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Working Notes:
The following selection
is a chapter from a novel-in-progress entitled M.,
the story of a young female’s thought process that acts as a hyper-conscious
resistance to her own sexuality and its desire to occupy her definition
of self comfortably. The project, my first in the form of narrative, arose
from my frustration with poetry and the limitations of its aesthetic concerns
in addressing issues of sexuality and self-consciousness. At the level
of language the narrator’s story is composed of erroneous logics.
In the attached excerpt from M. the sentences
form an irrational rationalism in the narration that keeps the narrator’s
consciousness safely disconnected from the pleasures of the body. For
this reason despite the narrative’s explicitness in discussing the
sexual act the language forms a strange detachment from the event it is
describing. I made this choice in form for it created a hyper-sensitive
but distant relationship to physical experience, a paradox that I felt
was true to the experience of internalized homophobia.
III.
That night after eating the ham steak I felt lonely because of the bruise
on my forehead and so when I finished my dessert I didn’t return
to my room but went to find G who was neither a friend nor a story and
I wanted to find her because I knew I could be with her any way I chose
because she didn’t know my friends and when I left her room she
would just disappear and I wouldn’t have to explain anything to
anyone. I could just sleep with her.
What I liked about being with G was that her lights were always on low
and she never had much to say to me and although I didn’t feel very
comfortable when we were in bed together at least I didn’t have
to talk although sometimes when we were naked and the room was dark I
had the strange need to try to talk to her and I would tell her she was
beautiful not because I necessarily felt that she was beautiful and I
didn’t because it was too dark to see that she was beautiful but
because I thought that if I said something nice to her she would maybe
ask me how my bruise was doing but she would never say anything back and
when she didn’t say anything back I knew that I had forgotten that
she was someone who wasn’t really in my life but that she was only
a breathing body beneath me who knew nothing about the dining hall or
my bruise or my imagination or how I would fall into mirrors at night
and that is how I had to treat her and that is why I thought maybe we
would love each other.
When I came into her room that night she didn’t say anything about
the bruise on my forehead which is why I came to see her that night so
when she didn’t say anything I knew that everything would be alright
and I should just continue on in the manner that I always did. I didn’t
really feel like touching her right then when I came in the door but I
knew that I needed to touch her if I wanted her to let me stay so I touched
her. And although each time I touched her I didn’t want to at first
once I did I kept wanting to touch her and that was because she felt soft
and though I didn’t want to touch her because something in me always
felt a little ill when I touched someone I kept touching her because her
lips and her neck were soft enough that when I touched her I felt as much
good as I felt bad. But I never let her touch me back and she didn’t
seem to really want to so we had a way of being with each other where
both of us understood the rules and so we were able to take our clothes
of together the same way each time.
That is first I kissed her and I kissed her until she started to breathe
heavy. When I heard her breathing heavy I put my hand against her breast
and then when she sighed after I put my hand on her breast I knew I could
push her to the bed and once she was on the bed and stopped me from kissing
her anymore and smiled I knew she wanted me to take off her shirt so I
would take off her shirt and then she would run her fingers on the back
of my head and that’s when I knew that she wanted me to kiss her
breasts and suck on her nipples. If while I was kissing her breasts and
sucking on her nipples she still rubbed the back of my head I knew to
put my hand between her legs to see if through her jeans I could feel
she was getting wet. If I felt a heat there and she began tugging at my
earlobe while I felt the heat there I knew it was ok to keep my hand in
between her legs and press and if I ever felt excited it was usually at
this time and I didn’t like it if I felt excited because then I
felt slightly dizzy and it was hard for me to keep thinking if she was
getting wetter there between her legs where I was pressing and it became
hard to pay attention to her pulling on my ear and I didn’t want
to miss any of her signals so if I got excited while my hand was in between
her legs I would begin reciting poems that I memorized in high school
and so I was able to keep count of her ear tugs and keep my hand pressing
in an even way against her just as long as I could keep saying to myself
“whose woods these are I think I know” and as long as I could
keep reciting the poem in my head I could keep my body under control and
get G’s pants off of her so I could continue pleasing her.
This time I did get very excited and I was chanting the poem to myself
and shaking my head back and forth so that I could shake my body out of
my thoughts and just keep the poem there but it was getting harder and
harder and I could feel myself swelling in my pants and I got so feverish
that I let go of the poem and pulled G’s pants off and just as I
moved my face in between her legs just as I was about to lick her thighs
I saw three cuts there three cuts that I hadn’t seen before on her
thighs but only on her wrists and now they were here on her thighs and
suddenly the poem came back in my head and I stopped and sat up.
Had I been anyone else or had G been anyone else the fact that I suddenly
sat up in bed the fact that I was moving my head out from between her
legs would not have been dramatic but as I sat up I knew I was breaking
our rules and our rules were not made to be broken and I knew that it
was not possible for either of us to have been anyone else and to be here
together but breaking our rules made it appear as though I had become
someone else and for this reason I knew that it was not possible for me
to move my head out from between her legs at this moment but because I
was doing it meant now suddenly that things would be different between
us and what that difference would be I was not sure but I knew that it
made me nervous so I tried to behave in a way that made the difference
not seem so great.
G’s head jerked up nervously and her eyes came wide open as her
arms spread out behind her to hold her body up above her pillow. This
is how she asked me for an explanation and although I knew I had done
something bad I thought my only way of salvaging the situation was to
act as if I didn’t know that I had done something bad so I said
“I just wanted to stop to look at how beautiful you are.”
