For Patrick.

“Ok bare with me. I’m new at this whole, one on one thing. And what I ask you might sound…I don’t know…generic? But, I mean, I wanted to do this because you’re writing, what you’ve written about, China, the people, the nightlife, the teaching, the culture…well, you get it. I just want to know…everything.”

I notice his mouth progressively curling upward as my hurried justification, pre-apologetic persona trips over the words and stutters.

He giggles, his eyes crinkling so I can only see the sea glass green of his irises

“Lady, you’re fine...so shoot.”

I take a long drag on the metal mouthpiece of the Hooka. The apple smoked tobacco hovers in my lungs, cool and wet like the fog from dry ice. I exhale, part my lips only slightly so a smooth wave of blue-grey smog belly-dances upwards and over the bridge of my nose.

“Why China?”

*

I’ve explored the nooks and crannies of my own backyard, seen what lies beneath the vast spread of cornfields and farmland that can seem to stretch on endlessly, rippling every so often as if someone had stuck their finger in a bowl of cooking oil, golden corn swaying with the breeze that seems to blow only enough to push the hair past my cheeks. I know what Lake Erie looks like in the winter. How it freezes in odd mountains of ice some years, as if Moses as parted it as he did the Red Sea, the spaces between each frozen wave beckoning me to venture between them. And in the summer how the mud soup lake from spring blends into a deep midnight blue, a glints in the distance when the sunlight catches a disturbance in its movement. I’ve been to the local coffee shops where I’ve curled around myself with a garden of paper coffee cups situated around me, unable to control my addiction to caffeine and the various concoctions like toasted marshmallow cappuccino or chocolate strawberry decaf (on the days my pulse threatens to implode my arteries form being over caffeinated). I know which shops supply the appropriate cards for special occasions, or just when I feel like leaving homemade paper embellished with golden ink and witty phrases that draw a smile.

Yet between each moment of appreciation for my home state of Ohio lies the insatiable pang in the depths of my stomach. One that aches, needing to be fed a nourishment of something foreign, something unknown, a place, a culture not so…Ohio.

*

I have an obsession confession.

I love people

Especially in the context of the collage campus atmosphere.

As a freshman I made the library my sanctuary, tucked in a corner on the second floor attempting to blend in with the potted plant situated beside me as I sat reclined day after day in the chair who’s cushions enveloped me like an egg tucked into a nest. I could sit there behind the glow of my Apple iBook and absorb the flow of students around me.

I pretended I was invisible.

I noticed the color wheel of skin tones.

Bone white, but with the texture like dough that I wanted to press my thumb into

Peach, creamy and tinged coral around definite features, the rims of their eyes, the ousides of their lips, the cuticles of their fingers

Skin the color beef bullion broth, nearly iridescent in the light that streamed through the ceiling

Mocha, rich and exotic, settting of the whites of their eyes so much that they nearly glowed if their gaze happened to flicker where I rested

Patrick speaks and I come back to the dim lit room of the hooka nook.

*

“Why China?”

He exhales an answer infused with the blue-grey smoke

“I watched a lot of “chinese news and entertainment” on a shitty international channel back home in Marryland, so I was kind of already interested in tonal languages”

I immediately thing of those triple digit channels on hotel room television

Then I picture him as an adolecent sprawled on his bed, letting the Manderin dialect wash over him like the brush to ink to paper, sweeping, soakingm infusing the culture into his skin.

“ I wanted something really different, basically. I know it sounds orientalist and cliché, but I really did. I had been raised on Spanish, and I was over the whole romance language-thing.”

My professor ruined French for me last year. So much for living in Bordeux.

“I had lived in Spain briefly in high school, and I loved it, but I wanted something wild. Chinese was perfect. I ended up in Nanjing because I didn’t get into the Qinghua Daxue program in Beijing and I’m SO glad, because Beijing is a shithole..

*

Even now at 21 I still do it.

People watch.

Whoever my eyes flit to is at the mercy of my imagination, fabricating a history like they are figurines in my hands. Sometimes I find myself on the edge of my chair, the balls of my feet jumping up and down impatiently, wanting to approach them.

But what would I say?

