The raw emotions of a woman

by Suzanne Steinberg

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  Fantasies

  Deep inside there is a lost voice, a hopeless cause of those who it sees through a narrow slit, a lets begin again as we dance to the same tune we have always played around in, the endless vibration of a life, of a person’s heart. And we dance and smile as we remember the way the words rose to meet one another, the voice on the other side as we played along with the mystery assigning blame and purpose and re-destroying our actions for new choices, new beliefs, new bodies, running and searching for the same faces.

  There is another lost cause will say the men on an adventure, kissing one too many women, thinking one too many of the same thoughts that have created bricks instead of doorways. There will be another you, once this you is lost, they say casually like sunshine on a rainy day, like a broken arm on a boy who jumped too high on his bed. There will always be another way to be perfect, and we believe him, these mystery men with perfect vision who ignite lust and passion with a drop of sweat, with an inner belief in beauty even if they are ugly on the inside, and we run to them as if they are sunshine and the answer for internal suffering, controlling doorways and mysteries, and we laugh when we realize the men we loved were never real men but fantasies. But pretend men, monsters we created during dreams about being alive, but really we were asleep when we met them. And all the courage it took for us to change, to look someone in the eye, to look beautiful enough in a summer’s dress, was just to touch a cloud in a blue sky that was 300 feet off the ground.

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  Womanhood

  There is often a darkness inside of an eye that catches the sun. It blinks to see clearly but through the tears and the rust and the glimmer on metal tables, there is nothing but an unusual reflection. It is a strange world when the women began to emulate men. Become them with every footprint and sly remark, with the cutting judgments as they attempt to bestow a sense of revenge.

  “There are never enough people,” will yell the conservatives as they pile on the births as a way of making everyone happy, one more mouth to feed, thought to have. A person with a passionate drop on their finger as they run from face to face to face, force feeding from their hands.

  And inside the womanhood are children becoming compliant alliances, witnesses and detectives, eyes that know the truths of what powerlessness feel like, what it feels like to love a man who is always in control with only a sense of superficial experiences to navigate the deep waters of belief and emotion.

  Inside is an innocent child who dresses up in clothes waiting to wake up one day and be in a woman’s shoes, to hurt like she does, to love like she does in a world titled to the left with all the game pieces falling off the table. And you tell the eyes that watch you like dew on a flower, you tell them how lovely it is to be an adult, how beautiful it is to chase around men like butterflies, how easily their admiration comes like bubble gum popping and whispers amongst best friends, and how quietly it undresses you into a better person, the right logical person without a stray thought towards another life.

  And the men come around as you talk like a dark storm and they act like someone lying about their compliments, lying about their lust as a way of getting close to God. But there is a strange truth in their eyes, in the way their mouth curves, in the thoughts they give away like loose change. And you believe in the thunder, you believe you live in a house that can be destroyed, you believe you can get caught in the rain, blushing for someone who is only a hypothetical thought in the day. And you will be stuck telling all your friends how you messed up love, wasted your time on an accident, because they acted nice. In the dead of night in a half insane frenzy, you were scribbling on refrigerator doors while standing on half hearted sing song words, because you wanted so badly to be better. You wanted so badly to be in the story that has built you from its concrete walls. But all you find in your moments of innocence is a child, standing in shoes that are too large for her, asking you again what adulthood is like and you lie.

  You lie to be better than you are, and to never be alone. Because in this die hard competition among women we only have the story and we all fight to fit into the story. Even when those men no longer know who we are.

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  The cycle of pain

  We often wait like heroes in the winter in the middle of an abandoned land.

  We wait like energy that has only a universal thought, like beauty that only carries itself by a thin toothpick on a dark stage, we wait like a smile of someone else that is a few minutes from changing. And we look the other way while we watch the darkness invade.

  Inside the mystery of love and the broken timer on a kitchen microwave, is often the strange shopping list for unknown emotions.

  That moment when avoiding life feels more like living than being in the moment, than standing in your own two shoes and being present while you feel small, when someone says something to sound cool, to be thought of casual and sexual, unknowingly that your devastating memories have become their entertainment. That your broken heart sitting on the edge of a kitchen counter has been sliced upon by words that had gotten too loud in quiet moments, has become food for the ants sweltering against locked doors. And you sit there quietly in a game designed for one but everyone plays it anyways, and you hear the laughter of your life, you hear your most painful moments being relived through others as a cat and mouse cartoon, as intimacy.

  And in the chaos of the laughter and the giggling and the closed minded weapons of leadership in a ceaseless uncontrollable wave of emotion, is the feeling of disappearing into the walls the line our hallways and photographs. It is the hidden smile of pain as it becomes the next hero, the next broken unattainable symbol of fitting in for someone else. And the marks of a hot breath on a cold window become written upon by someone else’s fingertips.

