For the first hour, I sat alone on a stool with my cheese slices, enclosed in a private corner nook of classroom A046, wearing pool sandals and a trench coat. I could overhear the students introducing themselves. For some, it was their first life drawing class; others were charcoal-cuticled vets. As the instructor’s voice expounded on the basics of sketching the naked human figure, I set the fromage aside. I found a shard of mirror on a shelf and jimmied it onto a spare easel. A plastic, legless skeleton gaped at me from the corner as I parted my trench coat and inspected my body, shard by shard.

Today’s focus, the instructor explained, would be on construction, creating the building blocks of a figure, perceiving the body as a collection of shapes—cones, cylinders, and spheres. To draw the figure as an outline, he warned, would produce a Picasso-esque rendering. “Break the body into as many shapes as you can.” A leg, for example, might be constructed as sphere, cylinder, sphere, cone. Hip, thigh, knee, lower leg.

Returning to my seat and my snack, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as a big heap of body parts; legs and arms tangled up with free-floating breasts, a foot lodged between my head and a butt cheek. Any sexuality that burdened my body de-materialized. Less form, more function. Generally, wholeness is a state of being I strive for, but this image of myself as a sexless pile of parts provided an odd relief, a strange feeling that would sustain me for the four hours to come, and bewilder me for much longer.

The murmur of the classroom faded to silence. The instructor stepped around the massive shelf serving as a makeshift wall and peered over his glasses at me. I sat there, surrounded by anatomical skeleton amputees and bins of fabric scraps, eating cheese. “We’re ready for you.”

My sandals slapped against the concrete floor as I trailed him, trench coat wrapped tight, to the center of the classroom. Two large wooden boxes draped in old white fabric served as a stage, flooded in fluorescent light, circled by easels. I waved like an idiot at the twelve pairs of eyes peeking over their giant pads of newsprint. “I overheard some of you mention in your introductions that this is your first time. It’s my first time, too. So we’re on the same page.” To the tune of a few perfunctory titters, I removed my trench coat, slipped off the sandals, and hoisted myself onstage, wearing exactly nothing. Well, except for a tampon, because of course I was on my period.

The instructor said a simple pose would work best for the first ten minutes, until the class got comfortable with construction. Tilting my chin toward the ventilation system, I tried to stand—to pose—like someone who’d done this before. Simple but not boring, like a Matisse cutout, maybe. Or a Schierbeek sculpture. I felt a little…grand. I was thirty-two and nude on a stage and yes, I felt a little grand. Graphite and charcoal whipped over newsprint on the crescent of easels around me.

I hung off the cart as Mom pushed. We trawled through the bulk section of a grocery store in British Columbia, in my small hometown of Westbank. I had Mom all to myself. I was twelve years old and wanted a giant bag of Chinese crackers, the same ones Grandpa mixed with peanuts. A woman kept staring at us across the bulk bins. She waved, motioning toward herself. “Who’s that?” I asked. Mom shrugged and walked over. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Mom returned with a business card, brows high on her head. “That woman wants you to model.”

I knew what a model was. My favorite photo of Mom from her modeling days was tucked into a clear plastic sleeve in her old portfolio, stashed at the bottom of a drawer: a close-up of her face, eyes slicing right through the netting of her pillbox hat into the camera. Dad kept a different picture of her on his desk, framed. In it, she lay on her side, head propped in her palm, naked—save for a surreptitiously draped fur coat. In that photo, I saw an enigma. Mom reminded me of the cover models on the stack of Sports Illustrated magazines in the basement, but less beach, more Vogue. She held some intangible allure I didn’t understand, a secret. I couldn’t grasp the intersections between body and sexuality, between obscured and exposed—and I didn’t know how to connect those undefined concepts back to my mom or my dad. I just knew that one photo was public and one was private.

Mom signed me up for modeling classes. Every week, we drove downtown and back, just the two of us. The other modeling students were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was new; they were not. They reminded me of the Sports Illustrated girls too, but skinnier, taller. Tangible. In class, I learned how to walk with my torso tilted back, one foot in front of the other, as though on a balance beam. I learned to do it in heels. My face had to exude power and apathy, I was taught—impossible concerns for a twelve-year-old, but I mastered it. When a dark-haired girl asked me to teach her how to walk, I couldn’t believe it. She called me a natural. “You’re only twelve? You look so mature for your age.” Pride ran up my spine; I felt grateful for my height—five-foot-eleven, and taller still in heels—and my talent for exhibiting contradictory expressions. I stood tall and glowered when I walked.

Glossy editorial layouts plastered the walls of the agency featuring their most successful models in high-end fashion campaigns. Many of them had been discovered at an annual international modeling convention in Vancouver, where scouts from all over the world searched for fresh faces. For us models in Westbank, this was our chance.  My agent wanted me to go, and Mom agreed.

At the end of classes prior to Thanksgiving, a month out from the convention, my agent knelt before me on the plywood runway with a measuring tape. I stretched my arms out as the yellow tape circled my chest, my waist, my butt. My agent smiled and said I could eat all the turkey I wanted. I caught the look on the dark-haired girl’s face. She looked mad. Jealous, my mom would say. I was excelling.

Faces appeared and disappeared behind easels. My skin burned as students analyzed the twist of my torso, the crook of my elbow. I settled my focus on a dent in the wall. Why in the hell was I here?

When a friend told me she worked as a life model, I’d been immediately impressed by her vulnerability. I was prone to tasking myself with challenges that destabilized my comfort. Nudity itself didn’t necessarily present a challenge; I regularly stripped down at Vancouver’s clothing-optional beach, but being the sole bare body at the center of a group’s focus would be a markedly different experience. To start, I had to submit a job application. I e-signed a contract. I was added to an institutional payroll. Langara College was a forty-minute bike ride from my house. On a Friday night, I could have picked up a serving shift at my restaurant job down the street and made more money. But I chose this, to stand naked on a box in a room full of strangers.

Did I hate serving that much? Was it the alt-artsy side hustle anecdote I was after? Was I an exhibitionist? Desperate to be a muse?

I told a colleague what I was doing. They confirmed it sounded quite literally like their worst nightmare.

The hallway circled the main ballroom like a moat. Inside a fancy hotel in downtown Vancouver, on the final day of the modeling convention, Mom and I readied ourselves to storm the castle: agent callbacks. I wore the uniform mandated by my agency: tall black pumps, black miniskirt, baby blue asymmetrical tank top stamped with the agency logo, and my number, 404, pinned to my torso. It had to be visible at all times—using the washroom, running to the hotel room, stepping outside for fresh air. You never knew when you might bump into a big-time agent. When you might have an opportunity to shine solo, apart from all the other teetering, languid models. When you might be seen.

I scoured the flurry of papers taped to the wall, listings of the models that each agency wanted to meet. An agent’s interest could lead to a secondary contract, a gig overseas, the start of an international career. My number appeared on six lists. Inside the ballroom, Mom diligently took notes of the agents’ comments:

Agent 1

• Great, unique look
• Too young for Milan
• Wants to see her in a couple of years

Agent 2

• Good body
• Has editorial look
• Too young for this market

Agent 3

• Perfect measurements—she’ll need to keep on top of it
• A little young

TOO YOUNG. My body was right. My age was wrong.

On the way to my next callback, I ran into 212, a model from my agency, and blushed. Owen, a whole five years older than me, glowed after landing a million callbacks and meeting with a big-deal New York-based agent (who had already signed a twelve-year-old that year) . The hollows of his cheeks punctuated his broad jaw like reverse parentheses. Muscles punched through his T-shirt. I was in love with him, but—as everyone seemed committed to reminding me—I was just a kid. And yet Owen talked to me like an adult. I swear he flirted. He hugged me and signed a headshot. You were the star of group runway and the dancing was awesome, you will be an international guest model next time I see you! See ya cutie. Flashes of us posing together for a Gucci campaign—love and fame—momentarily blinded me.

Mom and I settled into burgundy chairs at my next callback. The agent told me to get my teeth fixed. They were straight and had a natural gap between the two front incisors. “That’s ridiculous,” Mom huffed, as we walked away. “You’re not getting your teeth fixed. Lauren Hutton has a gap.” I clutched my white pleather-bound portfolio—my business card—to my chest. Yeah, I thought. Lauren Hutton.

“Twelve?” The next agent sighed. “That’s a little young.” Mom scribbled on her notepad as the agent flipped through my portfolio. “The pictures—the pictures are good though.” Her smooth nails pressed together as she pushed a card across the table. “Call me when you’re seventeen.”

“But … I can travel. In the summer.”

The agent’s mouth thinned into a smile. “You’re going to go through puberty and your body’s going to change.” Her laugh burned my ears. “Trust me, it will be very difficult to keep the same figure then.” She shut my portfolio. Her nails left little crescent indents in the fake white leather.

When the instructor announced a ten-minute break, I broke my pose and pulled on my street clothes. I had to pee. In the hallway, a student unwrapped his sandwich. “So, what’s it like to model?” he blurted. “Does it bother you?”

It probably wasn’t a trick question; he seemed earnest. Though poorly phrased, a similar question haunted me: what compelled me to stand naked before a group of strangers?

“I’ve been to life drawing classes before, but, like, to draw,” I offered lamely. My hands tucked into the pockets of my cargo pants.

“Oh right.” Bread bits cascaded down his shirt. “You’re in a room full of artists. The context matters, I suppose.” He dusted the crumbs away. “See you in there.”

All the stalls in the bathroom were empty. I tilted and turned in the mirror, lifting and lowering my clothes to inspect different parts of myself without undressing. The single mirror threw my body back at me; my legs were hairy, my weight and body measurements a mystery. Scars from my breast reduction snaked from below one armpit, across my ribcage to my sternum, and to the other armpit. I pulled down my shirt; it was impossible to really see my body like this. I strode back to the drawing room.

Soon after the Vancouver modeling convention, I gawked at photos of Owen splashed across fashion layouts. I saw him on a mega-ad, one hundred feet tall, frozen in place, on the side of a building downtown. The whole world saw him. His face looked different though, “chiseled.” His muscles sinewy. Owen-shaped, but not quite Owen. I thought he was beautiful before. His body perfect before. But perfect wasn’t quite the right shape.

I’d been honest with the tactless student; I’d enrolled in a handful of life drawing classes over the years, as an artist. As a kid, I spent hours drawing faces and animals. In my twenties, I became fascinated with naked bodies.

In the life drawing classes I attended, sessions were timed, but the models otherwise directed themselves on stage, flowing into new shapes of their choosing. I tried to capture it all with graphite, to somehow translate the energy of their gesture—a wave cresting from finger to shoulder to toe—onto paper, make fat and skin and muscle and bone move, push a current of blood through the tip of my pencil.

What did it feel like to be a form, a movement, rather than a body, with all its weight? I had spent so much time in front of a mirror, I’d forgotten I had depth. What was a body without a mirror to flatten it? How did it stand on stage, not as a singular, fixed shape, but as a figure constructed of many shapes, protean and mutable? How did it become parts that made up a whole, an arrangement that moved and gestured?

Eventually I was fourteen—older, finally—and though my parents couldn’t afford to let me attend the modeling convention in the fall, my agency announced a local model search in City Park, just over the bridge from Westbank. The prize was an all-expenses paid trip to the convention in Vancouver.

Mom was by my side whenever I wasn’t in front of the judges, but she never obscured my number. She held my portfolio and told me I was fantastic. I felt annoyed. It didn’t matter what she thought.  It mattered what they thought. I knew I looked older—I wore a bra now—but it was the wrong kind of older. Boobs could really fuck with your measurements, exactly as that agent had warned. At least I was the tallest. Us models, we snagged glances at each other. They clomped around in their heels, but I’d been walking in those shoes since I was twelve.

I pounded the concrete runway in a skirt. In a swimsuit. My number flapped, my face exuded power and apathy. I met the judges, flipping my face into an easygoing smile. I stood taut and tall in my bikini as an agent whipped out a tape measure and cinched it around my bust-waist-hips. I knew the numbers but held my breath. “Thirty-four, twenty-four and a half, thirty-four. Almost perfect!”

I breathed out.

The models scattered off stage as the judges deliberated. While Mom and I waited, the edges of my vision went dark and I crouched at the base of a tree.

“Are you okay?” Mom’s forehead crinkled and I admitted that I needed to eat. It would be another few years before she knew about my eating disorder. Even then, I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew enough not to talk about it.

Ten minutes later, the other models and I posed homogeneously side by side. My agent stood to announce the results. A charged silence struck the crowd.

I won.

After a long, hungry summer, I attended the modeling convention in Vancouver for my second and last time, the shape of my body half an inch closer to perfect than it had been at the model search. But I was only fourteen. Still too young.

Mid axe swing. The class was now learning to capture movement of a figure—gesture—and I was posed as though chopping firewood.

“Draw what you see,” the instructor said, circling the room. “Not what you think you see.” The students were supposed to find the single line that flowed through the entire form, a line that mapped the course of energy. “Don’t worry about details right now. Just get the shape. The more shapes you can break the body down into, the more movement you will see.”

This made sense. To consider outer space is to be baffled. But to look up at the night sky and focus on each moving part—the moon, the sun, planets, stars, and celestial bodies, solar systems and galaxies—creates a lens through which to observe the cosmos more holistically.

In my peripheral vision, I sensed the artists breaking my body down into shapes, reconstructing the shapes onto newsprint. Building my body back up with charcoal. The timer rang, and I followed through with my swing, met gravity’s force with my own.

In high school, I dropped to 116 pounds. I was so exhausted, I could not hold my head up, let alone hold open the heavy doors of the school entrance. I slept through all my English blocks in high school, my favorite subject. I skipped most other classes, except drama, but sat in the back row because I couldn’t stay awake there, either. Eventually my teachers stopped reprimanding me and just let me sleep. My hands and feet turned purple, then white, then numb. A thousand layers of clothing couldn’t keep me warm. My lips were stained blue from an endless, bone-deep cold. When the principal’s office called because my record showed over a hundred truancies, I told Mom I always missed roll call because I was chronically late. She believed me; I was always late.

My body stopped menstruating, stalled in time on a biological level. An anxious feedback loop played in my head: when will I be warm again, when will I eat again, when will the day end? I no longer had hobbies. But I had stamina. I had integrity. I had the figure of a twelve-year-old.

Naked. The timer sounded. The scrape of conté on newsprint tapered into quiet, and I readied for a new pose. I shook out my wrists, billowed my trench coat over the stage, and sat down as though at the beach, legs out, leaning forward to admire my sandal tan. Long poses now, hold for fifteen minutes.

The stretch made my hamstrings burn. Stillness was not painless. I closed my eyes, focused on my breath. Tried to relax. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

What if the students were disgusted by the scars on my chest? My hairy legs? What if they fixated on my poor circulation, which turned my hands and feet a dappled purple? What if my breast looked like a home-grown zucchini from this angle?

I forced my attention to my breath. In, out. My hands were probably purple.

The year I finally turned seventeen, I didn’t return to the modeling convention in Vancouver to strut the runway, to show that agent I could keep my prepubescent figure, that I had kept it. Instead, I went to the bush. 

A close friend called my parents, unbeknownst to me, and shared her concerns about my increasingly strange eating habits, long bathroom stints, and erratic social conduct. When they confronted me, upset and already devising a plan to fix my problem, I barely protested. In truth, I felt relieved. Secrets are lonely undertakings, and mine had demanded constant attention.

They sent me to a camp for girls with eating disorders, at a lodge nestled in the woods on a lake an hour outside Vancouver. The closest thing to a catwalk was the old dock, where I fell asleep during group yoga every morning. One afternoon, in the communal area of the lodge, we were each paired with another camper. Sunlight angled through the windows, landing on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls. The counselor passed out colored markers as she explained the activity. I stood against the papered wall, facing my partner, who smiled, a purple marker in hand. She traced my body all the way around, from one foot to the top of my head, from my head down to the other foot, tracking all the space in between. When she finished her drawing, I stepped away and turned around. 

The counselor told us the exercise offered a more concrete way to see our bodies, a way to disrupt the thick film of judgment and expectation we were trapped behind. 

