Remember that one time, you were biking up a huge hill and you just kept telling yourself, “Slow and steady, slow and steady, just keep pedaling slow and steady and you *will* make it!” And remember how you decided to adopt that mantra in your life to keep yourself focused and encouraged–even though so many times other people zoomed right past you making you doubt where you were in your process and progress toward your dreams?
Well, I just wanted to say thanks–for sticking it out, for not giving up. Because it isn’t all in vain. Because you are becoming. Because things are h a p p e n i n g. Because I’m proud of you. ♥
To my potential-but-not-guaranteed or wholly essential future male life-partner
I come with a proposal
That if we commit to walking down an aisle of marriage
We commit to walking in a certain kind of life
First order of business:
Let’s take an axe and chop down that white picket fence they told us we must live with
And with it let’s burn a fire so hot that we can finally melt that shining armor that Sleeping Beauty cast upon you
Because baby, I am not a damsel in distress
I am not a genetically inferior piece of flesh
I am a woman and I am strength
And surely, I am also mortal dust and weakness too
And there are days when despair weighs so heavily upon my chest that I doubt the possibility of just one more breath
But please don’t try to be my life support when I fear the forces of death
Instead, breathe life with me when I don’t believe in it
Hope with me when I sure as hell don’t see it
Be with me and not in front of me
Surround me but do not cover me
And I will pledge to do nothing but the same to you
Because if my form of feminism is just me taking you over as a head
Then our relationship will still have a violent end
So let us share life together
As the fibers of one flexible neck,
as nurturing breasts upon a single chest
as open hands and not closed fists
as feet that walk in peace when they would rather kick
Cause baby I’ve got big plans
Like us washing the dishes together
You mopping the bathroom floor as I scrub the countertop
And me pumping the basketball as you drive to the court for our next one-on-one
Darling, I’ve got galactic dreams
Of doing silly things like baking for the high schoolers from that sucky-ass garage band
Having the neighbor and his annoying dog over for dinner instead of poisoning it like we sure as hell want to
And listening to the stories of that elderly couple over and over again until we know it better than them
Honey, I want to go to lots of places like
Across the street to the local businesses
Down the corner to the bus stop
And up the road to the park
My love, if we adopt or have children I want to raise them with GREAT ideas
Like…not hating gay people
My sunshine, I want to accomplish mighty things
Like getting over our need to accomplish
I know they told you that you need to go out there and be a breadwinner
But please come back inside and let’s need knead something together
Let’s bask in the fragrance of un-productivity
As we tell the toxins of busyness to go to hell
Let’s eat the life-giving bread of mutuality and not the feast of domination
Let’s do this until our wrinkles set in and our hands are cracked with the dough of untraditional marriage
And let it be clarified
That this type of life cannot be quantified
It is not heroic and should not be romanticized
It is living simply when America tells us to live large
It is walking in equality rather than taking up patriarchy’s arms
It is sacrifice and working damn well hard
It is eating and breathing and one day dying
And it is in view of this that I say
To my potential-but-not guaranteed or wholly essential future male life-partner
I come with a proposal
That if we commit to walking down an aisle of marriage
We commit to walking in a certain kind of life
I have a dream we’re in Barcelona. You’re yelling in the back of a cab with your hair all dolled up like John Lennon, your heart pounding so hard like the whole rest of the universe has capitulated to atrophy. You’re slurring your words and the second syllable of “Barcelona” tumbles past your lips in a lisp. Your mistakes fill my head up with cold honey-flavored fog that spills out against the bright blue and yellow of the taxi cab skin, like an Easter egg shell, the husk of some monstrous beetle caught in a particular angle of light and barreling rainbow down the city street.
In my dream you scream Dostoevsky at swirling purple winds and spit fire into my throat like you did on the day we met.
“YOU HAVE TO READ KAUFMANN,” you scream against the tide swimming through our heads, the sand colored domes in the streets, the stones under our feet. “YOU HAVE TO READ KANT, AND KAFKA, AND PIAGET, AND SCHLEGEL, AND REINHOLD.”
You know so much more than me and its overwhelming; it always was. I press my hands against green and gold glass windows and hotels that look whittled away from Grand Canyon earth. My fist fit exactly into the carved out faces of churches and hospital wings and I imagine them smashing against your pink jaw, your white teeth glowing in the afternoon.
“You have so much to know,” you cry a little softer, running hands over rosebuds in public gardens. In my dream, you morph into the part of me that wants to touch everything, you push your fingertips against green and red glass windows as if trying to force yourself inside. You smash your palms into the hearts of public artworks and try to make me stop and stare. “I need to teach you things. There are so many things you could know and not enough time to learn them,” You yell like a lion tamer, a magistrate, a wide-eyed magician, like you have a whip in your hand, “I’m going to teach you things.”
And that’s what I used to believe, too.
I have a dream we’re in my grandmother’s house, in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Frankfurt, Willow County, White Elk Country. We’re in a Tennessee Williams nightmare, a stereotype filled with saber-toothed squirrels and forth cousins with names like LillaBelle and MaeAnn Vanderbilt.
