Tonight I'm Someone Else

by Chelsea Hodson

  I was the last person to leave the party. As I buttoned my coat, the host of the party touched his beard, laughed, and said, No, no, no. I wrapped my scarf around my neck, picked up my bike leaning against the living room wall, and walked toward the door. Stay, he said, and he wasn’t asking.

  He took my bike from my hands, placed it back against the wall, kissed my blue lips, pressed me onto the futon. He got completely naked; I had all my clothes on, even my boots. With my head against the wooden frame, he thrust himself into my mouth until he came, then fell asleep holding me in place. I stayed beside him for hours in the dark room, not sure how to get up.

  Though he did force himself on me, the truth is I stayed at the party waiting for something to happen. Everyone at the party left, and still, nothing had happened. He wasn’t a stranger—I knew he was a bad man, I’d known that for a long time. That’s why I stayed.

  I spent so much of my youth waiting for something to happen. Unsupervised, I had my choice of dark rooms. I knew which rooms were bad and I entered them anyway. It was a sort of power.

  When a colorful object is seen by the human eye, it is really not the color of the object which is seen, but the colors reflected from the object.

  I go to a party—I am responsible.

  A woman becomes a girl becomes an animal becomes an object. Is there anywhere left to go?

  As a young girl, I got up and walked to the bathroom during the Ringling Bros. circus. When I came out of the stall, I saw a reporter I recognized from television. She leaned against the sink, applied pink lipstick with a precision I admired. She noticed me and said, Hi, sweetie. When I returned to my seat, I watched a man lead tigers to their assigned positions.

  I’m tired of the line that someone drew down the middle of me. He split me into halves and said, Stay symmetrical or else. Or else what? No answer, and yet I obeyed that command my whole life.

  In March, I stood in a crowd at two in the morning waiting for elephants. The Ringling Bros. were scheduled to emerge from the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and I felt like a child standing there on Thirty-Fourth Street. The six beasts approached holding each other’s tails with their trunks, a stifled yet efficient parade to Madison Square Garden. I took a photo of them walking in front of a Bank of America. I started running alongside the barricades to keep up.

  On Seeking Arrangement, I exchanged messages with a handsome older actor who told me he had a German accent. I imagined it telling me what to do. A year later, I saw him in an online banking commercial. It was not a speaking role, but he pretended to work on his laptop in a café. The voiceover said, You feel safe. But are you too safe?

  At a Yellowstone campsite entrance, the ranger warned my father of the recent grizzly bear sightings. My mother turned to look at my younger sister, who was terrified of bears. She kept her headphones on and eyes closed as we drove into the campsite. That night, in the yellow tent, I awoke to large, searching footsteps. Did you hear him? I asked my parents the next morning, and my sister began to cry.

  It is always wise to tie a bright colored ribbon around your bear’s neck or on his leather collar so that thoughtless sportsmen, boys, and farmers of the neighborhood will recognize it as a pet and not run it through with a pitchfork or bullet.

  A friend once told me, That top button isn’t fooling anyone, you know. A man once said, As soon as I saw your top button, I knew you were a slut. My top button: my protector, my signal.

  A fire commands its audience. A flare in the middle of the road brings a man right to me.

  At the Mid-Manhattan Library, I saw a girl I recognized from Arizona. When I went to school with her, she always had her head in a book as she walked, so it made sense to see her browsing the stacks. We had several classes together, but we were not friends, and I found myself walking to the library’s exit so she wouldn’t see me. In her, I recognized the meek reflection of someone I used to be. I walked away from that person.

  Under no temptation should a hunter’s last shot be fired at a retreating beast.

  Human: to be more than. I pity anything stuck in one role.

  While technicians prepared red, white, and blue explosives along the Hudson River, I snuck through a Brooklyn turnstile with my friend so we wouldn’t be late for the party. The police were waiting for us on the other side. One cop said, How’d you like to spend the Fourth of July in jail?, which was stupid because we all knew girls like us were never punished, not really. We stuffed our $110 tickets into our back pockets and watched the fireworks from a famous singer’s rooftop on the Lower East Side. I wanted to talk to the famous singer, but she kept gliding around on roller skates. I didn’t want to be the reason she stopped.