I hoped for a stick figure but really expected more of a crime scene situation, a rudimentary outline like the tape around a cadaver on a TV cop drama. But the tracing on the wall looked like neither—it didn’t look like me whatsoever. It was just a line, after all, a two-dimensional contour on the wall. Still, I felt my defenses swing like a metronome. I should be smaller, I thought, wondering if my partner had held the marker at an unfair angle. But what if that rangy outline was really what I looked like? Because my name was attached to it, I felt an urge to take responsibility for that line, to place some kind of value on it. 

I traced my partner, determined to capture her just as she was. We stepped back. And the contour didn’t look like her either. Glancing around the room at all the outlines of bodies on the wall, it became impossible to tell which belonged to whom. They were just shapes. Not people.

Two minutes into the pseudo-beach pose and I could not push away my concerns about the vegetable shape my boob had possibly morphed into, given the way my torso arched, given the pull of gravity. Every time I switched poses, all my body parts took on a slightly different shape, and I felt the urge to step outside my skin and do a 360° scan of myself to ensure everything looked as it should. Aside from presenting a logistical impossibility, I recognized the urge as one with incredible potential to spiral. In such a vortex, thirteen minutes would become a lifetime.

I took a breath. Pricked my ears to the constant erosion of charcoal. If my boob did look like a zucchini, at least the artists were building the zucchini out of spheres and cones, focusing on accuracy. My body was a collection of shapes. It wasn’t worth losing myself over.

At the timer, the students spun their easels to face inward. A dozen interpretations of myself surrounded me. As each artist described their technique, I faced my body, sketch by sketch.

The first easel conveyed a hunched figure, arms clutching the edge of the chair between her legs. The lines were choppy, the form rendered small. In another, exaggerated lines swelled into a wide, muscled arm and the breasts swooped away from the rib cage like birds in flight. One picture portrayed the figure on a stool. The edges of the conté had been dragged to create shadows that revealed her shape through the relief of light.

Seeing my body this way, deconstructed into shapes, arranged on paper into stacks of spheres and cylinders, calmed me. Strange relief. The way others perceived my body, I could see, had very little to do with me, and nothing to do with the anxieties that spiraled in my head. Each drawing revealed my body’s subjectivity, unveiled an alternative way to see. On the page, I wasn’t in good or bad shape, appealing or unappealing.

While the students packed up, the instructor offered a final pointer for their portfolio pieces. “As you draw, notice the contrast of the body and the background. Think about how the contrast of the negative space informs the shape.”

I recalled the conversation with the student in the hallway. The context mattered. I wasn’t twelve but thirty-two. This wasn’t a competition, but a drawing class. Here, I was not expected to scrape myself down to a razor-thin margin of acceptable measurements, draped in sample sizes. My body wasn’t up for debate; my body was the shape in question—positive space informed by the negative. Here, I had autonomy over my body’s expression; the interpretation of it was beside the point.

I dressed, packed my bag, and waved goodbye to the class. “It was nice to see you,” a student called out.

It was nice to be seen.

The post A Perfect Body Wasn’t the Right Shape For Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

Well, well, well. Look at you, @teen-w00lf, back again. You’ve taken this quiz sixteen times. How many times can quiz creator @leavebritneyalone696969 tell you what you are? What are you so afraid of? 

It’s up to you if you want to continue. Remember: These quizzes are just for entertainment. 

Q: Do you ever buy clothes from the men’s section?

I want my body to be something it can’t be. I want it to be slim, rail-thin. I want the spindly body in so much lesbian media. It isn’t. I force myself into men’s clothing that fits me all wrong, that reminds me, you are not meant for this. I can put together femme outfits, in skirts and tank tops, in clothes that show my cleavage, the curve of my ass. This is what I am supposed to look like, a girl-shape. My body feels like it is something outside of me. 

I go to Babeland to buy a strap-on. Next to the dildos is a section of packers, limp and harmless, and I have an immediate urge to buy one, wear tight jeans, make myself into someone between genders, impossible to discern, with all my girl-body and an idea of a penis packed tight in men’s jeans.  

Your body, teen-w00lf, is the way you move through time, through sex, through queerness. What do you think it means that you feel so alienated from it? What body do you expect to have? Why do you blame this body? 

Q: Have you ever had really short hair?

My mom takes me to her hairstylist when I am eleven. This is a big deal, she tells me. She’s a great hairstylist. Up to this point, my mom cut my hair, scissors in the kitchen, straight across, straight bangs. She realizes that I am beginning to care about the way I look. I am an early bloomer, slouching in math class to hide the breasts that grew too soon, yanking at the hems of my skirts to hide a body I didn’t ask for, didn’t particularly want. I tower over everyone else in my class. I come from a tall family. My dad is so happy that I am a Tall Girl, for now, for now, for now, and he thinks I will still have another growth spurt. Instead, I get my period when I am still in elementary school, and no one tells me to expect it. This is the body I will be living in, my teens, my twenties, my thirties, my forties, until my body moves to menopause. I tell the hairstylist I want a bob, short, to my chin. I have what I don’t know yet is cystic acne, painful and rageful, that scars and blemishes my face. I don’t like how much of my face is visible when the hairstylist shows me the final cut. Even as I start hormonal birth control at twenty-two to assuage my cystic acne, even as I get older and my body and face become an adult’s, I am afraid to cut my hair again. I wear it like a mane. I wear it like a shield. For so much of my life, until I start Lexapro and Lamictal, I want to disappear. 

I am twenty-six. I cut my own hair, kneeling in my bathroom in front of the full-length mirror. 

This feels right, doesn’t it? Your body is not a fixed object. It is as mutable as you are. 

Is sexuality mutable or fixed? How can my body show this in-between-ness? I want to be something fixed. I want to hold on to something, whatever that might be. Can my queerness be this, rise up in me as fierce as a religion? 

Gender is part of this question. My body is feminine, soft, curved. 

Sometimes I wish I were a man. No—not quite—something outside of it all. Neither man nor woman, something in-between and bigger and more nebulous and mine. 

This question will take time to unspool, to learn that gender is a question that asks itself again and again. I walk through the world and I am “yes, girl”-ed and “hot girl”-ed and “yes ma’am”-ed and none of these are right and none of these are wrong and none of them are mine. My gender can be more than how I move through the world; a way of relating to the self. Nonbinary-ness allows for that flexibility, that movement. It takes time to get here. 

What are you leaving behind? Who are you leaving behind? 

Q: What have your friendships with other girls looked like?

My first best friend is a hockey player who has a GameCube in her basement. My parents are about to split up and I spend most weekends here, playing Mario Kart and Donkey Kong two-player games. She and I both have younger siblings and talk, with disdain, about being oldest sisters. Her mother picks both of us up from school on Wednesdays, and we share bags of grapes, pluck the fruit into our sweaty palms, burst them between our teeth. The two of us go ice skating for her eighth birthday. I slip, fall, and someone else skates over the side of my pinkie finger. I will always carry this scar. On field trips, the two of us curl together in the summer-sticky fake-leather school bus seats, reading from the same book. I read faster than she does, and when she reaches the end of a page, she says, turn, turn, turn. We go to different middle schools. She is an athlete, makes friends easily, and I am writing bad poems on the inside of my history notebooks, talk only over emails we send each other on family computers. I send her long messages about the boy I’ve decided to have a crush on. She responds, have all your brains fallen out? 

In my first middle school, I develop a tight, desperate friendship with four girls in my English class. We sit together at lunch and talk about what we’re not eating, how many calories are in bananas and apples. I have already learned this language of thinness, but here, I can speak it fluently, hear it repeated back to me. They teach me how to do makeup in the bathroom before class. I blink and smudge black eyeliner all over my face. They give me clothes that no longer fit them and barely fit me, squeezed over new breasts, and I feel like I am showing a body that hasn’t become mine yet. I go over to their houses for sleepovers and spread out my dad’s camping sleeping bag, feeling distinctly out of place. We talk about all the food we’re not eating, do each others’ makeup, play dress up, talk about the boys we like. I’ve decided on a boy to have a crush on and talk about him obsessively. My mother gets remarried; we move from the mountains to the suburbs. My friends grow older, find boyfriends. I am invited to their birthday parties, then I’m not. 

I have a hard time finding footing in high school. My best friend is a Christian girl whose Facebook profile reads proud Jesus Freak <3 and hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner-s me when I come out. Another friend who plays the piccolo in marching band with me says she also thinks girls are pretty sometimes, shrugs, when I come out. One friend is out, queer and nonbinary, and we understand each other without question, playing ping-pong in their basement, volleying the ball back and forth, not talking about all the pain we’re carrying. I have other friends, but they are moments, they are just conversations between lockers, talking during science class, exchanging notes in world history, talking about our AP tests. I make friends easily, but have a hard time letting people in: door open, but kept at an arm’s length. These are years of sloppily undressing and redressing in bathrooms, in bedrooms at 2pm, in the backseats of cars, in church rec rooms, next to riverbeds. I don’t realize you’re supposed to like the people you sleep with until much later, so as a teenager, I offer up my body to anyone who says they think I’m pretty. 

Q: What TV shows or movies have you watched obsessively? 

16 years old, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in bed. I fall asleep with the lights on, laptop humming, sweaty from what I haven’t realized yet is desire, what I excuse as only the Virginia heat panting through screened windows. 

Rewatches of But I’m a Cheerleader, in dorm rooms and curled up on twin-sized beds, no shoes, in pajamas our mothers sent in care packages from suburban houses in other corners of Virginia, in Alabama, in Louisiana; trying on the stereotypes of a lesbian life because it’s the only blueprint we have. Smoking Marlboro reds, wearing used Docs, torn flannels. Each of us comes home with tattoos, simple line drawings, ears and noses pierced up and down cartilage. We come back together at the end of weeks of homework. Only one of us has a TV, and all of us, queer eighteen-year-olds, Tinker dorm, first floor, A Hall, congregate, lay our heads on each other. 

I spend afternoons at home alone, my siblings at after school care, my dad at work, my mom at work. I guess the PIN he uses to lock channels (it’s my birth year, the year he became a father), and watch Tila Tequila’s Shot At Love, which is where I learn the word “bisexual,” and, a soda I stole from my dad’s Costco stash in the basement in hand – this is before he stops drinking soda, before he starts running eight miles a day, before he sticks to a diet of chicken caesar salads and yogurt – I realize, holy shit, I’m not the only one who ever feels like this. 

This is when you first came to this quiz, isn’t it? The family computer in the living room, you, the only one home, before you learn what Incognito Mode is? Well, we can tell you that you like girls. That much seems obvious. But, here’s the catch: the difference between lesbian and bisexual? That’s all you to figure out, teen-w00lf. Come on. You’ve always been like this. 

Why does this still feel so wrong? Forbidden? Like I’m stepping into someone else’s clothes? 

Q: Do you feel confused about your sexual orientation?

Am I a lesbian? Am I bisexual? Am I dealing with comphet? Why do I care so much about a box to fit myself in? Doesn’t that completely miss the point of sexual fluidity? What if I don’t want to be fluid? What if I want to be just one thing? How do I have the language for something as hard to define as sexuality? How can this already difficult to define thing also encapsulate gender, which is fluid, too? Why am I so uncomfortable with fluidity? Am I desperate for male attention? Do I want to be looked at and noticed so badly because of some trauma? Do I have daddy issues even though I have a loving, attentive father? Are step-daddy issues the same thing? Have I ever actually enjoyed straight sex? Have I ever even been present in straight sex? Do I remember having sex from the first person or third person? Does it mean anything that I remember having straight sex only in the third person? What does it mean that I’ve gotten through sex many, many times by imagining their body as someone else’s? What am I giving up by calling myself a lesbian? What am I afraid to lose? A life I don’t want anyway?

What would I gain? 

Q: Have you ever kissed a woman? Have you liked it? Is this a gain, the pleasure of a body? Has it been a pleasure? 

Kisses in dive bars, kisses on dares, kisses high in the back of nightclubs, kisses while dancing in lesbian bars, kisses immediately pulled back and said, wait, I’m straight, don’t tell my boyfriend, kisses good, kisses bad, kisses sloppy, kisses longing. First kiss with a girl: I am twelve, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I am about to move schools. My braces are off, teeth newly slick, and one of my friends wants to practice kissing and practice queerness all at once. We sit together in her attic, fans humming, watching a VHS of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she tells me that I am the boy, to kiss her. Pecks on the lips, quick, a toe dipped into queerness. I am sweaty palms and greasy bangs and bras that squeeze and full of desire that aches on my tongue, somewhere in my stomach. Kisses in high school, girls who think they might be queer and know I’m a safe bet, that I can be an on-ramp, easy, eager to please. Kisses behind the gym, at the back of the bus after marching band competitions, in practice rooms, in bathrooms, in the unused showers of the locker rooms. Kisses quick, light pecks; kisses long, slippery; kisses that yearn; kisses that beg. In college, I call myself a kiss-slut, work the kissing booth at the drag king show, fifty cents for a kiss on the cheek, a dollar for a kiss on the lips, and I wear bright red lipstick that stains. At the end of the night, a sweaty room full of queer women who carry my kiss-print. At parties, I throw up my hands, drunk, and shout that I want someone to kiss me. Someone always does, femmes in pink and feathers, butches with undercuts and jean jackets. My straight friends are embarrassed by this at brunch the next morning, say I’m developing a reputation, but if my reputation is kissing happily, freely, I want it. I go to the lesbian bar down the street from my apartment, single for the first time, and kiss everyone I dance with. I’m drunk on strawberry dykeiris and loop my fingers in the pockets of a butch I ask to fuck me in the bathroom. The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing. I want so much more, kisses constant, kisses nonstop. I love when a kiss blossoms into a want. 

You have a reputation, then, for kissing women, don’t you? Okay, fine. Proof of your queerness. What’s the point of trying to prove this? 

I want someone to tell me that I am making the right choice. I want someone to tell me I am labeling myself correctly, that if I do, no one will be able to hurt me again. Does excluding cis men protect me, keep me safe? 

What if you’re still just bisexual at the end of this? What if you get hurt in a lesbian relationship, anyway? What are the stakes here? 

I left a man I loved to pursue a truer life, a lesbian life. Was this the wrong choice? Here I am again, looking for proof. Tell me I was right to do this. Tell me I was right. Tell me. Tell me. 

Q: Do you have fantasies or dreams of having sex with a cis man?

I have been in relationships with a few men, but only fantasized about one. 

It would have been kinder, teen-w00lf, to say no, when men asked you back to their apartments, asked you out on dates to share pizzas and bottles of wine. Why do you struggle so much with saying no? 

Do I want to call myself a lesbian because it is a no without having to say “no,” in all its intents and implications? 

I am twenty and living in Paris. I haven’t had much experience being attracted to men, so because I am, for the first time, I don’t know how to contain myself. He invites me to a threesome. He invites me to do a line off his dick and blow him. I am too scared to say yes and do neither. He comes from money and buys me all the drugs I want, and oh, I want. His French is terrible. We go on a date, kind of, where we both do coke in the bathroom and smoke cigarettes on the patio. He buys an expensive bottle of Bordeaux that we share. We are both so addled with substances, and when we go to the symphony together, I am still trying to be a classical musician, I coke-fast talk about my favorite composers and he tells me about his father, the pressure of growing up rich, while  I think to myself that I grew up in the mountains in a house with bats in the attic and a one-bedroom apartment and a house with my stepfather where I was never never alone and whatever part of me that’s not spiraling into substances thinks something like, jesus, we have lived very different lives, but when we both get into the metro it’s crowded and our bodies are pressed together and god I can smell his cologne his soap and he lives in an apartment in Stalingrad and I live in an apartment way out in Porte de Champerret and oh I want to go home with him and he’s got an eighth of weed to share he says but I say no because I’m coming down and feel fucking awful and go home past midnight and walk up the empty rue Guillaume Tell unlock my door kick off my heels and masturbate unsuccessfully lying down in the shower. I never have sex with him. I follow him on Instagram. He becomes a model, marries another model. When I see his posts, I think, well, lesson learned, take the opportunity to be a slut when it presents itself. 