“Hi…ok so I know this is weird and random…”

Blank stare

“But it’s a small campus and I see you around sometimes…”

Inch a step back from me

“I mean, you just seem so…interesting…I’m fixated on who you might be…where you came from…where you’re going”

Puckered brow and cold shoulder

Try and start a conversation with a complete stranger?

That’s a good one.

*

My shyness can be paralyzing.

Patrick changed that.

“I told you I wanted to know everything about China so tell me everything! Ready…GO.”

He laughs and tells me I’m adorable for being so interested.

The tile floor is predicting my contact with it from sitting so far on the edge of my chair. My toes keep balance. I know I need to be more specific, tap the mouth piece against my teeth, weave the tube wrapped in bright string around my fingers.

“Ok, ok, top two. Give me your top two.”

He doesn’t even have to think about it.

“Traveling to western China”

I anticipate, lean forward, chin in my palms. I cant miss one detail.

“I had never seen Inner Asia before…it was amazing to feel like I was leaving home for somewhere completely foreign and different all over again.”

The concept boggles my mind

A forgeiner feeling foreign in another forgein place.

How? Can an American really become part of such an contrary culture?

I always hear of citizens of other countries thinking we are selfish, greedy, taking our lives for granted.

He made a home for himself in Nanjing. Just as he had come vulnerable, naked, to China as an American, he entered another region of Asia where he could experience that again.

“Nanjing had become my base, and I left it for a WILD trek into the predominantly Muslim, white region of Xinjiang. The people have blue eyes…it’s insane. I went all the way to the Tajik border, and I learned so much about what it’s like to be a foreigner, and then a REAL foreigner…I realized it when I got to Xinjiang, and suddenly my mandarin was useless in the face of the Turkic languages spoken there.”

He was a chameleon.

*

“Teaching—the teaching experience was awesome.”

I think back to his workshop piece.

About the student he was paid to teach American slang

About the ivory faced cherubs who “beat the shit out of each other.”

I laughted at that recollection

“Yeah you remember don’t you?”

I think he likes that I remember his piece.

“It’s helped me tremendously in dealing with kids here. I work with an autistic boy every week in Columbus, and I think the way I handle him has changed after having had to deal with a bunch of unruly ADD kids in Nanjing, Haha”

*

He cast a spell on me my freshman year.

I was drawn in by the slightness of his figure, the way his back arched slightly above the spot where his jeans slug around his hips.

The fingerless gloves cut at each knuckle that exposed his nimble fingers

How they drummed against whatever surface happened to be close by

Cornsilk hair cropped closely to his scalp and paled complexion, flawless and silken like the pressed power I dust over my face each morning

I was drawn in by people that surrounded him.

The girl with the celft like eyes, centers like opaque marbles, olive skin the texture of a ripe banana peel. I’ve heard them speak in broken phrases, words hanging in symbols in the air, his breathy tone soothing like Oolong tea down the back of my throat and her words, flowing with the mellowness of acoustic guitar chords, utterly entrancing, transporting me to the corners of Nanjing that I’d read about in his eccentric writings of his life abroad.

*

I miss him now, his stories, his eccentricity that oozed from his pours. He graduated and I did as well, his presence now just a orange-gray shadow on the back of my memory, the rements of a sunset.

First Chapter in the Novel I Will Never Write..

..because fiction, I am not so great with.

*

She watched through the spaces between the open blinds, segmenting the world as if it were notebook paper, a flipbook of early morning wakings. A squirrel scampers in little spurts over the paved parking lot and over a recycle bin, pausing to perch on a glass bottle before hoping onto a neighbor’s porch railing. She feels slight déjà vu. But the scene she remembers is from a late morning warm with brewing coffee and his linen pajama pants. She remembers the smell of roasting herbs and the musty familiarity of coffee dripping into the pot. His arm around her waist and nose in the space between her collarbone and neck, he inhales and yet she knows his smell is more therapeutic than hers will ever be to him. His free hand motions to a squirrel just beyond the window, its black tail curled behind him like a question mark where he pauses on the wooden table next to the half melted candle. His bottom lip grazed her earlobe and he whispers to her about that squirrel, how he scampers around every morning, up the tree trunks, acrobatting onto the scaffolding. The squirrel now hangs upside down from a drooping branch that nearly touches the windowpane “He’s showing off for you.” She catches his eyes, a puddle of blue green and she feels a happiness she never thought existed for her.

