Perfume
In the expensive gym, the girls are uncertain. They parade their bodies, young or old or approaching some pure azimuth of animé hyperbole. Or they are aspirational, regretful, immature, or aged, because here in the precincts of the expensive gym, even the women stay girls in how they parade. Here please find body professors in blue shirts, ready to explain and instruct, cajole, gently insult. Here please find an ideal of consumption, one blasted from the video monitor and even in the nightclub dark of the classes, lit by epilepsy-inducing strobes, by the cathedral heights of the neon-blue hallway you traverse in order to enter the peak zone of the parade, the one where men wear their tropes, pecs, triceps, and abs, the competing religions of gladiators with numbered sport shirts signifying whether they love that lazy, gifted, tiny plug of a soccer player or the one with the imitable work ethic who disputably cares little for his teammates—in that blue hallway, at any rate, please find more images of the ideal. Here, then, please blast into the huge converted industrial space with its cramped machines made for more cramping, around which you navigate invisible social etiquette made up of tradition and innovation. Be sure not to trip on the invisible silk of the agreements since, in this expensive gym, in the antique binary, women keep their gazes down and bodies exposed. Somber rituals attend all rites, especially true for the women, gravest when approaching exercises for their gluteus minimus or maximus, signifying the fecund. Huge plasticine balls are here hefted instead of anything agricultural while men continue their grunting work alongside. It is, in fact, an ancient village gathered around a watering well. Even the act of drinking water requires a bright screen, one you press because this is how your logic has conquered your libido: you must figure out the screen before the water flows. If there is a perfume to these women, it is contained in the makeup glow of afterward, in the private worry as they get dressed in the locker room, berry nipples always toward the room’s center, a quick glance to ensure they still exist in the mirror stage, a subject with the choice to anoint herself, bearing the aroma of all the gazes amassed out on the major stage of the expensive gym. At night, again, finally no victim of global capitalism, they undress again and waft about all the gazes they amassed that day ripped from such diverse locales, moss-grove, iron-red soil, fuming earth, all to remind themselves that perfume can also delight the wearer.
Obsidian
I always lost myself in groups, being made of lighter elements formed where heat spills into water, and always I sought the cool turning of becoming a sheath of glass, hard and tightened, in which others mostly saw themselves and not how good I was reflecting them while all the while some small part turned brittle, so much so that when the doctor of my discontent sought a new scalpel, only this one angle would help. These days, I seek groups and whenever that blade swivels, wishing to cut, I stop to remember our sweet beginnings: silt and sun, water and a mountain so hungry to express itself its tongue was fire and the sound it made spilling into sea was like nothing ever heard since—someone beyond me and that first story of connection.
Rumbles
To the woman with the cancer diagnosis, he listened carefully. She had on her bucket list to sleep with someone other, she said, but for some reason he wanted to make her happy and did his best until, to avoid being pitied after she went in for the first of the shots, she blocked him. Making others happy was not the problem: mortal gravity and leverage were, and he brought the baggage about his ex-wife with him everywhere he went. Seeing his cheery, small-boy smile under the porkpie hat, you could tell he had been a youngest son well loved by mother, granny, aunties, older sisters. To carry around this grievance about the ex had to do with his love for the daughter; he was afraid the ex prevented from the next generation’s fountain of love which he deserved without having to work for it. For one thing, he left wife and daughter in Sweden and came here to this tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic for a better life. He shared all this with you while you both sat on the seawall watching tourists disembarking, similarly looking for their own release from home lives, wishing to be brought to the exact edge of sensitivity and thrill-seeking their sensitivity might no longer be able to handle. They could go jet-skiing, canyoning; they could swim with dolphins, sight whales, shock their very bones. The boats rattled up to the pier and those watching absorbed the rattle, all on a spectrum of thrill-seeking, all with some bucket list to be crossed out the same way the woman had wanted it. Under his battered hat, he smiled his lost older-boy smile that had been useful at fending off the greater disturbance they were all trying to fend off, what shook the ground beneath them, the swell of life with all its indignities.
Palimpsest
What is it about certain women who sit with one leg crossed at the table, and serenely attack one task at a time? They cannot leave the oven glass until they have scrubbed it fully. Their libido is shocking, empathic, a fierce hug, their faces glowing from sunscreen. You work at the table with her and are shocked at her beauty; it perfumes the air around you as you, too, try to tick off tasks with your method more akin to a butterfly scenting nectar sun-warmed at the right moment. Your grammatical structures may echo this habit. Out in the world, you have learned, whenever you are about to leave a place, you see that people rush in, as if to proleptically fill the gap you will leave. Yesterday, at the lake where you swam naked with women of different generations, you left early because you were trying not to be a butterfly; you were trying to be prudent, to hug the shore, but it is hard to change old habits. Returning to shore, you swam against this small current. If you called out to the chorus of windsounds, who would come to your aid? You sat at the bank and the wind caressed the surface. Your friend, roughly your age, paused the car soon after pulling out and said: “I want to take this moment. I want us to acknowledge that I will really miss you. You’re my anchor, my bud.” This idea of missing is quite difficult for you—as if it were cauterized out of your psyche back in childhood when you were left alone, but it remains the dimmest imprint. To try to take that in, you looked at the surface of her, the raw, narrow, hungry, present face, the eyes with their warmth welling. Sometimes, she has problems with people who don’t look straight into her eyes, but recently your daughters have been telling you that you have a gaze a bit too penetrating. Their friends say it is as if you look into the back of their skulls. Call this “habit survival.” You are looking for their erasures and hills, the ventricles and sulci, the crenellations of habit and longing; and in this way, you will find a place to attach. Were you a pseudopod in another life? Is there not enough suffering in this one life for people to go seeking it in others? They want these layers; these might give them meaning. The richness of time is feeling all the striations in this one life, in the lake that will become part of the story of your friendship, cradling your head so it could be still for once. To have an injury means to allow silence. To go on a trip means to allow in no silence, all injury. To allow things to change is that you must trust in the endless recording stone that carries all the truths. The woman envies artists. “I’m so logical,” she says, her admiration a sheen across her beautiful face. Her mother had to send her and her siblings away after the father died; she was raised in an Indian orphanage and learned how to be neat. She speaks many languages and is starting to learn Korean; she loves K-pop. In the shed where you write, a hatbox—a present from the bald pioneer woman boss from your first serious job—holds all the tiny notebooks where you wrote observations such as: “In Italy, mothers cook for school on Mother’s Day”; “Nosepicker in a fancy suit with cuffs and manicured nails turns away from wife and slides his finger down her neck”; “The men come in to play cards, shrugging on entry, take ice cream out of the machine, singing opera”; “The underside of a garment shaped like bare olive trees; “She never missed an opportunity to either humiliate or glorify me”; “The only difference between a casket and throne is a few pieces of wood”; “The former POW who says, ‘Seventeen years of retirement here. We’re lucky. Let’s pray for good weather.’” The river of words—it will soothe but never understand the stone that contains them all.