Proof, then, in heterosexuality. I can’t be a lesbian if I feel like this for a man, just desire, nothing else clouding judgment. 

Right?

Do you think that’s lesbian behavior? 

Q: When have you lied during straight sex? What scares you about lesbian sex? 

I imagine a woman sitting on my face, pressing my tongue into her. I imagine running my hands over breasts, taking a nipple in my mouth, another between my fingers, rolled like a stack of quarters. In all sorts of settings: my sunny studio, a bedroom in a shared house dark from blackout curtains, in the lesbian bar bathroom, in tents in national parks. Want, heavy. In my dreams, I have a penis. 

Can I tell you a secret? Can I trust you? It scares me, the idea of being bad at sex. It’s easy to be a receptacle for straight men; what am I supposed to do, when someone wants all of me? 

Think: what are your kinks telling you? 

I want to be fucked by a group of women, the center of pleasure. Easy: I want attention. This is all I’ve ever wanted. I was a child smiling for the camera in every home video. I talk to strangers, I make friends everywhere I go. I want to be paid attention to. I want to feel real. 

Here’s what scares me: what if these fantasies are only good as fantasies? What if my sexuality is only good in the abstract, and if I admit it, if I know it, if it becomes concrete and real, what if I am wrong? 

You want everyone to like you, so much, you want everyone to like you. This isn’t a lesbian thing. This is a you thing. 

I want to perform my sexuality in front of a group of people, the exhibition, the voyeured. I want to take my clothes off. I want to go to the sex club on Femme Dominion night, stand on stage in tall, heeled boots, sweating off thick winged eyeliner. Tell me that my body is pleasure, even to look at it is something inviting, that it has worth. I want someone to fuck me in front of an audience, or do it myself. Pay attention to me, please. Tell me I’m beautiful and wantable. Tell me I am worth attention. Tell me I am worth being heard. 

No, teen-w00lf. It’s more than being liked. You just, simply, want what every person wants, to be loved, to be seen. 

Q: Imagine a hot femme is flirting with you. What is your reaction? 

I go to the lesbian bar after the DJ starts, dance close to the front, drink strawberry dykeiris, flirt with absolutely everyone. When people dance with me, stand close, make eye contact, tell me their names, I flirt back, smile soft, curve my body toward theirs. I am electric and hungry. 

I know you, teen-w00lf. I know you’re scared of wanting this. How much easier would it be to negate this, erase this? How much easier would it be to push away femme flirtation, to slip into heterosexuality? You could do it. You know you could. It would be so easy. Wanting never goes away, but you are an expert at restriction. 

The artist I’m dating leaves me compliments, buys us lunch, comes with me to art installations and poetry readings, meets me when we both have connections coming back to Seattle through O’Hare, share green smoothies while sitting on the airport tile floor. She stretches out with me on my couch, my cat curled between us, plays Stardew Valley with me. She tells me about queer Appalachian ceramics and I tell her about my opinions on Red Dead Redemption II. She is as beautiful and longed-for as springtime. I can’t tell her this, it’s too honest. The words get all caught up in my throat before I can spit them out. I am only good at flirting and fucking. 

She will leave you, you know this. What will you do when femmes disappoint you, too? What will you do when you can’t blame your loneliness on anything other than your own flaws and faults? 

Q: Have you ever fallen in love? With whom? 

a boy, a saxophonist | a girl, an ice skater | a girl, a fellow tumblr blogger | a woman, the communist next door |a nonbinary person, the poet with a david bowie tattoo across the hall | a woman, the environmental science major in philosophy of art | a woman, the poet I drive home from workshop | the poet, again, when we are in the same city | my longest lover, a man, with rough, tender hands 

Did you really love all these people? Or was the only person you really loved the lover you left? Isn’t it proof that you’re not a lesbian at all, that you loved this man so much, that you still worry you made the wrong choice in leaving? 

Q: Have you had lesbian sex?

bedrooms // bathrooms // under blankets in basements // dorm hall showers // dorm hall tubs // library bathrooms // bedrooms with a lizard in a cage looking on // bedrooms where one of us bleeds on the comforter // strap-ons from the sex toy store down the street // $120 vibrators // pierced nipples // what do you like? let me tell you exactly what I like // I’ll do you, then we can have a water break, and you can do me (repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat) // do you like this? is this good for you? // sex where I come six times in a night, I tell my friends, and they say that can’t be healthy (they are straight-girl jealous, I say to my lover) // can I take this off? can we cuddle for a little bit? I have to pee first. // 

Q: Have you had straight sex?

in bedrooms, unwashed twin sized sheets // backseats of cars // mall family bathrooms // dorm rooms // nightclubs // sex where we simultaneously orgasm // sex where I don’t finish at all // sex where I fake an orgasm just to get him away from me // sweat // come on my toes // come on my tits // come on my ass // please don’t come on my face (comes on my face anyway, I have to wash it out of my hair and eyelashes) // keep your glasses on, keep your skirt on, keep your dress on, keep your heels on //

My het friends talk about their body counts. One goes down the list of names she keeps in her notes app; another friend asks, how many of them did you have real sex with? 

I interject, hey, wait a second, what do you mean by “real sex?”  

You know. P-in-V. 

That’s like, one kind of sex. There are lots of kinds of sex. 

Come on. You know what we mean.   

They’re telling you exactly how they see you, teen-w00lf. This is exactly how they’ve seen you since you dated your first queer college partner, asking how two people with vaginas even have sex, and you were walking back to your dorm room, just barely eighteen, and thinking – if that’s the only sex you can think of, shit, you sure are missing out. 

I have the capacity to love men, love women, people who are both and neither. But, as I undressed for a shower, age 25, sharing an apartment with a man I loved, a realization as clear and bright as lightning: I really thought I’d be living my life with a woman. 

I can imagine full, bright, happy lives without loving men. I cannot imagine a life where I do not love women. 

Result: You are a lesbian. 

The score indicates a high probability that you are homosexual. If needed, you could consult with a relevant sex specialist for further clarification. But you’re not going to do that, are you? No one can clarify this for you but you. How ‘bout that, teen-w00lf, Probably a homosexual. 

You’ll be back in a year and a half or so. It’s okay, you know, to just be. To just be a lesbian. To just be queer. This is the life you’re building for yourself, isn’t it? You know leavebritneyalone696969 isn’t the arbiter of queerness. It’s just you. 

You left your lover because it was the right thing to do. Being a lesbian can be the reason, if that’s easier. It’s more complicated than that, of course it is, of course all of it is, but this is a life you get to build on purpose. Lovers come and go. It comes down to you, all you, just you. 

Just me. Here in front of my computer, I am a lesbian, I am a lesbian. A life building community in book clubs, at the lesbian bar, through lovers and friends. A lesbian life at supper clubs, sharing writing. A lesbian life gardening. A lesbian life with fulfilling, intimate sex. Imagining a life. There is freedom in this imaging. Queer love, too, the love of friends, the love of partners, moves in prisms.

The post I Left A Man I Love To Pursue A Truer Life appeared first on Electric Literature.

Why are memoirs still being published, the man asked. It was beyond him. It fed a nonsense cycle. Why do people keep reading them? Worse of all: Why are they being written at all? He leaned back, smug, as if he had just landed a well-placed punch against Big Memoir. The woman nodded politely, burrowing into her yogurt with a silver spoon. People are publishing them too young, continued the man. They are publishing too many. He paused, throat puffed with conviction: There’s no reason for that, unless you’re an admiral or something. He stabbed a strawberry. Eyes on the city skyline, he shook his head.

At that moment, the open tab on my phone was the Rachel Cusk profile of Nobel-prize winning memoirist Annie Ernaux. “Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience,” writes Cusk. “What Annie Ernaux understood was that as a female child of the regional laboring classes, her self was her only authentic possession in this world, and thus the sole basis for the legitimacy of her art.” I was thinking about how the life we live determines our perceived authority around what we can write about, or rather, what we are allowed to be experts on, which is to say published experts on. 

When I heard his line about the admiral, I stopped looking at my phone. I became very fixated on carving the melon from the rind. I needed a knife in my palm. I needed to separate that which was sweet from that which would lodge in my throat. 

I am not going to tell you who this author was. Not out of any sense of protection, but because I realize I was not meeting him as an individual. I was meeting him as the vessel of a voice that had, until that moment, been only in my head. His was the voice that tripped me when I sat down to type, that hissed at me whenever someone (usually a man) asked “So you’re a journalist?” and I said “Well, not exactly,” then went on to explain, his face pinched into a pitying smile, that my nonfiction reliably included myself, too. When I heard this man at the festival, I became convinced that every ghost who haunted my writing desk would, one day, appear in human form. That they might be friendly in the elevator. That when I dropped my fork, they’d hand me another. 

I stayed silent that morning on the roof. I did not, if you can believe it, ask the man about his favorite memoirs by admirals. And yet I have spent the months since talking to him. Thinking about what I might have said: about how witnessing a memoirist’s vulnerability on the page makes space for interrogating our own, or about the political imperative of a writing that swivels between self and world, not as a means of dwelling on the self, but as a mode of almost diluting it, contextualizing it, tracing its wires back to their environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural roots. I would guess this book festival man saw himself as an objective observer of our world. 

The first-person writing that I love refutes—critically—this myth of neutral narrator.

A few months later, I was traveling for the book in a different corner of the United States when, on a morning jog, I came across a historic waterfront sign about “naval stories.” I immediately thought of admirals. And then I thought of my belly.

To think of the belly-button is to think of navel-gazing, which is to think of the charges brought against those of us who write about ourselves, a kind of writing allegedly so myopically focused on the self that it does not see the world beyond it. Ted Kooser defines a poet as someone who stands before a window, controlling the strength of the sun outside, but the metaphor extends to creative nonfiction as well: Your silhouette can fade when you make the world outside brighter, just as your reflection can sharpen when that world darkens. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself in front of this window, fiddling with the lights. Who, or what, do I want the reader to see most clearly? 

It is true that a first-person author turns their own narrative presence up or down, but I have come to resent the idea that I must choose between seeing my navel or seeing the world. When I say I am omnivorous, I mean I am hungry to read and write about everything. I do not want to pick between writing about another subject—as my training in academia and journalism taught me—and writing about myself. I look at the world to understand my life even as I mine my experiences to learn about the larger world. 

Writing is the act of making one’s thoughts visible to other people. My pencil scrawlings are, very literally, the bridge between my interior and exterior world. Writing is an art form that lends itself, then, to complicating—to detonating—the binaries between self and other; inner thought and outer action.

Let us think literally about the alleged insult of “navel-gazing.” Imagine writing about your belly-button, a puckered lint-specked innie that nobody else, ostensibly, should care about. Then consider how looking at one’s belly button is not only to consider the bridge to one’s mother, but the body’s first interaction with civic infrastructure. 

I look at my navel and see the brown brick hospital whose windows overlooked the soccer fields where I later got kicked in the shin. I see my mother in the operating room, gritting her teeth, while Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on trial for sexual harassment on the corner TV. I see the silhouette of her doctor, dulled to the choreography of conjuring life, discussing an upcoming fishing trip from behind a sheet as he cuts my mother’s belly open and pulls me out. I look at my navel and I see the hanging question mark of whether I, one day, will try to carry a child into this world, too. 

Can you see that each navel has a different story? That to tell a navel story is to tell a story of labor, not just of your own mother’s, but of a system around you? Can you see how this story might be as important as a story about the life of a naval admiral?

To imagine that writing about oneself is not also writing about these larger systemic inheritances is utterly wrong. The writer’s job is to make visible the structures which might otherwise be unseen. We live in a world of interconnection, but we exist in a society that often tries to silo us into our factions, our nations, our species, our careers. To make us forget, for example, that the money our government spends on war is money they don’t spend on education. It is the writers’ imperative to illuminate the linkages between us, and to the histories we all carry. Not as a mode of teaching the reader facts, but as a way of helping them see their own body in union with the world. 

I write to make interconnection visible. There is a selfishness to my method. It keeps the world oiled with wonder. When I think about grief, now, I think about how scattered human ashes are changing the soil chemistry atop some mountains, and then about how the griefs that I carry have changed my chemistry too. Or take the seedlings of northern oak trees, so quick to grow back, ecologists now think, because they evolved when elephants trampled them. We are not so far from extinct prehistoric creatures as we would think. To imagine these elephants when I now walk through the woods is to restore a glaze of awe to an act that can, on my worst days, feel like dragging a skeleton through a burning planet. 

As a young journalist, I was taught that experts held authority. I would approach stories with a to-do list of ‘expert archetypes’ in my mind. When I was working on my first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, I would slot interviews in with the environmental conservationist, the rancher, the biologist. What I found, of course, is that ranchers are not just experts on their cows being predated on, they are experts on the habitat they steward, and where wolves like to walk. Just as I could talk to ranchers about cows, I could talk to them about the changing grasslands, or their experiences walking alone in the forest and being afraid. We each wear more hats of knowledge than are immediately visible. Considering my own first-person authority has trained me to think about other people’s authority in more capacious, generous ways too.  

I had a similar revelation when talking to my agent about what sources I could look to as I wrote about how fear shaped a prey animal’s body. You too are an animal, she told me one day over the phone. You have the authority to write about what happened in your own body, you don’t just have to quote biologists. At that point, I was hesitating to put my own experiences with fear—with symbolic wolves—into the text. I felt my own experiences with fear were unexceptional. I did not want to subject the reader to my navel. 

That was when I remembered a scene I had written years earlier, about something that happened on a college dance floor. This might not be necessary to include, a professor had written in the margins. It’s a fairly standard assault. At the time, I blushed. How embarrassing. I had presented something mundane as worthy of space. Only later did the comment lodge inside me, catalyzing the simple truth that writing about a “standard assault” is to write about a world that decides what sorts of assaults are standard. 

To accept the phrase “fairly standard assault” is to normalize both violation and violence. In college, in Sociology 101, I was taught that the job of the sociologist is to “make the familiar strange.” In many ways this is my goal as a writer too. I include mentions of my own life not because I think it is superlative, but because it is familiar. I want to challenge that which I—and which the reader—think they know. 

Today, when I see a new memoir hit the bestseller chart, I think of the man at the book festival. I imagine him rolling his eyes, shaking his head. And then, because he is a passing character and not the narrator in my head, I tell him to hush. I look at the world—I look away.

The post I Don’t Have To Choose Between Writing About Myself And Writing About The World appeared first on Electric Literature.

Her father’s drum sounded. The first powerful beat reverberated like thunder.

14 years later, my mom sits at her desk, a mosaic of script pages laid out around her. She’s studying the opening scenes, the interviews, and the movements of the music. She’s finalizing what will become the documentary of my great-grandmother’s symphony. She looks up from her tiles and tells me, “This must happen now. People need to hear this music again.” The footage for the documentary has sat unused, dormant for all these years. Until now.

That spring, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, police officers murdered George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis. Protests erupted around the country, and cop cars burned in the streets of Seattle.

My great-grandmother was 83 years old when she commissioned The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land. She had been troubled by the world. Back then, in 2001, the news was all about George V. Bush’s war on terror. She saw beyond the fear. She saw a country divided, the wars across the ocean and the violent injustices in her own streets. She saw that the people had lost their way. She believed so deeply in our people’s stories, the teachings inherent in them. She knew that no one would listen to an old Indian woman, that she would have to reach them another way. Somehow, she arrived at what she called highbrow music: symphonies. This came as a shock to us. My great-grandmother hadn’t grown up with this kind of stuff. She loved square dancing and Elvis. But she believed this was the way, that if all people could experience our beliefs through song, the music could heal the wound. She needed something that everyone could hear. She called a famous composer. “I need you to write a symphony,” she demanded, “and to perform it at Benaroya Hall.”

The composer turned her down.

But weeks after the call, he couldn’t get this 83-year-old Indian woman’s voice out of his head. He called her back and together they collaborated on a symphony, the first to be based on Coast Salish spirit songs with lyrics in Lushootseed, the traditional language.

