Useless Desire

This hand that covers the distance between my neck and my waist, down my spine, gently, and around my waist. A more gentle touch than this moment deserves, since we are not in love, and have no intention of being so.
My posture twitches between tension and relaxation. This hand that covers my body, reaching my belly, my breast, my insides as it builds the momentum. A conductor of my nerves. My desire an orchestra that is poised for crescendo.

I'm in a car, driving (winding) with him. The land rolls out before us and sky is clear and clean. This is home, I know it. My lips are sealed.

This hand that travels over my skin, it pulls me toward him and I keep my soul out of it. This is about my body only. I will feed myself this once, a guilty pleasure wrapped in guilty pleasure, without ever soiling my hands. This hand that lifts me like a feather to his groin, that searches through the folds of my body, that positions my neck, my back, my legs around him. This hand that seems to hover just inches away from my skin, we never touch, just vibrate like wings. This is a dance and we are performing. Or maybe only rehearse.

In dusty towns there are ice cream stands and junk shops. We don't say much, he and I. We don't know each other, after all these years, we are merely acquaintances that want. We keep the doors shut. Heavy and ornate they are twice my size, guarding against some dark secret that would explain the inexplicable hunger. He cannot want me, he wants everyone.

Spinning in place, we move from ledge to ledge. Gingerly than forcefully, there is a music in my ears that is summer camp, swampy days, sneaking away. All this in a vacuum. We break and reform, me in your lap, sliding down your legs, against the table, your hands firm and larger than life. And as I turn to face you my lips flutter at your ears and eyelids, forehead and neck; your smell burns my nostrils and I miss your lips, place one finger at the tip. I cannot close that arc, I cannot make us lovers.

Before Boys

At a party in 1984 the kids are watching Ghostbusters. I think that’s right. The little birthday girl isn’t too happy about it. She’s invited all these girls to her house, but as usual for 4th graders, there are sides being taken, alliances being formed. Politics at its youngest. They have chosen sides against her (or so she interprets) and its probably because she was caught crying. Well, she didn’t control her public display of emotion. A tactic that she had seen work for other girls, but had worked less often for her.

There is a game of memory where Mom brings out a tray of objects covered in a cloth napkin. Napkin is removed; girls memorize what they see. Thirty seconds pass; tray is removed; girls write down what they remember.
The birthday girl loses.
She loses the next game, and the next; and is then quite fixated on the fact that there must be a conspiracy. How can she not win at her own party? She’s had too much candy, she’s tired and spoiled by the attention and blubbers to one side.

All the parties came to this sooner or later. Blubbering. The bowling party, the ice cream parlor party, the Ghostbusters party. Beyond these three, I have no recollection of any other parties, so I must have been cut off
But regardless, at an early age I couldn’t feel much compassion between us girls. I could feel a lot of competition. I was at once alienated and angry, and at another desperate to make more friends, collect them like porcelain dolls and hope that one day someone would ‘want’ to be my friend, not just have accidently acquired me. I wanted to be desirable. And a winner.

A Dowry

What framed my life as a girl was the lingering impression that my mother was very unhappy. She dropped a lot of hints, so I didn't need much help formulating this theory. Around 9-14 years old I heard a lot about how she should never have married my father, or should have left him years ago (how can she put up with all this traveling? she'd ask); stories of longing about how she'd been a smart girl (skipped a grade even) and was now doing what? Raising two ungrateful daughters. And I was an accident. She'd temper these intimacies, that I'd have been more than happy not to share, with "but I'm so glad I have you, what would I do without you?" which, in light of the older sister's antics, gave me the oppressive feeling that it was now, all down to me. I would be held responsible for saving my mother.
As I grew into my teens she'd often discourage me from boys, I didn't need 'em she'd tell me, I should go to school and get a good job; which, thinking back was excellent advice. She warned me about depending on a husband, told me to take care of myself. Talked about how miserable it is be given an allowance and have no assets of your own. I should've focused on this self-improvement more, but like all young adults I focused on the thing I was warned to stay away from. I turned all my attention towards boys. I became a serial monogamist, a serious offence when your thirties roll around and you've actually lived with 3 different men, been married and divorced once, and in your heart still see yourself as a commitment phobe.

I moved away from my family as a strategy for avoiding my Mom's neediness. It's a complicated kind of neediness that I have given up on describing, because I ultimately come out looking insensitive. Maybe I am, I consider, when other folks tell me that family is very important to them, and they could never leave where they grew up and leave that very family behind. I made some tracks. I wanted the dust cloud to cover up what had turned into a massive failure. My siblings on the westcoast, rarely paying a visit, and me in the home town, expected for dinner only on special holidays. Mom only content communicating with me by phone and email as though I lived on another continent, rather than in another neighbourhood.
But the day I moved away for school was the day Mom wanted grandkids. The day I moved away was the day she thought I should be married and living in the suburbs. She started clipping eligible bachelors from the local paper and sending them to me in the mail. She'd keep an eye on the boys I'd grown up with and give me the running update should I maybe reconsider one of them. Then she'd pull back, angry, and threaten me with: "Well who would want you anyway, no man's going to want to take on your debt". And later, "I think that's why he broke up with you, he didn't want to be responsible for your student loans."
Mom had trotted out the latter statement as an explanation for a break-up I had initiated. Not content, she used it again as an explanation for a painfully failed affair with a best-friend. An affair, which she had hoped, was going to bring me back home.

Introduction: When Cabbages Were Kings

First things first: when you're trying to get away from your family and your lack of school chums and trying to get your big sister to notice you again, what do you do? Some kids might have been hanging out under the slide smoking cigarettes or drinking a can a Pilsner stolen from the basement fridge - but I was burying myself inside a make-shift tent.
At first I thought I was quite the architect, and that that alone would draw my sister's attention. I had rigged up a nifty pup-tent from bright orange blankets and plant stakes. The stakes were wedged in the dresser pulls and the rest of the blanket was draped over the far edge of the bed and tucked securely into the wall. This made a covered cubby-hole of the space between twin-bed and desk, about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long. I'd crawl in there with Archie comics and cookies, actively imagining myself into a scenario involving Antarctica and emergency amputations or Saskatchewan sod-huts in the dead of winter. For some reason I devised that she would be curious about me as she shuffled, sulking into her adjacent bedroom. Or better yet, that her friends might be equally curious and demand that the little sister get to hang out too.
Who was I kidding? A fourteen year-old girl with skateboarders hanging around the driveway, Le Chateau bat-wing sweaters and paint thick eyeshadow is not interested in my passive-aggressive antics. I buried in a little deeper, only to provoke the attention of mom, poking her head in at the entrance with unrequired sweets and beverages.