31

This is where I am:  A
lesbian bar in Decatur, Georgia with a woman I know and
love.  I left her a lifetime ago and I’ve
never been able to leave her orbit.  The
sound of laughter is around me – women not trusted.  They reflect the total emptiness within me,
these lying youth, these emotional tourists, the careful steppers.  Popular homosexuality, women running from a
world that isolates and rapes them.  I
look at the empty children a decade younger and, sometimes, I wonder if what I
feel as loneliness is, in fact, life.  Made
lonely by these struggling animals.

Music lives like the wind, the witches of power all around,
all these controlling creatures who have lost control of themselves. I am a man
of shapes and sounds, ass and cunt, tits, stomach, shoulders.  Turnabout, intruder.  Hand and voice and breath.    This well of perfume and musk, the world of
a woman’s hips.

My companion is showing her age.  She has a few greys in her untamed hair, she
has a tired smile as she brings me a vodka tonic.  I’ve been drinking all night, but that
doesn’t come to mind until the glass sits, untouched, in front of me.  I’m thinking about the shape of a glass while
my companion leans back in a wicker chair and watches the women, wondering what
she wants.  I know what I want, and I
wonder if that haunts her.

I’ve been writing on a cocktail napkin and she watches out
of the corner of her eye as I throw it to the ground.  She picks it up and flattens it out
carefully, religiously, then hands it back to me with that faded smile of
hers.  We’re testing each other.  That’s how everything between us has always
been defined.

There are songs and stories in my head.  Scenes from unwritten novels playing out
overtop these scenes of life.  She says
she sees that in me and, as our eyes meet and hold, I finally believe her.

Here come this song.  Rasputina cuts the dance music with an
alarming jolt and I take a breath.

At home, five months later, I open my eyes and step away
from where I was.

Surrounded by speakers.
With the lights off, I pretend to try and pinpoint where each speaker
is, as if I didn’t know.  I try to
separate the music into five distinct points.
I spin around and put my head back, the chair tilting, and I look up
into the space above me.  I think of some
things gone by.

Sometimes, a Saturday finds me outside.  It’s springtime again, and I go to a bar
alone and sit there, awkward, feeling like I’m being examined.  I feel like a stalker or, every once in a
while, like I’m being stalked.
Uncomfortable in my skin.  Sometimes,
in the warmer months, I sit in the yard and listen to the night sounds around
me, or I drive to a park and sit on the swings and think of my teenage self
sitting across from me, on the rotten picnic table, sucking down a Big Gulp and
staring right back.  Taking in the thick
air, the DC  spring sticking to my
clothes.

Sometimes, a Saturday finds me with empty bottles, sometimes
it finds me in bed, fully clothed.  I’ve
been known to call a friend or two, but all we ever talk about is the space between
us.

With the girl from Decatur,
whose life now has become that space between us, I remember every Saturday
night when we were going out. A year of Saturdays – some beautiful, some
painful.  Leaning against a sheet metal
wall watching a woman dance, her taunting eyes on mine, my old girl thrown into
a mix of faux lesbians, there’s a short in the back of my mind.  Burning wires stink of West Virginia mountaintop air.  Navigation lights in the distance, a weird lighthouse
effect fills the dorm room and mist obscures the library across the
campus.  Thin hands and long fingers play
on my stomach, her angular face against my back, her words muddled in my
mind.  I am surrounded by her smell,
candles lit now, her body a shadow with a match.  Her eyes come out of the gloom first like
some strange animal.  Too late to dodge
the leap of the wolf, I was always mesmerized by the glare of the
huntress.  She materializes as she steps
closer, doomsday’s queen.  She towers
over me as I hold very still.  Even
though she looks down on me with pity, I still try to hide.

At the gas pumps, after our night out at the lesbian bar,
after our grand reunion, horrible cold biting through my clothes, leaning
against her car.  She runs from the food
mart at a slant, everything seems to move that way when she’s around.  On the curve of the horizon.  She always ran with one hand held against her
stomach and the other one flying out wildly.
She yells against the cold, a strange sort of housecat sound.

Pathetic, clumsy, pale, she strips her clothes off and tries
to flirt.  Instead, she has wasted away,
sickness inside.  She wants to be sexy as
she peels off her pants but she turns to tears and I hold her naked body as she
shudders against mortality.  That’s no
way to spend a Saturday night.

Looking down on her nest of grey hairs, her smell has
changed.  The chain smoking woman, that
lovely musk stained by cigarettes.  That
sick twist that repulses and chokes.  A
smell that brings me back home to a road in Kensington, Maryland.  A child torn apart, left alone to crawl
inside his skin.

So, today, it is exactly five months later.  The evening before I turn 31, another number
that means nothing, really. I sit in the corner, alone, and order another beer,
looking down at cocktail napkins from January.
“This is where I am,” the writing on the napkins begins.  Crumpled blue ink.  Hello birthday boy.

I’m the last and the waitress is putting chairs on top of
the tables.  I look at her over the top
of my glasses as she winks and twists her hip, her chest out.  See you next time cowboy.