In our longhouse ceremonies, songs hold a spiritual power. There are certain songs for prayer, for healing. My great-grandmother had a cassette tape with recordings of two spirit songs: one belonged to a beloved cousin, and the other was Chief Seattle’s thunder spirit song. She entrusted the tape to the composer with instructions to listen to but not share them. She wanted the songs to guide him as he wrote the symphony. She hoped that the healing power of these spirit songs would take shape in the symphony and that when people heard it, they might be touched by that power. She was hoping for medicine, for a world that could change.

On a hot summer day in 2020 I stood thronged in protest, in collective grief and anger. We yelled, we chanted, we demanded justice. I raised my cardboard sign that read in bold letters indigenous solidarity with Black Lives Matter . But it didn’t feel like enough, would never feel like enough. Weeks went by. Weeks of flash-bangs and tear gas. Weeks of protesters being arrested and assaulted, until finally the people took over the precinct. With the police gone, the organizers secured six Seattle city blocks, declaring it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. There were medical tents and tables of free books on political education. People brought crates of food to share, while others held demonstrations. My partner and I walked the streets of a free Seattle, watching films being projected onto buildings, seeing murals painted over boarded-up windows. There were large plastic bottles of hand sanitizer duct-taped to telephone poles.

It seemed as though the people had created a utopia. Until it didn’t. We turned a corner to find the park in the center of the autonomous zone in full-blown festival mode. Kids in droves wielded glow sticks. It looked like Coachella. It looked like Burning Man. People were drunk, waving selfie sticks instead of placards, wearing angel wings and carrying Hula-Hoops. Is this what change looked like?

But in the middle of the intersection, we found a gathering of Coast Salish people. I watched as men laid out large cedar boughs in a circle. Then women entered carrying burning bundles. The cedar smoke wafted over the crowd, the tents, the abandoned precinct. They were sharing their medicine.

When the first speaker approached, he asked that any and all Coast Salish and Indigenous people come forward to the edge of the circle. He asked that the white people step back for us. I looked at my partner, who looked at me, then gently let go of my hand. A young woman stepped away from her girlfriend and together we both stepped forward, away from our white partners.

“Before we begin here today,” the man with the mic yelled, “I want to honor our elder Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert. It’s important we remember her, here on her land, for the work she did for the Coast Salish people.” The man spoke in Lushootseed and in English. He introduced a group of Coast Salish singers. They made a half-moon around the burning cedar and hit their drums hard. I closed my eyes and saw my great-grandmother as she stood on stage at Benaroya Hall fourteen years earlier. I saw the painted drum, heard its heartbeat as it boomed like thunder, as it called out for change. I hadn’t heard my great-grandmother’s name, her Skagit name, the name we shared, spoken in a very long time.

The symphony had been her last project; she passed away before the documentary could be made. But right up until the end she went to gatherings, to speaking events, events like this. I had seen her small and frail but still so powerful when she spoke. I thought of her here today in this crowd and shuddered at the imagined worry. Even amid the threat of this pandemic, she would have been here. I let the drums wash over me as I cried, transporting me to the smoke-filled longhouse, my great-grandmother’s hand on my shoulder as we listened.

Throughout this pandemic I return to the books my great-grandmother made, the ones that house our language and our stories. Some days I spend crying, curled in the crook of my partner’s lap as the cats and dog wander the house, charged with an animal anxiety. Some days I make salmon and black coffee, simply to fill the house with the familiar aroma of my great-grandmother’s kitchen. All these white women on Pinterest are baking loaves of sourdough, and I am trying to time travel.

We climb out onto the roof of my house and watch the sky change. The world has stopped, but it feels even more frozen on the reservation. I have good days and bad days. We make a game out of our once-a-month grocery shopping. We call it the Hunger Games. We call it the Soft Apocalypse as we wait in line outside the Trader Joe’s, masks on and six feet apart from everyone but each other. We dress up at night, light all the candles in the house, eat the fanciest meal we can muster, and drink wine like expats in Paris.

We spend the summer locked inside, only able to be outdoors for 15 minutes at a time. Beyond that it’s too dangerous, as the smoke from the wildfires ignites my asthma. I boil pots of cedar and rosemary to help me breathe. And still people are dying in record numbers. We are losing our elders and I try to find my breath. I look for a mountain I can no longer see, its peak enveloped in smoke. A thick blanket of haze conceals the islands I know are out there dotting the waters beyond the shore.

On election night my partner and I sit barefoot on the floor, nervously checking our phones. We scroll. We put them down, then anxiously pick them up again. We do this until I can’t take it anymore. “How is this even an option?” I hold up my screen showing the very close count. I am afraid as a Coast Salish woman, a female-bodied person, a queer person. I am afraid for the people still being murdered by police, for the elders still threatened by the pandemic. I am afraid for how many times I might have to endure another aggression from a person who refuses to wear a mask but still clings to their MAGA hat like it was a prayer. Would I feel safe again? Would the world feel safe again? My partner picks up his guitar and strums the opening chords of one of my favorite Ramones songs. I join in off-key and giggling. By the time we reach the chorus we are hysterical, barely able to get the lines out. We make it through the song only to roar with laughter and begin again. There is a power in the repetition. We let the song transport us. In her own home on election night, my mom is not scrolling the news. She is pressing play, pause, and rewind, busy transcribing interviews, busy sorting through the raw footage of that day at Benaroya Hall. Again and again, her grandmother illuminates the screen, paused in smile, in speech. Occasionally the music floats through, the symphony inspired by a Coast Salish spirit song. In the interviews my great-grandmother talks about her anxiety for the world, her rising concern, but there is something confident in her smile, some glimmer of hope when she speaks about the power of song.

“People have lost their way,” she says. “They need to be reminded to take care of one another.”

There is a belief in my Coast Salish culture that songs have the power to heal, that they can be medicine. My great-grandmother wanted to share that knowledge, she wanted to remind people to have compassion, she wanted to change things. I don’t know anything about symphonies or orchestras. I don’t know any spirit songs. But as we sing out loud until two in the morning on election night, we are no longer checking our phones. We are not thinking about the president or the pandemic. We are laughing, lost in the music, lost in trying to get it right, lost in a brief moment of hope. We are singing, we are dancing.

We are trying to heal.

Excerpted from Thunder Songs: Essays. Copyright © 2024, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe. Reproduced by permission of Catapult. All rights reserved.

The post My Great-Grandmother Knew Our Indigenous Songs had the Power to Heal Our World appeared first on Electric Literature.

Not a whit. We defy augury.

We were gone for almost all of August. When we got back, we found a rime of black and white bird shit and feathers encrusted on the top few steps of the stoop. Pigeons had been roosting on the pediments atop our windows. Whatever normally kept them away from our building was no longer keeping them away. Who’s to say where they came from; pigeons come from nowhere.

Nadia and I figured the late summer rains would wash the fecal matter away, and the pigeons would eventually leave. Find some other Brooklyn brownstone with protruding eaves. But the rains only got rid of the white shit, leaving behind the more three-dimensional, wormlike black shit, and the pigeons stayed. Fresh feculence of both varieties kept falling. The stoop, where we sometimes sat around and chatted with the neighbors, had become entirely unusable.

Our landlord, Erik, a veteran New York Times reporter based in Mexico City, was oblivious to the issue until he visited one rainy afternoon in October. He was standing by the trash bins sorting junk mail. He always wore a pair of newish black Sambas. No rain jacket or umbrella. High receding widow’s peak. Dark, angular, bushy eyebrows that gave him the semblance of a hawk.

“Sorry about the mess,” he said. “How long has it been like this?”

“Probably since mid-August,” I said. “We were away when it started.”

“That’s a long time, I’m really sorry. It’s frankly disgusting. It’s also a public health hazard.”

“How would you go about getting rid of them?”

The three of us looked up. A row of light and dark gray triangles hung over the lip of the brownstone’s uppermost ledge. The pigeons were sheltering from the rain.

“I’ll probably hire a guy to go up to the roof and hang off the side to clean those ledges. Then they put down this sticky stuff, which keeps the birds away.”

“Is that okay for the birds?” Nadia asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s all-natural. They don’t like the feeling of it on their feet, so they stop landing there.”

This seemed a better solution than nets and metal spikes, which always felt so medieval to me. Erik promised to have the property manager get straight to work. Rain had darkened his shoulders. The junk mail sat in his hands like undevoured prey. We thanked him and left it at that.

A few weeks later, I woke to the sound of voices on the landing. Aurelio, the property manager, and a couple of his guys were heading up to the roof. I lay still and listened to their footsteps creaking across the bedroom ceiling. When I went downstairs, I noticed that the stoop was clean. Aurelio the generalísimo—tall and well-fed, well-liked on the block—was standing by his van, staring up at the eaves. He smiled when he saw me and shook my hand. He said they might need to go inside the apartment tomorrow to work on the window ledges. I said no hay problema.

 “No hay problema?” he repeated, smiling again, and went back to work.

The crew came back the next day with coarse black brushes duct-taped to the ends of wooden poles. They dipped the brushes in a soap solution, lay flat at the edge of the roof, and reached down to scrub, presumably while others gripped their ankles from behind. I stood by the bedroom window at one point to watch. Fine particles of soapy water floated past the glass. The men joked around while they worked, suspended over the edge, supremely indifferent to death. Once the stone was clean, they took a pole with a putty knife taped to the end, smeared the blade with bird-repellent gel, and reached down to scrape the stuff onto the ledges. The job took less than half an hour.

Aurelio knocked at our door. I waved him and his right-hand man, Rodrigo, inside and moved some books and picture-frames away from the bedroom windows. I pointed to the potted sampaguita on the windowsill with its tracery of green leaves and vines wound about a bamboo trellis by the glass. I asked them to be extra careful with that—my cousin Emily had entrusted the plant to my care before leaving the city. Aurelio nodded. I went into the kitchen to wait.

Emily had been on my mind all morning. She had messaged the family WhatsApp the day before: “Hi fam! I am being admitted to labor and delivery. Baby will most likely be born tomorrow.” Hearts and prayer hands flooded the chat. I sensed something grave and unspoken: the baby wasn’t due for another month. “Eat noodles for us pls,” Emily added. A Filipino custom, eating noodles on birthdays for long life. Whose long life? I wondered. For us, Em had said. The custom covers both, of course, the same life force. Every birthday belongs equally to the mother—

“All done!” Aurelio said, emerging from the bedroom. On their way out, Rodrigo waved his caulking gun, fitted with the tube of bird-repellent gel, and flashed his perfect set of silver teeth. I went in to examine their work. On the ledge outside the window near my desk, they had put down some thick squiggles of whitish, transparent gel. They had done the same on the other window ledge, by the bed. I found the sight of it vaguely unsettling—the gel had a semen-like quality, maybe that’s what it was. But it also had to do with the lines Rodrigo had drawn. There was something runelike and indecipherable about them. A wide, looping, archaic script, just dense enough to ensure that nothing could land there without touching it. The pattern was not haphazard; some knowledge was encoded there. Some canny human certainty about the ways of animals that I found disturbing. It didn’t look at all, to me, like a deterrent. It looked like a fucking trap.

Nighttime.

Nadia came in and said, “There’s a pigeon on the stoop. I think it’s stuck.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s stuck.”

“To the stoop?”

“Come see.”

I followed them out. On the third step down, in the shadow of the wrought-iron handrail, a small huddled form sat motionless. I hadn’t seen anything there on my way up, an hour ago. Maybe I had missed it. We went closer, speaking gently: hey little one, are you okay? It didn’t move. Its head hung low, near the step. Its crown and throat were snowy white, with dark gray regions around its eyes. Its eyes were wide and black and blank, like the eyes of someone shocked.

“What should we do?” Nadia said.

I didn’t know. I switched on my phone’s light. The bird’s wings glistened with transparent gunk. Its feet were a mess. Globs of gel clung to the pink skin above its claws, and the feathers nearest its feet were saturated and dark. It did seem to be stuck where it was. I moved closer to see if it would try to strain. It hardly seemed to see me at all. It must have been exhausted. We watched it for a moment. Its whole form lifted faintly, then dropped, lifted, then dropped. It was breathing.

“We have to do something,” Nadia said.

I went upstairs to fetch one of the wooden poles Aurelio had left on the landing. I moved it carefully in front of the bird. No response. I touched the pole very gently to its breast. Nothing.

“Do you think we should try to free its feet?” Nadia asked.

“How?”

“Maybe with water?”

“That stuff is extremely sticky. I had to scrub some of it off the windowsill earlier.”

“We have to do something.”

I agreed. The alternative was what? It would just sit there until it died, or until the rats got to it. We went upstairs and did some research. As I clicked around, I saw an ad for something called “Tanglefoot Bird Repellent”—how obscene, I thought, how cruel. We found that vegetable oil might work. So we pulled on double layers of blue nitrile gloves and brought down a dishcloth, a roll of paper towel, and plastic containers of canola oil and water. Coming down the stairs, I felt a heaviness in my limbs. I wasn’t hopeful about the outcome, but Nadia was right, we had to try.

The pigeon had turned around. Now it was near the edge, facing away from the step. So it wasn’t entirely stuck. Maybe it wanted to fly. We decided to start by removing the gunk on its feathers. I moved to a lower step and held up a light. Nadia took a moment to drape the dishcloth over the pigeon’s head, and held a hand there to calm it. Then they dipped some paper towel in the oil and set about swabbing the wing feathers, pulling the gel outward, speaking to it the whole time.

It seemed to be working. The pigeon hardly appeared to notice. Nadia was able to pull one of the wings out from the body—a sickening sheet of gel stretched between wing and side. It had been literally stuck shut. I propped my phone against the step, dipped my fingers in oil, and did as Nadia was doing. We worked quietly, pulling feathers free, dragging the gel down to the tips, then out completely. It must have flapped its wings after it landed in the glue. It must have tumbled into the glue, then righted itself. It must have fallen three stories from the ledge. The Adhan began at the mosque on the corner. Evening prayers curled like smoke; we listened while we worked.

I thought of Emily and the baby. Josh, her husband, had sent a photo in the afternoon of Em lying with her eyes closed in the hospital bed. She looked unconscious or delirious. Her mother was standing above her, feeling her forehead, looking concerned. One aunt said she was going to the church to offer prayers to St. Gerard, patron saint of expectant mothers. She urged everyone to say the Memorare Prayer ten times. My mother wrote, “Lord, please protect Em and baby during this delivery. We trust in your perfect will and timing. Amen.” Josh had said the baby was likely arriving by the end of the day. I wiped a hand to check my phone for updates—nothing. I felt a sudden fear for Emily’s life, and the baby’s life as well. It was getting late. The pigeon moved very little.

Several stray bits of mangled feather matter had become lodged between its flight feathers. I extended the wings and removed each piece that seemed out of place, trying to simulate a natural preening motion. I had kept parakeets before, so I knew something about birds and their habits. A pair of pet-store budgies—one was green and yellow with a single ultramarine tail feather, the other was pale blue and white, puffy, rotund. It was never exactly my choice to own birds. The first was a rescue from my roommates’ theater production. They toyed for a moment with killing him onstage. I intervened on the grounds that art has nothing to do with killing animals onstage. The other one I adopted to keep the first company, to give his life purpose. Both lived in the bedroom I shared with my partner at the time—another Brooklyn brownstone, another life.

But keeping birds troubled me. I was haunted by the thought of one of them slipping through the cage, flying for the window, striking the glass. Somehow worse was the thought of the window hanging open and one of them flying out, a blaze of tropical wings, suddenly alone in the cold and powerless to the casual killing force of everything in the city. Even worse was the thought of the other one left inside, confused, calling for its mate. All of it was awful, the whole arrangement. In the end I broke up with that partner and left that apartment, but I had nightmares about the birds for years—cradling their little forms between my hands, traveling with them through the chaos and noise of the subway, shielding them from gears and cars and heavy machinery. I sometimes woke up flat on my back with my hands folded softly at my chest, as if we had all died together.

I would tell Nadia about these dreams just after we started dating. We were sitting on the stoop one morning drinking tea when they asked if there was any subtext to the dreams’ recurrence. Previous relationship, I said. That seemed clear. I suppose I equated their absence with grief over the relationship. I suppose I felt I had abandoned the birds, as I had abandoned my partner.

