Silence, Part 2
I suppose someday I will lie.
I suppose someday I will meet some man. He will work at a flower shop or the local CPS office or as a clerk for the city. He will take my hand in some club, he will kiss my cheek at my cousin’s wedding, he will fuck me for the first time beneath a full moon. We will both say that means something. We will be wrong.
He will propose in Paris or Hawaii or Cape Cod on our dearly bought vacation. He will get down on one knee. I will say yes.
I will not say no. I will not run back to the boy who is not waiting for me. I will not hang on to that moon or that sky. I won’t.
I will not hold out for passion. Passion came and I never knew anything could feel so much, and then it was over. Passion was a garland of wildflowers but the boy ran from me. I am a beach no human has set foot on. I am a rocky coastline where you cannot land a ship. I am the part of the voyage home where you start to doubt there is a home to get back to. I am the vision of the beautiful mermaid who turned out just to be kelp and stone and hoping.
This man I guess will love me, whoever he is. He will try to love me. I will try to love him, because I want to love someone. I need to. We will watch Ted Talks about how to speak to your partner and we will never fight because what is there to fight about. I will want to watch sci-fi tv shows and he will want to watch that new drama with all the men doing manly things and we will compromise and not own a tv. I will study literature or philosophy or history on my off hours. We will have separate boundaries because we both need our space. We will spend as little time together as possible. We will prefer it that way.
We will never have kids. I wanted kids with that boy and that desire is forever latched to him. You are not supposed to want such a thing from someone you just met but I did. You are not supposed to want someone so much it turns you red as coral but I did. Like swallowing someone’s soul in gulps of water. Like every time someone moves it’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen.
He never wanted me, he said. Models, skinny girls. I was not surprised but I was blinking past the words that wanted to stream out of the orifices of my body. Things like, why was I even born, if not for you.
Or, worse. Things like, I was thin once. I could be thin again. Give me a chance to try.
Someday I am going to meet some man and I am never going to tell him about the bad times. About how I’ve suffered. Because I have learned the hard way what white men can and cannot handle. I have learned how easy it is to move from passionate to crazy and it is so very easy. I have learned to let men dominate the conversation, to let men steer the ship. I have learned to smile and pretend that if he wants to kiss me, it’s fine, and if he does not, it’s fine. I have learned men expect me to communicate vulnerability and sexiness and desire and self-respect and autonomy but also a fragile dependence, all at once. I have learned this is exhausting. I have learned I must do it anyway. To get a man and keep him, this time.
I come from a culture where the man is always right. Where the man must be in control. Where we kiss when the man wants to. Where we fuck when the man wants to. Where it is love when the man says it is. Where what I feel and think and know is just simply less important.
It is not romantic to never talk about the things that matter most. But I have learned to agree with a man, to say yes it is romantic not to talk about how I feel or whether I want to be kissed or how I like to be touched. Of course. Whatever you say.
Sometimes I think there must be a cabin. In the parallel universe they say I go to when I sleep, maybe. That’s as good a place as any.
There must be a cabin. He must be there waiting for me. With no fear and with strength enough to hold me. Not to hold me up when I fall. But, just. Enough to hold me.
He will catch the deer. I don’t care how. A bow, maybe. I will skin the deer.
And we will live that way. Rebuilding our lives. Like animals, and people. Both at the same time.
At night I will touch him. A lot. Because I want to. And he will let me. Because wanting to, both of us wanting to, that will be a good enough reason why.
In my culture desire is the thing you feel for whoever your parents or the rabbi wants you to marry. Women were given away and our lives were forfeit to whoever the men in our lives chose for us. We had to pretend to love them. Forever.
The women of my matrilineal line have been depressed for one hundred years. Can you imagine what was happening to us before that? Locked in a house all day caring for the children of the man who bought us?
Maybe that is why my culture is afraid of love. Why we prefer love stripped of desire, love without the urge to touch, love that says you are as good as anyone else, the particulars don’t matter, you have a womb and lips and tits that’s good enough. The men treat us like chattel still. They like to look and look and examine the merchandise. When we complain, they say, we could never hurt you, you are ours. We love you. And they do love us, I guess. The way they would love any toy their parents bought them. By giving them male bodies and by giving them patriarchy with all of its many entitlements, their parents delivered us into their hands. To do with what they choose.
Mostly, they choose to break us. As a boy will. If he is raised to stifle his emotions.
These boys become men who make love to rationality. They rewrite the story of Helen of Troy. They choose the goddess Athena over the goddess Aphrodite. Sometimes that intellectualism is very sexy. And sometimes not.
Sometimes it is everything female made threatening because woman is the source of all desire. And desire is dangerous. Black. Cavernous. Fearsome.
Angry.
Somewhere there must be a cave. The boy in the cave becomes a man strong enough to hold me. He walks out of the cave into bright sunlight. He builds us a cabin. He leads me by the hand to where our home is. We rarely speak. There are some things that are just much too deep to ever say.
Someday I will meet another man who I will not love. I will be Vera Brittain. I will marry for convenience and because that way they will all think that I have forgotten. Everyone will be more comfortable when it seems I have forgotten.
They will not know. I am the kind of person who forgets nothing.
