EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
BY THEO WOLF
When I see you standing on the corner, I think I am dreaming. The city has that hazy, Sunday-afternoon feeling resting across the tops of the buildings. It’s August and I am a different person every time I emerge from the darkness into the next streetlight. I think I’m homesick. You are leaning against the red brick side of a Beacon Hill storefront with a cigarette, eyes closed, head tilted back. I stop walking, feeling like I’m intruding on your private moment. My shoes scuff on the pavement. You open your eyes, smile at me, and step away from the door to the corner store like you’re granting me permission to enter.
I want to marry you. I don’t know your name.
I pay for the six-pack and you’re gone when I leave. I think about you the whole walk home, chastising myself the entire time. I think about bringing you home to my parents, I think about you chasing my cat through my one-bedroom apartment, I think about your strong arms around my shoulders late at night. But when I get home my apartment is dark. My cat is asleep on the couch. Boxes of old takeout sit on the coffee table. I give my cat a passing scratch behind the ears as I walk towards the bathroom. The walls and the vinyl flooring are all off-white, not a deliberate design choice but the landlord special. The only mirror in the apartment is mounted above the sink; I can only see glimpses of my body, pieces separated from the whole. I shattered the full-length mirror at the end of my last relationship. I still sometimes find pieces of glass nestled in the carpet, even though she moved out long ago.
Decontextualized, I can accept parts of my body. Maybe somebody could even find some parts attractive. My ribs show under my skin; my chest is lopsided. Sometimes, I think I’m wasting a body somebody else might want. My chest and hips stick out; my waist tucks in. My legs are disproportionately short. Perhaps my strangest insecurity is the way my thighs flare out just above my knees. I don’t wear shorts because of it. Instead I wear long pants even when the weather reaches ninety degrees and pretend I’m not getting lightheaded with the heat. More often, I simply avoid leaving the house as much as possible during the summer. There are patches of discoloration across my back, stretching from hip to collarbone. I want to shave my head. I’m afraid my skull will be uneven.
I run my hands over my chest and wonder, not for the first time, what it would feel like if I gave myself a flat chest. Your chest was flat. I wonder if you were lucky enough to be born that way or if you, too, took matters into your own hands when your body didn’t give you what you wanted. My closet is full of shirts purchased with the mental asterisk of “for after surgery”, v-necks and button-downs that gap at the second and third buttons. Right now, I wear a lot of the same few t-shirts several sizes too large and round my shoulders and sit slumped over. Recovery is time-consuming, surgery is expensive, my insurance is too confusing to parse. The waitlists just to be seen for an appraisal are six months long. I wonder if I could take matters into my own hands. I imagine taking a surgeon’s scalpel and tracing it in two half-moons across my chest from sternum to armpit, watching blood bead on the lines, turning the skin inside out like I’m emptying lint from my pockets. The scar on the right would be more jagged than the left because my left hand isn’t as steady, but I was a musician once, and I think I still have enough dexterity to get the job done. My ears are full of piercings; my arms are full of tattoos. The morning after I pierced my nose I woke up to the entire lower half of my face covered in dried blood. After that visit the piercer handed me a sticker with the shop slogan: a moment of pain for a lifetime of pleasure. It seems like it would be so easy. The skin there is so thin. Purple veins spiderweb just beneath the surface. The blood will sheet down my ribs and cover my thighs.
I do not do anything. I pull my shirt back on over my head and toss my jeans into the hamper by the shower. If I die during a failed attempt at a DIY mastectomy, nobody will find me for a long time. My cat will probably start eating my body. The thought makes me laugh.
I drink a beer and I go to bed.
I think about you until I fall asleep.
You’re taller than me. Your chest is flat, your limbs are slender and strong. Your skin is clear and smooth. Your jawline is strong, your eyes bright and clear. I feel like I’ve known you my entire life. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.
