Anatomy Cont. 4

*

You’ve come to know yourself through the touch of others, through the tongues of men and the hands of boys, through the embrace of friends and the singe of indifference. But as the water rains down on you from the showerhead you open your mouth to the falling droplets and close your eyes, sensing each part of your body. Water makes your skin slick, moves in all the angles and crevices that so many others have touched but you have hardly explored yourself. So your own fingertips begin at the fringe of your hairline moving down your temples and over the sweep of your cheekbones, stopping at your lips. You taste the salt of your fingers even as they are saturated with tepid drops from the falling water, your nails outlining your lips, bottom lip full and swollen, engorged with the flow of blood your heart pumps. The palpitations you feel with the heel of your hand as the water from the shower numbs your skin, and now both hands encircling your small breasts which you’ve grown to hate but now seem thriving and supple, imagining his larger hands upon them then moving down your waist, over the firm protrusions of ribs, and to your hips where you trace the outlines of black ink that is now skin. The water flows. You explore.

-*

It’s easy to become infatuated wit strangers. It’s easy to look at someone and imagine what their skin would feel like on yours. But I am most interested in taste. How would the inside of his mouth, his lips taste of the tip of my tongue where sensation is most sensitive. I cant to know how his sweat feels on the corners of my mouth

When I think of him I think of his lips on the back of my wrist, the tip of his tongue tracing the outside of the small tattoo below the line my thumb draws where is connects with my wrist, his lips in small movements and puckers, feeling their way up my arm, pausing where my elbow connects, where he will smell the scent of my perfume that catches there. It will be that way.

-*

If, perhaps, someone were asked to describe you, Halle, what do you suppose they’d say?

Well it depends on who you ask, a man? A woman? Someone who knows me or is sitting at a various angle of that coffee shop where I write? IS it a love? A friend? Someone who loves me but that I don’t know loves me?

That’s step one, Halle. You complicate things; twist them into little knots that won’t come undone, like a tangled necklace.

Well, shit, that defeats the whole purpose. I want to become undone, for someone to undo me.

She likes to let her underpinnings show. Wear shirts made of sheer fabric so that the shadow of dark lace of a strap or curve shivers throat the fabric, just enough so that when she bends or maneuvers a certain way, parts becomes more defining and others hidden.

She wants someone to capture her sadness in a photograph, so beautiful that is makes someone think about crying when they look at it but are unsure why. They get that sensation at the back of their throat when they see her face.

She is a girl who hates to wear shoes, finds them constraining as if her soul wants to burst through her soul. Takes off her sandals even when she is in a place where she knows she is staying for the time being, slips them off one next to another and sits crossing one leg under another one, outstretched, resting on whatever is available, chair, table, sometimes someone’s lap.

But she hates her feet because they have become her own personal stress ball, leaving them scratched and cracked heels, callused and tough like a man’s. ‘Sometimes she is embarrassed by them and sometimes she just doesn’t notice.

If you were to ask her certain things, things that could potentially draw up negative feelings and an even more negative answer, black and inky, she would avoid the truth.

“You’ve graduated, now what?”

She would tell you and her supposed plan but be terrified of the perpetual circle her life seemed to be going in thus far.

In her mind she’d look around the coffee shop and wish she were anywhere but here because she hates her “hometown” whatever the fuck that means be cause she wrote Sandusky off as her “home” a long time ago.

She hates how this place can douse ever her best moods like two licked fingers pinching out a flame.

-*

She thinks she ponders too much about her quirks…and what makes her happy, which, consequently, isn’t that much. She came to this perplexing conclusion like a hiccup.

She thinks about her quirks in terms of ideas for her writings. Because, as a writer, she know most material comes from life experience, but too infrequently her own,

She cannot go to sleep without knocking on wood first, of the headboard or bureau or leg of a chair, whatever seems to be around. In the darkness of her room, perhaps her own, she fumbles until she raps smooth wood with three knuckles.

She is afraid of her father and wishes her mother would accept or at least pretend to respect her output of creativity on her skin.

She enjoys the “interesting energy of obsession” because it makes her feel as if she has faith in something substantial, concrete, something to grasp onto.

She loves the eccentricity of foreign-ness and foreign men, accents like melted butter under the heat of flame.

She is unsure of the direction she is traveling in. Sometimes it frightens her or gives off the sensation of how to ride a bike with no training wheels for the first time…with no one holding onto the back of the rubber seat to steady her, help to keep her balance.

*

She likes the comfort of her own skin, walks around in her underwear when she’s alone in her apartment, or not alone as well. She cleans topless, letting the sun nestle on her bare shoulders and stoke her naked back.