A Loose woman

A Loose woman

We’re both waiting on my punchline, and I’ve got nothing to deliver - it wasn’t ever that funny, and the concept was always going to be better than the execution, but there’s no patience between us and I’ve lost my audience already. I say, my entire existence is a one woman show, and get hurt by a lack of laughter that never belonged after - I decide I’ll write it, it’s better than squeaking barstools and sloshed beer. Someone will read it late at night, riding the high of someone else’s bit, and become entranced by what could’ve been a reckoning on this evening. Tonight, I’m not expected as a stage performer, but a silent starlet in CVS coconut oil and stacked jewelry. It’s familiar, not comfortable, just a stepping stone towards something less restricting, and I smell like Malibu Barbie.

Tonight, I’m an obscured writer with shiny knees and elbows, shiny enough to distract from a quick eye, shiny enough to counter the spotlight on a distant stage. It’s enough to delay a more original tag, one I can work out in a one woman writer’s room, without the slack, nonplused audience, and legs ablaze with untouched eczema.

Standing in South Brooklyn, raw peppers from vegetable cream cheese drip to bubbling tar and splatter your bare toes. We’re holding particularly still for the heat, for the sand roughing my armpits, for a parking lot breakfast, and all you’ve got to say is

if we could only conquer time and space.

It’s funny, and I wouldn’t have turned away to laugh had you paid for my bagel, but you were the idiot who took service without shoes, and I’ve always been much bigger than that. I’ve missed testing my patience with you, and I think you know it - we wouldn’t be humoring ourselves sleeping on the beach had we self-restraint or worth around each other.

I’m thinking about your joke as we drive back to the water, and then it’s just not funny anymore. I watch my hands, and wonder why I came to the beach at all. I look older next to you, and I miss being alone. 

A rifed fever blows through my skull, and pounds as a crown as I flip myself from under you - the floor is uneven, and its unoriginal to comment on something so proverbial, but its slope mottled with my reigning headache causes a new nausea to float at the top of my stomach. It’s a cold, or a pathetic flu, but I’m too lenient to pass up your concupiscence -

I’m a performer, what can I say?

I give you my best Newark showgirl, and you pull me back under. Nothing, not a crack. My chest can barely take the pressure of yours, and I’m a famous top, so I push right back. I think I’ve got you embarrassed and naked, one of your least favorite combined states to reside in, but that puts me right into my finest. It didn’t feel like hate sex. I wasn’t doing you any favors, but I hadn’t wanted to in a long time, so this was what it was now - sloppy, loosely spiteful, favorless sex.

I leave you to stir salted water in the kitchen with the lights out. An hour ago, I couldn’t find free counter space as roommates spread scanners and plates of eggs across every surface save the stove-top. I pour oil. Someone’s having sex, downstairs or down the hall - it’s not rhythmic, and I can’t remember if it ever is. I couldn’t make sense of our rhythm, it was a false heartbeat!

I wish I could make band jams with rhythms like this. I remember to turn the burner on. 

We floss our toes with old socks in Alta, asses to the unfinished decline, and I tell them about burying strips of mechanic’s rag in embers to make fire starter. They aren’t entirely on board, I lost them with the Altoid tin step, but it was enough to make me shake your silhouette from my blinks.

I feel far out, incredibly far out, and I remember what it was like to feel a gap of homesickness in my chest as a child, just a state or lake’s distance away, despairing. Absolutely despairing, sickened to a plague so young, I just wanted to be home.

Wyoming, my third or fourth time through, I miss the feeling in a passing moment. To miss something so desperately, my God, I must’ve grown heartless, to heal a pulsing opening with my own tissue and loss of tether, my God I must’ve grown heartless.

There’s no goatheads where I am, but sharded beer bottles - they stick to me here, so naturally, the goatheads. It’s a comfort that grew from loss, and reallocation of connection. I feel one between my toes, caught in the sock, it scrapes the tight space and rolls off the decline.

I don’t want to go home. I don’t miss it at all.

