femmoirs

[femmoirs]

The awakening

Her nose pressed against the foggy glass of the train’s window as she peered outside. She watched as the silvery towers of the Upper East Side blurred into heady forest greens; rolling hills; forlorn diners; sleepy cabins; rivers, like her, going nowhere. She watched, and took a deep breath, and she paused to savor the feeling of deep breathing; she couldn’t recall the last time she’d breathed, really breathed.

She had brought with her on the train a single chest of possessions, and a purse with immediate necessities and her favorite reading pamphlets. She left behind everything else, including a fiance and a lover, and it had been easy.

On that July morning, she thought of her fiance, standing at the altar, waiting for what would never come; when she closed her eyes, she could hear his nervous yet even laugh as he assured their assembled hundreds of friends and family — including a Senator, a coterie of formidable real estate moguls, and European royalty — that she would be there soon, that all was well. She thought of her lover, frantically beating down the door of her apartment, come to beg her to change her mind, only to be told by bridesmaids and servants that they hadn’t seen or heard from her all morning. She loved that woman, she loved every aspect of that woman, but there was no place for the two of them, together, in this current world, and she did not feel particularly burdened with the tall task of spearheading change.

From her window seat on the train, she watched the steady, menacing gathering of clouds in the sky as a summer storm brewed outside. Methodically, tirelessly, she counted the beads of rain as they dripped down her window, as if a solution to inner peace and stability might be achieved if only she could count each one.

As she counted, she thought of the chaos; the stupor; the rage, trauma, humiliation she’d left behind without a word, and a delirious laugh escaped her lips, as if she were a mere onlooker of a life that was not her own, an audience member viewing a Shakespearean tragedy. She thought of her own life with a sense of deep removal, and it was invigorating, liberating, even.

In her purse, an engagement gift of hand-crafted leather and generous pearl embroidery, she carried a wad of cash enough to support a comfortable, cross-coastal journey to San Francisco, and had wired the rest of the contents of her bank account to a close friend from her boarding school days, including a note to expect her soon. Over the span of a few hours the evening before, just after the rehearsal dinner of her wedding banquet, she had gone to the bank and created a new life for herself — a life far away from the ceaseless tensions, miseries, and deep contrasts of the life her family had created for her.

It was a life that had been the envy of nearly every woman in the city, watching from the outside-in, awestruck. She was certain they would puzzle for days over why she had run away, perhaps even suspect she had been snatched against her will, murdered, even. They would never understand the private suffering, the backdoor indignities, the psychological violence of it all — but not for lack of empathy. Their misunderstanding was not cruelty. Are we not all women? she thought to herself. Socialized to want the same things, to see each other as competition to our access to those things? Eventually, the skies cleared, the sun dipped behind the hills, the moon peaked out from behind lingering, wispy strands of silver, and still, she was thinking. For women, our happiness is fabrication, not real, predicated on a myth of male construction, that this and that alone will make us happy, that this and that we must sacrifice to be happy, that whatever pains we feel on that male-constructed path to happiness, we must feel in silence.

She thought of the older sister whose hand she had held as that beloved sister lost a child, and wept and mourned in the confines of her bedroom, then was dressed and smiling on her husband’s arm at a state dinner hours later. She thought of another sister, her face stoic as she beat at bruises created by a cruel husband, concealed them beneath layers of Chanel formula, then went downstairs and smiled as she greeted dinner guests in the foyer.

She thought of how misery, for women, happens behind closed doors, so that other women will continue to look on and desire their lives, aspire to their lives, then soon be subjected to that same misery, also behind closed doors. She thought of how misery is private, lonely, isolating, and she breathed a sigh of relief that, for the time being, she’d narrowly escaped it.

When she stepped off the train, she took yet another deep breath, cold ocean air filling her lungs, her veins, her spirit. She lit a cigarette and felt herself smile, and then she looked around, really looked around, and for the first time in her life, she allowed herself to wonder.

[femmoirs]

roses

On the Day He Hurt Her, she knelt on the hardwood of her bedroom floor, scrubbed her blood from its glossy surface, and she forced her mind to wander aimlessly through her grandfather’s rooftop garden in Manila. She thought of the colors of its flowers, vibrant reds and blushing pinks and fiery oranges, she thought of the kindness of his wrinkled smile, the roughness of his big hand in hers as he toured her around the garden’s perimeter, naming each plant.

