Letter to a stranger...

What am I supposed to say to you?

Sunday morning, I woke up to a man's hands running all over my body, my shoulder, the dip of my waist, cresting my hip, sliding between my legs as I lie still on the mattress, barely audible moans starting to emmanate from my throat.

He slides into me and we spend the next few hours engaging in different forms of sexual activity. My teeth and tongue on his chest and shoulders have him calling me an animal, and even though I'm on top, I know he could flip me over and subdue me in an instant.

It doesn't matter.

Breakfast and laughter, shared silence in the morning over coffee, watching the trickling of "early" risers on Sunset Boulevard.

We separate, and I go and write, I go and fill pages with my thoughts.

A few hours later, I'm in the arms of another man.

We're on the top story of a parking structure that overlooks all of Hollywood and Los Angeles, the moon is up behind us, the sun to my left, wind blowing my hair back as he presses his body against me roughly, fingers sinking into my flesh just below my collar bones, elicting whimpers and high pitched gasps, he traps my wrists against the wall behind me and grinds his pelvis into mine. I trail my tongue down the side of his neck, to his earlobe and back, he's quietly moaning and I writhe, undulating against him with that dancer sway I use at the clubs.

I know if I said the word, we'd be back at his place, in his bed.

But I hold off. Too many factors in play.

As the sun slides behind a building, we begin to lose our light and I know, I know that I'm going to be late to my friend's birthday dinner.

His girlfriend texts him, she's coming back from her mini-vacation with her other lover. My friend calls me, to ask when I'm arriving.

So we split, making plans for the next time.

I drive down the 101, to the 110, listening to Placebo. I get off at the wrong exit on a whim, but I memorized a map of the area earlier that morning, so it was no issue to find the place.

Steak, wine, bread. Friends are drinking and eating. I talk and laugh, am introduced to strangers, and when I go to leave, people begin to chant at me to kiss the birthday boy.

I decline.

The drive back home has me fading, has me loving the feel of forward motion, the rhythms of my car rocking me to sleep, but I drive like this more often than not.

I get home. My mother is up still, sitting in the family room, reading a book. I set my bags down and join her on the couch, tilting sideways and bringing my legs up, wrapping my body around a pillow, chin resting on the upper corner.

She asks me if I had a chance to talk to my sister. We speak on it for a minute, and then my sister and her boyfriend walk in the door. The boyfriend sits down in the armchair, my sister sits on top of him.

He's a robot. He's lost all personality as he scrapes by, intent on his depression, in love with being a victim.

My sister talks to my mom, obviously having built herself a shell of detachment and mild irritation to cover her fear and anger, her hurt at the situation.

But she's not as practiced as I am, and the shell starts to crack in front of me. Minor fractures that only I would recognize.

My eyes flutter closed and I listen to them talk, chin rubbing lightly on the pillow beneath me.

Ten minutes pass, and the pair goes upstairs to regroup. The airconditioner is on in full force because of the recent mini-heatwave, and it covers the whispered words my mother and I exchange.

She asks me how I think the talk went, about the opinions she gave, how frustrated everything is, how she is so distraught over the whole messed up situation, how much she has given and how little my sister acknowledges it. She asks if I'm upset, and I tell her no, that the only two things that bother me about the situation are that my father disrespected my mother's wishes and did not consult her before unleasing his temper, and that my sister is unable to see the flaws in her choice of mate, looking at him with blind love, which I find imbalanced and foolish.

At first, my mother denies any anger at her husband for going behind her back to deal with the situation. But I leave the space open, I let her talk, and as she does, her words shift, the emotions shift, and she opens. She is upset, she is hurt, she was furious and so sad about what happened, but there's nothing she can do about it at this point. Disrespect, so easy for my father to engage in, and never before has my mother opened up to me about how hurt it makes her feel. She's always denied it in the past.

I listen to her talk, leaning my side against the couch, eyes still half-closed.

When she says something I think is incorrect, I gently point out how my sister sees what's going on, and acknowledge that, yes, it does seem incorrect, but incorrect or not, it's how she feels and my mother needs to be aware of it and respect her feelings.