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  Being broken

  I am broken we yell to one another, through the shattered heart of a broken piece of glass, that has split our tongue, that has destroyed our time into sections and months and verbal worded arguments. And the broken often have so few words to describe pain, it is the same words other people use to describe babble, or superficial entertainment and finical obligations.

  There is never enough time to say everything you want to say, before life turns its head again, before its face drowns in the million tears of yesterday and speaks of sorrow. It utters promises so early in life, it words them carefully as cold tears on the hot pavement, in a place where please, thank you and I am sorry have become obligations instead of sincerity.

  And we love her, this voice we follow every so longingly, so easily like a sun that won’t set, like an answer in the desert, like a lover we can’t fix. And we run towards the oceans that evade her horizon, the water inside a mind that has lost its way home, inside of a superficial sacrifice for the foundation of money instead of love. And inside of who we used to be is a disease, as if as if we were children running towards safety, ready for poverty.

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  A faceless boy

  I am no one says a voice. It was created by parents who thought a foundation of love was made by sugar and protection from the strangers who come as thick as walls, that we can control and demean and easily turn our back on, with words that are too easily manipulated as metaphors for the experiences we know we will never have, a second population that are too easily wiped away by a simplistic cultural compliance, by a faceless boy sitting in a room of non-humans pretending he understands wisdom.

  And we sit there, these longing strangers playing games with our tongues and our superficial thoughts as if we were candy, simple and sweet and so easily digested with licks and happiness and inner points that are constantly redefined as boundaries and inner beauty, as a blue sky on a busy day that has nothing inside of it but children’s palms reaching for the clouds, and playground rhymes. And we live in these make believe lives searching for protection in one another, similar truths in a war until we meet the strangers with a knowledge that haunts at night.

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  Hate

  Life is odd as it moves, the voices that we have heard before, the life before we fell in love again, over the same cup of coffee the same eyes, and breath; the same yesterday we always go back and dream of thinking the past is better perception we carry inside of our heart. And we wait like travelers moving towards the edge of time, cocooning into different bodies and different minds, different agendas as we walk over one another, thinking about one another, forgetting one another, so easily like the flick of a wrist on a broken word that hasn’t gone out of style yet.

  And we breath waiting to know what is on the otherside of love, what is on the otherside of the foreplay and the boredom and the hopes that wait like leaves on a lake, superficially drowning themselves in dew. We wait like the hunters and the predators do, on solitude, the beginning of life as time moves below us now, we just stand in the same place. And inside this strange solitude with new people, clawing to get out or clawing to get in, stuck in the hate of power and the hate of powerless-ness is the cracking of morality, the heckling of another drunk man being bullied, of another girl thinking she was being sweet but was called out as dumb, another too sensitive too needy too lonely person waiting somewhere to be found, waiting to be liked by the popular kids with their money and beautiful clothes, wanting to fit in, inside the world of make believe kindness, of having too much, to to to much juxtaposed against someone who is too shy to ask for help.

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  Pretty houses

  A girl sits and waits and watches making dents in the piles of things that stand in her path, who feels overwhelmed by those mountains that block love, that throw children under the bus, that think survival is about who looks prettiest in a picture, and love is price tag instead of memories, instead of caring, instead of paying for your daughter’s doctor bills, instead of showing up for phone calls, or dinners, love is about having the prettiest best happiest family possible, those who look good in photographs which hang on the wall next to the laundry room with granite tabletops in a multi-million dollar house. And against that stupid crap, is often just a broken heart and an unheard of voice that was silenced, as all the people become robotic in how they behave and believe, and eventually they all leave so that it remains just a pretty house filled with photographs.

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  Caught on someone else’s hope

  I am caught in a dream I can’t seem to forget from last night. Caught in the memory of another face, eyes and love, human touch as I travel along the seams of human companionship. Laughing about the way my name sounds on a French Man’s lips who would lie about what he ate for breakfast if it would make a woman stay longer, inside his uncomfortable life that fits smugly as a facial expression towards the easily manipulated.

  And we all want to be better, painting our walls white in hope that someone will graffiti our brain with better thoughts, ideals like color pencil flowers, like power trips and authority issues, dressed up as women and men, dressed up as love instead of babble.

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  Married women

  The married women all talk about problems as if a political agenda or a topic change or a painful hurt could all be washed away by being submissive to a man. “No need to know reality,” they tell themselves while swooning to human interest pieces and cats and dogs, putting on makeup in metal tinted mirrors. “All I need to know is that I have a husband who shelters me. All I need to know is whose authority to take seriously. So we can all get along, and not be petty or argue about things that don’t really matter, because women never really fight about anything important. Let’s just look at life through the same eye, where all my heavy thoughts and deepest fears vanish. I can claim I am good because myself-esteem goes through him first. And I force everyone to get along because their voices all step on mine.”

