Syrah

I am so uninterested in men at the moment. Men, relationships, dating, sex. None of that.

Give me friendship.

Sexual Famine: An Introduction

sex·u·al   fam·ine

ˈsekSH(əw)əl/      ˈfamən/

Would you like to hear a story brimming with hedonism, romantic disillusionment, adventure and a disappointed, sexually-frustrated narrator? No? Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway.

Once upon an autumn in May, a boy returned from the vineyard to the second largest city in Australia with the intent to live with his best girl-friend. They shared the same room, but slept in separate beds. What she thought at first to be a relaxing, platonic month with her visitor, turned out instead to be a rather significant and impactful period of time for her. And only her (she found out later.)

Night after night, the boy and the girl indulged in life’s sweetest, most elegant vices. The two of them drank classy Australian wines (sometimes imports) and craft beer. They smoked perfectly rolled joints and surrounded themselves in sound-scapes of music, smiling, stoned out of their minds. They relived myriad realities through many great films, and of course, filled their bellies with delicious food. Time did not exist when they were together. It merely dwindled.

On the night that changed everything, the boy had prepared a steak dinner with grilled potatoes, and mushrooms sauteed in chives on the side. The girl was ecstatic to come home each night, as he often cooked for them. They sat on her bedroom floor per usual, and drank a rich Malbec with their steak. It was perfect. After a joint or two, they put on the film, True Romance. As per usual, they sat up against the wall by her bed, and talked in the half-darkness. He told her about his best friend from home, and how he slept with her. How his friendships seem enriched after intimacy. The girl thought for a second, and realized that she was also his best friend. And she was feeling quite horny, as she had earlier contemplated to invite her English friend to her home just to fuck. She decided against it.

The girl then asked: So, technically I could just take advantage of you?
He said,
Well, yeah.

So it happened. Easy, right? They had sex on that chilly, autumn night after their succulent steak dinner, red wine, a joint and a good film.And they continued to have sex. Days upon days of pure hedonism. They got lost in each other’s bodies. The girl was pummeled with orgasms, multiplying hour by hour; him above her grinning and laughing as her body writhed in ultimate pleasure, her mind transcending their plane of existence; oxytocin feeding the brain like cocaine, hit after hit of endless pleasure. The girl made one mistake, however. She allowed herself to trust him wholly and completely. For some strange reason, she entrusted her body and her heart to him. Perhaps because she was so reminded of her previous relationship, that she let her guard down. Soon enough, her emotions became her weakness. She had fallen in love, and she knew it was going to be painful. But she did not anticipate how painful it would be.

Everything was on fast-forward then, and remained that way until the boy got on his plane back to America.

…To be continued…

Stepping Into Fire (a sestina)

“My nerves are turned on.
I hear them like musical instruments.
Where there was silence, the drums,
the strings are incurably playing.
You did this. Pure genius at work.
Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.”
— Anne Sexton

The streets I walk are laced alone with autumn.
Sanguine fruit, the glorious decay of day turned bittersweet;
I willingly bask in your absence, and there, I am insatiable.
I count the lovers after you. With seething eyes I watch them writhe.
Embraced by a naked darkness, I ask myself: Why can’t you flourish?
Already, I know the answer: they are not quite as succulent.

Embraced by a naked darkness, I ask myself: Why can’t you flourish,
Sanguine fruit, the glorious decay of day turned bittersweet;
Already, I know the answer: they are not quite as succulent.
I count the lovers after you. With seething eyes I watch them writhe.
I willingly bask in your absence, and there, I am insatiable.
The streets I walk are laced alone with autumn.

The Cavity of Absence or, Redefining Gravity

He left for the mountains in the Victorian countryside. A train and two hours brought him back to me. When you pine for someone or something, time willingly stretches itself to fill the cavity of absence. It is one of those things you possess, but do not always have. It is carved by companionship, by affection, and appears only when you are apart from something dear to you.

He was gone for four days.