  The man in the bandit mask kept going as I watched him pee at the party in May. I loved the way he unbuckled his belt, unzipped, and pulled his cock into his hands, proud, casual. He had his back to me, but I looked around him to watch. He asked, Wanna hold it? and I did want to.

  I wished his question was, Wanna know what it’s like to be the one who enters? because I do, and I wish that knowledge was as simple as holding a man in my hands. I want to see my desire as a protrusion leading me into dark rooms. If I can’t have that, then I can attempt to reduce myself to the most vulnerable object possible. Either I await instruction on how to be a dutiful thing or I am the explorer leading this ship or I am a piece of luggage holding other belongings. I take up barely any space at all.

  It’s true that I want what I can’t have, but it was never my intention to please Freud. I’d like to feel satisfied with my own autonomy, but it seems like a job to experience something outside myself. It feels like a respected field. What would Freud say if I inspected his lap? What did Freud ever hunt?

  In Joseph Delmont’s book about trapping animals, he wrote: The true adventurer always has an object in his wanderings.

  There is an island where former versions of myself gallop around on all fours. Untouched, the island populates itself; the versions share what they’ve learned. They never run out of things to talk about by the fire that the latest version knows how to start. If Joseph Delmont came to the island intending to trap a tiger, he might find one. The version might go willingly, without a fight. The island feeds off itself. I wait to be discovered.

  So circle me like the prey I’m dressed as, erase my penciled-in boundary, pay me for the privilege. If I wave a flag of your face long enough, I can forget my own.

  The Id Speaks, Mid-Decision

  Today was all sunshine and car crashes but I didn’t let either stop me, not even when they closed all the lanes on the I-10 in the middle of the desert and swept the cars off the road like leftovers, five lanes into one, and then into a detour that took two hours to go twenty miles, I could see the freeway up ahead and it was so, so clear, the way it had been for me the whole ride up, nothing but me and my indignation, I Would Go The Whole Way Alone, I checked my phone and learned that a tour bus crashed into a semitrailer and 13 people died and 31 people were injured and I thought of the mirrored numbers before I thought of how many lives were lost, one three three one one three three one, the bus crunched accordion style, dramatic, me and the drivers of lesser vehicles—we considered the horror of the accident, and we considered our lives, too, but mostly that we had been inconvenienced, of course we deserved our luck and our willingness to stay alive—we were the kinds of cars that became so unrecognizable we had words like totaled assigned to us, when we got in accidents we were completely wasted, totally done, but right now I was just going to be so, so late, I had to pee and I was hungry, it took me forever to even get to the gas station two miles up, as I crawled along Indian Canyon Drive I thought of the other car crash I had passed three hours prior, the one with the truck that you might call totaled, it was so done it had to be attached to another truck in order to move, I’m like that sometimes, I chain myself to you and call it a day, I touch the back of your head and call it a nightmare, I trail one scent and call it two lives, but when I passed that first crash, I
thought, Like a woman, that is, the truck reminded me of a woman, her capacity to be ruined, I thought I was strong, I thought I could drive myself anywhere, and I did, sometimes just to follow through on something, what did I ever think I was doing, wherever was I, the truck didn’t remind me of myself because no one knows what their specific ruin will look like until it arrives, I was on the precipice but not quite there, I was driving so far to be here with you, I was on the verge of ruin which is not the same as ruin unless you get caught, I never knew it could be like this, total muse, I never knew your face could change in the light of my indignation, my insistence that I love you and that you love me, that you’re worth the disaster that gets a little bigger each day I choose to continue, and make no mistake: each day is a new choice, a new betrayal, a new life I lead outside of the one I already live, I am given two options and I choose both, both, one three three one, it was just one of those days that seems as if something is about to go wrong, the lightning and then the thunder like math, if we got in our own car crash then what, what would I even say to anyone, what if I got in a car crash and kept it a secret, what if I lived a life and held it for myself like your face when we fuck, but today I opened my eyes halfway and saw green ones like mine, brown-black hair and freckles and a big nose like mine, I saw the mouth open like O like the holy part of a poem like the way I do when I feel something about to happen to my body, and I was feeling that, seeing that, I was seeing myself, I decided, I was facing myself at last, I looked terrible wide open like that like I was trying to make the entire world fall in, wasn’t I discerning at all, wasn’t I picky, wasn’t I looking in the right direction ever, I felt so far gone, so totally the right truck on the wrong road, all it takes is one second of distraction, I was afraid I would crash and then I’d really have to see myself as the mistake that I am, crunched hood and airbags inflating to save me from myself, but then I stopped the car before it hit the car ahead of me with its brake lights shining and I was safe again, there was nothing to report, no omen, just the possibility of ruin, which is always present, which is what drew us to each other in the first place, how did we find each other in this world, who have I become, I see you and I see myself, everything I’ve kept, my omitted record like something to learn from, except I know the lesson already and I’ve decided to unlearn it each day, I love my tendencies and I hate being right, I love your voice when you sing other people’s songs, I love the face I make when I want the world and now I can see it, I can see that I fuck myself over and over and over again, and that repetition is the only thing I reach for on this awful highway full of half-paved shoulders and reflective vests and orange cones guiding me to nowhere, and I see how I move according to each detour, and I see exactly how much time this one takes, and I see now it’s impossible to stop.