Jazz Man

He never knew why he worse the thick frames when he played. There were flimsy pamphlets of sheet music that he followed for a time but now he only pretended to skim the lines wit a twitch of his head before squeezing his face into the crescendo of sound that floats from his instrument. Those damn frames slipped down onto the bump near halfway down his nose from a baseball accident when he was young, slipped from the inevitable blips of sweat like Morse code with each beat.

And the breathy melody, his melody wafts from his sax in a sultry steam. Maybe he liked to see the audience through those lenses, crisp and sharp, to see the toothy grins and lip-sticked ladies, the gentleman’s hats being removed one by one as they settled into his music, placing them on pant suited knees or soft denim. A smile in the back, widened eyes and furrowed brows to the left, one woman with a rivulet down her cheek and wet eyelashes. Yeah, man, you dig it? These glasses are essential.

Dew

The light was tangled in his hair, twisted through it in pieces, braiding itself among the tendrils in glowing knots. I love it when he tosses his head to the music, sending light flying from his hair like water droplets, holding my palm outward as if I could catch those bits of light on my fingertips and rub them a crossed my lips that I have just moistened with my tongue

*

And tonight she is alone with the rain. Coming in random dots, ellipses on paper skin while she pedals through an atmosphere heavy in sultry dampness, running its fingertips over her bare neck and exposed thighs, now sticky with sweat and humidity. She is a peach just picked in morning dew, just bitten into. Maybe, she thinks, this is why her bumper scalloped the back end of a utility van today. The music too loud, or she was lost in the deafening beat. She only closed her eyes briefly enough to be a blink, two fingers guiding the steering wheel. Maybe that was why she found herself, alone at the bar accompanied only by a glass of sake, burning down her through either because of the alcohol or because it was so cold, she wasn’t sure. She was only sure of what was in front of her, her journal with dog-eared corners, a set of chopsticks, splintered down the middle and a glass half full of sake, stained by a half moon of red lip gloss. She rubs her thumb a crossed the print because she likes to muss things up, muss, not to be confused with mess. Drips of condensation from the tease of summer roll down the bowl of the glass, over the smeared lip gloss, dripping slow and remorseful like the contemplations on her brain. She runs her fingertips over the wet glass, picking up those droplets and traces her bottom lip.

White Light

-Photo by me

There are afternoons, now, like these ones, where the sky is heavy with its own vast weight, and the air is someone’s breath caught between your shoulder blades nuzzling at the base of your spine, a breath that has just finished a glass of ice water. These days with that tremor of breath and heavy sky, I miss my grandmother’s grilled cheese and goulash.

Now I have a room or two to myself, a wall mainly to my left full of windows letting the outside in. Blinds shut out the world. I hate them, want to rip them down with that sky just hanging there, tear it all down like an old poster or wallpaper come undone, in sheets, strips, letting the white light in.

Pillows gathered in haphazard little molehills around my on the floor; a book open, turned over to save a space, laying like a naked woman on lovers sheets pen quivering over blank, lined paper. This has become my day of rest. I keep the lights off, the natural flush of the sky restoring my sight, fighting off electricity and all other things that come with a flick of a switch or wall socket. That flush will hush into a blue-violet twilight. But I will hardly notice until the corners of my eyes ache from straining to see the white paper beneath black ink.

Underpinnings

Stockings, she regarded with her best friend between open walls one evening. She says,

“It's interesting, the power that underpinnings have...not necessarily a bra, or pair of underwear...but stockings, to me, have always been a rather scandalous and sensuous garment. Think of the time when the were first created...as a means to cover the actual skin of a woman's leg, to conceal that flesh from any who may be lured by it...yet the act of removing stockings is far more suggestive and sensual because it reveals that bit of flesh to the open...perhaps that is what we do, as women, as artists, when we write, we are ever so slowly removing our stockings to expose just a bit more of ourselves...

*

She doesn’t want to bother with toothpaste, doesn’t want to taste the mask of fake mint on his tongue. She watched a movie once where a man dreamt of a feast with a plainly beautiful woman, they ravished themselves, with wet lips and laughing between bites, kissing long and slow even before they finished chewing or swallowing, and she thought of the sex that would come after, feasting upon each other as they had sharing a table, a meal. And she knows now that the taste of a man is what makes the pulse between her thighs quicken, his pure raw taste.

