The Chronology of Water Part 8

I didn't know yet that s.e.xuality is an entire continent.

I didn't know yet how many times a person can be born.

Mother.

Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I'd been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and d.i.c.k unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his d.i.c.k whipped until it was red as a screaming infant.

I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her t.w.a.t whipped for over an hour while her p.u.s.s.y swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint.

I went back.

I saw a woman's thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles - 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other - her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her c.u.n.t gus.h.i.+ng.

I saw reddened welts rise on a woman's a.s.s like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted.

Some of which I began to let happen to me.

Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it.

But I wanted to feel it more. Harder.

" Tell me what you want."

That's how it began. If I said something dumb like, I'd like a kiss, she'd say, "No, that's not right, Angel." And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of ta.s.sel. "Try again," she'd say.

I'd try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted.

What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally.

I suppose it's good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm s.a.d.i.s.t. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper.

"Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?"

I don't know why, but I thought of my mother - who was under hypnosis during my birth. "Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?"

At first I didn't know what she meant by "journey." I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted her to hurtpleasure me. So when she asked me that, it was annoying. It involved thinking. Can't we just do it?

This woman though, she was 25 years older than me. For her, having s.e.x - that anchor of heteros.e.xual scripture - she'd left that behind more years ago than my age. So it seems true enough to say that in her hands I became again. I became a daughter again. I became a student again. An athlete. I became a sister again. A lover. And the most difficult: a mother. All the crucibles of my life were now available across the surface of my own body. With her.

This: territories that had caused me psychic pain were now available to recross physically through a pain that ... cleansed me like water.

This woman unlike any other woman I ever met in my life didn't want to be in a relations.h.i.+p. If by "relations.h.i.+p" we mean living together with someone else and entering the social realm as two people you could point to and go look, there's a couple. Or any of the domesticity that comes with cohabitation or long term close proximity. In fact, my only option for seeing her and being with her and doing with her was to meet her when she came to the west coast or I went to the east. The longing in between? I could feel it in the bruises and cuts and welts left on my skin for weeks. My skin story.

Look I'm not trying to creep you out. Or shock you. I'm trying to be precise. I'm just saying maybe healing looks different on women like me.

She read every story I wrote. Where I placed my truths, just underneath the skin of wild girls - junkies and prost.i.tutes and child thieves and girls with their hair on fire. And that is why the third year she told me to call her "mother." Because my real mother? She'd been a numb drunk folded into her own pain when I needed her. This one took action. This one could have killed my father. I wanted her to ravage me.

The cross beam was not in a dungeon -those remade bas.e.m.e.nts in the homes of people you would never suspect. It was in broad daylight in her loft, bathed in white and golden light when the sun came in. Or hued black and blue when it rained. The crossbeam was lodged at an angle, not straight up. And there was a padded bench on it like on a weightlifting bench. And a ledge for your feet. When she bound my wrists with thin black leather twine christ-like to the wood I started crying.

"Mother, I would like to be whipped."

Then she would present a long cat of nine tails - its dark red leather strips the color of blood. "Tell me where you would like to be whipped, Angel."

So I told her. And begged her. She whipped my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She whipped my stomach. My hipbones. Late into the day. I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing. Oh how I cried. The crying of something leaving a body. And then she whipped me red where my shame had been born and where my child had died, and I spread my legs as far as I could to take it. Even my spine ached.

Afterwards she would cradle me in her arms and sing to me. And bathe me in a bubble bath. And dress me in soft cotton. And bring me dinner in bed with wine. Only then would we make love. Then sleep. Ten years to bring a self back. In between seeing her I swam in the U of O pool. I swam in the literature of the English Department. In water and words and bodies.

My safe word was "Belle."

But I never used it.

My Mother Demonology IN THE END, THE BOOKS I LOVED THE MOST IN GRADUATE school were the deviant ones. The underbelly of literature. George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper and William Burroughs. Which makes it easier to understand how I found a literary foremother in Kathy Acker.

So if you've never read Kathy Acker's books, then you don't know how often fathers rape their daughters. Without artifice or affect. Without any literary strategy to lyricise or symbolize or otherwise disguise. A father will show up on a page and rape his daughter, and the daughter will be the one narrating, and she will not be in any kind of victim position you've ever imagined. You'll be reading going, mother of G.o.d, that's some horrific s.h.i.+t, but the daughter won't be. The daughter narrating the rape by her father will be extremely articulate even if coa.r.s.e, and the narration will be the jumping off point for radical adventures of a girl child or robot woman or she-pirate. Her rage will drive her. The transgression will write her very body.

