by Gabby Bess
“Julie, after I drop you off I’m going to go to the hospital. I’m having an asthma attack.”
Juliana instinctively thought “good” and then made up some joke about getting him a snorkel for next time while secretly hoping that there wouldn’t be a next time but even more secretly hoping there would always be a next time. She felt her brain caving in at this thought. She felt hopeless. Juliana spent her nights like this.
Constantly caving in.
gun control
THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE CUL-DE-SAC
I watch the woman at the end of the cul-de-sac, through my car window with the pleasure
of my internal monologue thinking “cul-de-sac” and feeling distinctly suburban, as I drive
at slow speeds and gentle angles,
so as to not run over the deaf children that live inside of the cul-de-sac.
The deaf children play secretly, exclusively,
a game of hide and seek, as I have never seen them But I drive in gentle angles to feel amused and calm thinking about humans that can go unseen
The woman at the end of the cul-de-sac
doesn’t walk like a secret but she walks soft-bodied,
like the women in poems are,
and she retrieves her mail with a small key
from the community mailbox; though she is soft-bodied she walks without the hand of a man around her waist
The sun comes into my face through my windshield and
I feel my internal monologue thinking, “The Female Gaze.” I watch the words pass inside of my head
and project
onto the sun through my eyes.
At this moment I know
that the woman in the cul-de-sac can see
the words, “The Female Gaze”
written on the sun.
Now her internal monologue is thinking,
THE FEMALE GAZE
in all caps and she feels suspicious but she pulls her face at me to nod and smile
And I pull my face at her to nod and smile,
quickly averting my eyes before she looks to me
to improve her life or teach her something about it. (Sometimes, my eyes suggest things about me–when
they go off talking on their own–that just aren’t true, for example,
when I was there with you on the night
that you asked me if I was sad
because my eyes were heavy and wet with tears and I couldn’t quite look at you straight on,
I was only sad
in the way that I was supposed to be
when I was there with you.)
And I know that she also averts her eyes because the sun presents itself
as an empty light source–
We do not earn salary for this emotional labor.
raw ambition
FRENCH LESSONS
Watching a documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, I am revealed as an unrelenting ambition. I view myself as an exception in a room full of people
who view themselves as an exception. To hear someone talk of greatness and then become greatness is the basis of American culture. I love it. It is okay
to die here. Reduction and declarative sentences are the basis of communication. I learn it.
I teach myself
how to pronounce his name, training
myself not to say John-Michael Repeating:
Michelle Michelle Michelle, Like my mother.
Now once more, with exaggerated slowness:
JAAhn Meechelle Bask-eee-aht,
What a name for The Black Man, like my father.
The French language becomes very ugly when it hangs limp inside of my mouth. To express myself in French
and sound cultured and pleasing,
is there any better way?
To master self-expression, I leave
my middle class home in Brooklyn
at 17 and become famous for cleverly expressing myself on the sides of buildings. On the insides of art galleries and on the cover of Artforum Magazine I express myself fluently, with a consistent point-of-view.
I express myself to Andy Warhol
because he is my friend and he oh so
adores me!
In a documentary
about how well I was able to express myself in my lifetime before I became addicted to heroin and my skin became bad
and I alienated all of my friends that I had once expressed myself to, I express myself.
In exchange
for expressing myself I will accept
money ($$$$$$) and hot arty-bitches
and drugs and fame and the certainty death. Most young kings
are compensating for something.
Directing my eyes at the wall
of a home in suburban Virginia,
I concentrate my vision
in such a way until everything becomes out-of-focus and soft and pleasing. Tell me,
what is the difference between a true occurrence and a manipulated image?
I move the wall back into focus using my eyes, repeating:
Jahn-Michelle Jahn-Michelle Bask-eee-aht Bask-eee-aht
JUST BE FAMOUS
I took up going to the library–rarely have I taken an interest in someone other than myself, and here I can look around and find others sitting quietly,
equally fascinated with themselves–
to read the fiction of only women
and I will take whatever advice they can offer me, studying their diagrams. What makes a sentence feminine? It must be
in the adjectives.
And so, I Googled it:
GOOD ADJECTIVES FOR WOMEN (as written by a man):
Personality Traits
In general, there are a series of traits that have been his- torically associated with women, such as “meekness,” “shy- ness,” “calmness,” “temperance,” “matronly” or “compli- ant.” These terms may have a negative connotation today, because they stem from a patriarchal society’s standard for women. Now that women are regarded as equals in society, they are described with a broader array of adjectives, such as “bravery,” “strength,” “compassion,” “motivation,” “humil- ity,” “meritorious,” “harmonious,” “artistic” or “devoted.”
Unique Attributes
Positive adjectives that highlight a person’s unique- ness include these: “individual,” “one-of-a-kind,” “re- markable,” “noteworthy,” “unmatched,” “exceptional” and “unforgettable.” Keep in mind that you can use more specific adjectives in pairs with these to describe what makes a woman specifically unique. For example, you could say she has remarkable and alluring eyes.