In that time, I became a kind of fading daylight. A waning moon. I walked around to the back of the house and slipped the key into the lock. My hand on the doorknob to my room; the creak of its aging and there he was again, in my presence. We held each other for a little while, there in the center of my room. He rolled a joint for us and like rag dolls we lay half-entwined on my bed. Dreamy, white haze filled the space. We questioned our hunger and decided to take a walk to the cheap Vietnamese restaurant I had discovered. We carried the bags of take-away down Sydney Road. Our wrinkled palms, the sound of his voice after mine in the cold air. I smiled. The menu he gave me to keep was folded in my back pocket. On the wooden floor of my room we sat cross-legged, shoving our mouths with plastic forks and spoons. Coriander and red chili. Rice noodles. Bright orange julienned carrots. Little slivers of mushrooms. The door was left ajar.

“Should we shut the door?” I glanced at him, feeling my lust rise like heat.
“I don’t know. Should we?” He grinned with eyes of desire.

I stood up and pushed it shut. How eager he was. With my foot, I slid the containers of half-eaten food away from his mattress. I fell upon him with my lips and my tongue. His shoulders embraced me, the muscles contracting, harder it became. We had already undressed each other with our eyes and now, with our fingers. I had not even stripped bare and he was ready to consume me. He positioned my legs above his waist and pulled my body downward, now caught in his gravity.

I sigh and sigh, like blissful flames.
Our bellies were full. Our hunger,
satisfied.

“If You Leave”

I make note of the freckles and tiny marks strewn across your soft white torso. There is a mole just above your right hipbone. I place my fingertip on it. Kyle had one there, too. I begin to think up names for these newly discovered constellations upon your astral body. A Smiths album plays in the background, rotating on the lopsided record player. Morrisey’s voice fills the room with his bittersweet voice. The light of morning seeps in around the sides of your window shade. I run my fingers through and through your thick, wavy locks. Your eyes are shut. Mmm, you moan. We are naked. How did I get here, the thought drifts through me and dissipates somewhere between our bodies. I recently learned that time spent completely nude with another human being should be cherished. Why distract myself from this beautiful moment to think about how I got here? This is where I belong and here is where I am. My fingers run along your chestnut hair, tender and firm. I smile at you, closed-eyed and dreamy. I want to take everything in. To soak up the moment. I fill myself with the image of your wondrous nakedness, long-limbed and almost hairless. The sweet scent of us lingering in the air after we’d made love. And how we were surrounded by all the film photographs of your travels through Europe. Your journeys, tangible, dangling across twine. Our little universe reverberates with a serendipitous awareness: that we found each other, and we simply enjoyed each others’ presences.

In Milan Kundera’s, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Tomas, one of the main characters, comes to this conclusion:

Making love with a [wo]man and sleeping with a [wo]man are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of [wo]man) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one [wo]man).

“Shared Furniture”

This is an unfinished and on-going piece about specific pieces of furniture and how they tie into the tasteful, vivid moments Kyle and I have shared.

+                      +                       +

1. A table. First, is a table. Stretched mahogany, waxed. Borrowed. Nearly the length of my tiny kitchen at 40 Hartwell Street. It’s the big white house on the corner. Kyle sits across from me, at that table. It is late September. I hear the tea kettle heating up slowly. Tiny bubbles scream under high pressure. He sips his tea slowly. I take large gulps. The thought of leaning over and kissing him crosses my mind. It confuses me– i’ve never had these kinds of impulses, not for him. I use a small spoon to mix honey into my tea. Our fingers are too afraid to touch, just as our words hide truths behind unnamed pronouns. We tell our deepest secrets without using names. There are boxes and bags of loose-leaf tea tucked within the cabinet above the stove. It’s past midnight. The two of us—we are the epilogue to a birthday party with the candles and the frozen cheesecake and the tearing of wrapping paper. Mugs become empty and bladders become full. It makes for a good excuse to leave the table and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I mouth words, attempting to read my own eyes, searching for a hint of dishonesty. No, not one. Just truth and myself. I take my place where my cup sits. One of my housemates descend the staircase and stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of tap water. She stops. Looks at us, all sleepy and suspicious. I wonder, does she know already? That when she sets her glass down and falls asleep, while the teacups are emptied of everything but the wet leaves that lay shriveled and cold at the very bottom, that I will return from the bathroom to him standing in the middle of my kitchen in that dim light and embrace him with my face pressed into his chest as I inhale deeply?