I see you by the light of the fireside eating Grandma’s Famous Delicacies, baked turtle, gumbo with tail of crocodile, mourning dove tarts with chipmunk’s collar-bone whipped cream, whatever. In the back of my mind I know you when I stopped knowing you. I know your fingernails are clean, your eyes bright green and shining watching the willow trees outside thinking that there is nothing more beautiful in all the world. I know your passport’s empty, I know you’re satisfied with California State School Educated, Back Country Bred, raised to appreciate the few things you can take and hold on to.
You munch on chocolate chip and roasted woodland critter, and its all you ever wanted, you bite down with cold white teeth on blackened sea turtle and caramelized onions.
I have a dream like a 22nd Century novel. I have a dream like a space-time mishap, and obnoxious concept painting, a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. I have a dream I’m falling asleep with your lips whispering up against my ear, while I dream I’m falling asleep with you whispering against my ear, dreaming of falling asleep while you whisper in my ear.
“I love you a whole lot.” Well, that’s nice of you, finally.
“I want to be with you forever and ever.” That’s nice. I think wearily, that’s wonderful. “I want kids with your eyes and my relentless immaturity. I want a kitchen with black and red applique. I want a swimming pool and no sunshine outside.” Okay.
“You just need to stop thinking of me like your hero. I’m a human being.” You sound like a beginner’s screenplay.
“I’m not your hero. All your heroes are full of shit. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, they’re full of shit too.”
“What? No they’re not.”
“Bagism?”
“Bagism was symbolic. If everyone wore bags over their heads, symbolically, there wouldn’t be any racism. People wouldn’t judge each other. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“If everyone wore bags over their heads, people would continuously run into picture windows.”
In my dream within a dream, within a dream within a dream, I star clawing myself awake.
“You can suspend judgments and preconceptions when you eliminate the visual aspect of interactions,” I say, my voice swimming like hot bitter citron, “if everyone practiced Bagism we could make negotiations,” I sound like a medical instruction pamphlet, a historical textbook, like you and your importance, “WE COULD MAKE HEADWAY IN CREATING A PEACEFUL SOCIETY, A REAL, INTEGRATED, ETHICAL COMMUNITY.”
The dreams peel away like tangerine skins, the sharp juice inside stinging my earlobes and the tips of my elbows.
“Bagism doesn’t accomplish anything. The only way to get anything done is to face each other honestly, exactly the way we are.”
In my dream within a dream, I shut my eyes and wake up, and wake up, and wake up.
* * *
You never believed in heroes. You never believed in angels, either, or gods. Or distant cousins, animals with human eyes and mouths, symbolism, or world peace. I have a dream about the day you stopped believing in me. We’re in a hotel room, the walls papered pink and silver and filled with noise. We’re in a Barcelona that only exists in television sets, gray and black and white, high definition fog and sunshine closing in on church spires instead of taxicabs and rain. You roar with the same kind of insolence only beasts have, the guttural groans of frustrated dragons and belittled creatures of unimaginable power. The things you never believed in–Graduate Education, South American Civil Rights, mixing dark powdered cocoa with butter and coffee beans, little gods and demonic statuettes–they dance on the walls and split patterns apart with their pirouetting and clumsy two-steps.
You twitch and holler, “THIS ISN’T WORKING OUT,” little demons dancing around your neck.
“I know; speak softly.” In my dream I’m more rational than I was that day. You’re louder and I’m calmer. I’m a bourgeois doll made up of shiny and soft. In my dream the toes of your shoes pull back into devilish grins. In real life we’re both quiet. Its less easy to hate you when everything is quiet.
Your eyes darken into coffee grinds and suddenly its exactly the way it happened in real life.
“I just wanted to learn things from you?” I plead, my sentences pulling back into question marks. “I just wanted us to teach each other things? Isn’t that the most pure kind of love you’ve ever heard of? I just wanted our love to be an example? An inspiration? More famous than gods or holy wars or vaccinations? More famous than Yoko or John or any 1970′s casualty with a bag over their head?”
In my dream the wallpaper snaps in half and you walk out the door the same way. You break gravity and walk away from me with your shoes against windowpanes. You walk all over and over church spires and don’t listen to a word I say.
I have a dream on a London rooftop. I watch the clouds and you watch red sparkling tourist buses, wailing like widowed ladybugs along the road. Its not Barcelona, and well, there’s nothing we can do about that.
“Its beautiful here, isn’t it?” For once you’re too quiet and I have strain my ears to listen to you.
Yeah, I think, you want grey clouds and thoughts the color they’re supposed to be.
“I don’t really think so.”
You want Cambridge and chocolate cookies and sermons on manifest destiny.
I pull my heartstrings back into a big grinning question, “What about Dostoevsky? And Piaget? And Kant?”
“Well, what about Yoko? They’re all just thinks to make yourself seem more interesting.”
“They’re passions.”
“Right. I really don’t think so.”
If you listened to the color of your dreams you’d find me there, green yellow and blue. When I listen to my dreams I find you there with your palms pressed into passenger door handles on city cabs, seeing me off. Your fingernails crunch into the yellow metal of the cab’s great hissing beetle body, and your eyes mold back into black coffee. On my way away from you my fists fit into Grand Canyon earth and steal orange blossoms from public gardens. I smell yellow and orange and bright burning red and gather everything beautiful in my own little taxi cabin.