Leigh Stein

Mother, I have been devastated all my life. I never said anything. That’s why I wear a parachute. Why I tiptoed from my bedroom to yours, and lay my head on the beige carpet for fear of worse. Were there sirens? There were. Were there familiar songs? Yes. I am afraid of the beds I have been in. In the morning there was the heel of your boot sharper than before. Mother, what do I do with your mail? Do you want to keep this snake in the basement? What about the kitten? Do you want all these photographs of other people’s children? The temperature in the lizard’s cage is dropping. Let’s be realistic. If I open the windows the birds will come in and eat out the eyes. Mother, I am bereft. Mother, I wear your necklace and nothing else. Mother, I never. Nevermind. Let’s be fatalistic. The neighbors know I’m down here. I can hear them watching. Mother, after they take your eyes I will sew the lids myself.

At the gym, they told me I would not die, I would only get sexier, and I believed them. I spent my nights wondering if this was going to turn into something long-term, if this was what is meant by casual, or if this was just my annual catastrophic disappointment because if it wasn’t, then I would have to brace myself. I took my medication and looked at pictures of people who were not in love with me. I deleted their names from my cache, said hello to my cat over the phone, took more medication. Days passed. I learned it’s hard to measure your own increasing sexiness. I enlisted bystanders. I passed mirrors and pretended they were not mirrors, but clean windows, and I was not myself, I was a clean stranger. Some days I was sure she wanted to come home with me, and I had to let her down easy, through the window, like a priest. Once I’d been unleashed from thoughts of my own death I was free to be loved in the way I always knew I’d deserved: reciprocally, in Fiji, our bodies lithe and bronzed like gods, but at the same time I felt like a vampire, and none of my friends could relate. They were jealous of my book deal, my time spent at the ashram while they were here, suffering another winter, their unsexiness a flourescent sign that blinks all night.

I can’t go to the east village anymore because it is like going on a tour of my worst dates. I get older, my heart leaps at the sight of children who don’t belong to me, I pronounce everything like an Italian opera title. I used to listen to songs and have someone in mind for the you parts, now I just want to be where the light is intense, I want the kind of heat that kills you if you drive into it unprepared. This isn’t a metaphor for anything else. When I speak of the light, I mean the light. I go to church and sing along and feel just as moved as if my faith were blind. When I speak of the blind, I mean the light. Truly the only things Lindsay Lohan and I have in common are our preoccupations with fame and weight loss, and yet I recognize a kinship there, as if those two things mattered more than anything. When I speak of the darkness, I mean this living. In a restaurant called Caracas, I once spent fifteen minutes arguing about an Ayn Rand book because every time he said Anthem I thought he meant We the Living and I said what dystopia, what about the woman, and he said what about the Home of the Infants and I said what Home of the Infants? What about loving a man so much you’ll sleep with another man in order to finance the first man’s tuberculosis treatment? Welcome to Russia, I said, and we were looking at each other and then not. I tried to picture Caracas, tried to leave him for elsewhere, a fever.