"I have become weaker than the wind", you said, "spinning in each
direction like a ballerina with a broken leg", and in between the
loathing for your mixed metaphors, I thought of a plane, of the wind
pushing and pulling to bear you away from me, like the slow withdrawing
of our thighs beneath mud-colored sheets.
I was menstruating, and resentful of a world that told me the blood between my thighs didn't mean anything, and somehow this was liberation. Men never had to be
liberated - even though, according to Rousseau, they were everywhere in
chains: "It's different when you're enslaved to yourself, because, in addition to being the slave, you're also the master", I said, on our first date,
but you just laughed and poured me more wine. I got so drunk, I nearly
vomited while giving you a blowjob, but you were still able to
come in my mouth, and when I left in the morning, I knew that you'd call
me.
It was on the fourth date that I brought you flowers - I
thought I was so cool for shifting the gender paradigm. You spent an
hour looking for a vase; by the time you found one, the petals had
wilted slightly, and I had peed four times.
I like peeing; I like the feeling of letting go. So why
is it so hard to release you, crystal by crystal, before your yellow
rots in my mouth like a bunch of dandelions? I used to pick them during
summer afternoons, and weave them into my hair, a walking stereotype
waiting for the dramatic music, accompanied by deep-voiced male
narration: The young lady tries not to cry as she reads Susan
Sontag's ode to urination, and imagines airplanes dancing in the wind
like disfigured ballerinas.
