Leila

"Your poems are too sexual", Leila said, her fingers crawling like spiders up my back. I could feel her nails through my gray flannel shirt. She called it my Harry Potter shirt, because the word "flannel" reminded her of Nicholas Flammel. "I am a big believer in straight people's right to wear flannel", she said, and the words hung like a thread between us, or maybe a necklace - a ruby necklace, her favorite color - red, the color of blood. "It is a feminine color", she said, "not because it has been foisted upon us by a patriarchal society, but because it is the color of the liquid that monthly oozes between our thighs." "That oozes between our thighs monthly", I said, and for a second, I feared that in her anger she would rebutton her starched white shirt, depriving me of the sight of her breasts.

The night she left me I was wearing a chemise of black silk. I waited for her to tell me I was beautiful. "You look so...female", she said, "in the way that those models look female - more like statues than real bodies. I didn't expect you to buy into the patriarchy." "It's not buying into the patriarchy if you're dressing up for a woman". "So you'd let me objectify you?". The silence was thicker than her golden hair. "I am leaving you", she said, and her shadow fell across the sheets of my bed. My hand was on her shadow's back, but her hands were already on her handbag, fishing for my keys.

Whenever I pictured the end, I imagined it like those soap operas on TV: "Carmen, te quero, pero no puedo vivir con tigo mi amor", or something of that sort, followed by incredible breakup sex - most of all I imagined the breakup sex. But here there was only silence. Her hand brushed up against mine when she placed my spare set of keys on the bed, and I could feel her eyes trace the shiver that ran up my spine. "Goodbye." she said softly, and, by a pause at the door, "You've been good to me. Thanks for that."

I listened to the closing of my bedroom door, the opening and closing of my apartment door, the fading echoes of her stilletoed footsteps on my marble hallway - who was she to lecture me about the patriarchy, this woman who waxed every week and wore eyeliner? I felt my anger crawl up my sides. I shrouded myself in my sheets, trying to savor the feel of the cotton against my skin, but all I felt was rage, and that is an emotion that is hard to savor, but even harder to let go of. Like when you know that potato chips will make you sick, but somehow you can't stop yourself from finishing the bag, because there is something so satisfying about their strange saltiness melting in between your teeth.

Potato chips were her favorite food. My new girlfriend, Cary, does not understand why I have banned them from my apartment - she thinks its a health issue. I wonder, if Leila's absence is always present in the form of the lack of potato chips in my cabinet, does that make my relationship with Cary a threesome, or a sham? How do you define monogamy? Isn't it all a holdover from marriage - the hetero-normative paradigm? Marx believed that common property applied to women - because women of course, were property. But here I stand, a common capitalist, wishing for - what, exactly? Not this shared utopian ideal - no, like a good capitalist, I wish for two women I could call mine.