I go to work the next day. At the cash register, I make a conscious effort to keep my voice lower, to speak from my chest and the back of my throat instead of my head. When it gets busy, though, I can dedicate less effort to it, and my pitch begins to creep back up. If I raise my volume to be heard over the music we pipe in over speakers and the chatter of people waiting for their orders, they complain that I sound angry. If my voice is high, I’m a shrill bitch, according to one man who demands I serve him twenty-seven ounces of straight espresso for four dollars. His language shocks me, not because a customer called me a bitch but because I’ve genuinely forgotten that some people see me as a woman. My body exists in my mind the way your voice exists in yours. When I see a photograph of myself, when I hear my voice on a recording, when I overhear someone talking about me, it takes time to realize that it’s a reflection of me. I am not my body.
When the man calls me a shrill bitch I wonder how the other customers in the store would react if I started screaming. Not even necessarily at the man, not even necessarily screaming words. Just one long, guttural scream, holding it as long as I can, until my face turns red and my throat feels bloody. For a split second, I think I might do it. But then the urge fades just enough that I’m able to maintain my composure and nod my head and ask if there’s anything else I can get for him. My chest is tight. I look at my own emotions with a sort of detached interest, a scientific curiosity, before setting it aside to think about for a vague and undefined “later”. I am not angry; anger is somewhere inside my body. But only for a moment. And then it is gone.
If you were here, you would not stand for somebody calling you a shrill bitch. You’d tell that man in no uncertain terms to get the fuck out of your store and never come back. The conversation in the cafe would immediately fall silent as every person turns to look at you and you stare down this man with righteous anger. You tell him he cannot speak to you this way. And he listens.
There’s a lull in customers, and for a moment, I wonder if it is healthy, this disconnect between myself and my body and my emotions. An outsider, looking in on a body that I do not recognize, going through the motions for eight hours every day so that I might go back to my apartment for a few hours every day and feel something close to human. But then another customer arrives, and I put these thoughts aside.
It’s dark out when I walk through Boston Common, one headphone in. I’ve walked with a hunch for so long I can’t tell if it’s because I’m trying to hide my chest, I’m trying to keep strangers from talking to me, or I’m just drop-dead exhausted from my shift. In the subway station, I keep my back pressed against the tiled wall behind me and glance up every time somebody else walks down the stairs to stand on the platform by me; a few weeks ago, there was a spate of assaults on the train, and a gay man walked away with a black eye and fractured jaw. I like to think that I would be able to defend myself, shouting somebody down and taking a swing at them if they tried, but deep down I know I would freeze in my tracks. They’d see how weak and thin my arms are, how I don’t know how to throw a punch.
They’d hear how my voice cracks, how thin and shrill it is. They’d probably laugh at me. It’s embarrassing. I am not proud of this. So I keep my hands in fists at my side and let myself continue to pretend. It’s nice, the pretending. It makes me feel strong. Protective. Like I’m somebody worth keeping around.
Two stops later, you get on.
You don’t seem to notice me; you drop down into the seat across from me and look down at your phone. You’re wearing boots and green pants and a button-down I once saw on one of those websites that brag about how gender-neutral and inclusive their sixty-dollar shirts are. I’m wearing jeans that are several sizes too big and a black t-shirt that clings to my chest in all the wrong ways. I don’t know the neighborhood this stop is in very well, but if I had to guess, I’d say you probably work in tech, or maybe as a professor at the nearby university. You might live in one of those nice new loft apartments, the luxury developments cropping up along the Charles and out at the end of the Red Line. I could have done that, I think. I could have had that life. If only my family had more money, so I didn’t have to work two jobs to support myself through college. If only I’d had the time for that internship. If only I could afford the time off work to recover from surgery. If only, if only. You’d be unimpressed with my one-bedroom in Davis, where sounds from the restaurants trickle in until late at night and the five-way intersection fills my bedroom with a red glow all hours of the day. At least I don’t have roommates.