There was so much blood. She scrubbed harder, more frantically now, that her father might come home from work at any minute, and she couldn’t be found naked on hands and knees in a pool of her own blood. At least it isn’t carpet, she thought, and she remembered standing in the doorway of her bedroom as a girl, watching her father on hands and knees, sanding and painting the floors after tearing out the matted old carpet that had once been there, at her request.

She thought of her father and her grandfather when she went to bed that night, wondering if men were good. And she tried to think of Him, but her mind wouldn’t allow it; all it could conjure was the distant sound of the front door closing downstairs behind him when he left. He hadn’t even been able to close it properly; upon coming home, her mother remarked the door had been left ajar, and asked her if she had wanted for the house to be broken into, if she had wanted to be killed. “No,” she said.

Now, lying still on her back and wishing that sleep might take her, she kept thinking of the door. Are men so weak? Is that why they hurt girls?

When sleep did take her, she watched her body from afar. She knew it was her body, yet it looked so different: thin, brittle, pale. Void of the melanin for which her father’s parents so routinely shamed her. Void of the womanly features that seemed to draw inescapable jeering and derision everywhere she walked. Her dream-self lay in a field of forest green grass, alone for miles. She watched and waited for something to happen, anything; and when the flowers began to grow and bloom, she didn’t notice, at first. The deep red crept from the crevice of her white thighs slowly, inconspicuously, like the drip of benign blood. And then she watched the blood form rose petals, and she listened to her grandfather hum a folk song, the one he always hummed as he watered a crop of roses in his rooftop garden. She listened and watched as rose after rose bloomed from that most intimate place, until her body was gone and it was all just roses. Still, she waited, waiting for nothing and everything. More roses bloomed, one after the other, and then, from somewhere far, far away, she heard her own voice, small and sad: “Will you ever come back? Will you ever say you’re sorry? What are you thinking about, right now? Are you thinking of me?”

She woke from the dream slowly, and then all at once. And finally, unceremoniously, she allowed herself to cry.

[femmoirs]

la

It doesn’t rain so often in LA, but when it does, the city stops. Already we move at such a slow pace—bumper-to-bumper traffic; suit-clad professionals stopping in the streets to marvel at the tent cities, the homelessness, the suffering, all so tangential to their own lives, so tangential yet inescapable.

We live suspended in a perpetual slow crawl, from one obligation to another; work then drinks then home on a weekday, shopping and dinner at The Grove, drinks in downtown, a few clubs in West Hollywood, on a weekend. Life in slow motion.

Sometimes when your Lyft halts at the intersection, you peer outside the window of the passenger side, dream up stories about the pedestrians that pass you by outside, and you wonder if this is the closest you’ve ever come to really knowing someone.

Sometimes when it’s 3 a.m. and I reach for and find you awake, when you hold me and fill me and it’s all a haze of sleepy ecstasy, outside the window we hear horns honked, brakes slammed, profanities shouted, and we have to stop and laugh. Real life is inescapable. LA is not Calabasas.

LA is slow and the slowness is cruelty in ways those foreign to our land would never understand. We spend so much of our lives in cars, forced to sit in our feelings our grief our rage anxiety pain loss loneliness, and we can’t move, and we can only think. Think what we’ve done and where we’re going and wonder if that’s nowhere. And sometimes, when it’s raining and the car is wading through traffic at 7 miles per hour, it feels like nowhere, indeed.

[femmoirs]

do you think of me when we’re not together

I like the way you think, the words you say and the way you say them, unassuming and certain, all in the same breath.

I like the way you dress, muted colors and deep V’s and long, shapely legs, the way you walk in such a hurry and I wish you were walking to me.

I like the way you laugh, the secretive tilt of your head, the flash of heat in your dark, dark eyes. You are so beautiful and you don’t even know it.

Once you asked if I think of you when we’re not together, and I said, “I try not to.” It would take up my whole day, consume me for hours, if I allowed myself to. Already I see you in everything, everywhere I go—the smoothness of your touch in water; the feeling of your breathing, heavy and urgent when I hold you, in the unrestrained autumn wind; the sound of your mind in claps of thunder. I can’t afford to let myself ponder the vastness of your person, I think I would get lost at sea like an Elizabethan explorer in search of the New World. Isn’t it crazy? That you are one person and everything all at once. I hold onto you in my mind as if hanging off a cliff: I can’t let go.