From here I constructed my identity
and set it aside for myself and others to admire. When I give advice it is essentially saying, “Oh, be more like me” and I can say that and point to a diagram that I have drawn up in the time that I have spent alone, bettering myself.
I could just go on all day pointing at things
and saying, “Just be famous”
because that is what I’ve worked out the goal of life to be, I am confident in it. If I were a rich pervert I would throw dollar bills at strangers to make them feel famous and fulfilled.
Just be famous! Its so easy, life is so easy when you know what you want. I’m working toward my goal: I took all of my money
out of the bank just to roll around on it
and luxuriate in the filth of all the hands that could touch me at once.
WHAT I CAN OBSERVE WHEN VISITING A CITY NEAR WHERE I ATTENDED HIGH SCHOOL
Walking through the Ghent district of Norfolk, VA city blocks don’t feel like
a fixed measurement. A recently erected above-ground metro rail cuts through a road
that seems too narrow
to be a two way street
with an above-ground metro rail cutting through it. Most days are like this:
I close my eyes to the ability
to inhabit four places
; in long enough intervals
to miss them all.
The local hip-hop radio station, 103 Jamz,
is playing over the speakers in a sushi restaurant. From the perspective of a sushi restaurant window, there is a homeless man walking confidently
across the street in one direction
while smiling. He turns around and walks back across the street in the other direction. He is still smiling. On the drive home I get lost trying
to find a highway that goes North.
At one point, I end up on a farm
where the edges of the property open
up to meet the Potomac river & at another
point I end up at a police training facility.
I arrive at both places and think,
“Let me stay here.” There is too much
smiling in the back of the van that is driving parallel to me. There are too many faces
that look exactly the same
when pressed against a tinted window
moving at the speed of 70 miles per hour
on a highway at night.
TIPPING
Paige spilled milk onto her kitchen floor on purpose. She thinks, “I am doing this. The milk. My hands and my brain are allowing me to do this. This must be okay, if I can physically do this. My body was made for this,” as the milk goes from inside of the carton to the floor. Paige thought of everything that her body was physically able to do. Paige could murder. Paige could scream at an uncomfortably loud volume to others around her and even herself. Paige could mastur- bate until her body became whatever bodies become when they get too tired and sad and they give up completely. At any point in her life, Paige thought, she could say fuck it and completely give herself over to the physicality of her body. She could become all movement and motion and impulse. On this day, when this day happens, Paige thought, she would improve her posture. She would let her shoulders roll back and her neck extend. She would allow her body to appear confident and tall. Paige wanted to perform the physical limitations of her body like a community theatre play, aware of her own thinly concealed artifice. Paige lifted her shoulders up to her ears and then slammed them down. She did this exactly five times. She wanted to make sure that her shoulders were locked into place. Paige lifted her right arm incrementally until it was outstretched in front of her face. She spread each of her fingers apart until her palm felt vulnerable. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her arm outstretched as she watched the white milk blend into the white tiled floor. Paige watched the milk seemingly disappear against the floor, find a path- way through the tile grout and zigzag its way underneath the refrig- erator. Paige’s feet stayed dry and everything remained normal. “In- consequential,” thought Paige, “like most things.” Paige let her body collapse in on itself as she slumped down into a hard wooden chair.
Paige sat down at the kitchen table and stared at her iPhone. She touched the screen and tried to will messages to appear. She was waiting for something, anything, to happen. Lately Paige felt as though she simply allowed things to happen to her rather than pro- actively trying to set in motion a series of events. She had taken to letting events and other people set her in motion, in any motion, in any direction. Not only was she willing to go wherever something happened to take her, she simply no longer cared. Paige told this to her therapist. Her therapist replied by shrugging her shoulders non- committally and saying, “This too shall pass.”
Paige was waiting for a text, or any acknowledgement of her existence, from Adam. Paige and Adam had been dating for five months. The last time Paige saw Adam was exactly a week ago.
Adam and Paige sat together in the front seat of Paige’s car parked in the driveway of their apartment. Paige sat in the driver’s seat with her back against the car door and her legs draped across Adam’s lap. In the passenger’s seat, Adam held a small plastic bag with JWH, a synthetic cannabinoid, inside of it. He rested the plastic bag on Paige’s legs as he reached forward to grab the pack of Lucky Strikes that sat patiently on the dashboard, its red and white cardboard ex- terior wilting in the constant July heat. Adam took two cigarettes out of the box, licked the ends of them with his tongue, and dipped them into the bag of powder. This method of smoking JWH is known as “tipping.” Paige’s first experience with tipping was not pleasant. The first time Paige smoked JWH she was standing on the balcony of Adam’s apartment. Adam and Paige shared a cigarette that was laced with JWH while they drank forties in their underwear. Paige kept hallucinating a light consistently flashing on the brick wall of the hotel building and she felt paranoid that the flashing light was a man on a bicycle that kept riding by, three stories above ground, just to watch Paige in her underwear. But now she feels calm whenever she smokes JWH. Time feels slower for her. She could live inside the pocket of every second just a little bit longer. It gave her time to breathe.