When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker's books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender cla.s.s and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No s.h.i.+t. p.u.s.s.y, I thought.

When I read Kathy Acker's books, and particularly any section in which fathers s.e.xually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes.

I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt ... present.

So it did not take me any time at all to understand that what she was deconstructing was the law of the father. Patriarchy and capitalism. More precisely, the effects of patriarchy and capitalism on the bodies of women and girls. Actually, you know what? I just cracked myself up writing this. If you've never read Blood and Guts in High School, you are in for a treat. Every year I teach it I expect to be fired.

You can count the books written by women that precisely articulate these themes on one hand; one hand that has four of its fingers shot off with William Burroughs' pistol.

But underneath that, what she was also writing was literal. A literal father and a literal daughter and the plainspeak necessary to name it. I'd read sections and stop and look around expecting to get caught or smacked a red blotchy one. You can say this s.h.i.+t? And it can be published?

In this way, her books saved me.

So you can imagine how large it was to meet her and hang out with her. Feminae a feminae.

Many many many people "knew" her better than I. I'm friends with lots of them. That's actually not the story I'm trying to tell. The story I'm trying to tell is quite a bit more ordinary than that. But sometimes ordinary things are staggering.

I swam with her.

When I swam with Kathy Acker it was at a Best Western shrunken indoor pool with too much chlorine. Trust me. I know chlorine. Her swimsuit was black and blue. Mine was dark red. Her body was decorated with tattoos. Her hair was platinum and as short as a freshly mowed lawn. All kinds of sterling silver sprouted from her face and ears. I had one side of my head close shaven, and on the other side I had Breck Girl long blonde hair. We must have looked like a pretty girl's wound.

How I came to be swimming with Kathy Acker was I invented a Xine in Eugene - that's what you to do in Eugene - called two girls review. One day when I was drunk and high with my second husband, sitting on the floor of our next to the tracks rental house I said to him, "Let's bring Kathy Acker down here to read." And he looked at me all slow eyed and said, "OK ." Things seemed like they could go like that in Eugene.

It's not what you think to contact people you think of as mega stars. I dialed information. He called. I wrote down what he should say. He said it. And shebazz. I was swimming in a Best Western pool with Kathy f.u.c.king Acker.

I know not all of you would do the tinkle dance to hang out with Kathy Acker. In fact, some of you don't even know who she was. But to me, Kathy Acker was the s.h.i.+t. She was the woman who staged a break-in on culture and gender, on the prison house of language, and blew it up from the inside out. She was the female William Burroughs.

And after we swam, she talked about p.u.s.s.y spanking.

p.u.s.s.y spanking, for the uninitiated, is not just foreplay. Christ, most of the women I know now have never had the pleasure, but the good ones have.

When we swam in that ghoulishly green colored Best Western pool, we did laps. This was after she lifted free weights for about an hour. She swam hard. She wasn't a superb swimmer, but she was a solid swimmer. How she looked in the water was like a human muscle beating the c.r.a.p out of each lap. And when she'd turn her head to breath, if I happened to breathe her direction at the right time, her face with all that hardware gleamed.

It wasn't in the pool that the p.u.s.s.y revelations happened. And it wasn't later in my blue Toyota pickup truck after we went to Rite-Aid to buy her sinus medication, where she asked me things about my body, having seen me swim. Though being asked questions about your body by Kathy Acker is definitely enough to make your car seat wet. It was later, at dinner, with 14 other people sitting around. Between bites of dinner and sips of wine she self narrated about how she didn't much c.u.m from penetration and loved to be spanked into o.r.g.a.s.m. I was sitting next to her. I've never been that wet sitting next to someone just talking in my life. I thought I might slide off of the seat and dribble to the floor right there, sucking her ankles and whimpering on my way down, begging her to go under the table with me.

I talked with her other times. People who knew her would agree with me - she was wide open mouthed about traditionally s.e.xual things - she was precise and clear and fully descriptive. It was smaller, ordinary, human things she'd go all quiet or shy or girl about. Like an inside out woman. Like all the swollen red gus.h.i.+ng salty complexity of a woman on the outside. Going THIS.

The night after we swam together at the Best Western, after her jammed to the walls packed reading, after the take the writer out to a bar so people can drool on her and crowd her into claustrophobic h.e.l.l, at approximately 4:23 a.m. I think you know what happened.

I got the motherloving juice spanked out of my p.u.s.s.y until the bed flooded. It was not like with the photographer. I laughed. I laughed with pleasure.