[femmoirs]

[femmoirs]

Oregon, United States | by David Alacaraz

[femmoirs]

Nightmare.

Last night I had a nightmare

That one day, I’d wake up

And forgive you.

When I hurt you, I hurt myself.

When I love you, I hurt myself.

Desire like ice, pain like fire

My mind, the prisoner of my heart,

And my body is the cage.

[femmoirs]

The girl who loved you.

I wonder what it must be like — to lie in bed alone on a warm summer night, arms aching with desire to hold her: the girl who loved you, the girl you let go. To know that you were wrong, to know there is nothing you could do to make this right. What did you think would happen when you told her good-bye? In your brazen short-sightedness, what did you imagine? A girl more beautiful, more passive, more ambivalent? That was what you wanted, right? A pretty girl without a thought in her head, not a grown woman who made you think of wife and duty and honor. There you were, thinking you were trading in an old, reliable house for a sports car, and where are you now? What do you have, now? What a cliche. A man leaves a good, faithful woman, man goes on to feel regret. So what makes this any different you might ask? She wasn’t like that, before she met you — steady, devoted and, in your eyes, perpetually needy. That was a part of her long hidden that came out because she loved you. That was the girl who loved you. And now, she is gone. She bid you good-bye with tears in her eyes because you gave her no other choice, and now she is gone. And you can never have her back.

[femmoirs]

Autumn .

Summer, the season of light hearts and flighty lovers

Time of warm nights and lonely, sweat-stained sheets

Fresh berries, hard kisses, bundles of daises

Think: temporary as an ocean breeze on a beach in August

And when it passes we are left with crunchy leaves, crisp air and solitude

Autumn is a time of depth and mourning

You must find a hand to hold and sturdy arms to fall into

In summer we are all as birds, fluttering to and fro each other on a whim

In autumn you must hold and not let go

When the leaves begin to change you will watch him go without regret

A last hard kiss that will taste of crushed berries and nostalgia

And in the night you will dream of fireplaces and red wine, hazy lazy lovemaking and desire like reliance

The whispered words, “I am yours and you are mine.”

[femmoirs]

modernity

street lamps

I listen to the uncertain click of my heels on the wet pavement; I’m off the subway, above ground now. Raw, wet air floods my lungs, casually informing me that a brutal storm has just passed. 

It’s 2 in the morning, and the elusive glimmer of street lamps is just enough to remind me of the wine stains blotted across my dress shirt; ivory, linen, the most vulnerable to this sort of thing. I pause to question what happened tonight. 

Then I can see his apartment building; it’s so much closer than mine, it looms over me and I close my eyes, imagine his breath against my neck. 

It’s late and I’m not in a great part of town, but more than anything I just want to see, to be with him; it’s a physical ache I can feel in my bones. Momentarily, I reach for my phone. But I’m just not drunk enough.

candles

When you touch me, I close my eyes, look into the face of death. I am pulled under, suffocated, at a loss for the very autonomy that I have always known to be the mark of human life. I am consumed by you, I am my own victim, crushed by the weight of my desire, my addiction. It’s my problem, not yours. I could not leave if I wanted to; sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. You are the flames, the inferno that swallows me whole within a pyre.

But when I touch you, you don’t blink, your smile holds. I am as a flickering candle in your sunny, well-lit world. Pretty, enjoyable, but at the end of the day, just a disposable accessory. You could take a breath, I’d be gone, and you might just shrug, look up at your sun, smile.

flicker

I breathe in, he breathes out. He pulls me in deeper, harder, flesh burns against flesh. There is only darkness; there is only stillness, whispered words, the tangible heat of our longing. Window shutters block the light of the corner street lamp; the candles burnt out hours ago. His face dips, his lips brush against mine. I can see nothing, but make out the flicker of his eyelids, and I imagine the uncertainty they conceal as I lie still in the darkness. 

There is no light to guide our path forward, just that flicker of his eyelids like an unhelpful street lamp in the midst of a storm, a stub of a candle in a power outage.

Again, he blinks, then reaches, pulls me deeper.

[femmoirs]

what is escape

I think escape can be an abstract concept, when you put distance between yourself and reality, a state of mind as much as it is, of being. Maybe it’s in the blunt you pass me, a dreamy satisfied look on your face after we’ve finished. Maybe it’s in the puff-puff that passes through my lips as I exhale your name. Maybe it’s the feeling of your hand laced in mine as we stroll through the aisles of Barnes & Noble on a Sunday morning, or in your car when we’re mumbling Lana Del Rey lyrics on the way to some diner for brunch.