*

"You are like a daisy in an overgrown yard,” he told me

Fate has a way of finding me in uncertain times, drags me from limbo and blankness. And now I find myself falling in love with him again as I did the first time I saw him. Silly girl, there is no such thing as love at first site. But there is when it comes to him. He is me, incarnate, of the male persuasion. He is the sweat on my brow and we can taste each other miles away.

“Cioppina, Arctic Char, Prawns, Diver Scallop, Duxbury muscles in a spicy consommé, peppadew aioli crostini.” All by himself and he made love to the thing until it was perfection, beginning to end. The endless line of hanging tickets is proof the sex was perfect.

Tell me you favorite protein, ready...go.

Fish, any fish

Not one over another?

…Toro, arctic char, monkfish, tuna...

Let's go with monkfish!

Ok, roasted with a little olive oil fresh oregano thyme sage and a little butter. To finish?

Whipped parsnips...or orange and carrot purree

Herb salad and pickled fennel and lemon

Credo...lime orange and a bit of coconut water...what about texture...crispy sunchoke...candy striped beats and blood oil for the citrus

*

You have become used to pale skin, the sepia tone sucked from those layers, along with the skin that brought melted air seen in rippled heat waves. You’ve tried to keep that brassy glow through the murkiness of winter with violet bulbs and vacations closer to the equator, terrified of becoming pale and ghostly as if you would evaporate with the colors of warm weather into a black and white still frame of cold nights nearly indistinguishable from day. But as you let that sepia tint fade, a new, pure, bar-of-new-soap clean beauty shone through. You enjoy the flush that penetrates the apples of your cheeks when you smile.

*

You like to be kissed in such a way that seems as if you’re enjoying a very expensive but exquisite dessert, patiently but devouring with all the energy to your lips. You love the feeling of his hands cradling your face, thumbs resting just below your jaw, near your chin, the following three fingers just barley curled by the apples of your cheeks. Perhaps his index finger would uncurl and find the corner on your jaw line and linger there hesitant but wanting, waiting to test just how supple that skin is…

*

Rememberance

*

His flesh enticed me from the beginning, looks like the edges of burnt paper. And it took me a few awkward, accidental brush of my knuckles against his wrist of elbow before I was convinced his skin wouldn’t burn me. The warmth that came from somewhere inside of him, reminded me of the way sand feels between my toes right after the early afternoon sun has touched it. Before I was with him, my body was riddled with a constant chill. Bad circulation inherited from my mother. But he cured it, and I wonder, even now, how he kept that constant internal heat, radiating out through his flesh.

The first time we shared a bed I noticed the warmth flowed through his entire body, not just his extremities, those body parts exposed to everyday air, and I claimed him as my personal heat source. There was snow on the ground that night and he insisted on keeping the thermostat 64 degrees. My body rippled in shivers before he climbed in next to me. There was a hesitancy in his touch, his large but delicate hands were meticulous and gentle as he removed each article of clothing from my body, like he was peeling away the shell from a hard-boiled egg. The slight tremor of his fingers tangled in the straps of my black bra so I stopped him, took his hands in mine and placed them on my bare hips while I lifted the bottom hem of his white undershirt up past his navel. I was shaking too.

But as soon as he pulled the stark cotton sheets around both of our naked bodies, the heat from him seeped into the mattress and radiated through the covers. And when the sunlight reflected off the white ground in the morning, I was awake before he was, the white light penetrating my closed eyelids. His smell was there next to me and my skin pulsed almost feverishly. Sachin has his back toward me and the sheets had crept down in folds just below his waist. The white material from the sheets nearly glowed against the contrast of his cherry chocolate skin. Outside, the snow on the ground and rooftops shone in the sunlight against the bare, dark branches of the trees that dotted front yards of his small neighborhood. I loved how the sheets of his bed felt as if they had just been pulled from the dryer. We fit into the empty spaces of each other, curled there in a fetal position. The nights I didn’t spend with him I’d coil around pillows, pretending he was there. But I’d wake up shivering.

*