I had a few other encounters with her. We exchanged two letters about s.e.xuality. I talked to her on the phone once when I thought I might be in love with a transs.e.xual person. That's it. And this. She read my writing and said: "You should keep doing it. Not everyone should. You should."

Kathy died in 1997 of breast cancer.

Kesey died in 2001 of liver cancer.

Sometimes in my head she is the good mother. He's the good father. Me swimming in words.

IV. Resuscitations.

A Drowning Scene.

MY SECOND HUSBAND WAS A CHARISMATIC NARCISSISTIC tender hearted frighteningly attractive artistic drunk. With h.e.l.la black curls of hair traveling halfway down his back. And black eyes. It seemed. And a tiny zipper scar across his left wrist. My break up with Devin - poet, divine one - it took 11 years. G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

I took an informal poll of all the incredibly intelligent, intriguing, beautiful women I currently know on the question of why we find ourselves driven like moths to fire toward men who f.u.c.k us up. They said things like: "Because in loving his darkness I found my own." Or "I learned from an early age that if it feels bad, it's good, and if it feels good, you are bad." Then there was the ever popular "Between s.l.u.t and saint I choose s.l.u.t." And this one's a cla.s.sic of course: "Bad boys are more interesting than good ones. If you can survive it. And I still feel that way." Also: "Suffering makes a stronger bond than love," and "I'd rather feel alive and die than feel dead and live." This one nearly made me cry: "He made me feel like someone somebody would risk something to choose." But the one I personally identified with the most was, "He celebrated a death drive with me."

The first night I slept with Devin we consumed 25 bottles of Guinness and two jumbo bottles of wine. I barely remember the actual s.e.x but I remember exactly what we drank. We listened to Jim Morrison all night in his bedroom. Strange Days and LA Woman until it felt like it was in our skin. When I woke up the next morning and looked at the desk across from the bed I saw as many bottles as I was old. I laughed and burped and went back to sleep, Devin's arm pinning me to the bed.

I didn't feel anything about myself.

It was everything to be filled with such nothing.

I first met Devin at the orientation meeting for new graduate students at the University of Oregon in Eugene. It was my second year, his first.

I looked around at all the earnest grad student folks at orientation and felt kind of like I had a big red "A" on my chest due to my checkered academic past. Flunked out of undergraduate school in Lubbock. Quit undergraduate school in Eugene. Went back with a pile of D's and F's and clawed my way up to the pretty people.

Then I saw a guy who looked equally out of place and very uncomfortable with astonis.h.i.+ngly beautiful long black hair and eyelashes. I watched him. He kept looking at the door. And fidgeting like he didn't fit in the seat. I didn't hear an orientation thing. After the orientation I sort of sauntered up next to him and without looking at me he said, "I feel like I might get arrested here," and I replied without looking at him, "Do you think they can tell I'm not wearing underwear," and we went straight from the orientation meeting to a bar and didn't stop drinking for 11 years, so you might say I was perfectly primed to cross his path.

This man was gorgeous. I'm mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.

Honestly I remember feeling shocked every time he walked up to my Toyota pickup truck and got in. I always expected him to veer off at the last moment, get into someone else's vehicle. Or bed. Or house. Or life.

Our love, was liquid. Turned out we both loved drinking more than almost anything else. The anything else turned out to be f.u.c.king. Drinking in bathrooms and kitchens and alleys and hallways and bars and cars. Drinking all the way to the coast and all night at a bar and in the morning with eggs and oyster shooters in some c.r.a.ppy run-down motel and all the way back to Eugene. Drinking before, during, and after cla.s.ses. Drinking in beds and in baths and at the rivers and in the rose garden and in the graveyard next to U of O and on top of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall.

We drank Guinness.

We drank cheap turn your teeth purple wine.

We drank Chivas, because he had a thing about Jim Morrison.

We drank vodka, because of... well, me.

We drank everything his favorite poet drank - Bukowski - and like Bukowski's women, I matched him drink for drink.

We drank each other blind.

Drinking our minds gone. Drinking our lives away.

In between drinking he said I want to be a painter. I said I want to be a writer. So we drank to that. And painted. And wrote. And celebrated every hour with booze. Dancing with lesbians. Tripping with hippies. Mushrooming with artists. Slitting the tires of Republicans. We drank with b.u.ms under overpa.s.ses and on the tracks. We drank with friends and enemies and ex-cons and tat artists and once a priest and bikers and once with a famous actress and with his drunk father and my drunk mother and all the people we'd never met. We dreamed in drink.

While we were underwater stories began itching at my fingertips.

