Butterflies & Lemonade

In the summer, Natasha gets lazy. She’s a lazy girl naturally, but only
because she’s been gifted with a wealthy family (which I’m not supposed
to mention) and a high metabolism (which I can mention, because it
means she’s reached an unmentionable age and still maintains a “girlish
body”). On especially comfortable days, when DC approaches 90 degrees
and things look rough, you can find Natasha in my backyard, beneath
trees planted by suburban developers 60 years ago, on one of my good
blankets, loaded to the gills with vodka and muscle relaxants.

Natasha makes me think of dreams. She’s the type of girl who
haunted me on lonely nights, and filled my head whenever past
girlfriends were away. She’s loyal as a dog, vicious as a wildcat and
dangerous as a burlap sack full of oversized hornets that have just
been tossed down 32 stairs to land in your bedroom at 4am in the
morning.

She’s a pretty little thing full of indignation, love, and a feverish
need to break loose of self-sustained boundaries. The eternal struggles
playing out in tiny features and small, hard fists.

I met Natasha some time ago. I think, in many ways, she’s always been
with me. In high school, she was the gust of wind, the “spirit,” that
caught up with me whenever I stopped running. But it was in my adult
years that I met her, the real her, in a physical sense. A constant
companion, the woman whispering in my ear, the scent of perfume on the
nighttime air, the warm creature next to me in a bed.

There’s nothing quite like a woman up close. The curves and the flesh,
the light covering of hair, every ugly flaw a mystery of beauty. Women
represent everything that is powerful and weak in humanity. They are
the confused, boiling creatures of emotion. Dangerous, unpredictable,
childish, insane, rock and rolling tits, hips, lips and pussy.

They say putting a woman in charge of government will change things,
but the last ordeal we need is to live through a government of
emotions. Cat calls and inexplicable judgments, angry first impressions
and over protectiveness, mothering in the Oval Office and wildcat
battles on the Senate floor.

With men in charge, you know where the axe came from. Mindless,
bludgeoning. War, hatred, prejudice, camaraderie, cliques, sects,
clubs, secrets, blustering madness. Women, like cats, move silently and
pounce. Sometimes you don’t notice them and, when you do, it’s because
they want to be noticed and they won’t stop crying at the moon till you
coddle them. Men are the same, but there was never a moment you failed
to notice them. They are crying and mewling from the moment you burst
through the doors.

I never trusted women. With me, it’s been a story of betrayal and pain
from day one. I’ve been two-timed, cheated on, stalked, cut, and stolen
from once too many times to have an open heart. But Natasha doesn’t
mind. She never seemed to care. Her agenda doesn’t involve me in any
intimate way. She lives for herself and my presence, whether it be for
comfort or because our stars just happened to be a few light years
closer than others, I’ll never know. She could leave any day or never
leave. Of this, there was no sense of prediction, so we took what we
had. She, the voice of my writing. Me, mild amusement for long summer
afternoons.

I sat down beside her on my good blanket and looked at her pale, nude
body. She was sunbathing in shadows, though she would still burn
easily. She wasn’t in the yard for the sun, anyway, she was here to
shake off the cloak of greys and blacks from the long and strange
winter of 2004. The troubled January, the dark February, the deceptive
March and early April. She was here to, finally, soak up warmth and
green and blue and brown whilst the locust infestation drifted lazily
around her.

Wherever I was in the world, Natasha was always with me in spirit, and
we always came to visit this back yard. It was a place of invocations.
The beginning and end of each story, the ebb and the flow of every
conversation. This place where I danced and sang as a child with my
mother, even then a woman of shadows and darkness. The place where my
grandfather set off fireworks and where I played with three generations
of Best in Show Newfoundland dogs.

It was a back yard of life and death, realities and dreams. Every
childhood home is like this. The trees and the house stays on, but dogs
and mothers die. Father’s leave. Men and women betray and sin and cry
and love. The yard full of bones.

I press my hand to Natasha’s soft belly and I have to picture her eyes
fluttering open beneath the dark glasses. Perhaps they were open all
the time. She turns to me and smiles, black lipstick, pale skin, coffee
and cigarette teeth. She doesn’t speak, but she still tells me to kiss
her in that seemingly bacterial method of communication that a man and
a woman share between them when they know each other well. I kiss and,
through that portal, the current year comes boiling into my mind.

A TV is on in the house, Wild West Mexican music playing in a
Technicolor cantina. A calico cat rests on my lap. I look up into the
light of a full moon, battling the flickering television, and the
calico chirps at me, resettles herself and turns her head upside down.
I’m restless, I want to move and write, I want to run and fight. But,
instead, I settle deeper into the chair, my attention caught somewhere
between moon and TV, and absently stroke the drooling calico’s chin.
She seems to smile, eyes pressed closed, tail at rest. The Stoli is out
of reach, but I’m still drifting.

Then I move forward to writing. Pounding through a hundred pages, three
hundred, a thousand. A trilogy, a single book, a monster to sell, hopes
running higher than the limit of Pickett’s doomed charge.

A decade of work and success and failure. A decade of love and power. A
decade of troubles and loss. Pain, death, despair, life, strength,
success. The future, in a capsule, in a woman’s breath, in her taste,
on her lips. I pull back and she places a hand on my face, careful to
avoid the nerve damage on my right side. She can’t stand to see me
flinch anymore. She smiles. I have to kiss her again, a hand moving
down her body, cupping her breast, spinning and rising to her nipple,
down and drifting to her belly, the warmth between her thighs, slipping
inside her as the kiss becomes a gasp, the hand on my face now in my
hair, the other hand forcing my own deeper.

And, now, there is no sense of time.