One Door Among The Many
I dreamed so furiously I woke up exhausted, morning after morning. Dreams of excoriating my father. Dreams of heartache that stayed all day. I stood in a dimly lit room looking out at Chicago’s water and tower. I stood in a New York room, four men later, looking out at the waning day. In Versailles it stayed light until 10pm and we were at it again, lingering in the antique jewelry shop, pretending a proposal would ever make sense, then sitting on the ground in new clothes laying dreamily against each other in the cold. I wanted to write badly about the one who wasn’t paying me, about our pale flirtations and how I clung to them for weeks. A grotesque man said, “I could tell you were submissive” and his hand left trailing bruises like comet tails, like lashes from a whip. One client gutted himself in front of me, saying, “I’ve never talked like this with anyone else,” and I forgot all the details. Nothing seemed worth remembering. No one seemed to notice what I left behind.
I met the celebrity and he barely touched me but had me swelling wet. Isn’t that always the way. He came so quickly. We hardly talked. He asked, “was it like you thought it’d be?” I frowned, I paused. I opened my mouth to speak before I spoke. “Yes,” I said, disappointing him. He smelled strongly of his own frightened sweat.
I said, “It feels like I keep being rewarded for making the wrong choices.” Wrong meaning easy. But if it happens so naturally, why do I object? A canceled flight becomes a cheaper flight becomes being paid more generously than I anticipated. It’s somehow ominous. The better I am at making money, the more I make and the less it matters. Then the better I become. It can’t stop. The more time I spend shaping my body, the less I am inside my body. I can’t talk or teach about it anymore. I don’t even want to be there. I stop talking to the people who care. The first fox I saw in a year was dead in daylight at the edge of the road. In the dreams there’s always the car without brakes. I never die but that’s the punishment: I have to keep driving.