  And woman among woman act like this limited understanding of life is necessary as the unruly emotions have their way with us behind closed doors, inside the lines in a closed fist and a broken heart, next to the shattered glass of strangers seeking approval. “Can’t we all be good enough for that one husband,” all the women scream, creating a mold from roses, jewelry and jealousy. And the women on the inside look out at them, knowing them all by name, she had coffee with each one discussing her wedding dress, and she says causally as if her heart is not held on a string balancing on an edge, “only the lucky ones marry.” And slowly her eyes turn into snakes and her heart into a child.

  “I couldn’t make it in the world,” she whispers as an apology or a confession to those who look like friends, “I needed someone else’s heart.” And we all believe her, because why would she lie?

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  Compliance

  “Have sex with me,” cry the angry voices of women, trying to find a heart inside their legs. “Toy with me, make me believe in love again,” they scream at heaven for letting them fall so far from the clouds. “Make me believe in myself again,” they say worriedly as now their lives have become a broken down storyline about an incident that no one else can talk about. And inside the people who believe in people, inside the lives that seem so far away, is a dance of I told you so on white walls without shadows, without vulnerability in a game of intension, an underlining sense of obsession, a let me bend over backwards so a man can hold all my cards game, that we play to see who can win, who can feel the most belittled in a fight to be small, to have someone come in and take away the burden of looking through life in a cracked perception, which alienates people with words that sound like such harmless observations at night but become mountains in the day, words of different points of view, different values, words that create faces of data on mannequins in store windows wearing orange.

  But we all want to buy the same outfit, pretend that self-abandonment is better than preservation, because it will protect you from the judgment, it will protect you from the past and pain. And we curl up inside, thinking a penis and a brain are the same as solid ground, and we wait like soldiers to hear a whisper in the wind of foot prints, so that we can say when the negativity of never being good enough to be sincerely loved creep into our daily discoveries of ourselves, that seep into conversations, that come in ever so subtly staring at a kitchen table, that we have protection. That we are better, because we have become a part of a much greater entity just by agreeing.

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  The men who I have loved

  We stare at one another like children playing with crayons, how will you draw me I ask, glancing at the colors and the lines, glancing at your fingers as they move through the selections of us, the timing and the reasons and of course all the running around we seem to do. And you glance suspiciously at the color blue.

  I know you I say laughing, taking the crayon from your hand, the words from your lips as I paint my face on all your characters. I know what you are thinking when you are alone, I joke spelling out adverbs and nouns as I create a city, the fantasies in my head, one by one, by one, until they appear like drops of water on petals.

  Wait I hear you say, the men of men of men that have created our towers of history, the life line of generations and children and truths that can’t be pronounced for they would sound too dangerous on a tongue, wait. I don’t think those things at all.

  But, I say with the color still between my fingers and my body leaning dangerously close to your side, I thought.

  Well I never said any of it, is the voice behind another mind that I can feel crawl out from some small corner crouching and scratching.

  I thought, I want to believe.

  I don’t want you to like me, comes a cold set of eyes, a half hazard lazy tongue that has now circled around all my adjectives as if they are candy coating our hands.

  And I stare away, thinking about what I was never supposed to have thought, as the strange thunder of another man’s authority has ruined my infatuation again, it has changed my guard into silly putty with strings so carefully entwining, so carefully changing, becoming mushy and softer and afraid.


  I never liked you, says the boy with all the crayons of different colors, attempting to draw with that same blue that I thought was made just for me, which would describe my eyes.

  What are you drawing I ask, timid now as I hold on to the edge of the desk dreaming about the mess I would make with his paper if my hands could get closer, if my lust and dreams and fingertips could unravel what love is supposed to look like.

  Nothing he says, turning to the wall feverishly enjoying the process of ignoring me. As I wait like a lamb staring at a gate in someone else’s farm, like a child who has been told to stay indoors on a sunny day.

  I want you I scream, my voice so loud it shakes the walls that have been watching us.

  I don’t want you he replies, with a gleeful look, with a squinted hope in the corner of his eye, with a strange obsession I keep between my legs.

  Why I ask casually knowing the answer, but asking anyway. I thought we knew one another, I thought I recognized something in you.

  No reason he says continuing to watch me, watch him. As I feel smaller and smaller and smaller.

  I thought.

  Don’t think he says, as I go to touch him. It will only make it worse.

  And we sit, me and this strange man. We sit isolated. We sit dreaming of something better.