I’m staring at you. I realize this and avert my eyes, the same way I did as a child growing up in the suburbs and couldn’t look at the Victoria’s Secret in the mall without feeling like I was committing some cardinal sin. The thoughts filling my head are mortifying. You in my apartment, looking at my body like I’m the only person you’ve ever wanted. Like maybe this time I’ll make it through this without crying. I can’t imagine anybody like you thinking about me this way. There is nothing attractive about this body. Part of me hopes you don’t see me, coming down off an eight-hour shift, wrinkled clothes, slumped over in my seat like I’m drunk. I can’t imagine anybody looking at it with anything but the disgust I feel when I look. I feel predatory for having these thoughts at all. I remember how the girls talked in the locker room when I was a kid, back when my body was changing so quickly I felt possessed, when I didn’t understand why I would flush whenever my eyes met my lab partner’s. I understood how I felt was dangerous before I knew what I felt at all.
I don’t know how to talk to you. I want to talk to you. I feel like I’ve seen every person who takes this train north. I’ve never seen you. I want to ask you what you were doing downtown. If you were following me. If you’ve noticed me, too. If you heard my voice, what would you think? Would you believe me if I told you that I don’t sound like this? I think of a thousand things to say to you, a thousand ways to start a conversation. They all die in my throat, just beneath the vocal cords.
I know you.
I get off one stop early so I don’t have to sit in silence with you in the car and so I can take the long way home and try to sort out my thoughts as I walk down Highland Avenue. I throw my bag over my shoulder and stand up as the train rolls to a halt, and I stand in front of the doors before they open, ready to bolt onto the platform the moment they start to slide open. You look up just as they do. There’s a flicker of recognition in your eyes, the very beginning of a smile, and then I’m out on the platform and taking the escalator steps two at a time, running away from you before you have a chance to get a word in, before I have to reply.
More than half a million people live in this city. So does it mean anything that I’ve seen you twice in two days in two completely different places? Am I reading too far into this? I think about walking home along the yellow line dividing the lanes on the road. Being illuminated by the oncoming headlights. Looking at the drivers’ faces as they fly by. If they’re scared I’ll know they saw me.
My last relationship ended far before we actually broke up. I think we both knew it, too. There was no catastrophic fight, no betrayal, just a quiet, sad understanding of what was to come. A fundamental mismatch I tried so hard to ignore. It doesn’t matter what it was. This was somebody who found me attractive. Was able to look past all of the pieces of me I wanted to peel off and see something worthwhile underneath. I was devastated for months afterwards. I’d been convinced that this was my only chance to be loved. There was nobody else for me. Dating baffles me; I work so many hours that I’m usually too exhausted to consider going out to meet somebody. I don’t take pictures of myself, so hookup apps are out of the question. Most of my friends seem small and far away, and the one or two times they’ve tried to set me up, it hasn’t lasted more than two dinners before something drove them off.
When I look at you I wonder if you could love me. An entire relationship plays out when I blink. First date, meeting your parents, moving in. Kids. A life together. A chance for something resembling normalcy. I tell you that I am not my body and you understand what this means. Your fingers brush over the small of my back and for a moment I am grounded in my skin again. I raise a surgeon’s scalpel to my chest with shaking hands and show you what my heart looks like.
I am home again.
Strewn throughout my apartment are remnants of the woman I tried and failed to be. Heeled shoes, twice worn, next to the pair of combat boots with gouged leather that I’ve convinced myself go with every outfit. Drug store makeup with expiration dates in the previous decade underneath the sink and spilling out of the medicine cabinet every time I open the mirror. Seven-for-twenty-seven lacy underwear with holes (from the very Victoria’s Secret I couldn’t look at in high school) mixed with boxer briefs in my hamper. Neither fit quite right. Perfume and blouses and nail polish, graduation and job-hunting gifts from well-meaning relatives. We don’t really speak anymore.
