She stood at the threshold of an abandoned storefront, in a town where street lamps were too bright, and the roads were barren. The corner of Penhale Avenue and Plum Street stood littered with books, but with no titles to be found. The spines were missing words, and women were missing their manners. The next person to see her shadow in the doorway would most certainly let authorities know: another patient had escaped The Female Rebellion Hospital. 

 

 

Her stare pushed into the back of his body like a set of rusted upholstery staples. She peered from behind tired glasses, wrapping an optical slow burn around the heels of his black boots before spiraling up his calves and singeing the backs of his legs. The indentations of his rib cage, barely hidden by a thinning t-shirt, smoldered invisibly until her tarty gaze reached the nape of his neck and crawled into his hairline. He twitched. She maintained silence. But it was her. He felt her presence in a room prior to her usual trampy, glass-rattling public announcement. There was no way to avoid her tired eyes.

• quit drinking.
• quit speaking. 
• quit seeing. 
• quit reality. 
• quit thinking. 
• quit talking about art for the sake of art. 
• quit trying. 
• quit laughing. 
• quit explaining. 
• quit writing. 
• quit rambling. 
• quit thinking about doing something when all you're doing to do is nothing. 
• quit impressing. 
• quit believing. 
• quit walking. 
• quit consuming. 
• quit smiling. 
• quit doing it for someone else. 
• quit abusing. 
• quit fearing. 
• quit denying. 
• quit teaching. 
• quit working. 
• quit stealing from others and calling it your own. 
• quit life. 
• quit sharing. 
• quit seeking. 
• quit crying. 
• quit now. 
• quit falsely representing what you do not know.
• quit artificiality. 
• quit counting. 
• quit yesterday. 
• quit cheating. 
• quit authenticity. 
• quit spending. 
• quit lying. 
• quit fucking.
• quit telling people what they want to hear.
• quit brooding. 
• quit faking it. 
• quit caring. 
• quit using. 
• quit attempting.
• quit staring. 
• quit smoking. 
• quit thinking you know. 
• quit holding. 
• quit sleep. 
• quit judging. 
• quit allowing. 
• quit forcing. 
• quit being condescending. you have no authority. especially in art.
• quit obstructing. 
• quit feeling. 
• quit it all. 

 
just quit with intention. 

Don't you think they would look at you differently if you didn't have those stupid things stuck to your face? Pretty girls don't need to see; they just float through the air with the full understanding that nothing bad will happen if their skirt hem is the right length. You don't need glasses, your mother said. You need to learn how to curtsy with a proper bend in the knee and bleach your teeth more often. White teeth and good grammar will set you apart. Make you ripe. Approachable. Sunny. Harmless. There is no position of power better than the status of pretty. Acceptable to look at. Even when you've got a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and a pelvis that juts from the rest of your frame and wears your peachy skin like a tent. Smoking helps because it shows the world you value being thin. It is important to stay thin. 

He was always on his throne. Women threw roses at his feet like he was some kind of perfect specimen. But his soles were cold, and burned up the flower petals like dry ice, turning organic materials into a blueish dust on contact. The women would come with their roses to pay respect to his beauty. His beauty was housed inside his masculinity, and dripped off of the tip of his nose, ran down the curved ends of his fingertips, and onto the bends of his knees like hot paraffin down the sides of a creamy candle. If you looked into his eyes, you could see the fear. He was incapacitated by this power. Every where he walked, death would follow. His incinerating steps murdered riding boots and sandals, grass and carpeted stairs, even the thick ceramic tiles of a kitchen floor. He couldn't pace the length of the boardwalk because his steps would burn right through the weathered wooden slats. So he sat on his cathedra, a high tower of a chair, watching the women as they marched forward to deliver reddish bushels of adoration. He wanted so badly to come down from his perch and thank them with kisses and embraces and head-petting strokes of gratitude. 

It was a queer holiday. Everything fell into your lap, unwrapped. Portions of chicken breast, table legs, Necco Wafers, a barbell and a radiator still gurgling from the apartment upstairs. How pleasant a way to spend the morning, washing up from the salmonella possibilities put forth by raw poultry. Pinching at splinters of blonde wood from a Dutch dining set. Licking away at the red dye no. 5 stains from the candied hosts. Pushing at the light purple bruises already rising to the surface from the weights. Praying that the burns from the heating element would at least form an even pattern on the insides of your thighs. You hate to ever think that things can't be even. In line. Morally correct. Upright. You are a Virgo, after all, and order dictates happiness. The number four does too. So perfect and square. So wholesome and numerically satisfying. Four dollars in your pocket goes a long way. 