Or maybe it’s got nothing to do with you. Maybe escape is Thursday night alone in my room, sitting at the foot of my bed painting my nails. Maybe it’s sipping unsweetened coffee from the ceramic mug of an ex; or is it in the five minute drive to the drug store to refill on cheap foundation, humming to the mainstream shit on the radio. Maybe it’s in those frigid moments that feel like eternity, waiting naked outside the shower for the water to warm.

I guess I don’t really know. I think it’s the not knowing that will prevent me from ever achieving it, from achieving escape.

[femmoirs]

under the table

You can touch me under the table, behind closed doors, in the tender hours before the sun. You can touch me when the world is still, when there’s no one awake to cast their merciless judgments. But draw the curtains, close the blinds; and smile at me with guilt in your eyes because you know how much this would hurt her, destroy her – God knows, it wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t.

It would mean nothing at all if you didn’t.

We can be a secret to warm my blood on cold nights, a secret to keep tight between my thighs. We can be a thought I’ll fixate on, one I’ll distract myself with between searching for purpose in the raindrops on my window pane, playing with wrists and knives, humming children’s lullabies between sobs.

And I know every level on which we’re wrong, I can name each one but can’t count all on both hands. I know the moral gray is in the rear view mirror of your car when we’re tangled up, breathless in the backseat, but it’s a game, isn’t it? The objective is to make me resent myself even more. And you can push me all the way, I’m a leaf in the wind under your touch.

When I’m lying on the floor, it’s 9:17 PM and I’m home from work, staring at the ceiling puzzling over how this day-to-day, this meaningless blur of motions, of fake words and faker smiles, blinks of sleep and routine paper cuts, has become my reality. The very premise of my existence has become all lab rats and chemicals; it’s an experiment, but I’m unsure of how to assign the variables. The inquiry: Can I have the thing I crave without consequences? The hypothesis, I’m still developing; I probably can’t, I know on some level that I can’t, but regardless, the consequences seem irrelevant when you look at me and I look at you.

Can I have the thing I crave without consequences?

It’s what I need. You can kiss her lying in a field of daisies, and you can fuck me on a bed of roses, red and violently thorny. It’s what I need.

I don’t need your love, let her have it; I can find it at the bottom of every bottle with my lips, and it’s sweeter. It’s sweeter than your bitter, guilty kisses. I’m egocentric, apathetic toward the ruin this erotic, existential experiment will bring upon others. I’m selfishly fixated on my desires, but I’m not greedy: All I need, and it’s one singular thing, is your touch under the table.

[femmoirs]

if things were different

He is just a plaything for my id – in my head, I know this.

Yet his hold on me transcends the physical, whether I’m tangled up in him, breathless at midnight, or half-asleep, lying deliriously satiated in his arms at 5 in the morning.

I never want to tear myself away, it so breaks me, and that’s why I do it. I’m an emotional masochist, holding on to let go, climbing cliffs merely to hurl myself over the edge. I taunt myself with what I will never actually allow myself to have; and I’ve instead bound myself to another man whose touch I flinch and crumble beneath.

I’ve made it to the door of the motel room. The impending twilight is an ugly, fleshy color in the window behind me. I only know this because I’m looking back, peering over my shoulder at the man I’m leaving behind like they do in all the tried Hollywood romances.

He stirs, looks at me, and I’m still, a deer struck by the headlights of a painfully handsome stranger.

The smile on my lips is so agonized, it betrays my regret. “You know,” I whisper, each word gnawing brutally on my throat, “if things were different…” I don’t need to say it.

“I know,” he says, slowly, sleepily. Then he lies back down with strained apathy.

[femmoirs]

57°F, partly cloudy

Rain is pretty -- inconvenient, yes, but pretty. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, though: It’s the post-rain scene that’s beautiful, and I’m not even alluding to the rainbows. It’s the translucent silver of the clouds when the sun is just beginning to penetrate, the conspicuous specks of blue sky, the rawness of the air. It’s the wet earth, the greener grass, all the accentuated colors. It’s the fresh scent pervading all around, the distinctive coolness you can feel in your bones. It’s like peering through a lens of slowly-drying tears at your smile, broken but hopeful.