  I’m Only a Thousand Miles Away

  When my friend Alexis and I were in the sixth grade, my mother took us to a water park in Phoenix called Sunsplash. My mother sat in the shade, reading, while Alexis and I wandered around, going down the waterslides, swimming against the current in the wave pool, and, finally, floating on inner tubes on the Lazy River, a circle of water with a gentle current that looped us around the park.

  Two boys our age paddled their way up to us. The more attractive one, TJ—tanned, with defined abs—began talking to Alexis and her buoyant tits, which were just as mysterious to me as they were to him. Her disproportionately large chest made her bold, and I hoped some of her boldness might make its way to me and my flat-chested boy body—no luck yet. For now, I was talking to the less attractive friend—Freddy, a pale, soft boy with a gentle demeanor. He sat up on his inner tube and showed me his love handles. I asked him to repeat the term, which I’d never heard, and he said, You know, handles. For love.

  When it was time to go, we borrowed a pen from the corn dog stand and we all carved our phone numbers into napkins. When Freddy gave me his, I saw the dampness from his hand had smeared the numbers, but I could still read them. Alexis and I hid the napkins in our hands as my mother drove us home.

  I hadn’t liked Freddy that much in person, but on the phone, I was charmed by his jokes. The calls also gave us the chance to talk about our good-looking friends, who both impressed and terrified us. Last week, TJ’s father drove TJ forty-five minutes and dropped him off at Alexis’s house and they had made out in her room. The logistics of this seemed impossible to Freddy and me, and yet we knew it was the truth. Our friends were the kind of people who made things happen, and we were the kind who waited for other people’s magic to touch us. Freddy and I pieced together both sides of their stories until we’d imagined the event so thoroughly that it became ours, too.

  I liked the way the phone connected my voice to someone else’s without a real commitment. It was casual, like instant messaging—I’d let silence fill the line if I had nothing to say or if I wanted to think before continuing. My calls could last hours, until my phone ran out of battery and beeped and I had to quickly say goodbye before placing the phone back in its lime-green holster on the wall next to my bed.

  My phone was made of translucent lime-green plastic, and it brightened with a red LED light each time it rang. I shared a phone line with our computer’s dial-up modem, so I could be either on the phone or on the Internet, but I had to choose. After a few months, Freddy and I ran out of things to talk about, since we knew our parents would never drive forty-five minutes to drop us off at the other’s house. We’d never kiss, and our friends would likely never kiss again. Eventually, the light stayed unlit.