There’s a friendly speed I rip, just over the limit, and suddenly I’ve cleared all the Jersey plates - it’s an offensive drive, efficient doubtlessly, and yet still I white-knuckle each narrow turn. It’s not escapism because I haven’t got a single route memorized, not an idea of interstate capability, and absolutely zero toll coin or cash. It’s flirting with expansionism and settling at romanticism, I am my own biggest tease.

I’ll miss this,

I think.

What, am I terminal now? An hour ago, the sky fell and my window was obstructed entirely by a wall of rain - I pulled off from the furthermost left lane, screaming to match the horns blaring behind me, screaming for my goddamn life, and now I reflect on my youth like a decaying keepsake. I can’t imagine a loss like this one! I’ve lost the kindred speed, and fall back to the right. I don’t feel like driving anymore, so I pull off and try to figure how I can keep away from home without moving any further. It doesn’t come to me, and I decide to sleep in the car tonight. 

I feel looser.

A retired rockstar, confident in skin-sensitive sheets and a guaranteed remembrance. I don’t want to bring myself to a mirror, or watch my hands age and fold against smoother surfaces, but rest with my arms bent the way that feels best.

It kept getting better, for a long while it got better. I didn’t need to propel with my breath, or mind the cycles, I just trusted I could carry myself by now. I wore scarves all the time, over my head and around my neck and high on my thigh below long skirts that no one lifted but you.

I liked not to worry about you, just the top of my head when it rained and whether the sweat below my breasts was seeping through my dresses. The scarf solved these issues, I always remembered the scarf.

In the summer, you picked up a cold from a separate lover and passed it to me on an isolated weeknight, a night I had chosen not to wear a scarf for, and suddenly my immune system was shot and I thought, maybe, now maybe, it was time to start taking a vitamin C pill to shake you. Or Emergen-C, or something. Or something.

I moved since we saw each other, and lost the scarf box for a while, then found it, left it folded and waiting at the laundromat, deleted voice messages and dodged a corner-lurking laundress for a few weeks before bowing my head and picking them up. I never stopped liking them,

it’s just my thing,

it hasn’t not been. You so graciously allowed me my originality, as I experiment with doubling the scarvage, and it’s so immensely frustrating. My chest is wide and I can push and push against the front, but my knee is bad and I cry at broken toes - my bottom gives out before I quit wading.

And, we’ve got friendly speeds rearing too far over the limit, and the amount of beer my stomach can take is expanding, it’s a gut, and there’s drunken speak of green marriages and blue houses or something more colorful, and I’ve never been here before, truly.

I wanted to pay for my own gas, and go, and keep going, I was already speeding,  and suddenly it was all Jersey and I couldn’t even touch the nozzle. Jersey!

Oh, but we were in love, and being naked with someone is wonderful if you haven’t the embarrassment or anger, and being a loose woman becomes artless and naive,

you’re so naive,

it’s unoriginal. The repetition of it is tireless, and I’d forgotten the grip of a cycle, and I fell from my own arms. It bruises me plainly, and my gut bursts my belt, but here I wake in skin-sensitive sheets and scarves with a stomach full of iron, vitamin c, probiotics, rhodiola.

It’s looser this way, better off, not to feel sick or homesick or another lover’s sick.

I feel looser, a looser woman than I could’ve thought to be with a summer cold or oiled breasts or parking lot breakfasts.

And

it’s naive,

I think,

the paramount idea of the year, that I could lie without a care in my rockstar bed this morning, lie alone today and for every evening I feared sleep without what I turn against now - I bend my elbows in all the pointy ways, I take up all of the space because it is mine for now. I am this loose woman, getting bigger now, with busted belt loops and dusty boots - it’s funny, watching myself. I’m addled in a mirror reflection, refamiliarizing myself with the natural wideness of my own pupils, repurposing a retired gaze. It’s very funny, downright hilarious, the absurdity of this new comfort, the nightmare of a comfort.

Oh, my God to be a loose woman in my own bed, to be like this forever, in my own arms without a strain. I’ll be here forever, in my friendly range, naked and loose, the finest state, the best band jam.

Art

Running with Black Panthers and White Doves, Mary Lovelace

mid-1980s/early 1990s

c Mnuchin Gallery, NY

https://news.artnet.com/market/mary-lovelace-oneal-mnuchin-gallery-1719756