“I feel like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.” --Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body It begins how these things always begin, or so I assume. I don’t remember a definite beginning and I’m not creative enough to imagine an ending. Not dark enough to fathom a life without you, a breath entering my lungs that doesn’t bring with it your scent. Dusty dry shampoo and sandalwood hairspray and that peachy lotion that seeps into your skin, tan and smooth under my hands, taut where your shoulder meets your neck. I knead my fingers and press my lips against the freckles there, feel your muscles relax. Inhale the lotion and, underneath, something primal. Something that sharpens in my sinuses, stirs your longing and mine. Need and want and desire that we try to delay but give in to. In these moments, there are no barriers. No lines. Though who we are crosses every line. Erases signatures on lines on certificates signed to men who we swore to love. Who we do love. But really, what we loved most was the safety they gave. The safety of masculine heteronormative protection. Of passing. A line that we crossed before we even knew it was there. I stood in a line for you. After your show, a Women in Comedy tour a friend begged me to see. I never liked stand-up, hated their mocking, the way female comics always seemed to loathe themselves and male comics seemed to loathe their audiences. But I went, sat with my friend, scrolled through social media on my phone and wanted to be anywhere else. Until your set. Your sharp wit, not tainted by loathing. I found myself laughing and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. After, I stood in your line, rehearsing what I wanted to say, dreading sounding boring. I make a living with words, teach words to my students, and I wanted to give you my words. But our eyes met, you smiled at me, I smiled back, studying every line where your elfin nose crinkled and eyes creased at their corners. That’s someone who could teach me to laugh, I thought. And I lost my words. I lost everything I thought I needed, but it turns out that I didn’t need anything at all before you. We started following each other on Twitter, shared photos and tagged one another in political discourse. Then messages that went from pleasantries to sharing everything except what we were avoiding. I went to other shows, stood in other lines. Then dinners, long talks over pasta and shared bottles of cheap, too-sweet wine. Then nights together where we held whispered debates. I shouldn’t. It’s wrong. I’d never…. I promised. Followed by mornings where neither of us wanted to be the first to let go. We’ve shared lots of words by now, but never shared I love you. I pretend it doesn’t matter. That putting a name, a label, isn’t necessary. We’re more than that. But underneath your peach lotion is the scent of fear. Mine, tinged with memories of high school, shouts of dyke and whore. You’re going to burn in hell. Memories of fists and lockers and broken ribs. In your eyes, before the lust takes over, I see hints of that same fear. Shadows of the same memories. We don’t talk about that, either. Don’t talk about anything, sometimes, past I want. I need. Yes. Oh, yes. Your light brown eyes growing darker, then lidded, then closing. I kiss the freckles on your closed lids. Watch your hands, roughened by gardening, clenching starched hotel sheets. These stolen weekends, our phones turned off against distraction, against reminders of the world outside, this is all there is. But weekends end. Excuses run thin. You return to a Los Angeles apartment, a husband and two cats and a daughter, a couch where you sit and write jokes. I return to a house in the midwest suburbs, a cat and a dog, a garden filled with tomatoes ripened past bursting. I bite into one, feel the skin tear under my teeth. Taste the sweet acid juice spurt against my tongue like you do. I step inside, wash off your scent and memory. Smile. Tell my husband I missed him. Only then do I feel guilt. “You look tired,” he tells me, watching me towel dry my hair in the bathroom mirror. Asks how the weekend—professional development or pedagogy conferences or whatever flyer I left on the kitchen counter as an excuse—went. “Fine.” I tell him I learned a lot. I tell myself I’ll stop. I’ll be happy here. He’s a good man. Solid. Dependable. But he’s a lie and lines and polite society. And you—you’re everything else. He kisses me. Watches as I smooth on the lotion I snuck from your suitcase. On my hands, up my arms, over the tattoos I cover with cardigans when I teach. You run your fingers over every line. He pretends not to see them. Pretends not to see how I close my eyes when he touches me. He puts his hands on my shoulders. Inhales. “I like that lotion,” he says. “Is that peaches?” “It’s perdition.”
Karyl Anne Geary Fischer is an adjunct instructor at Jefferson Community and Technical College and works on a children’s psychiatric unit. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Spalding University. Her essays and poetry have been published in CONventional Wisdom, Entropy, The Offbeat, Bitch Media, Lunch Ticket, Sweet, New Southerner, so to speak, Stonecoast Review, IUSoutheast Review, and Barbaric Yawp. She is currently working on a collection of essays about growing up in Kentucky and some essays about the television series Supernatural. She blogs at karylannewrites.wordpress.com.