2. Second is a couch. First, it belonged to my oldest cousin Alissa. She was older and free and promised to take me to Mexico when I turned eighteen. She never did. At the time, she was living next to the asbestos-coated ruins of the Twin Towers sometime in the 2000’s. You could see the collapsed remains from the one, big window. I remember sleeping on the couch, brown like a leather cafe armchair, but lumpy and cotton-filled. I was much younger then. When she moved, she gave the couch to my second oldest half-brother. He sets it against the only window of the living room of his house on Ray Street. I sink into it, holding a giant juice box filled with white wine that he bought me. There’s a board game coated in dust on a shelf behind the TV. He is a drug dealer and that’s that. I’m the delivery boy. He moves out without a word, someone else moves in. I move out of the dormitories and move into the big white one on the corner. Our landlord, a small Chinese woman, offers us some furniture from a previous house. The house on Ray Street. It all smells like marijuana. My brother is long gone. Part of the door frame breaks in the attempt to get it into our living room, and we do it and it is there and now it belongs to me. That couch. Kyle and I. We move to the couch after countless cups of tea in the dimly lit kitchen, late September. He suggests we sit someplace where he could be closer to me. I am still trembling from our first kiss, some sort of electricity only generated by human lips upon lips. I think of bridges. Building bridges with our lips.

“This feels right,” I say. “This…it’s so foreign to me.”

We pull back and look into each others’ eyes. His are a shade of subdued blue like a rainy afternoon. I notice my reflection in his irises. A new phenomenon, I tell him. I can’t recall what I wore, maybe it was dark green like the pine forest in the dead of winter and a pair of panties I never wanted anyone to see. It’s all shed, his skin and mine. The light from the street float between our interlocking shadows. In his ear, I whisper, consume me and he enters my most sacred place where, with his hands and hips and knees makes love and all sorts of neat things. He says above me, I don’t want you to sacrifice anything because you don’t want to sacrifice anything, either. In the morning, the light filters through the bed sheets someone hung as curtains and I awake to him, naked, too.

3. The mattress he’s had for fourteen years. It is twin sized, so his feet hang off the end. So do mine.  Underneath the off-white bed-sheets, it’s all baby blue and floral, cut in diamonds by small threads. The middle of it is slightly sunken in. It gives Kyle his bad back. The sides are frayed. To him, it is just another piece of furniture. At seventeen, he loses his virginity on this mattress while his brother sleeps in the next room. It is sometime after 2 a.m. on a Wednesday and I just got off from work at the Alexander Library. October sheds its leaves and the world becomes frigid. I remember walking directionless to his house. I remember the stretch of Easton Avenue, quiet. The stoplights change when nobody is around to see. He leaves the door unlocked for me. I make my way to the basement, untie my shoes, move silently into his room. He mumbles something, turns and makes room. I slide under the covers and encase his body with mine like a wasp’s wing. As the world becomes colder and colder, the temptation of sleeping next to a breathing, human body grows greater and greater. I find myself pressed against his sleeping body almost every night. His mattress grows warmer as my house grows bitter and cold towards my absence. Will Winter be bearable this year? I think as I drift to sleep with him for the first time.

4. Fourth is the king-sized bed in the downstairs room of my house. It wasn’t always there. The room used to be full of cabinets with toolboxes and car parts. Laid out of place was a single bed where only my father slept that year. It was supposed to be a bed for my little sister. She wasn’t so little, however, all the poison she’d pushed down from her childhood began to resurface. The violation of her most intimate place as a child. So, she became afraid of sleeping alone, for fear of being violated where she lay to dream, the place following sleep where she goes to escape. My father wasn’t afraid of sleeping alone so he took her place in that single bed. I like to think that maybe, he was actually conquering the fear of doing so. One day, that bed became empty and the tools were moved and used and the parts of the car were put in motion again. Now, there is a king-sized bed in the red-painted room. The day after Thanksgiving, Kyle and I rise from his blue, floral mattress and with our bad backs, make our way to my house in northern Jersey. I live on Aspen Road in West Orange where there are no aspen trees, only a dead end and a cul-de-sac. It’s the white house at the very top of the hill. We sit in my living room with our hands folded in our laps. My mother asks nice questions but is more enthralled with the Filipino soap opera on the television. My father talks only about what he knows most about: cars, building things, his garden, how it used to be. We keep our hands folded in our laps until they go to sleep, until we are expected to leave for the post-Thanksgiving dinner. It is quiet. We are pining. The sound of the TV becomes washed out under our heavy breathing. I untangle our hands and pull him to the red-painted room with the king-sized bed and shut the door. Quiet. We remove only our pants until our legs are bare and the space underneath us spread wide and open as we move, silent, in the sea of sheets.

