What Goliaths
Petulant and street savvy, they were children nonetheless. They snorted dust and swallowed laxatives but in those morning after brunches in Berkley, they tried to remember to drink milk. Their bones were still growing in their uncomfortable bodies.
It was a time of slackrope and deadlines. Half the time the trick was to look like a burning church couldn't arouse your passions, that this braided nylon under your bare feet was as solid as an inheritance. Sweat was last month's old fashion, not a biological necessity.
The other half of the time, the fashion was a kind of studied over-work. The look was sweatpants that hung off your artful hipbones, a drip bag of coffee and a certain expression that said my calendar's full and my bed's booked. aint gonna happen, sugar.
She's seen kisses that made Judas seem sincere. There's not trick to it, really. Read her lips, she'll show you as easy as lying. But Cate's teeth are brace-straight. She was diligent about flossing. She washed her face regularly. She kept up these habits like a lonely army regiment, waiting for a general to appear.
Her peers experience desire as a broken rib that hurt every time they breathed. She had thought she was her own unique mess, but she's just the parlor in the Collyer brothers home. None of them trusted their bodies as biology. What they between their legs was a mixture of hope&fear&wetness&and a sense of urgency that no one had talked about in sex ed.
They made their own curriculum and she listened in on lectures on Saturday nights and syllabus reviews on Sunday morning. The students pontificated on the intersectionality between two bodies, trade relations at two in the morning and practical biology discussed in terms of cunts and toes and dejected curves of his neck.
They were all in transition, she thought. Their old children's bodies were helped us a porcelain vessels to be protected. Children's life vests, vitamins, car seats and sunscreen. They were accustomed to their bodies as the subject of protective legislation against faulty school buses and moral outrage over short skirts in the preteen department.
Now they wore gold shorts that let half moons peek through and no one staged an uproar. It boggled the mind. They reacted against the discontinuity by learning how to hurt themselves in socially acceptable ways. The women ate less and less, learning how to admire the austerity of an empty plate. They all learned the skill of taking leave from your body, which is a synonym for blacking out. And even the little destructions; staying up too late watching Disney movies on laptops, forgetting over and over and over again to wear a jacket in the rain- these were, in their way, a cry for attention.
Their bodies were on the precipice of decay. Some of them had already blown their ACL, had knee surgery. There were rumors of tan girls who lay on white hospital sheets, dying of melanomas, but no one had seen them for certain.
They were wired awake, iridescent, privileged in the way of the young and whole, absolutely miserable, full of earth shaking enthusiasm, exhausted, strung out on caffeine and worse, too beautiful to touch. She wasn't sure any of them were going to make it out alive.
By what Goliath was I begot, so strange and so unwanted?
Rainer Maria Rilke
What is it with Rilke? Why is he suddenly everyone's poet du jour?
ReplyDelete