listen, i’m not sure what i mean so i’m not certain what i want. it’s all up in the air now. it hovers, watching over me like a bird. a big bird. a bird of prey. i am its prey. talons reach for me and i am alone. the talons are the night. in the night i toss and turn. they’re deep inside of me. i know what i want. i want to sleep. a story in my mind twists, shredding through my skull. i get off the train. i walk up the stairs and through the turnstile. i walk home. everyone at the west village reading was bilingual. i’m just full of pizza.
my therapist says i say i don’t know when i do.
“i think you know,” she says.
she’s right. some cognitive dissonance runs through me like a river.
there’s a storm blowing inside the water, writes duras. a wind raging.
i’m waiting for the train again and thinking about when hillary clinton was once beautiful. the train doesn’t come and then it doesn’t come some more. i actually don’t know where it could be. there it is again. i do know. it’s stuck in a tunnel somewhere but not coming here, to me, where i need to get on it to go to manhattan to meet with a man who has misplaced his desire. we will go to the tarot exhibition uptown. then he’ll bring me to dinner. he sent a big, expensive bouquet earlier this week for the dog dying.
“enter your emotional landscape,” i tell my kundalini client. “move the water from your sacrum, up your spine and out your third eye. make a fountain and watch it fall into the eternity of your spirit.” she gets it.
j- and i go to the pools and steam room at pocketbook late in the afternoon on a friday. neither of us have been there before. we’re giddy when we pull up. i love doing things with her.
we change into our swimsuits and shower together and i laugh when she says something about washing her vagina in front of the older couple who sits within eyeshot.
i come alive again in the steam. i can breathe. j- lays down and i watch her long body spread out on the tiled bench. the room is dark and the steam limits visibility. i reach for her. i wrap my hand around the arch of her foot. i apply pressure with my thumb. i love her feet.
off to rest at foot of the great mother’s bed in the sky, wrote a friend after the dog died.
why didn’t you write when i told you the dog died?
out of the steam room are three pools of different temperatures in a large, sparsely decorated, naturally-lit, beige tiled room.
j- swims laps along the long edge of the biggest pool. i slip in and watch her.
“do a flip,” i whisper from the edge.
she doesn’t.
i float on my back, staring up at the high industrial ceiling.
she comes beside me and holds me in her arms, swaying me back and forth.
“forgive me lord,” i say. “for i have sinned.”
she laughs.
“dunk me,” i whisper. “baptize me in the waters of pocketbook.”
she dunks me.
“make me clean again,” i say, coming out of the water.
i stare up at her and she looks down at me. her eyes are a perfect chestnut and i melt into them.
we leave and go to dinner at the new place on warren street. we sit at the bar and she tells me how i remind her of the swiss.
“her aura walked into the room before her,” she says.
she touches my neck while we wait for our food. i drink her wine.
i want to put my mouth on her skin. i want to crawl inside of her. i want to smell just like her. i watch from above.
i am the bird. i am so in love.