His toothy grin smells like horseradish, topsoil, and deteriorating dental work. I was so in love with a feeling, I forgot to make sure he was still in the chair. But he is there. Our legs intertwine; a thick collection of hair wraps around one set of my knuckles. My other hand is over his mouth. There was a time when only a mask full of a gaseous anesthetic was needed to calm him down. But now, I have to force my body, all 130 pounds of pressure, on him like a magnetic vest. Straddling him feels awkward, but correct. He's not getting an x-ray, but a friend. Well, he will say we're friends. But I can't very well operate on a locked jaw if he's awake for this relationship, and I can't depend on drugs to make him come to me. 

It used to be something I could do with nitric oxide and a reclining position. There was zero resistance. He liked it, even. Gas him and watch him pass out, trick/drag him home, awaken him with a coffee cup in his hand and a back massage at the breakfast table. I knew how much he could take, so I brought him in regularly for check-ups. The office is a great escape, I would say. No really, you can't beat the privacy. Seclusion, the secret to my success. The dangers of a dental chair were barely visible, barring the idea that he may never wake up. But that didn't cross his mind, I'm sure. Who thinks getting their teeth pulled also means being tied down and forced to look through family pictures? It was the good life. I was a good, gaseous wife. 

But a temporary one. Once the anesthesia set in, I could barely move his dead weight from the chair. A good wife should be able to take the lead when necessary, moving her detached husband from the dentist office, to the car, to the front door step, to the bed/kitchen counter. I operated on many levels, multiple surfaces allowing for differing scenarios. Men aren’t rag dolls, or puppets, or bystanders. They are always there, but participation is debatable. That’s why I liked him under. You can’t manipulate an unconscious man. You can only hold his head up by the hair.

Nitric oxide eventually wears off. It can become ineffective. He may like it. Our pleasant time in the dentist’s office would come to an end. I couldn’t hold him down in the chair forever. I couldn’t put him in my dollhouse and make a scrapbook of our morning coffee and wedded bliss every day for the rest of our inanimate lives. I could climb off of him, photograph my work, and pin it to the wall with the other tales of petrol-based harmony.

I swear, I loved you almost as much as I loved the green vinyl of my dentist’s office chair.

I remember standing in a shower stall with you and thinking, what if we went that far? I met your parents, we named a dog, we fought over chair railing color choices. Joint monetary situations like checkbooks and public service bills would occur naturally on the counter next to photographs of trips to New York City. You would know how much I enjoyed collecting books on Art Deco architecture and Estee Lauder the same way I would know how much you loved collecting cassette tape sets of blues masters and topographical maps. There is something to be said for the tangible aspects of domesticity; knowing someone else’s exterior cultural fanaticisms and consumptions lets others outside of your relationship know how much you love your partner.

 But with domesticity comes fear. Not just fear of the antiquated ball and chain. Not just fear of a loss of self. Not just fear of losing out on the lean and healthy stride of individuality or that flippant idea of a single existence. Not just a fear of the bleak fall into comfort. There is the fear of letting go, yes. But there is a real fear: it is a fear of being you next to someone else you’re assuming is being themselves too. We all aim to be authentic, but in the right collective grocery shopping situation, are we? In the right perfunctory bathroom towel ownership situation, are we? In the right goal setting, house purchasing, ten-years-down-the-road-I-trust-you-won’t-be-fucking-a-coworker-while-I-fade-into-Benzo-mode, are we?

The ease of a proposal by the right wallet might lead us to stop questioning our authenticity and start living that dream. The plague of age might drive us to ceceed to some else’s particular fantasy for our life. The comfort of sleeping next to a warm body for the immediate future might lead us to take the plunge. Maybe authenticity is just naturally lost when cable bills, lights-only laundry loads, and large item furniture purchases become dual participatory ventures. 

After all, why do we need ourselves when we’ve got a double sink in our mastersuite?