A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy.
—RS Benedict, Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny
Yesterday I was a shark culled out of the water to die. Imagine to not know the sun apart from a biblical, shimmering blanket across the sky and then it is the last thing you see: You are at the end, and also you were always wrong.
I remember being about nineteen years old in the waiting room at the Stanford medical facility for eating disorders. I had come straight from a lecture, and I was by myself. I had my earbuds in. I was finding the next song, which always took awhile, but what I heard instead was a couple of older male voices, for whatever reason:
“Oh, hey,” one of them said.
“Hey. I thought that was you.”
“Yeah. So, how’re things?”
The men sat across the aisle from each other adjacently, and turned their heads to speak. You got the sense they couldn’t remember each other’s names, nor how they had met, yet both sat their with their ear-budded, detached daughters, trying to make conversation.
“Things have been good, yeah... She plays soccer right?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s on the Cheetahs, right?”
“Right, yeah...”
“It’s been a good season for them.”
“It has been, it has been.”
Then I noticed the kind of salient, prolonged silence you’d expect a waiting room to occupy. The men nodded at each other, chewing their cheeks. As though they’d simultaneously remembered the plaque above the door, and the department. As though their comradery existed solely upon their individual failures as parents.
“Well,” the first one laughed.
“Well,” the other agreed. “It’s a coincidence, running into you here.”
“Yeah, life’s funny. Glad we could catch up... I hope things are well with everything though.”
“Oh yeah, of course. Good to see you, man.”
But what they were really saying was: We’re here. We’re both here.
It angered me then so I buoyed away immediately, but seven years later it just breaks my heart. One of these men wore a buzzcut. The other wore tortoiseshell glasses, and a button down to hide the square pudge that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone apart from the owner who was trying to prove it wrong.
The receptionist called my name. I held onto that moment as a forty-five second case study, though, as I sat upon the loud paper of the examination table. They were the subjects, those two men. They were the victims I resonated with the most somehow. Their daughters were younger than me, though I couldn’t tell you a distinguishing characteristic about either of them. They should have been better on the soccer team, I thought. They should’ve been more memorable.
Before I knew it, the doctor was knocking on the door and poking her head in, and it was my world again.
My snowglobe of New York City shattered on the floor while I was busy losing my virginity. The light was dim, but I knew exactly where it stood on my desk, so I had a vague sense of where it landed on my floor. The noise was such a startling interruption that the boy and I exchanged a look, and for a moment I could tell we were both considering taking a brief respite from using our bodies as callow, nervous instruments of passion to clean up the damp shards.
As I laid there, a series of moments from my life vividly began to flash before me in still frames, the way slides switch in an old View-Master: I saw the pale ceramic tableau of Manhattan as I sat at that desk with my chin propped up on my fist, procrastinating my summer reading and pretending that those buildings were the whole world. I saw the flurry of sparkles as I rolled the clear glass ball around and around above my head, leaning back in my chair, observing the distorted shapes of my bedroom through it like a looking glass the first time I smoked pot. I saw the tiny currents in the water, and the broken bubbles I could make at the top of the dome if I shook it hard enough. I saw it on my desk as I left that very morning, undisturbed, and I remember thinking I ought to move it away from the edge.
The boy didn’t stop of his own volition above me and I did not tell him to. “Sorry,” he breathed, but the word was labored, and broken up by the rhythm of his body.
And I was already so disoriented by the loud noise and the fact that I hadn’t eaten that day, that the prospect of a man apologizing for something—the prospect that a man could have the emotional tact, or self awareness, or even the instinct to feel guilt at all during sex—bewildered me even further. At the time, I didn’t have the language necessary to parse this feeling, but I know now, unequivocally, that that’s what it was. I opened my mouth to speak, but my voice was suddenly absent.
“Do you want me to stop?” he went on, pulling my legs up to his shoulders.
For reasons that still remain beyond my comprehension, I nearly slipped into genuine, unironic laughter at the invisible question pinned to the air between us: Would it matter if I did?
He continued to fuck me for a long, long time before I finally shook my head. “It’s fine.”
I used to keep an eye on the sun’s position in the sky through that snowglobe. It would refract the light shining through my window into a dotted line along the desk, like my own imaginary little calendar of the solstice. There was a squeaky tin globe hardly larger than a grapefruit that always stood beside it, and something about their symmetry and uselessness together always just made sense to me. As a pair, they had this united, satisfying predictability, and if ever I awoke in a cold sweat in the blue, small morning hours, the moon always drew a glossy outline around them that I could easily recognize as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The way they were placed made them look like planets beside each other, so perhaps that’s why the snowglobe always seemed to have such a celestial quality about it. But it was a trinket—strictly ornamental. It meant nothing to me. In fact, I’m almost certain it came into my possession by regifting. I never cared much for New York City.
The boy left and I showered and washed the sheets and sat on my bed with wet hair and ate dry Apple Jacks and watched a show on my laptop and tried not to think about the way my hips, and the middle of me felt a little bit different every time I would shift. I took Advil. I painted my nails. I reorganized my bookshelf. I procured myself breakfast each day, and went to all my classes. I took my permit test and a pregnancy test on the same day. I whitened my teeth.Â
Eventually, I had sex again in a different room, and later in a car. But for twenty-one days, Lady Liberty’s dismembered arm lay on my bedroom floor in the dry, sparkling grave of my former snowglobe. I do not know why I swept all the broken glass into the corner of my room, or why I let it sit there in a pile like a cadaver I didn’t want to deal with. I didn’t want to look at it, or think about it, but I also had to have it right there. It had to sleep in the same room as me.
Sometimes I still think about the snowglobe when I’m in bed with a man—if a picture frame falls, or the furniture shifts. I don’t remember it on my desk, though; I remember its final resting place on my bedroom floor in the corner with no sunlight. I remember the drawn curtains and the radio silence—the way I still had clothes hooked to me somewhere around an elbow or ankle, as I did not have the luxury of disrobing completely before we began. And while I do not remember the boy, I remember how he looked into my eyes, said sorry while he was doing it, and didn’t stop. He said sorry while he was doing it and didn’t stop. I swear that has never left me.
look at this teapot lamp i found in a random cafe/store i visited??! i couldn’t find this exact lamp on their website but i’m still linking it just in case <3