We talk about my past a little, and how my father handled it. The endless lectures, the constant judgment and total inacceptance.

And then I go upstairs to shower.

When I get out, toweling myself off, I hear voices through the bathroom door.

My sister is on the stairs, my mother at the base of them, and they're talking. My sister feels that my mother and father have not given enough help to her and her boyfriend. She wants money, or she wants to give up college so she and her boyfriend can move to Las Vegas, where rent is cheaper.

I brush my teeth, debating for a few minutes if I should speak to her boyfriend, who is in the next room.

To tell him to listen to the conversation downstairs, that my sister is willing to give up her future, her comfort, her wellbeing, for him. That he's the pressure on her, tearing her apart from her parents. That she hasn't truly been happy since she's been dating him. And how he could ever say he truly loves her? If you love someone, you want them to be the happiest, healthiest, and best off they can be. If that's with another person, you let them go. If that's in another state, you let them go.

Because you want the world for them.

He's a self-centered leech. He would allow her to give up her schooling, allow her to move to Las Vegas, in order to keep her. He lets her fight all his battles, lets her help pay his bills, when he needed a place to live, she was the one looking for it, not him.

I did not. I finished brushing my teeth and went to bed.


We dance between worlds, between beings, between ways of being. Because there are parts of us that we can't show other people. I take up with men who understand that a relationship is not currently for me. I take up with men who expect no promises, but value my friendship, value my body, value the dynamic we have in bed. I swing through devoted lover, bedwarmer, sex-starved slut, confidant, therapist, teacher, coworker, student, and writer, and I do this all with the constant voice in the back of my head analyzing and watching, urging me to manipulate, engineer. Body language, tones, word selection. Information is relayed in what people say and what they don't, and I listen for what they don't.

Going between two partners in less than four hours is no issue. I've had weeks where I was out, and/or sleeping with, a different man almost every night. Five dates over the course of a weekend is no issue, though I won't sleep with most of them, though I could.

I go through this. I go through watching GV8 test the waters, watching him to see what he does, to see what he wants. I listen to his word choice, I watch the angle and drive of his stories, and learn about his goals. His body language in bed cements it, and I understand, make estimates and probabilities. My brain is a constant flow-chart of "if..., then..." statements.

When I spoke to my sister on the phone before I arrived home, she told me of her plan now that her boyfriend would have to move out, complete with the logic behind it.

To a perfect 'T', it was exactly as I predicted. Her reasoning was mine, word for word, presented to my mother weeks ago.

So I made a counter-point to her, one that was easy to make, that followed her own logic. The one that would cause minimum damage.

When I got up this morning, my father was up in the kitchen, putting on his shoes, his white button-up not yet tucked into his slacks. I was eating applesauce, leaning against the counter, and he asked me, casually, if I had talked to my sister.

I gave him an affirmative, but no more. I let him draw himself out, listened to the slow, careful queries, the ones that would indicate how he actually felt. Left that gaping space open so that if he wanted any information, he would have to provide it to me first.

I had been awake for fifteen minutes, after spending a good chunk of the night listening to my mother and sister, but not interfering.

Fifteen minutes and barely awake, and I was pushing the buttons I needed to push in order to operate the machine that is my father.

What are you supposed to say to that?

I'm turning into a puppeteer.

And you know what you're doing, too, when you move the pieces around the board with this combination of self-loathing and supreme satisfaction. The dark hero, plagued by demons. It's not a fakery, but it's not everything. We both know that if there wasn't a love, a drive, a desire, to do it, to do what we do, the way we do it, we'd stop.

Even when we're falling apart, even at emotional heights, there's always a part that isn't reaching us. A part of us to reserved, so isolated and untouchable, that whatever emotions we experience, we're not fully experiencing them.

Disconnected naturally, and then disconnected once more by the sheer fact that we aren't quite with everyone else.

Yes, I know.

So I keep myself separate. Relationships are a no go. You dive right in, and I wonder if you feast on the destruction that follows, or if it's just a sidenote.

What do you want? Do you know?