I put on bleach-stained sweatpants and a different black t-shirt, sit on my couch, and listen to the chatter from Davis Square drift towards my windows. There’s another ache in my chest, different than before, a desire to wander down the streets at night and gaze up at the little white lights winding around the branches of the trees that line the intersection. Wanting to feel that sense of wonder and serenity and peace from back when I thought I knew somebody loved me. I haven’t felt it since then. Now it is just me and my little cat in my dark apartment as I sit on the couch and pick at the tangled ball of emotions sitting in my stomach. For a moment, there it is, that wonder, the gentle happiness of walking in familiar silence with somebody as you both gaze up at the sky—but then behind it is the rage of the day, the loneliness, and the feeling floods every inch of my body until I’m sure that my skin will catch fire and I will burn down everything that hurts.
I want to cry.
So badly, I want to cry.
I want to feel the tension in my chest release. I want to open my mouth and scream until my throat is raw and the people on the sidewalk in Davis Square look up through those shining white lights in the trees and hear me. Then when they come to my door to see what’s wrong my voice will be hoarse and low. When I’d tell them I’m finally fine, blood would fly from my lips and spatter across their faces and they would look at each other and nod and say to themselves as I close the door that yes, finally, they’ve met the person who lives on the third floor. Maybe it would even stain their shirts.
And then the feeling is gone. I think I’ve forgotten how to cry. I knew how when I was younger. I don’t know when I lost it.
I think if you touch me I will feel as though I have some place in this world.
I will show you every divot and scar if you tell me you love me. You don’t have to mean it. I think it would be better if you didn’t. I promise I won’t believe you.
You are at my door.
I let you inside.
Did you follow me home? Have you been here before? Or have I always known you, seeing pieces of you everywhere I look—hearing your voice in a crowded room, glimpsing you through the glass between cars on the subway, shoulders and jaw lines and throats and hands? I have loved you since I first met you, far more than I could ever love myself. You are broken neon lettering. You are shattered glass on the sidewalk on a hot June night.
You look past everything in my apartment as I follow you back to my room. Everything I see as a marker of my failed womanhood you see as me becoming. Of course there are growing pains. I frantically look for myself in you. My broken mirror is all around us. If I step on the slivers, I will leave bloody footprints in my wake. Maybe if I’m lucky the glass will travel up my veins and lodge itself in my body so that you might see parts of yourself, too.
Your hands slip underneath the hem of my shirt and travel upwards. Everywhere you touch, I exist for just a moment, disjointed parts. My body crumbles away. You sharpen soft points, make them jagged, harsh, my own. You smooth curves. My ribs are visible beneath my skin. My heartbeat pulses at my throat. Here it is, for you. I say your name because I have always known it. My voice sounds like my own for the first time. I love you. I cannot stand to be around you.
Your thumbs carve out the hollows of my cheeks.
You have no face; you are no one.
You have blue eyes because I have blue eyes and your hair is dark because my hair is dark and you squint just a little bit because we’ve both taken off our glasses. Your legs are slender and strong. Your hips are narrow. Your hands are small and deft, like a musician’s. The tattoos on your arms and vanishing onto your back tell the story of my life. You see me. I say nothing. You understand anyway. You take away the pieces and make me whole. The scar on the right side of your chest is jagged. You have no face. You are more complete than I ever will be.
You are leaving in the morning when I wake up. My cat twines around your legs as you stand near the door, butting up against your legs, purring. Pieces of me are strewn across the floor. You close the top button on your shirt and look back at me when I yawn. There I am, reflected back at myself; blue eyes and dark hair and childhood scar just above the right eye. I reach up to touch my own face and find nothing. Just a smooth, flat expanse of skin beneath my fingertips. Relief bubbles in my chest.
I love you, I say.
You crouch and scratch the cat behind his ears one last time. That’s too bad, you say.
You leave. I am alone. I stare at the space you’ve left. I will never know myself again.