Talking it through made it comprehensible. Even then, Nadia could tell when I was stuck or troubled, bewildered to the point of incapacitation. I saw them off that day with a kiss atop the stoop. I remember it vividly: Nadia closed the gate, waved, turned away. They were carrying a yellow backpack and wearing a yellow leather belt. I watched them recede down the block and sat back for a moment to enjoy the morning, the spring air. Then glancing down, I saw, just inches from my feet, a dead chick, sprawled on the step. No longer than a finger, pink and nearly translucent in the sun. Its head was thrown back, arms not yet wings at its sides. It must have fallen from a nest—the oak tree moved extravagantly in the wind, shuffling its leaves like cards. I sat for a while with these strange pieces of experience in my hands. The continuous line from dreaming to waking to this moment. Ill augury? I waved a fly away, went into the vestibule for an envelope, and lifted the bird with mute ceremony to the trash bin. It weighed next to nothing.

Once the feathers looked relatively free of the gel, we turned our attention to the feet. But as soon as Nadia started swabbing the toes, the pigeon startled. “It’s okay, it’s okay!” Nadia said, and placed a hand atop the dishcloth. They used their fingers to drag the gel away from the legs and claws. They were making steady progress; it was working. But then the pigeon jumped again, and this time it tumbled off the side of the step, falling with a thud onto the trash bins below.

“Oh no!” Nadia was horrified. “It’s okay,” I said, hurrying down the steps with the light. It had fallen all the way to the ground, between two of the bins. I moved them apart carefully. It was standing with its wing against one of the bin’s wheels. It was alive. Nadia was rattled—“That was my fault. Is it alright?” “It’s alright,” I said. “You’re helping it, you’re doing beautifully.” We decided to wait a few minutes so that it could rest. We needed to collect ourselves as well.

It was a cool night, temperate for November. Occasionally someone would walk past, glancing at us in our blue gloves, glancing briefly at the pigeon in the field of the flashlight. No one seemed to think about it much. Our neighbor Linh, who lived on the parlor level, appeared at the gate. Nadia told her what was happening. Her shoulders fell forward. She seemed genuinely sad. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked. We said there’s no need, we would take care of it. I could tell she was relieved. “We have some Dawn,” she said, and offered to bring it out. We accepted.

I squeezed some soap into the water and we went back to work. Nadia laid the cloth over the pigeon and picked it up entirely. They set it down in a clear part of the forecourt and tried to continue wiping at the feet. But now it was sitting flush against the bluish stone, as though brooding over a nest. I checked my phone: still no news about the baby. “It must be really tired,” Nadia said. Maybe if I held it up, they could get to the feet? They shrugged. We agreed to try.

I refolded the dishcloth and wrapped it around the bird’s head and body. Then I placed my hands on either side of the wings and lifted. It felt somehow both substantial and light. Hollow bones, I thought, pneumatized, devoid of marrow. But here was a life. These were its contours. I tried to impart calm through my touch. It did not strain or protest. I saw Nadia’s green eyes distant with concern. I thought about the heat at the edges of bodies, the life contained for a time within. I thought about the living force within my body, as well, and I thought about Emily, laboring to bring life into the world, laboring to keep it there. What large decisions was she in the midst of making? What life-or-death adjustments was she trying? My lola, the mother of Emily’s mother, would say that in giving birth, the mother has her one foot in the grave. One life going out as one comes in. The hold of one body weakening as it releases another. The thought was unbearable. Unbearable, unspeakable—to imagine the family’s prayers becoming prayers for the dead.

I tilted my hands so the pigeon’s feet faced up. Nadia pulled back the cloth and swabbed the claws with their fingers, now using both oil and soap. From time to time it twitched, and its feet grasped, but I held it steady and we spoke to it, and it relaxed. Nadia worked diligently for a few minutes. But holding the bird like this, we saw how deeply the gel had worked its way into the feathers covering the breast and abdomen. The stuff came away from the wing feathers, more or less, but it seemed to be caked about this lower region like tar. It all felt suddenly hopeless.

We looked at each other. I wondered where I should set it down. “Out there?” I said, gesturing to the sidewalk. I don’t know why I suggested that. Maybe I wanted to be free of the responsibility. Maybe I wanted to be like all the other people walking past, going about their swift urban existences. “How about here?” Nadia said, pointing to a corner of our forecourt near the neighboring wall. “It should have some kind of shelter.” I eased it down where Nadia pointed and lifted the cloth. Its right shoulder seemed higher than its left. Its head still drooped. Because I had set it down facing the wall, it gave the appearance of turning away from us, refusing our help.

“You poor thing,” we said. This bird had no chance. What more could we do for it? Calling animal rescue seemed absurd. A single pigeon in New York City; who would move a muscle? I thought about the rats again, big ones on this block. They would descend on it soon, any moment. It would be a bloody mess by the morning. A sad thought occurred to me. “Maybe we should put it out of its misery,” I said. Nadia searched my face. “You don’t think it’ll make it?” I didn’t even think it would last the night. Nadia frowned. I did, too. I felt we had a hand in this—getting rid of the pigeons had seemed like a good idea to us. We were partly responsible for this creature’s suffering. Maybe the least we could do was to end it. Miserable, the frailty of human logic.

“How?” Nadia said. I had no desire to kill it with blunt force. “Maybe we drown it,” I said. But we didn’t even own a bucket. Our other neighbor, Deb, was coming down the street. Nadia explained the situation to her. “That’s so awful,” Deb said. “That’s exactly what I thought would happen with the sticky stuff.” A completely inane solution, we agreed. “We’re considering putting it out of its misery,” Nadia said. I asked Deb if she had a bucket. She shook her head. I think she was lying.

Nadia and I went upstairs and rooted around in the kitchen. I found a bag made of thick green plastic and tried filling it at the sink. It seemed to work. I lifted it into a nylon grocery bag, in case the plastic ripped, and filled it about halfway. I asked Nadia if they thought that was enough water. They did. I held the double bag in my arms like a wineskin and brought it down. “Are we really about to do this?” Nadia said. The pigeon still hadn’t moved. I frowned hard and looked down the street. No one else was out. “It’s the right thing,” I said. “It would just suffer otherwise. I think I would want the same.” Nadia nodded, pensive. I said if they held the bag steady, I would drop it in. “Them,” Nadia suddenly corrected me. “Drop them in.” They were right, of course.

I wrapped the bird with the dishcloth, this time holding the fabric a little more snugly over their head. Their life in my hands. “Sorry, little friend,” I said. “You’re going to fly straight to heaven.” Nadia was solemn, holding the handles of the bag upright. “It’s really brave of you,” they said. I said I was just following their lead, which was true. I brought the pigeon closer to the bag.

“On three?” I said. We counted—

One. Two. Three.

Remember,

O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.

Inspired by this confidence I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful.

O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy

hear and answer me.

Beside the bag, a little yellow larva was inching along the ground—a newborn caterpillar maybe, fallen from the oak tree. A little bead of pure life, inching, squirming, striving blindly. I stared at it, amused, while Nadia said some words I couldn’t hear. Water was seeping from the outer bag. “Oh no,” that’s what Nadia was saying. I worried suddenly that there wouldn’t be enough—I moved my hands and felt the coolness of the water at my wrists. It was still deep. I looked for the larva again and was pleased to see the water trickling in a stream just past it; it was dry, safe. The pigeon strained—I felt their feathers sharpen against my hands. I adjusted my grasp. I spoke to them. The wings went slack. “I think that’s it,” I said. We waited for a moment to be sure.

I lifted the body in its sopping cloth out of the water. Nadia opened the lid of the trash bin. I set it down inside. “It’s too bad we can’t bury it,” Nadia said. I brought the bags to the street and tipped them out. The water rushed forth. I felt relieved. It was done. I covered the pigeon’s body with the bags and carefully lowered the lid of the bin. We floated upstairs in a daze. I felt a vacancy in my eyes. We sat silent in the kitchen. I lit a stick of palo santo at the stove, and it burned a long time.

An image of St. Francis lay face up on the dining table. I found the sight of it calming. “He looks like the pigeon,” I said to Nadia. Wounded and alone. Wings at his sides. Draped in coarse cloth. We decided to pray the Memorare for Emily and her baby. Nadia lit a candle and turned out the lights. I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. We sat on the floor and did ten recitations, taking turns. My mother’s voice traveled to me across the years; I remembered her intoning this one often, almost every day. At the end I said, “We pray for Emily and her baby. For the soul of the pigeon. For the current of life that connects all of us.” The candlelight flickered through my shut eyelids. I didn’t remember how to end the prayer, so we just sat there for a while in the dark.

The post On Killing A Pigeon in New York City appeared first on Electric Literature.

I tried to enter her mind in the days before, and then in the moments before. How she had prepared to face her own death, as across town my sister and I prepared to face math worksheets and a mandatory bedtime. I tried to enter her parents’ minds, too. What could their conversations be—what dialogue can you speak in a house that has become a crime scene? Among my peers, the story of the girl’s death became a grisly mystery whose strangeness was unfolded again and again, like a contraband book of scary stories.

The eleventh most common cause of death in the United States, suicides have the unsettling feeling of whodunits that arrive solved, but still invite obsessive puzzling. If we could only write down all the clues and signs, parse out the timeline, give language to our supreme devastation, we imagine, we might begin to make sense of things. Then formless grief might take the more comforting, familiar form of a book. 

Sloane Crosley’s arch, elegiac new book Grief Is for People is the latest entry to a genre for which there is an endlessly, nightmarishly growing audience: books about surviving another person’s suicide. Grief is for People joins a bookshelf crowded with memoirs and non-fiction works about loss to suicide. In recent days: Molly by Blake Butler (2023), Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson (2022), Stepping Back from the Ledge by Laura Trujillo (2022), Certain and Impossible Events by Candace Jane Opper (2021), and Life After Suicide by Jennifer Ashton (2020). Clancy Martin’s How Not To Kill Yourself (2023) and Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (2019) concerned both the writers’ suicidality as well as the suicides of their family members. Anne Sexton’s daughter wrote a book about her mother’s suicide. So did Kurt Cobain’s cousin, and David Foster Wallace’s wife. “Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?” asked David Sedaris, writing in 2013 about his sister’s suicide. After a suicide, I’ve seen communities announce the intent to “pull together,” and then all too quickly rush the bereft to move on, or “remember the good times.” These books pause time, stretching out the memorial or wake or shiva long beyond the hour final mourners would linger.  

I come back again and again to these books about life after another person’s death, amazed by the precision with which they capture the sensations of grief, the many ways they find to say accurately and exquisitely what has been said before and will be said again. “My friend was alone when he was murdered,” Crosley writes, then repeats the same line, as if eager to watch the ink seep into the page, to make a tangible record of horror, and step back to marvel at it. It reminds me of being a child, trying to understand a child’s suicide: alive, then dead. Here, then gone. Forever? Forever. 

In claiming public attention for their specific pain, these writers carve out a public space for practicing grief. They disrupt the obliterating silence that has historically accompanied a suicide. Crosley, an essayist and novelist who has made a career of unsentimentality, devotes herself to full-throated mourning, and to making an accounting. Her book is a ledger of what has gone missing, and an argument for keeping talley. “If I do not capture what I have lost,” she writes, “it will be like losing it twice.”

Written in the immediate aftermath of the loss, Grief is for People records the thoughts and actions of a person who is almost willing herself to be haunted. “My initial grief, which I thought might be taking a manageable shape, has mutated,” Crosley reports, at the point when friends and acquaintances begin to tacitly demand that a grieving person move on or at least fake it. “It’s colonized my entire personality. Any word that comes out of my mouth that is not Russell’s name is a lie.” Russell is Russell Perreault, the executive director of publicity for Anchor Books. He was Crosley’s best friend, former boss, and father figure, and he killed himself in 2019. 

A longtime humorist, Crosley turns as unsparing an eye on grief as she has often trained on New York neighbors on dinner party drama. She captures the abortive moments of empathy, when onlookers try to relate to her grief through anecdotes about their ‘father’s law partner’s wife’ dying. “I have perfectly edible yogurt in my fridge, purchased before my best friend hanged himself, but do go on,” she snaps internally. (“There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable,” Li writes in Where Reasons End.) As if daring the reader to chastise her, Crosley devotes nearly equal on-page real estate to a home invasion, one month before the suicide, which relieved her of all of her jewelry. “If I can get these items back, I can get my friend back,” she reasons. “I would sooner be separated from this logic than from my own skin.” Both events leave her unmoored, missing something precious, and laboring in the delusion that if she would only retrace her steps, everything might be put to right. Perreault, Crosley writes, “believed in the souls of objects.” He would have perfectly understood the intertwining of the two losses. Books written about a beloved person’s death are not strictly for readers—we trespass in the margins, peering into scenes of devastation. The ideal reader for this book is dead, these writers suggest. The reader is invited as an impossibly distant second place. 

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living,” wrote Camus, “amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” This is interesting in theory, but not relevant at 4AM when you’re going back through a newly dead person’s social media profile, looking for clues. In the wake of a suicide, the mind wanders away from the elegant logic of philosophy, and towards the truisms of Tumblr memes and suicide prevention slogans: You are not alone. You are loved. There is hope. The cliches of grief feel belittling, as if another person’s death has parked you permanently in a high school counselor’s office. 

Books about another person’s suicide veer away from politeness into the realm of nightmare, resurrection attempts, and magical thinking. There is great comfort in reading descriptions of a grieving person crawling up the walls of her own addled, grieving mind. Carla Fine, the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One, tortured herself with thoughts that she might have been able to prevent her husband’s death if only she had “been more insistent about our going out to dinner together the night before.” Trujillo’s book opens with the author gazing down at the spot where her mother fell to her death. Li’s narrator, in the space of three pages, references Flaubert, offers the Latin root for the word “stupid,” and recites lyrics from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera: “Wishing you were somehow here again, wishing you were somehow near.” In life, our experiences of other people’s grief are often limited to tributes: an anguished Instagram caption, a glimpse of a tattooed date under a rolled-up shirtsleeve. In memoirs, the oddness of grief and the unpalatable behavior of the bereaved become the reader’s business.  

When Carla Fine’s husband killed himself in 1989, she told all but her closest loved ones that he died of a heart attack. The shame was too enormous. She mourned in solitude. 

“I did not have the stomach to face their real or imagined accusations, blaming me—or blaming him—for his death,” she later wrote in her book No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One. 

A month later, she ventured into basement support group for people grieving suicides. But she balked—before even taking off her coat, she was stealing from the room, wanting to get away from the odd and unidentifiable expressions of other people’s grief. A man, the group’s facilitator, approached her as she made to leave. 

“Please stay here with us,” he said. “You’re among friends.” 

To read these suicide memoirs is to feel yourself to be among friends. The writers are people who are not quite on the side of the living. They articulate the sweet, sickening nature of mourning, the wild attempt of a living person to claw under the dirt with the dead. Crosley narrates for the reader how her friend’s death becomes more real to her than her own life. “I have the strongest sensation that if I only knew where to push, I could reach through and pull him back,” she writes. “By living, I am, by default, leaving him.” She offers a stunning image of cradling herself in her grief like a child. Taken by the mournful sound of a singer’s voice, she writes, “I imagine this moment holding me up on its hip, bouncing me. Wave goodbye to Russell! Say: Bye-bye, Russell!” In the book’s final pages Crosley speaks directly to Perreault, as she commits going forward in a life without him. “I know you,” she reminds him. The reader knows him a little, too. The moment bounces us on its hip: we sit with Crosley, waving goodbye.

What can books written by people grieving loss from suicide do for us? They revive the dead in the brief space between the front and back cover. They let us sit with a stranger’s familiar grief for a while. We are invited to an open-casket viewing of the writer’s most vulnerable feelings, so that we may recognize our own mourning, or save the image as a roadmap for a future grief.