While we were drinking he painted paintings of wild faces - abstract faces so you could never say who they were or why.

While we were drinking the chaos of art came out of us. There was nothing we could do to control anything about us.

Always we were making. Making love, making trouble, making art. We made performance art together. He made paintings and I made stories. He made dinner and I made money. It seemed like all that making had a power bigger than our dumb lives. Making and making.

Art. The expression of human imagination. Or emotions that have been locked inside a body spilled out all over the G.o.dd.a.m.n place.

Always he made me laugh. I hadn't laughed since I was 10. It wasn't safe to laugh as a child, and later in life when I lost my daughter, laughter hurt too much. But a drunk man made me laugh. All the time. Sometimes I think that's the best of it.

I would have done anything for him. A love unto death. And...

G.o.dd.a.m.n it.

I'm already lying. I'm making it all sound literary.

It was messier than that. A lot.

Like the image of him sitting slumped over drunk against the wall of an airport while I bought our tickets home from Reno, Nevada. How by then I was deadened with drunk. How I looked at him for a long minute. How I tucked his ticket in his pocket and left all our bags around him and got on a plane without him.

Let me start over.

Distilled YEAR ONE WE DRINK GUINNESS MOSTLY ALL THE TIME and we ride Mountain bikes around Eugene at night and we go to the Vet's Club we go to the Vet's club we go to the Vet's club we go to the High Street Cafe hey I'll give you my student loan wad of $700 if you kiss the guy who joined us for a drink he does we laugh we drink we f.u.c.k. We rent a house together near the traintracks we drink Guinness we paint each other's bodies we paint the walls we paint an entire room we f.u.c.k. We go crazy loving we go crazy f.u.c.king we go crazy drinking we do performance art in Eugene him naked on stage with a b.l.o.o.d.y pig's head me naked on stage wrapped in Saran Wrap we perform on stage we perform at school we perform a life his long black hair my long blond hair attractive dramatic people dramatically drinking we have our first yell fight me on one side of the bathroom door with a Swiss Army Knife him on the other side of the bathroom door with a kitchen knife we carve each other's names into our arms we do I fall and break open the body of the toilet water spewing everywhere he breaks down the bathroom door we bleed we f.u.c.k septic water. Year Two we drink Bushmills we ride our bikes in summer at night to the rose garden we steal all the heads of roses we strip and ride the current down the McKenzie river we road trip from Oregon to Florida we drink mushroom tea and hallucinate in the redwoods we see a guy die on the road some terrible wreck blood everywhere stretchers with corpse side of the road gorgeous ocean cliff view blood and road flares and ambulances and bodies how you loved looking just like you loved moving deathward so Jim Morrison I wanted to be in your fire we eat ecstasy and ride our bikes on the freeway we drive and drive all the southern states redneck f.u.c.kwads laughing snakeskin boots and cowboy hats all the way to Alabama his home to Florida my parents then turn around as fast as possible back to the west to Oregon where we can be who we are the west we get married in Tahoe at the top of Harvey's Casino with my best friends lovers Mike and Dean and my sister and my parents Oedipal fakers and his parents southern Baptist fascists and we drink with the gay boys and a casino preacher with giant hair groomed black as a record alb.u.m marries us says a Native American prayer there on top of Harvey's Casino overlooking Lake Tahoe we laugh all the way down the elevators all the way through the year all the way to rings on our fingers and bells on our toes. Year three love is a series of islands in Greece the Cyclades rising from aqua ocean waters like stepping stones for dumb naive drunk Americans with back packs riding ferries we drink Tsipouro we drink Mavrodafni we drink Retsina we drink Metaxa Metaxa Metaxa white stone buildings endless rock beaches mountains and olive hills and brown skinned people with dark hair dark eyes open arms open hands fishermen breadmakers winemakers women with giant t.i.ts and laughing until I'm drunk dumb with love drunk dumb with Greece drunk dumb blond sleeping while he goes out to sleep with Greece. Year four is London and Keats' house and laying on the tiny bed we're not supposed to and getting kicked out drunk tourists and Hyde Park naps and the Tate Gallery and Westminster Abbey choir boys coming out from behind a giant wooden door my crying and crying so beautiful these singing children but we didn't come for London the food is s.h.i.+t the people are unattractive the Shakespearian tradition is all over everything until we f.u.c.k in a giant tidepool near the Cliffs of Dover good really good pub with no Americans but then some show up ugly very very very near to giant fistfight he's drunk he thinks he's Bukowski run I say run these are English pig dog thugs we escape to where we wanted to be to Ireland. Becket and Synge and Joyce and at Yeats house we f.u.c.k in the castle against the wall we f.u.c.k on the stones at Innish Moore we drink and pa.s.s out in Joyce's country his shoes was.h.i.