By: Avery Lin
Art by: Sam Kang
As a preface you might understand that
my conceptualization of life has been historically framed by novels and mediated through
a distorted window-pane; that I (used to?) primly shuffle between collegiate rooms with collared clothing and grandiose baggage,
anxiously participating in classrooms thriving on simulated energy sustained by
a fallacious faith in authenticity
soured, still, by a lurking suspicion in the false promise of the academic haven,
in the contentious theory of this lightweight ‘suffering’ as a
cruel perversion of the truer more
life-affirming thing;
and even feelings seemed to exist
primarily in the crude realm of the intellectual,
the impressions of subjects in bleary Impressionist paintings,
caught in the sieve of a privilege-shaped rationalism
stunted at the altar of getting sh*t done.
As a story:
the way I thought that maybe I wasn’t destined designed
for romance until one day I, or perhaps my incurably conditioned psyche
glimpsed a hackneyed hope (I cannot exaggerate how reassuring this was)
in a nonchalant guy’s
charming idiosyncrasies and endearing neuroses embalmed in
diagnosable masculinity, activating some pathological submissive disposition
married to unwilled coquetry enacting coded behaviors for which
I’d once fancied myself too unsocialized like
sprawl out (performatively?) in his lap take a
childish fistful of his shirt and
pleasure in pleasing bite
the flesh of my lip idolize his opaque mind but tease, gently, cushioned by apology
emphasis on the joke (just kidding!)
lovingly scheme of ways I can slide the gift of my female personal validation in his lap say that
his troubled genius is authentic and that
I see the emotional underbelly beneath his acerbic airs;
that he doesn’t have to explain himself to me (I’ll do the talking!) that he
will never know how gratifying (is this deliverance?) it feels
to be the abstract object of his substance-enhanced attentions.
How fulfilling it had felt to say, with simpering affection,
how impossible it is to hold anger
(it dissolves…my laughter is placating, trivializing, effacing) when I intimately know
the blissful innocence of his intentions,
the casual thoughtlessness of his carelessness…
I am ashamed to confess that
under cover of sleeplessness that first year away,
determined to bloom/get unstuck I nurtured the seed of the shallow thought that it will all be worth it when, fortified with a degree like a shot, I clutch an
imperfect child
absorb by glimmering osmosis the wonder of life tacitly affirmed by witness of his adoring gaze (I am always arranging my face);
and then I will have
something non-cliché, humbly self-referential yet proudly alien to call my own;
something other than
two-faced writing and indulgent thoughts, exorcizing
the guilt of my materialistic attachments.
And then I might finally feel as though
life had not passed me by, stroking the palm of domestic bliss…
I think I want the noble irresponsibility validated by exhaustion
born by the unselfish purposefulness of a life outside of my own:
I want to do less yet be incontestably more, to outgrow
this tenuously sculpted female egoism sustained by
flaky visions of self-fulfillment materialized by
calculated assiduousness and creative thirst, of
uncontrived individuality and inherent selfhood…
I know that I should be thinking about more than grades when note-taking,
about more than establishing self-image when parading around
and personality in non-capitalist terms;
that writing should be more about cutting through bullshit and less about
framing self-reflection in an empowering and palatable way;
That I should be propelled by some self-conviction divorced from the prosaic hope
that my lovable humanity may be validated by my loving him without
condition or circumstance, dazzled by the glare of the theoretical ‘forever’;
that I will be the first line of defense for him and his rich psychological crises
that haunt a wilder, more poetic tundra than mine.
I know that I should feel less assured by the thought that
when I walk around feeling chronically displaced, comically frazzled
privately preoccupied with my shoes and jacket
and all the materialistic things filling my room,
wondering whether my twisted priorities are just run-of-the-mill girl stuff,
that there’s a precedent and theory for all of it:
Yet sometimes I cede, more happily than indifferently, too much power to this
hackneyed vision of assuaging his insecurities on the armchair I chose,
drying my hands on a couture dishcloth and
padding demurely in slippers, tending to something important —
— had I once confused loneliness with independence?
So as an afterword: one day I may
let my eyes rest strip down all the flowery prose
spool out something like pride, hold it up to some artificial light and
laugh at the pretentiousness, at this vampiric impulse to narrativize and simply
bask, artfully unmoored,
in the covert delight of saying anything at all.
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