  Fan mail had been my primary mode of communication with boys up until that point, passing notes to boys in class. In fifth grade, I fell deeply in love with Taylor Hanson, the androgynous middle brother in Hanson who played the keyboard, sang like a girl, and, frankly, looked a lot like me. When my bitter music teacher, Mr. Bell (real name), mocked them for being superficial pop stars, I argued, Actually, they write all their own songs.

  I remember sitting at my desk in my bedroom with a piece of notebook paper and an envelope I’d addressed to an official Hanson fan club that I’d found online. I also had a map of the United States and a ruler. One inch meant a hundred miles, so I counted out ten inches from Phoenix to Tulsa—where Taylor lived—and I began the letter, Dear Taylor, I’m only a thousand miles away from where you are. It seemed like a manageable distance—the kind that could be traveled through sheer will. One day, we would meet, and he would know what I knew: that I was young, sure, but I was the only one who could really love him.

  I never saw Hanson in concert, I never got a letter back, and loving Taylor became so deeply uncool that I gave up and found a replacement. By sixth grade, I was in love with one of the Backstreet Boys—Brian, the seemingly asexual, nonthreatening Christian who loved playing basketball. Alexis loved AJ, which was no surprise, since he was the clearly designated “bad boy” of the group. Our friend Casey loved Nick, the obvious heartthrob with blue eyes and a blond bowl cut.

  My love for Brian was fierce, and it was perpetuated by Alexis and Casey, since the group was our main topic of conversation. We wrote entire notebooks full of stories in which we were in high school with the Backstreet Boys before they were famous. Chapter by chapter, they fell in love with us. Even if we’d known the term, we would never have dared to call what we wrote “fan fiction,” because that would imply the stories weren’t true—and though we knew we invented everything, it seemed true to us. Or it seemed true to me. Alexis and Casey loved admiring the Backstreet Boys, but I secretly thought of myself as the most devoted of us. What I wrote wasn’t meant to be entertaining, it was meant to change fate’s course.

  I knew how famous they were, and that they were in their twenties while we were only thirteen, but it’s hard to explain how close they felt. I filled an entire wall with magazine photos of the Backstreet Boys, and I looked at them with such focus and for such long periods of time that it became like a prayer. It was the first time in my life that I remember feeling physical s
ide effects of longing—I preferred to ache than to feel nothing at all. Someday, I would reach out and touch Brian and he would touch me—but when?

  My mother took Alexis, Casey, and me to see the Backstreet Boys in concert about a year after our obsession began. I wrote Brian’s nickname, “B-ROK,” on my forehead in metallic blue eyeliner, and Alexis wrote AJ’s nickname, “BONE,” on hers. Inside the stadium, it was mostly girls like us and our mothers, filling the stadium with our electricity. Casey said, We’re about to breathe the same air as them, and we screamed.

  We were seated at least two hundred feet away from the stage, but we yelled their names as if they could hear us. They sang all our favorite songs, but I spent the entire show distracted, waiting for Brian to look at me. And then, toward the end of the show, he waved in my direction, and I felt it. He looked at me! I screamed in Casey’s ear. Did you see that?

  A few hours later, around midnight, I was in bed listening to the radio, trying to fall asleep. I loved pop music, of course, but the radio station I had playing that night was the alternative rock station that played at least one Nirvana song every hour. It certainly wasn’t the kind of station on which you’d expect to hear a Backstreet Boys song playing, but I felt I’d already had my fill that evening.

  Suddenly, the DJ announced, Ladies and gentlemen, we have Nick Carter in the studio this evening. Yes, that’s Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys. I immediately sat up in my bed to listen: he was there promoting his friend’s rock band. I didn’t wait to hear the details; I picked up my lime-green phone and dialed the radio station’s number.