What I remember now about the suicide of the little girl was the silence that accompanied it. It felt like a hand had been clasped over the community’s mouth. Surely, people did not wish to reproduce stupid platitudes about dying—“She’s in a better place!”—or to cheapen the moment with gossip. But I think just as likely the parents of the community were experiencing a sense, itself child-like, that to acknowledge a suicide too loudly would make it more real. Speaking about it would crack the door open and allow the specter of suicide to venture into your own home, to sidle up to your own children. Decades later, I’m moved by the profusion of suicide memoirs, even as I feel panicked at rising suicide numbers. These books take the opposite approach to the cold silence that often falls over a suicide—they pour words into the wound. 

In Miriam Toews’ 2015 All My Puny Sorrows, a novel written in the wake of Toews’ sister’s death from suicide, the family works round-the-clock to keep Elfrieda, or Elfie, from killing herself. She is able to kill herself by convincing her husband to go to the library to get her some books. 

“Well, Elf, I thought, you’re so clever,” her sister reflects. “Getting him to leave you alone on the pretext of getting books. Of going to the library. Of course he’d do it. Books are what save us. Books are what don’t save us.”  

Books about another person’s suicide save us from going through it in silence. 

The post Grief Memoirs Are for the Living appeared first on Electric Literature.

Standing in line at the H-E-B checkout, I’m mindlessly deleting emails when a photo of a naked, pornographically hot beefcake stretched out on a massage table illuminates my screen. I recoil and quickly pull the front of my jacket around the phone, worried I’ll scandalize a wayward shopper, or worse, traumatize some passing youth. I tap the bookmark button, then quickly swipe to another screen and wait for my turn to clumsily scan my groceries.

Once I’m settled in my car among frozen pizzas, off-season blueberries, and kitty litter, I reopen the email to check the sender, worried some porn site has laid hands on my address. I’m relieved to discover it’s a promotion for an erotic massage workshop, distributed to a mailing list for Austin Naked Yoga. I’d signed up a year ago when I overheard a couple of Daddies talking about the group while I was sunbathing nude in the gay section of Hippie Hollow, Austin’s nudist “beach” (really a limestone cliff on Lake Travis). Now, safely in the cocoon of my Corolla, I grin as I read the copy below the beefcake photo:

Join Bo, experienced leader and gifted giver of bodywork, as you give and receive touch, experience relaxation, eroticism, sensuality, brotherhood, and a very intense release.

Oh, I think. Well then.

I read on.

Every participant will receive massage for one hour and give massage for one hour. Bo will empower attendees by reviewing full body, Swedish, and deep tissue massage techniques, glute and outer anal massage techniques, and genital massage techniques. Erections will occur and are most welcome. Participants may choose to release their erotic energy during the session or take it with them.

My oh my. My cheeks feel warm and I know I’m blushing. Coincidentally, after almost a year of delay, I had attended my first gay naked yoga class about three weeks before. I’d been keen to participate after hearing about it that day at Hippie Hollow, but I’d been too nervous to go alone and only mustered the gumption when a friend asked me to accompany him. Safety in numbers.

But naked yoga is one thing, an erotic massage workshop is something else entirely. Still, I’m curious, and when I get home I decide to ask my boyfriend, Brandon, if he has any interest in going as my massage partner. I’m anticipating a “no,” but I’m not sure where it’ll fall between “abso-fucking-lutely not” and “maybe at some point in the abstract future.”

I get a firm “No, thank you.”

“Fair enough,” I say, a little bummed and a little relieved. We’ve been in an open relationship for a couple years, so I could still go on my own, but his “no” makes it easy not to venture outside my comfort zone. The class, I think, might have been too big for my (absent) breeches.

The next week I go to yoga class again with my friend Evan. It’s my second or third class, and it’s as liberating and exciting as I’d imagined, a yogi exhibitionist fantasia. I still feel shy during the initial strip-down, still find myself giggling during Happy Baby and smiling as I push up my glasses (the only thing I’m wearing) during Downward Dog. After class, I’m standing around chit-chatting and flirting, still naked, when a skinny older guy I’d noticed eyeing me during class comes up to me.

“I’m Bo,” says the man standing stark before me. “I’m doing this massage workshop on Saturday.”

I mutter an introduction, looking over at Evan, struggling to maintain eye contact with Bo. For a moment I think he’s going to ask me to be his partner, and I start rehearsing excuses in my head, simultaneously feeling guilty that an excuse is my knee-jerk response. But then it clicks, and I realize I’m talking to the “gifted giver” himself.

“How open minded are you?” Bo asks.

The question feels like a challenge and an affront. I’m here, aren’t I? I want to say. I’m fun!

But Bo’s question is delivered with a softness and compassion that lower my defenses.

“I’d say moderately,” I answer. “But it depends on what you’re getting at.”

He smiles. “My model for the Erotic Massage Workshop just canceled. So, I need a substitute.” He’s speaking pragmatically, simply, hurriedly. “Would you have any interest in filling in? I’ll just massage you for both sessions, demonstrate the techniques on you, and the rest of the time just give you a massage.” He pauses briefly. “And I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

I notice he’s speaking in the future tense, rather than future subjunctive, as though I’ve already agreed, as though this is a foregone conclusion. I feel myself blush and demurely wrap one foot around my calf. Our nudity makes the conversation feel rawer, the nerves of my skin exposed to the warm musky air of the yoga studio. Evan, who’s been standing nearby and has clearly overheard the solicitation, walks away, smirking, to check out some other booties.

“Oh,” I say to Bo. “Interesting.” I pause. “I need to think about it. Can I get back to you?”

Bo and I exchange numbers. I tell him I’ll let him know one way or another the next day. I need to ask my boyfriend about the prospect, sleep on it, jerk off on it.

When I get home, I tell Brandon about the proposition and ask for his opinion. I suppose I’m partially asking if he’s okay with me getting felt up by a massage instructor, but since that’s clearly within the bounds of our open relationship agreement, I’m more interested in his reaction to the element of financial exchange. To me stripping down for money.

“Go for it,” he says, chuckling. “You’re having a whole hippie-dippie nudist woo-woo moment. It seems like you’d have fun.”

“For the record,” I say, “I don’t think it’s a moment. I am a hippie-dippie nudist. A free spirit. A liberated queen!” I toss my imaginary locks.

“Sure,” he says.

Brandon doesn’t say it, but I know he’s thinking about a story I’d shared with him before. A story about another massage, when I was seventeen, at a chain called Massage Envy.

Back then, no one would have described me as a hippie-dippie nudist. I was not a free spirit, did not possess even a scant trace of whimsy. I was a type-A, overworked, under-slept, five-AP-class-taking little shit. All I thought about was college applications, which extracurriculars would help craft the most compelling narrative for my future success, and competitive gymnastics.

I was tragically repressed. No one at my high school was out, and I had only recently begun to even allow myself to consider that I was gay, to allow myself to explore those feelings, in my mind and on the internet. I’d probably known somewhere deep down for years, but it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I dared voice my personal “persuasion”—a rhetorical dodge because even uttering the word “sexuality” made me uncomfortable.

After a physical therapist recommended a massage for my gymnastics-injured spine, I called the local chain in town, Massage Envy. I was already suspicious of the place, especially the questionably sensual name, which evoked both sin and the puritanical value system in which sin exists. The local paper for our geriatric beachside town had recently run a series about another massage business, Crystal Spa, which had been shut down on multiple charges of prostitution.

On the phone, after I spent too long justifying why I was getting a massage, the receptionist replied: “Wonderful. Now let’s get you scheduled with one of our licensed clinical massage therapists. Would you prefer a male or female therapist?”

My stomach seized up. “What?” I whispered.

She repeated the question.

I looked around to make sure my bedroom door was closed and listened for my father in the hallway. We had been on precarious terms since I’d come out to him a few months earlier, and, after a few outbursts, had settled into a hostile silence. I imagined how my father would feel about the idea of a man kneading his son’s warm nude body. (It wasn’t hard to imagine, because some not-so-small part of me still disapproved, too.) But with a barely healed lumbar injury, my back was killing me. I needed someone strong to knead my knotted muscles. Plus, I was curious.

“Male, please,” I said softly.

On the day of my appointment, I pulled into a parking space at the opposite end of the shopping center from Massage Envy’s gaudy purple sign. Inside, a marble reception desk shimmered with a golden sheen that matched the receptionist’s spray tan. She checked me in and swiped my debit card, “just for incidentals.” I wondered if incidentals were what had gotten Crystal Spa in trouble. Then I heard footsteps, which materialized into a tall, dark-haired man with a thick mustache and thicker Slavic accent. He extended a hand.

“Hello, I’m Alex,” he said gruffly, giving my hand a firm shake. My dad had made me watch the Terminator movies at least five times each, and I imagined Alex as Arnold’s replacement in the next installment. “Please follow me.”

Alex led me to Room 6 and ushered me inside. It was dimly lit, which I knew was supposed to be relaxing, but instead made me worry about the possible hygiene concerns brighter light might reveal. Alex pulled out a clipboard from under his muscular arm and began asking for my medical history: what brought me in, where it hurt. The procedure of it comforted me. Despite the flouncy decor, the appointment had at least the façade of a medical encounter.

When I told him I had a gymnastics injury, his eyes lit up. “Romania has some of the best gymnasts in the world,” he said, beaming with national pride.

I smiled in agreement, relieved to find common ground. Then Alex pressed the center button on a silver iPod mini and the room filled with the sound of rain and a sitar. He pulled back the purple sheet on the massage table.

“Undress,” he said, directing me to leave my clothes and belongings in the chair and get face down under the sheet.

“Undress, as in . . . ?” I asked, eyes averted.

“Completely,” he answered; he’d clearly made the clarification many times before.

As the door clicked closed behind him, my heart fluttered like it was supposed to on the first date I’d never had. Uneasy, I stripped out of my tee and below-the-knee Volcom shorts (I was still performing straightness), then whisked off my plaid boxers and shimmied under the sheets.

I shifted uncomfortably until I heard a knock on the door, followed by Alex’s voice. I lifted my head to grunt an affirmation, then settled into the lavender-scented face hole. I could feel myself trembling and tried to force my body still. Alex folded back the sheet, exposing my back down to my last vertebra.

I heard the spatter of massage oil. I heard him rub his hands together vigorously. As soon as he made contact, I felt my body jerk away.

“Just try to relax,” Alex soothed.

I was fully shaking now, teeth chattering. It took me a few long minutes of Alex’s tentative, preliminary pats on my back before I settled down. I breathed through my panic like I’d practiced in therapy.

I’d never felt a man’s hands against my skin like this. The warmth and pressure as he glided his hands from my neck down to my lumbar spine. Coaches had prodded at me to correct my form, laid on top of me to press me deeper into the splits. Physical therapists had probed my nerves and joints. But this was new. With each measured stroke of Alex’s hands, I felt a muscle relax, an insecurity fade away. I was a touch-starved teen, and this was delicious.

“How’s the pressure?” Alex asked, interrupting my bliss, now ten or so minutes into the massage.

“Good, good,” I muttered, but the disruption allowed an outside reality to creep in. The sound of his voice was quickly succeeded by thoughts of my father. I imagined that he would writhe in disgust if any man tried to lather oil on his back. I felt a stab of shame, a flash of anger, then a momentary pity.

I directed my thoughts back to my body on the massage table, my face smushed into the head cradle. Alex had just ventured a bit south of the sheet. No complaints, it felt lovely, just a little surprise. Glutes are muscles, too, I told myself. Still, the butt-touching made me feel like I was doing something bad, and it pulled me out of the experience of the warm sheets, the warm hands. No, this wasn’t anything bad, I corrected myself. There was nothing even sexual about this—this was a massage to relieve back pain. A medical procedure.

Okay, I asked myself, then why do you have a raging boner?

I felt myself swell under my abdomen, a throb with my heartbeat. Briefly, I panicked that Alex might be about to finish with my back and ask me to flip over, revealing a teepee erect on the table. But fortunately, he moved from my glutes up to my shoulders, where the nerves were less touchy, and then walked to the other end of the table.

He began to massage my calves. Then, gradually, the circular motions inched up my leg, past my knee, and into the uncharted territory of my inner thigh. I felt a little chill as Alex pushed the sheet to one side, and tucked it under my leg so that it covered any embargoed goods. Oh, no. I shimmied to adjust myself, to brace against these new sensations. I felt myself pressing into the massage table to the motion of the massage. No, no. I urged the carnal forces to retreat as he continued to massage my hamstrings. I tried to think about SAT questions, and college applications, and the tumbling pass I was training on floor. Anything else. No, not now. And then Alex’s hand lingered on my inner thigh a femtosecond too long, and I stifled a moan. I felt the gooey warmth beneath me, gluing the sheets to my abdomen.

The wave of shame crashed over me immediately. I felt my skin go hot and knew I must be bright red.

I briefly considered telling Alex I needed to end the massage now, but I clung to the hope that he hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized what had happened. But he must have smelled the teen angst, right? He must have felt my body shudder and contract? I hoped not. I didn’t know. I’ll never know.

I wanted to fuse with the table, to become inanimate. When Alex instructed me to slide down and turn while he tented the sheet over me, I rotated onto my back, feeling the wet stick of cum beneath me, the physical manifestation of my shame.

For the rest of our time, I laid there, hardly able to notice the massage. I hated myself. Hated my body for betraying me. Hated how I hadn’t been able to will my body to stop, how I’d lost control.

I felt, too, like something had been taken from me. I’d never even kissed a boy. And now a man had made me cum. That was supposed to be something special. That was supposed to mean something.

After the massage, Alex stepped out and I pulled my clothes on quickly. I was confused. I’d never felt anything so incredible, and never so powerfully hated myself, within the same hour. I wanted to disappear.

Thirteen years and hundreds of hours of therapy later, as I’m considering whether to model for the Erotic Massage Workshop, I’m thinking about Massage Envy. I’m thinking of bildungsromans and rites of passage and even something like kismet.

When I tell Brandon I think I’m going to do it, place myself in a vulnerable position in front of eager eyes, he replies, “You’re not just doing it for the money, right?”

“No, no,” I assure him.

“Or the story?”

“Definitely not just that,” I say. “It sounds fun!” What a liberating and absurd experience! I pause, then ask, worriedly, “But does taking the money mean I’m, like, legally, a sex worker?”

As soon as the words come out, I feel ashamed. Intellectually, I believe sex work is real work, and that the puritanical legal framework in America is unjust and stupid. Yet here I am, concerned that I’m about to cross a legal line I don’t think should exist in the first place. Worrying it’s unseemly for me to dabble in sex work when I have the privilege of not needing the money. Wondering if this even “counts.”

I shake the thoughts from my head, and text Bo to tell him I’m game.

On the day of the workshop, at the designated time, I check into the fitness studio, the same place where naked yoga is held. Bo is at the front.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Pretty nervous,” I say. “Excited, but nervous.”

He leads me over to the table, muttering comforting things I struggle to pay attention to. Most of the men are already there, standing naked around their massage tables. Then Bo leaves the room to continue checking guys in, and I’m left standing beside a massage table at the center of a semicircle of massage tables, dozens of eyes furtively glancing my way. I’m not sure whether I should undress now or right before the workshop begins, so I split the difference, wait a few minutes, and then undress. While I strip out of my clothes, I avoid direct eye contact with anyone, looking around but not looking anywhere, never letting my gaze linger too long. I take a seat on the table, grateful that the wall of the studio is mirrored, so I can peruse the scene without needing to engage real eyes.

In my peripheral vision, I register that an emaciated old man, butt naked, is walking toward me. Before I can react, he puts one hand on my thigh and reaches out to shake my hand with the other. I mutter some dismissive pleasantries and remove his hand, shifting away from him. He walks away, then right back, this time grabbing my inner thigh and rubbing his semi-erect dick on my leg. I push him away and wave him off. “That’s enough of that, thank you,” I say, sliding off the table I’m sitting on, making it a barrier between us. I immediately beat myself up for my too-polite tone. Still, as he walks away for the second time, his deflated ass makes me sad, and I worry I’ve hurt his feelings, done something wrong.