+ng away down a river my hair soaked with rain we read books we wish we were part of history we wish we were part of drinking we wish we were part of anything not ourselves we walk and walk but why do the pictures we took of each other have no smiles. Did we become a Beckett play? Year five a restored farmhouse in France my beloved Michael with us his lover with us we live there for a month we drink every French wine $5 to $500 we drink champagne we eat rabbit we eat crepes we eat escargot we laugh they taste like dirt we eat and eat and drink restaurant with menus and walls designed by Chagall the Louvre get lost and too high in all the art and high ceilings and hide in a bathroom hunched like a little troll in the corner rocking until a French woman asks "sont bien vous? sont bien vous?" Back out into the Louvre and even the Mona Lisa looks silly back to the farmhouse which is not in Paris but on the speed train taking speed on the speed train back to the farmhouse which is near Normandy on the coast - stop - war and remembrance - back at the farmhouse 100 year old restored house walk in fireplace cooking and drinking and fire. Next night nightmare we become drunk people driving and getting pulled over and me wis.h.i.+ng wis.h.i.+ng my beloved friend to talk to these police but beautiful gay men stay in the car and Devin Bukowski begins to fight with the French cop and a miracle we are not all taken to prison. Gay men fight in the French farmhouse we feel less alone when other people fight love. Year six yelling begins a rhythm and me writing book begins and him painting paintings begins and yelling gets louder and drinking gets louder and him kissing women I know and him kissing women I don't know and how do people last together how do they what is a couple over time but a line and me writing more and more and him painting and my first book and his first painting in a SoHo gallery but nothing stops the yelling that is taking over the house and drinking and kissing that becomes animal and desperate and no travel too much reading graduate school too much writing me reading and writing and language and the liquor of intellectual fights the liquor of love no travel more writing just the distance of two bodies barreling through pa.s.sion but barreling differently splitting apart into the flames one mind one body splitting. Year seven I start a dissertation he quits grad school drinking and yelling: cleaved. Year eight I get a Ph.D. I get a real job someone here needs to someone needs to take care of this couple gone haywire beautiful f.u.c.ked up children so full of promise so full of self loathing so full with alcohol we keep on being married and married and married and yelling and drinking and he p.i.s.ses drunk in the corner and he falls down the stairs and he pa.s.ses out on the lawn and he pa.s.ses out driving and how do you do this how do you where is my love going? Year nine here is a job at my job adjunct pretend grown up here is a trip with a drama colleague of mine I am giving you my love go to go to Vietnam here is a life I buy him a loft along the riverfront in Portland I buy him alcohol I try and try to buy our love back I try and try but no money stops him in Vietnam he falls in love Tu-Ha he lies and lies he comes home Tu-Ha he goes back I wait in bed for him night after night he stays in Vietnam Tu-Ha I stay in bed for days and days I don't eat I drink the drinking of alone I p.i.s.s in the bed I don't move me urine and vodka and sad sad dead childless woman with her job and her house and her first book and her cat and her dog and her money no husband Tu-Ha. Year 10 we pretend. Year 10 we go back to Tahoe to try to remember pretend. Year 10 we drink on top of Harvey's Casino we drink in the elevator we drink instead of f.u.c.king until we can't see or hear or feel we drink even on the way to the airport in the cab we get to the airport I go to the ticket counter to go back to Oregon but I know I'm not going to get to go back to anything just Oregon I turn around with the tickets he's asleep against the wall snoring like drunks do all our luggage around him like children we never had I leave the ticket in his drunk sleeping hand he's p.i.s.sed himself I can't take care of this man. Year 10 he sleeps with one of our mutual students she emails me and tells me she is a good person she emails me and tells me he is a good person she emails me and tells me I am a good person they f.u.c.k and f.u.c.k I come home from work she is on the black leather couch pa.s.sed out he is pa.s.sed out on the floor. Year 10 you said you would love me until I died you said we would die together in love you said when I was 75 we'd laugh our saggy skinned laughs and drink to our old a.s.s love you said it to me you did every year until you stopped saying it where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father I stop eating lose 25 pounds everyone says everyone says you look so beautiful. Like a movie actress. Isn't she beautiful?

Am I beautiful?

Love is a lifedeath.

My Lover, Writing I KIND OF DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU THIS.

I mean I was going to write this whole book not telling you. I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you.

Ask me about my life as a s.e.xualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and f.u.c.ked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue.