be enough. And it’s not fair to ask to be understood by someone you’ve never tried to understand. Men do this all the time, when they think that you are beautiful. They see all sorts of things, even the future, but not you.

THE OSTEOPATH

The osteopath tells me my intestines are in knots because I miss my father, because there is a hole in my heart. It has crippled the right side of my body she says, and I laugh as she speaks. She is quaint and petite, she looks like a black bird with the spirit of june.

Except I’m thinking about my lecturer, about my basketball coach, about that croaked old man with his watch and his toys. She’s wrong, I tell myself, I haven’t seen my father in years. It’s like that where I’m from, not a bone in my body aches.

-How’s your balance? she asks
-I always trip on my right foot, It’s like that in my family, my mother does the same.

She fiddles with my hip bone, with my head and my toes. When she’s done she says I stand better, that both my feet are steady on the ground. I supposed she saw my heart when she was looking at my posture. She said my back hurt from a pain in my womb, that our lives are inscribed on the surface of our minds. But does she know I killed my child, or of the time I almost died when I couldn’t see the traffic cause the sun was in my eyes. Does she know I tried to write? in a small attempt at flight, before my mentor said I ought to feel the ground beneath my feet...get a note pad, he said document concrete expressions...then write some more, and I wrote some more just as I was told.

I think his hairline was receding. I noticed that then, when I thought to rip his heart from his wife and from his child.

TALES OF THE ORANGE TIME OF DAY

On the north coast of Indonesia, just east of Lovina, the Lambert's built their villa near an old monastery which housed blind orphans. The French–English family moved to Singaraja five years ago, and their decision to relocate remained somewhat of an enigma. Mrs. Lambert, often described as something of a floating spirit, had since taken it upon herself to educate her son Leo and daughter Celine.

“We are fortunate enough to be impractical” she'd often say jestingly, in an attempt to justify her digressions when teaching. It therefore came as no surprise that her first born Leo, sharp as he was, seemed to lack basic algebraic skills, though at the age of twenty-one he'd mastered the art of antique restoration and ceramics. He soon developed an unmatched passion for mythology, and I arrived to find him persuading his mother to invest in a library, arguing it would benefit the community. See More

Some men have an obsession with being profound. Ever notice that? The formality in their tone? Sure, they are often profound. But that’s not really sexy. I would hate to be profoundly unclothed. Find myself profoundly naked. I would hate to feature the weight of the world with the weight of a man on my body. And then this talk of China Africa relations. Why that’s not sexy at all. Of late, several occasions have forced me to consider such a thing; and I find myself feeling small and inarticulate. It’s not so much that I don’t know, but that I should have known. I should have known about the economic recession of 2008 or the geographic location of my judicial capital. 

It’s just sometimes I’ll see something beautiful and it becomes my only concern; like a fruit fly in the company of these profound men, I’ll see a flock of birds take flight from the branches of an apple tree in winter, and I’ll imagine that its leaves are falling up. And of course, such a thing can’t come up in conversation. I can’t even mention it in bed. Instead I’ll scrape my mind for a subject of substance and hope that he wont probe deeper.

I’m not sure how I got involved with this guy. What happened was, he looked very good and the other people didn’t, and somewhere along the way I found there was a mind in there and I was flattered by his liking of me. I tell him, “I know a lot, but nothing that matters,” he reassures that “there are many ways to be wise.” And suddenly it matters a little less if I am a writer, and I am more concerned as to whether that’s profound. I’m wondering when I forgot to place my feet on the ground, or when I started hovering on this cloud. 

That’s the thing with these men of certainty, they make you feel as though there is certainty on the ground. They’ll have you watching the news and coveting newspapers, and trying very hard to be profound. But then somewhere in the gaze you couldn’t hold, your tone, the little things; those things add up. Caused him to ask himself; when did all these feelings grow? or wonder if they are feelings at all, whether it is simply because you are beautiful, and if that’s all one needs to feel a certain way. 

When is it okay to leave? I’ve always done it prematurely. I promised myself I wouldn’t behave this way again, but with you, from the very start I was afraid. 

You looked so much like the kind of man who would leave me. You spoke like him, walked with that same indifference. That cold demeanor which gradually reduces me. And I tried, I fought the urge so many times, but each time I never heard from you I felt I simply have to leave you. 

You are one of many stories which ended just the same. But I did what I could to maintain my sanity. I simply could not give you the power to raise my spirit, not If I could afford it on my own. 

And though it is hard to be alone, its far worse when it’s not your choice; when you are banished from a very simple truth: That solitude might be the only lasting pleasure. It is almost as reliable as pain.