The start of this workshop does not bode well for the remaining two hours. It feels like a comeuppance for my prior thoughts about doing this as a fun new adventure, about flirting with sex work. I want to bail, but I don’t want to ruin things for Bo. I walk to the front corner of the studio where I’ve left my things and futz with my phone, take a few breaths, then excuse myself to splash water on my face in the bathroom. I tell myself I’ve gotten this far, I have to finish.

When the class is set to begin, Bo directs everyone to their tables, and then pulls me aside. “Minor problem,” he says, and my stomach clenches. “We’ve had a no-show, and an odd number doesn’t really work for a massage clinic.” After a moment of looking around and presumably thinking up a plan, Bo guides me over to a sexy-cute bear cub with dark hair bleached on the ends, the right amount of fur, and a big bubble butt. Bo tells me to choose between two options: Either he can massage me for an hour while Hot Cub serves as a “floater” massaging other workshop attendees, and then massage Hot Cub for an hour while I serve as the floater, or both he and Hot Cub can massage me for an hour, and then Hot Cub and I can switch. The “four hands” option.

I almost take the opportunity to dip out completely. The no-show gives me an out, and a big part of me wants to take it—Hot Cub is game to participate as the model, so I wouldn’t be ruining the class.

But I want to see this through. I let Bo choose. We go with the four-hands option.

“Welcome to the Erotic Massage Workshop,” Bo says, then launches into his spiel about how we’re going to learn five techniques for outer anal massage and nineteen for penile stimulation. Bo introduces me and Hot Cub to the class. I wave awkwardly.

I’m the model for the first hour, so I climb onto the table as Bo says that we’ll be starting face down. I’m nervous, but the nerves are keeping me soft, which is probably good for now, while we’re learning the outer anal massage techniques. I’ll need to save up for demo-ing the dick massage later. Hot Cub is absentmindedly massaging my legs, my back, my ass while Bo demonstrates the techniques for the class.

As I settle face down, I’m feeling really good. I love massage, love the feel of the oil. After that time with Alex, massage became an important part of my wellness regimen, after a few years’ delay. This is gonna be good, I think, starting to enjoy myself. I think about how beautifully poetic, how full circle this is, a symbolic bookend to the shame I felt with Alex. A redemption. A reclaiming.

Then Bo’s voice snaps me out of my reverie.

“One way to get access to the area is to pull a knee up like this,” he says, moving my leg into a frog position, his forearm caressing my crack and hole. “Or, if it’s more comfortable, hands and knees. Mark, can you . . . ?” he asks.

“Yep!” I say, too chipper, as I climb into tabletop position. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on my breathing. This is moving really fast. Now I’m worried I’m supposed to be hard, but I’m not yet, because I’m worried I’m supposed to be. We’ve quickly sailed past my comfort zone. We’re in the zone of what I wish I was comfortable with. What I’m intellectually comfortable with, but still feel myself having a visceral, clenching reaction against. I push through. What is there to be ashamed of, even? I ask myself. But shame refuses to oblige logic.

“You okay?” Bo whispers to me.

“Yep,” I say again.

“You’ll also notice this position gives you full access to the penis,” Bo tells the class. The medical term feels out of place, but I don’t have time to dwell on it. He grabs my dick. “We’ll cover those techniques in more detail when we flip over.”

After reviewing the outer anal massage techniques again, Bo sets the class to practice. This first half hour will be face-down, the second face-up, on our backs, and then we’ll switch giver-receiver positions and repeat. The instructor and Hot Cub set to work on me.

I’m more relaxed now, without all eyes on me. I settle back face down, which is more comfortable, and feel one of them spread my legs to the edges of the table for better access.

Ten minutes go by, and it feels great.

And then it feels . . . too great.

I’m worried I’m getting too close. Four-handed massage, it turns out, is a game-changer. We’re only fifteen or twenty minutes in, and I have to model for the dick techniques after this. I prop myself up on my elbow and lean over my shoulder. “Hold off,” I say, “too much, slow down.”

They do for a few minutes, but after a brief reprieve they’re back, one working on my ass, the other on my dick, which is tucked down in the gap between my legs where it’s getting too much attention.

No, no, I think. Not again.

I call over my shoulder again to slow down.

But they don’t hear me, or don’t want to stop.

I do my best to will myself calm, to diffuse the sexual energy into the rest of my body, and for a few seconds, it’s working. And then it isn’t. The cosmic balance is too perfect. I start to prop myself up again and say, “Hold on, hold on. I’m gonna . . . ” and then I finish into someone’s hand. As I come, someone, I’m not sure who, continues to pump me. I shove my face into the pillow in front of me.

“Oh,” Bo says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Oops. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “That’s fine. Just a little change of plan.”

Hot Cub leans down and whispers, damp breath in my ear, “That was hot. Really fucking hot.”

I chuckle, and I appreciate him, but I’m still spiraling. Mostly, I’m worried about the logistics. In about ten minutes I’m supposed to flip over, but I don’t think I’ll be able recharge in time. A darker thought creeps in, too: Was it bad they’d made me come, despite my protest? Despite the fact that it felt great, that I was riding a flood of endorphins? Should I have had a safe word? They didn’t hear me, I tell myself, I wasn’t clear. And regardless, I’d known what I was getting into.

I feel a carryover of the Massage Envy shame. Some censorious moralism that I haven’t successfully battered out of myself. I’d just been jerked off by two pairs of capable hands, and still I wasn’t able to remain present. Much of the time, face down, I’d just been comparing the experience to Massage Envy. Why was I stuck spending time in retrospection when, of all times, I should have been most in the moment?

As I towel off, I worry that others in the class noticed. Meanwhile, Bo has worked out the logistics and swoops in to save me. He proposes that Hot Cub demo the next portion, face up, and then I’ll do the face-up session during the second half. Thank god.

For the next hour, I learn nineteen massage techniques and apply them to Hot Cub. As I glide my oiled hands over his body, the coarse hair of his legs, I look around the room, this sanctuary of touch. Sweaty bodies, focused on one another, some contorted in ecstasy, some blissfully still. This workshop is a marvel. Helping men become more comfortable in their bodies, teaching us, repressed and liberated alike, to find pleasure for pleasure’s sake, something so beyond my worldview at seventeen.

In the past thirteen years, I realize I’ve come really fucking far. I’m still fighting a lot of the shame I was fighting at seventeen, but I don’t feel the same self-loathing I did back then. Not once during this workshop had my father’s judgment interrupted my thoughts—and there was only a transient visit from the ghost of shame past. I could see now that much of the hatred I had felt radiating from my father was really my own insecurity, reflecting back at me. Sure, I was still probably a little too sensitive (both physically and emotionally) to serve as an effective model for this type of thing on the regular. But I’d been brave. I’d gotten through this new, nerve-racking experience, and I felt better for it. More open.

“It looks like you’re enjoying yourself,” Bo says as I reach for the massage oil.

And I am. Throughout the rest of Hot Cub’s massage, I smile the whole time (and only tremble slightly).

When the workshop ends, relaxed and invigorated, slicked in sweat, I’ll put my clothes on. Bo will slip me a Benjamin folded into a tiny square, a funny detail I’ll ascribe to either discretion or a lack of pocket space. I’ll head out to my car, still smiling—flushed, alive—and I’ll text Brandon a picture of me holding my hundred-dollar bill.

But for right now, I’m recharged, and it’s my turn for the face-up portion of the demonstration. Maybe I’ll even let myself enjoy it.

The post A Workshop for Shame and Sexual Energy appeared first on Electric Literature.

The plan was to connect in Dallas from Arizona and land at LaGuardia (that would be the worst part), pick up a rental car at the airport, and have a chill drive to Hudson, New York, land of millennial weddings and trendy second homes, about two hours away. 

But, as too many people had already hinted, the plan was far too ambitious—I’d started feeling sick two cities ago, and I was generally broken down, unraveling in airports. Whatever. I’d started taking mood stabilizers before my tour and was invigorated by the promise of such an extraordinary idea, a stabile mood. 

I’m always excited when I RSVP. 

Another problem with the plan is that it was 2017, which meant that for the past two years, anytime I drove alone at night, anytime I saw blue lights in the rearview, anytime I drove alone on a highway at the mercy of unfamiliar landscapes, and actually, every three days in between—brushing my teeth, or taking my meds, or seeing a bumper sticker about my life mattering, or seeing a commercial about mental health mattering, or if my mind wandered to any future beyond tomorrow—I thought of Sandra Bland. 

On the Dallas flight I could not get water. Twice, I asked the Dolly Parton–blond flight attendant and after making eye contact, she legitimately looked away. After the third time, a young mom in the aisle seat had mercy enough to be a White Savior and go to the back to get me one of those little half bottles. 

From Arizona to Dallas, my requests were ignored to my face—my requests for the one inalienable requirement for being an alive person. I was too tired to feel slighted and invisible, again, in transit, helplessly gawking at the rampant preferential treatment around me, the data and disappointment. And when I was on the ground, what I did every day was perform. I cried in the Dallas terminal bathroom after a white woman bumped me as she passed and didn’t apologize. 

LaGuardia was LaGuardia—I heard someone once describe it, perfectly and hilariously, as akin to a hallway. My plane is hours late and I arrive at the rental car place at almost midnight, tired enough to get a bottle of Coke from the vending machine, and there’s a whole drama in there— a full and properly inconvenient breakdown, everything covered from fear of lifelong loneliness and aloneness, the heaviness of expectation, the self-punishment, never admitting I’m tired, punking out. I had created the mess I was in, and worse, I had created the kind of life that could reap this kind of mess. I even called my parents for an extra serving of I-told-you-so. 

When I finally get my rental car, which is decades younger than mine and too “smart” for me, I seem to circle the same two blocks of Queens in the pitch-dark before pulling over and crying again. It’s pitiful. I hate myself for it. I can’t get the Bluetooth thing to work, I get obsessed with trying to make the Bluetooth thing work, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t think my lights are on, this car is not on my side. I wonder if I should or can or will fold on the wedding. I realistically do not know how to use this car, it is the middle of the night, how shitty is it to cancel right before a wedding? They’d probably already ordered my food, right? 

I don’t want to fail just because I’m alone. I say a bunch of mean things to myself until I decide to go back to the plan. 

Finally on the dark road heading upstate from Queens, empty but for a few semi-trucks, I was scared, hesitating even as I sped up. The whole day was bullying me to give up. Into giving up on myself. I didn’t want to prove myself right. 

It was starting to look like wilderness, which is to say I started to think about Sandra Bland. As I drove I worried: If I were to slip up handling the unfamiliar vehicle and its screens and buttons. If I started frantically and idiotically crying again. If I got tired and drove too slow. If I tried to keep up with other cars and went too fast. If I were to pull over. If I were to be pulled over. If the cop happened to be a white man from the wilderness. No witnesses, one subtle movement in the deep dark, and just what am I doing out here driving this road at this time of night? Why was I alone, where was I going, why are my eyes so red? If they claimed I killed myself, it would be believable, everyone knows I have suicidal thoughts. 

Anything could happen. Anybody could say anything happened. 

After her death in 2015, Sandra Bland visited my thoughts daily; now I’m down to just once a week. I google her name, irrationally hoping the cause of death will have a different word after its colon. It’s not just that she was around my age, it’s how the death ruling is so effective and final. It’s her smile, and how the word suicide shut her up for good. How she was starting a new job the next week. How she acknowledged her mental illness. The video she posted, eloquent and passionate and proudly Black, condemning police brutality. She was pulled over for a broken taillight (ain’t it always that?), and after that, “hanged herself” in a cell at the empty jail. 

I already knew the stakes of Driving While Black, how they fluctuated county line to county line (that part we’d known since Till), how important it was to be faultless, and how that probably wouldn’t matter in the end. When I see someone’s on my tail and I’m already doing close to eighty, I just think, that person must not be Black. 

Risk. Our particularly heightened sense of doom produces in us a skill for continually and quickly evaluating risk. An additional region of the brain is devoted to this analysis, gathering sensory information in order to be one step ahead. Two or three if you can make it. Otherwise, hide. You never know what they can get away with in the dark. 

Every Black person has a victim who hits hardest. Whose death at the hands of the police changes everything—about how and how often you step off the front porch, how you interpret every gaze at the grocery store, whether or not and whom you date, the list of ambitions you hope to accomplish before it’s your turn. 

Back at the rental car office, I admit defeat and return the keys. That night, instead of staying with friends, I sleep at a hotel in Flushing that’s also an all-night karaoke bar. 

I’m what you call a “high-functioning” depressive. Which is a fancy way of saying I can “pass” as someone not having a nervous breakdown, even when I am, that my depressive episodes seem, for other people, to come “out of nowhere.” Being a Black woman is another way to say I can “pass” for someone unneeding and undeserving of help. A high-functioning single Black woman: redundantly no one’s concern. 

The next morning it’s back to the suitcases, all the effort, no witnesses.

Excerpted from You Get What You Pay For copyright © 2024 by Morgan Parker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

The post The Stakes of Driving While Black Are Unconscionably High appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Did you hear about Ralph Yarl?” I ask George, my 17-year-old Black son on Tuesday night, five days after a white man in Missouri shot the 16-year-old Black child in the head and chest for knocking on his door; three days after a man in another state shot at a car that’d pulled into his driveway to turn around—20 year olds lost on their way to a party, and no cell service in those woods—killing the woman in the passenger seat; two days after a white student on my husband’s campus called in a shooter threat and my son and I had spent some of Sunday and Monday worrying—not for the life of his dad, whom we knew was unharmed, but for what it might be like to feel safe in this world again; the same day two cheerleaders in Texas were shot for mistakenly opening a car door in the dark, thinking it was their car. What has happened in this country that shooting at strangers has become our answer? What triggers our fears so deeply? Or is it that we’ve always been this scared and now just everyone has a gun?

George nods, keeps his eyes on Football Manager, sighs softly like his father might, sounding older than he is, and at a distance. I think he wishes he believed that if he knocked on the wrong door, sent to collect his younger siblings, this couldn’t happen to him. I think he wishes it were as simple as this world being so sad. He makes that sound, like he’s sighing from far away, and is it my job to bring him closer to this fear, or to let him stay distant?

“I tried to start watching a new show with George tonight, but he just played Football Manager on the couch next to me,” I’d texted my husband Ngoni an hour earlier. My second son and I, living alone most of the time these days, have been bonding over TV shows and Martin Scorsese films. 

“Sometimes just being in the same room is enough for George,” Ngoni reminded me. Sometimes George and I consume content together so it can be discussed and dissected and understood. Sometimes we just sit on the couch together—parallel play, they called it when we were talking about two year olds. I can still do that. I can always do that. 

“Do you remember the night I told you about the shooting at the Sandy Hook school?” I ask next. He’d been just one year older than those children, too. 

“Nope,” he says, looking up from Football Manager with annoyance. I’m taking this too far, his eyes tell me. I stop talking and scroll through my phone and realize my second son doesn’t remember an America where the school children weren’t being killed by guns. I stop talking and scroll through my phone and wonder what Ralph Yarl’s brothers thought about when he never arrived to collect them. 

“I’m kind of heavy from the news this week,” I text Julius, my first son, in New York on Wednesday after we’ve had an exchange about his day at school and he’s asked how I am. 

“Can I call?” he texts. Would the answer ever—ever—be no? 

“I can’t imagine an America without racism,” I tell him when I pick up, “but I can imagine one without guns.” I don’t add that my imagination paints a giant magnet in the sky sucking up all our weapons, finite metal objects to be collected and destroyed. “And even still with racism, that would be better.”

“That would be better,” Julius agrees. “But every time something like this happens, I think we’re stretching and stretching and it just means the breaking point is coming sooner.” He’s talking about his favorite topic: when the nation states fail and news media is revealed to be the façade he’s long known it to be, and we rebuild society from the bottom. He really believes this day is coming. It’s his only hope in this world and who am I to say he’s wrong? Do I want him to be wrong?

“It’s not only race,” I tell George on the couch. “A young white woman was killed when the car she was riding in drove into the wrong driveway and the owner of the house came out shooting.” Why do I feel compelled to tell him this? Do I tell him this so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only target?  