5. Fifth is a bathroom mirror on the first floor of the house on Duke Street. There is one window and it overlooks the neighbor’s backyard. Their son is sixty-five and calls the cops on Kyle’s band when they play. Wistful. The mirror remains clean while the rest of the bathroom grows filthy, like bread that’s been molded over. Does it remain clean so the human beings can see their own filth? Nobody cares about the bathroom because nobody cares about each other in this house. It is a place for cold strangers. He rents the basement only because it is someplace quiet where he can be alone, like a grave one could exit. The two of us stand before this mirror and brush our teeth. The first time we brush our teeth together, our eyes are blood-shot and our tongues reek of whiskey and coffee. It is Halloween. It is also his twenty-first birthday. I am wearing his fitted cap and his brown hair is a mess. My toothbrush is purple, his is blue. When I brush my teeth in that mirror, I watch his eyes watch mine.

6. The front seat of my 1999 Nissan Altima. We are horny on Parkway South. Our hands, too, travel in that direction. I moan as we pass Exit 139. We radiate heat. My eye-sight begins to shift and the lights of the cars pulsate luminously, bursting in my vision. My knees tremble. I follow the lines on the road. I think: stay within the lines! like a kindergartener with a coloring book. But the crayon in his hands colors passionately, moves too wildly, surely it will pass the lines! I moan some more. Surely it does. Suurely. Kyle shifts his legs apart. He’s grown and I see this with the corner of my eyes. It pushes against his jeans. Let me out! It pleads. So I do and it’s dark and my soft fingers wrap around him. Pulsating and delicate. I pray the other drivers cannot see that his left arm and my right are crossed and that he and I are writhing in pleasure. Exit 130 to Route 1. Let’s stop somewhere, I nod with flushed cheeks. I make a right at the Hotel Classique where only half the sign is illuminated. The parking lot is unnecessarily wide; it snakes far enough around. I park beside a lone pick-up truck. The front seat of my car is pushed down as far as it goes: I lay on my stomach as he moves above me and behind me. The glass begins to fog. Surely, a bedroom on wheels.

7. Jiyun hides a key under the front mat for us. We’re in hasidic Williamsburg. Take the J to Marcy Ave. Walk past all the jailed up shops with Jewish names, turn right. Heave open the welded iron and ivy-shaped door, let the long-skirted woman out first. Walk down the hallway past the other apartments; hear the mothers shrieking and the dogs whining and the children barking. Number four. There are Christmas lights above the doorway. Walk past the bikes hanging from wires above the shoe racks and around the kitchen to the spiral staircase that leads to the basement. There, to the left, is a couch with mismatched pillows. It pulls out into a sofa bed. That’s seventh. It is January of the new year, two-thousand and twelve, the year we’re all supposed to die as the planets realign. 189 South 9th Street, Apartment 4. Kyle and I are at the forefront of our journey North, to Montreal. This place is a community for wanderers to stay and meet and feel at home in a city where if you are nothing, you go unnoticed and remain unnoticed. Here, I meet a young girl from Estonia in film school. Love Connection, a band from Australia, a journalist from London. I’ve forgotten their names. There’s a door by the coat rack that leads to the backyard. It’s all cement. I walk past a naked mannequin wearing sunglasses, leaning against the brick. A single wooden table and mug full of cigarettes. Broken glass lines the edge of the building. Jiyun comes out with us to Think Coffee, a cafe where you can have a glass of wine or a cold beer with your text book. That night, we make grilled cheese sandwiches for the house and dip them in tomato soup. In the dead of night on the pull-out sofa bed, we make love silently so not to wake the sleeping travelers.

8. to be continued…