My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
plastic. I meet you without well-formed expectations, giving you nothing to rise to.
I tell friends half-truths about being stable now that I am in Seattle and on the right meds. I say I have some issues left to work out. I do not usually say that this entails straddling strangers.
In my East Coast circles, random sex was never really random, and nobody ever used the word anonymous, but in Seattle, I can absorb every one-night stand into my body and keep it there. Once I bring you into my home or cautiously enter yours, then exit, I can avoid seeing you ever again, having failed to get what I was looking for. What do I get out of this? I don’t know. If I knew, I would find somewhere else to get it.
#17. For my twenty-third birthday, two days after Thanksgiving, most of my friends are out of town and unavailable to celebrate, so I decide to settle for a one-night stand and a back rub. A friend and I go to a hipster bar where sombreros and fake flowers decorate the ceiling. Over dinner earlier, she told me I am good at making sultry eyes, so I practice this tonight. I catch your attention. You buy me a drink, and I invite you home. I have condoms and lube beside my bed, and you say I am very well prepared. After my back rub, we have quick missionary sex. Afterward, in the bathroom, I find blood on the toilet paper, blood on the condom, just a little. This is not my period. Not since my first time have I bled like this.
At seven, you ask for directions to the bus stop. We avoid exchanging numbers. We don’t kiss goodbye. We smile and say, “See you later,” even though we won’t. All day I feel strange about how good the downstairs door sounded when it shut behind you, and how much I believed your kind goodbye smile. In my apartment, there is no trace of you but the shriveled, reddened condom; you never existed.
#16. Saturday morning, Halloween weekend, I stroll through the farmers’ market on your arm, dressed in a naughty nurse costume, a winter coat, and a pair of Nikes. In the car I point out the mountains, now snow-capped, and you tell me about being a toddler in Siberia and tunneling through deep snow. You are an electrical engineering graduate student, a member of a research group; you are the first man I have slept with who has his shit together. When I realize this, I feel silly and cheap, and in the skimpy nurse costume, I am. You tell me you will see me again, but not during the week because you cannot afford the distraction. I wish I had a change of clothes. I wonder whether I should be hopeful when you hold my hand; I wonder whether my neck is covered in bite marks from last night. As it turns out, I shouldn’t be hopeful; you never left a mark.
#15. On our third date I summon the courage to ask your last name, but I still do not ask your age. You say you walk with your hips forward because it makes walking easier. When I first saw you stacking glasses behind the bar at the Crescent, I was quite sure I would never rip off all your clothes. I was right: we strip separately, me, then you.
When you end it, you admit that you are thirty-four, as though it’s nothing that you are twelve years my senior. In the months after, we see each other a few times around Seattle and pretend we never met. When I see you on a bus, I sit across the aisle from you, never turning my head to look. My peripheral vision provides glances of your leather sneaker on your knee, your green knit cap, but no explanations of what I was lacking, what in me could make you turn to stone when you look back at me.
Months later, I will duck into a used video game store near the University and see you behind the counter. While I browse in silence, I think of your dump of a place, your college-hippie-chic tapestry covering your bedroom’s French doors to offer privacy from your roommate, your mattress on the floor. There was no lack in me; there was nothing more than my tendency to choose the grit-coated seraphs out of whom I had no business trying to force love.
I leave without buying anything, say, “Thank you,” and never see you again.
#14. We meet at a Melvins show downtown, and you kiss me too much, too publicly. I have a yeast infection but a girl cannot tell a boy she has a yeast infection, so I let every thrust hurt badly. When I drive you home to the other side of Seattle, you point at the broad, white horizon and say, “The mountains are out.”
#13. My friend tells me that while I am in New Jersey, staying with my parents during the month before my move to Seattle, I have a mission to give you relief from your cunt of a girlfriend. I accept this. I have seen no photos of her, and you never mention her, so to me she does not exist. I try to put myself in her place, but I have never been in her place, so I do not try very hard.
You have hips like a lady and treat me like a girlfriend. You keep telling me you are old, twenty-six, as though I’m still hanging from a placenta at age twenty-two. If we go downstairs to my purse for a condom, your parents will wake up, but you swear to God, swear to God you’re clean. I figure I am probably clean too, but you never ask.
You used to work at a pharmacy. In bed I tell you about my medications. A month ago, I started on antipsychotics for my bipolar disorder, but the drug is causing akathi-sia, a cocktail of anxiety, restlessness, and dread. There is something I can take, you say, but I do not believe that I will ever feel right again. This is my sixth psych drug, and it has stabilized me; chemical torture is the trade-off.
You ask me to leave silently. When I drive back to my parents’ house, my temporary home between moves, and I roll down the window to ruffle your smoke out of my short hair, I become a disobedient child again. You live farther into the state than I’ve ever driven, deep in a patch of woods, and as I drive, I realize I know nothing about what you do with yourself out here, who you see, how you make the time pass between trips to the diner and household chores.
I have a long trip ahead of me. I speed; I am home by two.
A year later, I call you to say hello after too much red wine. You tell me that you tried to kill yourself: Xanax, Valium, codeine, and a bottle of red wine. It didn’t work. I know about these things. I tell you how I would’ve done it.
#12. All my friends are drinking because I am about to leave Maryland for good. In the woods behind the party, you kiss me through a spider web. I am obsessed with the gap in your teeth. You have whiskey dick in my bed and say the feeling of my fingernails is inconsequential. I keep saying, “You’re so hot, you’re so hot,” because I don’t know how else to say that I don’t even care about sex—I just want to stare at that gap in your teeth and listen to your voice rumbling over it. Once you get it up, I feel too bad to put a condom on it.
Two days later, I load my boxes into my dad’s truck and unload them in New Jersey. In the month before my move, I separate proper adult clothes from ho gear and put the latter in boxes in the attic. Now I am an adult. I take Klonopin every night to sleep. Soon I will shed my old life like a cicada’s brittle shell.
#11. You tell me it has been weeks since you smoked the last of your weed, smoked the resin you scraped off the bowl, and now that you have been laid off, you’re too broke to get more. I will only see you because you aren’t high tonight. When you are high, your limbs are everywhere, your words move faster than your heart can beat. In your basement bedroom, there is almost no room to move because of the two beds, one full-sized and one twin. You make the bed for me. It could be day or night. We never sleep; we emerge from under the earth to sit in your backyard swing and share cigarettes at twilight. Later, when I see you at a bar, I pretend there is nothing between us, and thinking of your mostly empty beds makes me hurt.
In the month before my move from Maryland, you attempt to make yourself a fixture so that I will have to keep thinking of you when I’m on the other side of the continent. I remain noncommittal. You put me in a bath when I drink so much my blood turns to liqueur. Later, after I move to Seattle and you move to L.A., we meet by the Pacific Ocean, kiss on beaches as bleached as I had imagined I’d find in somewhere called Malibu, and rub aloe on each other’s sun-singed bodies. We decide to become a couple. A few months later, you visit Seattle and leave string cheese wrappers around my apartment. When you bring me to visit your rich relatives, who live in town, I flirt with your well-adjusted sixteen-year-old cousin, who keeps Strunk & White’s Elements of Style next to his bed. He makes eyes at me over the dinner table like a grown man. With enough money, perhaps any child can seem like an