A detail I keep back: as the bird flies, this one happened around the corner. I want these things to only happen far from us. I want to pretend the Trump signs we drive by on our way to my mother’s house, the mall, the train station aren’t indications that this could happen to us. White mama, Black boy, side by side in a little orange car. If it breaks down? If we get lost and turn around in the wrong driveway? If I have an aneurysm and George runs for help? Knocks on the wrong door? 

“I think this is all about covid,” Ngoni will say over FaceTime on Wednesday night. “Two years of lockdown made everyone so much more paranoid.”

“I think this is all about guns,” I will say. My phone will be propped on my bedside table while I fold laundry. He will be ironing his shirt for the next day. In this new life of jobs at different colleges, we talk every night on FaceTime, but we sometimes don’t look at each other’s faces. “Fine to be paranoid, but if everyone didn’t have a gun, would Ralph Yarl just have been threatened with a baseball bat, plenty of time to outrun the old man? Would that girl Julius’s age still be alive?”

As a child I worried my mother had been in a car accident each time she was late to pick me up, that she’d drop a cigarette on the floor in her sleep and the house would burn down, that the airplane she was traveling in would fall out of the sky. The children today, their fears. I can’t begin to catalog them, or how much more likely they are to happen. 

“Sometimes I think I just want to write my book, that that’s the contribution I should make,” Julius tells me through my AirPods. I want him to think exactly that thing and not any other thing. “But other times I think I have different skills. Maybe I could make a difference, ignite the next phase. But do you know three of the original BLM leaders died under mysterious circumstances?” He talks for a time, sources confusing and maybe exclusive to TikTok—which he would shame me for not trusting—asking: what if he became a leader of the movement and was killed by the CIA? 

“It won’t be the CIA,” Ngoni will tell me over FaceTime in a few hours. I won’t ask who it will be. “But I’m glad he’s asking these questions. It means he’s not among the apathetic of his generation.” I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you. Just let my sons live their lives in peace, let them find joy and meaning, and later, so so much later, let them die of old age. This is my only wish. 

“Do you ever feel scared driving around in this town?” I ask George just one more question on the couch. I know he’s tiring of this, of me. But then I feel something else beyond his silent shaking head. A sweaty foot still in its sock pressing against the crook of my elbow. Casually. Like maybe my elbow is in the way but he’s not worried, we can share this space. Sometimes it’s enough to just be in the same room. Now I won’t move for fear of breaking the connection. I sit slightly sideways also, so casual and maybe not on purpose, but my body maintains the pressure against his body, so his body knows that his mother is here on the couch next to him, always. I scroll through my phone like I care what it says. 

Would he tell me if he were afraid?

I am so scared I will lose my sons to this world. 

“Before Sertraline, I used to think about all this stuff so much more,” Julius tells me through AirPods, “and I feel guilty about that. Like the medicine is just the same propaganda as everything else, a happy pill we take to keep us quiet.” 

Ngoni will tell me over FaceTime in a few hours that propaganda isn’t the word he means and I’ll mutter something about our son being 20 and thinking it is the word he means and that isn’t the point, really. The point is that Julius might be considering going off his antidepressants because he thinks that might help him save the world, and these concentric circles frighten me on different levels I don’t have the words to express. They have something to do with me never wanting my sons to carry a gun and how the revolution he’s discussing won’t be peaceful; they have something to do with me worrying that grandiose thinking is a thing my first son has in common with my father, and does that mean it’s a sign of schizophrenia?

“I need to do the dishes,” I say after George’s sweaty foot slides away and he readjusts himself to sit with the laptop on his lap and Football Manager (his team is winning!) running his emotions. But I come right back into the living room because I suddenly very badly need to apologize for scaring him so late at night (it’s 8:20) and bringing him into this broken land in the first place and asking him to try to survive here when the world he experiences is a world I will never experience or understand and who was I to think our children would inherit a better one? But he’s not in the living room anymore, he’s downstairs now, standing outside the basement door, thinking—maybe—that I don’t know what he does out there. Or thinking—more likely—that I do. That I get it. Smoke wafts up my windows. 

“Let’s look at this structurally,” my therapist will say over Zoom on Friday morning, and I’ll wonder what she could mean. “All three of your men are in danger in this country, and your sons are both exhibiting signs of fear. Julius, for lack of a better word, through paranoia—” and I’ll wince. I will know she does not mean paranoia and I will know that she does. And I know that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, and I know that paranoia is the first word in one of my father’s diagnoses and I know that in addition to being afraid, so very afraid, that I will lose my children to this country, I am also afraid I will lose them to my father’s disease. But I breathe and I listen. “And George by numbing out.” And this I can hear. 

I spend so much time fighting the anxiety, sometimes I forget that its job is to cover the fear. I forget how to tease it apart from the fear and sit with these things separately. “Anxiety is a constant, obnoxious force,” my therapist will say, and I’ll think about a child from grammar school, always buzzing in my ear when I was trying to learn science. “But fear, like grief, will come and go, and the trick is to learn to sit with it, and to breathe.” 

I’ll recognize that it does come and go, the fear, and I’ll think about how I learned to put my fears in a box as a child. (Brick houses don’t burn down, stop worrying. But then the brick house across the street burned down.) And that fear closed away opens the door to anxiety. 

“I am feeling some of the awfulness of the world after this week in the news,” I text my mother when she asks me how I am on Thursday morning. 

“The news this week is awful,” she responds. “I am only happy the stupid old man didn’t manage to kill Ralph Yarl.”

“Me too, that kid is a wonder,” I type across state lines to my mother, not asking if she knows he ran away after being shot twice, that he knocked on three doors before someone helped him. Not asking if she knows what his brothers were thinking when he never came to collect them. “The girl in Hebron, NY, tho. The cheerleaders in TX. When did we become such paranoid people? Ngoni says covid. I say: when they gave every American a gun.”

“Or when we decided it was okay to own other people,” my mom types back faster than is typical for her poor eyesight and arthritic thumbs. “Always knowing deep down it was wrong and indefensible.”

And then she adds in a text bubble all its own: “Hence guns.”

My mother. How many 83-year-old white women in this country would throw down slavery as the cause of it all in one simple text, making her daughter feel so much less alone?

“Up to pee and this thought occurs to me,” I will type to Julius—who I know leaves his phone on silent—at 3:23 am on Thursday, on what will become my first sleepless night in a long time. “You might have thought about all this stuff more pre Sertraline, but you weren’t able to do anything about it bc of being too depressed to act/move/do. What if Sertraline allows you just enough freedom from that to be the very thing that gives you the ability to do something about it all?”

At 9:04, before he’ll even have seen the first text, I’ll be just out of the shower and will text him a Spotify link to Mos Def’s “UMI Says,” and hope he gets the message. It’s a song I sent George some months ago, too, after a similar conversation justifying antidepressants. Who can shine their light on this world without them?

One fall night last year, George and I drove through the backwoods of Massachusetts on our way home from a soccer game, and he spoke about beauty in nature and the end of the world. 

“I know I’ll live to see a world without trees,” he said, looking at the trees all around. I strained not to see them, to imagine not being able to see them. “I need to paint all this before it’s too late, so we can remember.” 

I’d recently hung one of his paintings on the wall, a landscape based on the view of trees and grass and sky from our back stoop, but all purples and reds and dark blues. That it is recognizable as our backyard speaks to his talent. That it represents how he sees this world speaks to his mind. 

“I’ve been thinking about life after society has crumbled,” he said, and I asked if he’s scared to live in that world. I am so scared to live in that world. 

“No,” he said quietly. Confidently. 

“Because you feel equipped for it?” 

“Humans adapt,” he said. “We always have.”

We were quiet for a moment, though I was certain it was my job to say something next. Instead, he continued: “I’ve been thinking about what it’s my responsibility to fix, since I was born into this moment.” 

Overwhelmed with all there is to fix, I sighed and put my hand on the back of his neck, thankful he was born into this moment. That he’ll find what to fix in it.  

Tonight George will have his friends over for homemade pizza—he and Ngoni built a wood-burning oven during the first covid summer, and he dried it out for the season last night; inaugural pizzas for him and his girl. He’ll blend his homemade tomato sauce, mix the dough in my KitchenAid, shred the cheese all over the counter. His friends in this small New England town are all white and they won’t talk much about Ralph Yarl. They’ll giggle and share stories about college visits they made during April break and smoke some weed and eat some pizza. And Ngoni will come home while they’re out there, pulling into the driveway like he does every second Friday night, like it’s home. I’ll pull the casserole out of the oven and wipe my hands on my apron and put on lipstick when I hear his car (just kidding; I’ll be wearing sweatpants and flip flops and dinner will be takeout; he’ll be tired and grouchy from a long day and a long drive and barely kiss me hello) and I’ll watch him walk up the stairs with his suitcase, like he’s checking into a hotel. Tomorrow, George will go to work at the restaurant where he’ll impress the rest of the staff with his maturity and cooking skills as he does every Saturday, and Ngoni and I will take down the corn house he built a few years ago to keep the squirrels out, which collapsed under two feet of March snow. The sun will shine, or it’ll be cloudy. The dog will chase the ball I throw for him. Or he’ll lie in the grass and watch for deer. George will come home from work smelling like bacon. Or—. 

We’ll breathe.

The post I’m Afraid I’m Going To Lose My Boys To This Country appeared first on Electric Literature.

If you answered Poor Things, you’re right. If you answered Barbie, you’re also right.

Both films have been applauded as expert examples of empowering parables about the adversities of being a woman. However, their critiques of capitalism and patriarchy —packaged in delicious pastels and tightly wrapped with a coquettish bow, and delivered with a cutesy wink—are ultimately shallow. Hailing either film as a feminist triumph would be like saying “WAP” solved misogyny in hip-hop or that Lean In eliminated systemic sexism. 

Don’t get me wrong, I loved both movies. Mark Ruffalo gave one of his best performances as the delightfully louthe Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things, while Barbie perfected the cotton candy landscape of my dreams. But despite the enchantment of watching them on the big screen, I couldn’t help but lament the misguided nature of calling either film a “feminist masterpiece.”

In Poor Things, a sexy and pregnant Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is revived from a suicide attempt by a maimed surgeon (Willem Dafoe), who transplants her baby’s brain into her skull to revive her, essentially rendering her both mother and child. 

Let’s dissect that: A man neglects an unconscious woman’s bodily autonomy by cutting her open and further violates her by sticking her unborn child’s brain in her head. And he’s supposed to be one of the sympathetic ones! There’s also the fact that for most of the film, she calls him God. 

The film starts in black and white and transforms into opulent vibrancy with Bella’s first orgasm. There are interesting threads to pull on: How would a woman without shame, a hedonist who follows pleasure and indulgence—eating pasteis de nata until she pukes orange sludge, rubbing her clitoris at the breakfast table—perform in polite society? How does shame get instilled throughout our upbringings and reinforced via social disdain? In what I consider one of the film’s biggest missed opportunities, Poor Things avoids delving into these provocations, instead focusing on the transformation of her obsession with sex from pure pleasure to labor.

During one extended vignette, Bella works at a brothel in what is supposed to be a celebration of her cavalier attitude toward sex and a symbol of her increasing agency. It’s the oldest profession, why shouldn’t she engage in the simple demand/supply of it all? “We are our own means of production!” Bella shouts at Duncan, in what is supposed to be an empowered cry of agency. However, the film shies away from actually analyzing the circumstances that often force women into sex work, as well as the dangers that often befall women in the industry; her foray at the brothel is depicted as without consequence, frivolous, played for shock value alongside the repeated gag of Bella’s bored face during a male client’s furious humping. 

Barbie is the sanitized sibling of the often-crude Poor Things, and suffers from a similar depthlessness. While behind-the-scenes female involvement incorporated more interiority (Poor Things was written and directed by men, based on a book by a man), Barbie is at its core a feature-length commercial proselytizing Barbie’s official slogan: You can be anything! But what this hackneyed message airbrushes is the lack of agency millions of women face due to inequitable social systems. The women who don’t have the privilege of choice.

Instead, Barbie exults: The world would be a utopia if women were in charge! Yes, capitalism is bad, but not if we had more female millionaires! The system isn’t broken but only cracked around the edges; gender equality is the caulk to seal the world back together. 

Of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the prolific cultural critic bell hooks wrote: “It is as though Sandberg believes a subculture of powerful elite women will emerge in the workplace, powerful enough to silence male dominators. Her optimism is so affably intense, it encourages readers to bypass the difficulties involved in challenging and changing patriarchy so that a just moral and ethical foundation for gender equality would become the norm.” hooks may as well have been talking about Barbie. 

Much like Barbie, Bella is treated as a doll—an object to be played with and rendered silent. When the impolitely candid Bella makes a scene at dinner with her displeasure for the food and her desire to sock a crying baby at a neighboring table (honestly, relatable!), Duncan pushes her against a wall: “You will rejoin the table and will confine yourself to the following three phrases: ‘how marvelous,’ ‘delighted,’ and ‘how do they get the pastry so crisp?’” Once Barbie’s Ken learns of patriarchy in the Real World, he returns to Barbieland, evicts Barbie, and transforms her Dreamhouse to a preposterously hyperbolic bachelor pad known as the “Mojo Dojo Casa House.” Men in these films are so cartoonishly villainous that the best ones are seen in a compassionate light simply because they are not as bad as the others. Ramy Yousseff’s character—God’s protege and Bella’s betrothed—is a “good guy” simply because he does not condemn Bella’s sex work. The standards we have for men are so low!

Both films portray patriarchy as simple, straightforward—all wolf whistles and ass groping—as if the daily fear of men that women live with in the real world is not insidious, textured, and often times subtle. Although not without its flaws, the 2020 film Promising Young Woman deftly shows how sometimes the most dangerous men are the self-proclaimed “nice guys” who own koozies embroidered with feminist slogans. Or “Cat Person,” the viral New Yorker short story turned film, which catalogs the dark psyche of a man who does not get what he feels entitled to. 

Poor Things is supercilious yet silly, cramming in a bunch of sociopolitical topics without dedicated dissection. The frivolity makes the 2.5 hour run-time feel like a slap in the face. As Bella becomes progressively progressive, she donates to the poor, attends socialist meetings, and blithely comments on the fragility of hysterical men. All this evolution gets undermined when the film ends with her sipping a cocktail with her queer lover while commanding a zombie Bella 2.0 to fetch more drinks in her cloistered, opulent mansion. 

Similarly, Barbie ends with the titular character’s voluntary transformation into a real girl. The evil Mattel executives agree to produce a “regular Barbie,” a doll that eschews beauty standards because the concept will make the company boatloads of money. Barbie apologizes to Ken, men are included in Barbieland, and everyone kumbayas that cooperation is the antidote to an unjust society. 

That both films end with the enlightened dolls recreating and upholding the same systems that they spend the entire plots undermining is a convenient absolution. Are Mattel executives forgiven for the damage they’ve caused through endless endorsements of unrealistic beauty standards because it cheekily pokes fun at itself through the film’s depiction and recognition of their boardroom sausage fest? Does the male gaze in Poor Things get a pass because the woman in question is a libertine exhibitionist, unashamed and unabashed? These happy, Hollywood endings promote the feeling of victory without asking who the true winners are. 

While I thoroughly enjoyed both movies and would happily consume their cotton candy fluff again, upholding either as the zenith of feminist commentary disallows a future where truly nuanced films don’t get their due credit. For all of its preoccupation on Bella’s vagina, not once do we hear of her ability for menstruation or motherhood; there’s a singular shot where she lingers on the cesarean scar that birthed her but that introspection is not deepened beyond the discovery of her origin. And despite Barbieland’s representation of plus-sized, Black, Brown, Asian and disabled women, it is important to remember that diversity (especially when most of them are silent and perfunctory) does not equal inclusion. I want a Poor Things where Bella discovers the horrors and joys of menstruation for the first time! I want a Barbie where two Barbies kiss! Namely, I want films that paint the whole messy mural of feminine spectra. To settle for anything less would be a disservice to whichever plastic dream—or real—world we exist in.

The post I Loved “Barbie” and “Poor Things” but Neither Film Is a Feminist Masterpiece appeared first on Electric Literature.