my class is doing a critique of my piece on Wednesday

1

I love you:

your apple lips, your gothic outfits clean and smelling like fabric softener, the way you used words like doppelganger and fetch and double and changeling.

      And how hard I can make you laugh.

      You can’t play a single instrument, but you’re still the biggest rock star I’ve ever met.

2

You love me:

       the way I eat entire melons, halved, with a spoon, or how I would offer up different interpretations based on other ways of translating some our favorite Japanese songs.

      How smart you think I am just because we think of things the same way.

      You called me lovely when I wore tight dresses and gold lipstick.

3

We used to go into my bedroom, smoke weed, and read Harry Potter to each other.

4

Being around each other is just so easy.

5

You tell me that when you were a kid you used to pick wild flowers and eat them.

6

You once said that God is everywhere so you felt no real need to be religious.

      I said that God is Cognitive Dissonance and Confirmation Bias.

      I didn’t say, Avery Baby, You’re the only miracle I ever believed in.

7

Only because you said it first.

8

Frankly, out loud, it was corny.

9

You are talking about getting a tattoo.

      You keep talking about it for a long time.

10

You are googling how to give yourself a prison tat. I don’t know why two people as smart as us are surprised by the fact that it is as easy as snapping a pen in half and dipping a safety pin in ink.

Or why I am surprised that the process takes so goddamn long.

11

Needle and ink

12

Needle and ink

13

Needle and ink

14

Needle and ink

15

Needle and ink

16

Needle and ink..

17

Needle and ink..

18

Needle and ink!

19

Needle and ink!!!

20

“Fuck this, man, this shit is tedious like pointillism.”

      “This was your idea, baby love.”

21

Yours is the image of a Torii Gate, the stylistically Japanese gate outside the front of temples and shrines.

      You tell me it represents the crossing over from the mundane into the divine.

     

22

We joke about tattooing the same thing right over my cunt.

23

We work on my tattoo, Jason in the room, all three of us watching Seinfeld.

24

Mine is an inside joke—3 black dots across the back of my neck.

a)

      Jason gets the joke, but I don’t think you do.

      b)

      It’s cause that shirt I wore all the time had 3 dots across the back of the neck, as the tag.

      c)

      It amused me, what can I say?

25

My tattoo is smaller and less complex than yours, so it should take a lot less time.

26

Still, my mind wanders as you work on me.

27

Your hands right there at my throat, face and breath so close to my ear…

28

Hot.

29

I think of you as a white-haired Japanese fairy king and I am a brilliant poison purple flower and you pluck my petals and fill your mouth with my blossom.

30

We were working on a comic, then. But we could never get our conceptualizations onto paper. I saw your vision, you saw mine. Often, we could only explain what we really meant to one another.

31

I want three dots.

32

Normally our projects didn’t carry on this long, and your Torii Gate was already done.

33

Also, it was your last weekend in the state and we had other things to get done before you move across the country.

34

The art we put, permanent, on each others bodies.

      You kissed three points along my neck, but you’d only finish two of them.

35

Undone.

36

“Baby, this means you’re mine,” you smile.

      God, your vampiric smile.

37

Your closed eyelashes are a crows wing against your cheek.

38

It’s your last day here, so we go to the park in between my house and your apartment where we first met.

39

Juxtaposition.

40

We lie underneath the largest rhododendron in the park. I pluck off large red blossoms, break them open, and suck from the

sticky sweet nectar.

41

You kiss me

42

I put your hand up my skirt. I tell you you should use your mouth somewhere else

43

Sticky sweet nectar

            the smell of damp earth around us:

                 

44

Aaaaaaaa

Oh my god baby why do you have to leave?

45

We talk about us

a)

Well, we were always talking about us, but this time it is hollow and sad and unresolved and bittersweet.

46.

I always pictured that if you were to break up, it would be as

Explosive

and passionate as the rest of our relationship.                                                                      

47

You asked what I was thinking about,

I am thinking about singularity and that I didn’t know who I would become if we weren’t evolving together.

48

Symbiosis, you know. Identity doesn’t come forth from a vacuum, we are impacted by those we spend time with.

49

I try to separate out the parts of myself that are

Me

And the parts of myself that are

Us.

50

I just feel more tangled.

51

Your last night here, I make you fuck me slow with lots of kisses

a)

I normally like it rough, so I feel it for days

b)

I normally like it brutal, with bruises and bites as physical proof that we were together

c)

I normally like a scattering of hickeys to blossom deep red, sickly purple, jaundice-yellow across my throat

a.       Battle scars

d)

I normally liked it when you say things that are doubled edged: when you call me a bitch or a slut

e)

This time, you call me love,

f)

You call me beautiful,

g)

You say, Riot baby, you’re a psycho. You’re a star.

h)

You say that I’m yours.

52

We are not finished, you say before you leave.

53

You leave me undone.

54

I loved you,

Your ghost stories and the way we’d sneak off, just to the park or to the water front, in the middle of the night to go make a fire and make smores and drink vodka and make out.

The way we were always wrapped around each other, always touching.

The way our bodies, separate from conscious thought, would be tuned into each other.

55

Now, I don’t go to the sea.

56

Jason and I walk to the grocery store to buy some chips and Swedish Fish. The rise and falling waves, the Doppler effect of passing car after passing car:

That is our ocean.

57

I spend a lot more time with Jason.

58

We do the same things we ever did, but it is not the same.

59

We used to talk about how we were atheists.

But you said that you believe in humanity.

I would say that I believe in myself.

When Jason says he doesn’t believe in God, it’s like he’s saying “I don’t believe in anything.”

60

Jason gets annoyed when I point out how a literal translation of this song totally changes the meaning, but the author was trying to make an allegory about the universe.

“Yeah, I never really liked Japanese music,” Jason says with a shrug.

61

Jason and I go up to my bedroom, smoke weed, and play video games in silence.

62

I can’t stand Jason:

His apathy, his eyebrows, his love of the literal, the way he is when he’s on his meds. The way he is when he’s off his meds.

The way he never laughs at my jokes.

He spends so much money on clothes, but he dresses like he has fucking Aspergers.

63

Jason can’t stand me:

The way I eat pomegranates one seed at a time, the way I trail off my sentences because I’m not used to having to clarify what I mean, the way I sing what actions I’m taking as I take them.

I can tell he thinks I’m an idiot, we rarely see eye-to-eye.

He asks, slut, who’re you trying to impress, when I wear breezy dresses and gold eye shadow.

64

Being around each other is just so easy.