Adam handed Paige one of the cigarettes and they smoked while lis- tening to the radio. This had become a daily ritual. Lately, however, it seemed like there was always something preventing them from just sitting closely together in comfortable silence. Adam had been acting increasingly distant and seemed to have other things that he would rather do. Paige and Adam scanned the radio stations for contest an- nouncements or free giveaways. Today, in the next town over, a car dealership was having a test drive promotion. If you were one of the first 100 people, the radio announced, to get to the dealership and test drive a car you could win a $35 gift card. Adam idly played with the skin on Paige’s knees. “Should we do that? Do you think it’s too late to be in the top 100?” he asked while grinning. Paige laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t tell the time. It feels like they announced that hours ago. We should just sit here. Your hands are on my legs and I just want them to stay there.” Adam’s hands felt heavy on Paige’s legs and she felt as if she had molded to the seat of the car. In that moment she didn’t mind the idea of being a permanent part of her car. She wanted to sit like that for a long time.
“We could do a lot with $35 though,” said Adam. “We could basically be millionaires at the dollar store.” “We could be thirty-five-dollara- naires,” Paige said. Paige looked down at her legs. They felt lighter. Adam’s hands were now adjusting the dials on the radio. Adam be- came silent and shifted his body away from Paige.
Alone in her kitchen, Paige’s iPhone began to vibrate. Paige looked down at her iPhone but it was not Adam that was causing this dis- turbance. Paige had received a text from her ex-boyfriend, Adam 2, wishing her a happy birthday. Paige had a conversation with Adam 2 via text message. She learned that his most recent girlfriend had broken up with him for seemingly “no reason.”
“I feel like my life is on a shitty loop,” Adam 2 said via text mes- sage. “Every time I feel as if I have transcended the loop and start to think ‘this time it’s going to be different, life takes a dump on the still idealistic parts of me. Maybe I am depressed. Well, I am definitely depressed. But I am in mourning.”
“I feel like life is mainly a shitty loop,” Paige responded. “I feel un- sure of this though. I am on three different mood stabilizers so I don’t think I experience a full range of emotions anymore. I feel abstractly dissatisfied with my life but mostly detached.”
Paige wondered if this was what it was supposed to feel like, if this was just life, if this was statistical normalcy. She wondered if blank- ness was merely contentedness. Maybe, without knowing, Paige had accidentally settled into happiness. She wasn’t sure of this. Even without feeling sad, Paige knew that she was sad. Paige was con- vinced that she was lacking something that everyone else had, some- thing that she did not even have the innate capacity to fathom. Paige wanted to run down to the street and ask everyone she encountered what this thing was or what it could possibly be. What is inside of you besides this human stuff of veins and bones and existential longing?
“Why does everything eventually become terrible?”
Paige thought about this. It was seemingly a non sequitur but she
assumed that Adam 2 was referring to his recent breakup. Why do relationships become terrible? Before Paige could respond, Adam 2 texted, “People give up too easily.” Do relationships start to dis- integrate when the people in them simply stop trying to hold them together? If a relationship needs to be so carefully held and attend- ed to, is it fated to fail from the start? Paige tried to formulate a con- ception of love and relationships. She wasn’t sure if “not giving up” was the main strategy for keeping a relationship’s vital signs healthy. Paige thought that, almost by design, it is hard not to feel alienated from another person no matter what and that, she thought, is what makes relationships so difficult. A human brain is encased in a skull and each human exists in separate body so it seems like there is al- ways going to be a feeling of disconnect; one human will never com- pletely understand what another human is thinking or feeling. Paige felt increasingly lonely as she thought about how she would never be able to make anyone understand what she was thinking or feeling.
Paige knew that Adam 2 was a romantic. He believed in an all-en- compassing love. He believed that love was a force, similar to a God, which was bigger than humanity, bigger than loneliness, bigger than alienation. She knew that in every relationship, including theirs, Adam 2 believed that not only had his partner failed him, but they had failed love.
Paige believed that love was not just an unquantifiable thing. Paige thought of love as twofold. She thought that love was made up of an immeasurable amount of concrete things about one’s partner and about oneself and about the interaction between the two. She thought of love as the overarching combination of all of those things that make you feel emotionally endeared to the other person. Then, she thought, under the overarching endearment is the day-to-day minutia; the concrete and tangible. It is possible that although one may feel this overarching love for their partner they may not neces- sarily feel, on a concrete level, that they are compatible. They may feel completely emotionally attached from their partner but not fully content simply discussing the boring minutia of their lives. Paige thought that in this way it seemed understandable for someone to ‘give up’ on love when at the point in the relationship the overarch- ing feeling of love becomes vague and distant. All that is left is just minutia and coexistence that, unfortunately, are not aligned.