I knew the sentence would confuse her because suddenly I was not myself
but myself pretending to be someone’s lover a lover who I could
never have and had no way of knowing because I was incapable of uttering
the sentence “I just wanted to stop to look at how beautiful you
are” without pretending to be someone else and that fact made me
someone who could never sleep with someone who needed their lover to utter
that sentence sincerely and the fact that I pretended to utter the sentence
sincerely also made me someone who could never sleep with G.
These thoughts were streaming through my head as I uttered the sentence
and I knew suddenly that I had to stop thinking if I were to make my lie
believable because someone who was able to say the sentence I just said
would not be someone who could think but someone who could feel. In an
effort to be someone who wasn’t thinking which I knew when I started
was an impossible task I began rubbing G’s leg and for a second
I did stop thinking and the second in which I wasn’t thinking was
the first second I touched her thigh and the skin was soft soft enough
to excite me and make me not think of anything except my own body swelling
but the not thinking felt so good that it made me move my hand and suddenly
I felt the lip of the cut skin on her leg and then my thinking started
again and I kept thinking that my finger was falling into her cut and
moving around in the flesh and blood and I couldn’t stop it and
these thoughts made my face burn. In my head I imagined that my finger
was deep in her cut hurting her but on her thigh my hand was now running
over her cuts and in between her legs because I didn’t want G to
know what I was thinking now and when I reached the lips between her legs
they were wet and I looked down now to make sure they weren’t the
cut but only the place where I usually stuck my fingers and where G usually
liked it. It was so I put my fingers in there but in my head I thought
that my fingers were still in the cut on her thigh and although I knew
this wasn’t true I couldn’t help thinking that it was and
each time I looked at G it was easy to think that it was both true and
not true because her eyes were closed and she kept turning her head slowly
back and forth grunting O and so she only helped the thinking to keep
going.
I kept trying to change the thoughts because I thought that if I couldn’t
stop them then I should try to change them. So every time that in my thoughts
I thought I was putting my finger in G’s wound I thought instead
that she was Jesus and I was doubting Thomas and that by putting my fingers
in her wound I was saving myself and this thought would make me push my
fingers deeper inside of her and it would make her groan louder but each
time she groaned louder I got scared that I was hurting her and then I
began thinking again that I wasn’t doubting Thomas and she wasn’t
Jesus and I was just sticking my finger in the cut in her thigh and I
was just hurting her. And when I began to think that I was hurting her
my face would begin to burn and my heart would beat faster and I would
sweat and I couldn’t take this feeling so then I would imagine that
I was tying my hands up in the vines that I saw in the mirror the night
before and once my hands were tied up I imagined another me pushing my
head into the mirror every time I heard G groan and because I had the
bruise on my forehead to prove it I knew that that thought was true and
that instead of hurting G I was just hurting myself and that made me feel
better and I kept thinking this until she came and I felt good afterwards
because I didn’t hurt her and I thought that I made her feel good.
But my good feeling didn’t last long because G knew that I had put
my fingers in her cut and I knew that she knew this because after she
finished coming she sat up in bed without looking at me and she got out
of bed without looking at me and she went into a dark corner of the room
and sat in that dark corner naked with her knees folded up to her shoulders
like upside down Vs and she sat there smoking and I could see her face
light up around the cigarette for a second as she lit the match and her
eyes were big and her face was beautiful with long hollow cheeks and big
red lips just as I had imagined it so I knew that everything I thought
was true because it all flashed true even with the slightest bit of light.
Her eyes didn’t look at me and this is how I knew that something
was wrong and because I had been putting my fingers in her cuts I knew
that I was the something that was wrong. And because she didn’t
stay in bed and because she didn’t smile at me after coming I knew
that what I did that was wrong hurt her and there was nothing that I could
do about it and because she didn’t talk and because she didn’t
look at me and because things were different now than they usually were
after G came I had to figure out a new way for us to be because there
seemed no way now to go back to our rules because they were broken now
and although most things that were broken could usually be fixed like
for instance a window there were certain things in the world that once
they were broken couldn’t be fixed and because they couldn’t
be fixed then they just became something else like for instance a virgin
and so I knew that what I broke in G couldn’t be fixed and now she
was something else so all I could do was put my clothes on and tell her
I was sorry and kiss her cold face and walk out the door and that was
the last time I ever slept with G.
That night I dreamt that G was walking towards me with cuts on the insides
of her arms. She was coming towards me with open arms showing me the cuts
that she had just made on the insides of her arms and in the dream she
spoke to me although in real life she hardly ever spoke to me and in the
dream she said to me “you did this to me” and in the dream
I said back to her over and over again “I didn’t do that to
you” but she in the dream always spoke back to me “yes you
did this to me” and this went on in the dream for what seemed like
a very long time until in the dream I got very angry and finally said
“yes I did this to you” and then I took a knife and cut her
arms over and over again and I kept saying “yes I’m doing
this to you” and it felt good to say that in the dream because I
no longer had to worry that I had done something wrong because I was doing
something wrong and doing something wrong felt better than worrying about
doing something wrong and it felt so good to cut her in the dream because
I no longer had to worry that I might cut her and when it started to feel
good I woke up because even in the dream I was worried that bad things
made me feel good.
The next morning I saw G on campus and she stopped and spoke to me and
when she spoke to me she smiled and so I didn’t mind speaking to
her and we spoke for quite a long time but then I saw new cuts on her
arms and I thought “I did that to her” and then I hurried
away and felt bad.
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