Tag Archives: women

Low Cut

Bad

It doesn’t happen all the time, but there are mornings where I wake up craving a cigarette.

Not the mouth feel, or the taste. Not the smoke coating my lungs and staining my fingertips. Just the practice of it, the art. Stretching out in the morning air in my pajamas, coffee in hand, smoking.

My body hates it now. It’s tolerated it the last few years. Before that it was scarcely a blip. I could breathe it out of my body, and my blood. It’s barely ever registered as a habit. Just purely as a love for the sport.

Though I am less self-aware overall as I age, this is one thing I am conversely self conscious of. Who would get near me, breathe me in, touch me, kiss me? if I smoked. It becomes a social delineator. Once it’s done I can’t leave the house.

And I don’t want to socialize with other smokers. Especially not ones my age. These are not my people.

Which begs the question, who am I? To be so singularly acceptable in this private transgression. To crave a sexy cigarette, without anyone ever seeing it. To put my body through yet another vice, and more toxins it can’t afford. What the fuck am I actually doing?

Maybe it isn’t just the cigarettes.

Standard
Laundry Day

Title Story

I love to sit and think about baby names. Why do I do this?

I’m not married, or any in danger of becoming pregnant. I’m not even being courted as a girlfriend. I am as single as it gets, and closer to menopause than puberty. And, yet, I love to imagine what I would make with a baby name.

It’s usually a baby girl. I like girl names. They have personalities with subtle differences. Not like boy names, that fall into coarser categories. Troy, Chase, Dominic — probably athletes with a drive to succeed. Evan, Warren, Sol — more like poets in beatnik coffee shops. Michael, William, John — no frills types of guys.

But the difference between Helen and Helena, Elle and Ellen, Vicki and Victoria — these feel like worlds to me. The difference between black leather and black patent leather.

I string the names together — first, middle, and my last name — and imagine classmates calling them out. Nicknaming them. Forming them into their own interpretations of my original work of art. Sampling and revising and making more modern, this vernacular image I nailed down so perfectly.

And then I see that little girl ebbing and flowing with those changes. Coming into the world, pristinely polished with her given name. Then trying it on with her clothes, her makeup, her interests and thoughts. Seeing if they match. Making it her own.

And me, always wondering if I got it right.

Standard
Low Cut

Hot Lava

pawel-czerwinski-1538546-unsplash

It took me way too long to see the movie When Harry Met Sally. I am a romantic, I love easy comedy, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are two of my 80’s baby favorites. Of course I loved it, and have since thought a lot about the different kinds of relationships that can occur between a man and a woman.

I had drinks with a man last night who I can’t help but care about in a borderline maternal way. I have a lot of male friends who have fallen under this nurturing gaze, partly because I work in a male-dominated profession, and partly because I don’t have children of my own. I want to listen to them, feed them, and make sure they got home safely. I have this urge to bring them under my folded wings and warm them like freshly hatched chicks in an unpredictable spring.

A lot of times, these feelings grow into something more. As you share yourself with someone, and they open up to you in turn, it’s only natural that connections begin to forge in those soft streams of vulnerability that run deeply in us all. This can either cause a fraternal relationship to turn into something almost sibling-like, or plant a bunch of what if? seeds that lead to eventual catastrophe and awkward mornings.

None of my romantic relationships have ever started this way, though. At least, none of the ones that lasted more than a month. The big loves I’ve had in my life have always been rooted first in attraction, chemistry, and that thing. Of course, these haven’t been successful either, if I’m judging by the fact that I’m still single. But when I look back at those relationships, they were the ones that cut grooves through my internal landscape, changed the trajectory of rivers inside me, moved mountains around me. They altered my entire countenance, so that I was completely unrecognizable from the person I was before them.

Certainly, friendships can have that affect, too. But it almost seems like it’s a secondary purpose to love. To tug at the fault lines within you, and break you apart.

So that, through these fissures, your beautiful insides can pour out and create a brand new surface.

Standard