who am i to disagree?

Marilyn Manson: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)

Because Aaron Davison can pick out the notes and chords to this on the piano, and because he dyes his hair black and has a safety pin through his wrist, he attracts my attention. Later in my life this same attraction will manifest itself as a desire to fix the men I'm with and make their difficult pasts disappear, but as an insecure 10th-grader with a crush on the school's resident goth, there's no danger of anything but awkwardly long stares in band class.

Sweet dreams are made of these
Who am I to disagree?
I traveled the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something

y una mezcla de miel y cafe

Bacilos: Tabaco y Chanel

Perfect walking music. It's my first autumn in England and I love everything. I love the colors, I love the huge sky, I love the people I'm meeting, including you. You want to go to bed right away. This makes me horribly uncomfortable, so you tell me to get over myself, which makes me angry, and then we start laughing. You feed my yoghurt on cereal (you bring me boxes of cereal as a gift), you teach me how to dance. We dance almost every night. People watch us. We're meant to dance together, we're the perfect size for one another. And we're in love, which helps. In the afternoons we work on our dissertations. You are arrogant and I am stubborn, and you are one of the most loving people I have known, and you do not think there is anyone else like me in the world. What are we supposed to do, when you cannot forget your ex-fiancee? So we go out in the rain and I go home alone and you go home alone, and those days with all the sun and the bright blue sky and the red leaves on the Japanese maple merge with the sound of a violin on a track the next boy I love will think is tacky.

Un olor a tabaco y Chanel
me recuerda el olor de su piel
una mezcla de miel y cafe
me recuerda el sabor de sus besos...
y esto solo se vive una vez.

the evening hanging like a dream

The Clientele: Saturday

Nothing inspires me to learn language like knowing someone I want to speak to. He is 6'2" (a whole foot taller than me) and beautiful. I don't know much besides this when I, in a tempest of uncharacteristic daring, give him my phone number in the student bar on a Friday afternoon. He calls on Saturday, the next Thursday we go out. We walk all over the little town, which is covered in lilacs now, and swing on the swings in a park. We hold hands when it gets dark. We sit at my kitchen table and have wine and chocolate. He kisses me. I kiss him. He asks if I want to have lunch the next day. I do. We do.

The surprise of touching a stranger's skin, so suddenly he is not a stranger but a fragile other and deserves my care. Something lit up in me, a slender green flame like a blade or a leaf.

And when I saw your eyes
What could I do, what could I say, my love?
Your kisses, they will hide away the stars.

serrería cada puerta

Shakira: Tú.

It is the beginning (or middle) of my sophomore year of university. The carpet in the dorm room I share with a pre-med student from South Dakota is reddish-purple, berber, designed to hide as much dirt as possible. I never do my dishes (she hates that). She papers the walls with posters of David Duchovny (I hate that). I build shelves over my desk, loft my bed, and pretend the space is all mine.

I fall in love with a thin, blond boy from outside Moorhead. We magic one another. I meet him after work with muffins. We leave love notes on one another's bicycles. We don't see our roommates for months. I miss an inordinate amount of early class. We go to tango lessons, we go to the movies, we hang out in the architecture building, we go to lectures, we go to the library. He makes me fish out of paper. In my first apartment, on my 21st birthday, he brings me a bottle of plum wine and we drink it out of tumblers. It is my first drink.

In the building on campus where I work, I stop a Spanish professor and ask her what Te regalo mis silencios, Te regalo mi naríz means, because it's in a song my old roommate gave me and I love the song but can't figure out the metaphor. She doesn't know it either. I like the song anyway.

I keep going. I break the blond boy's heart after two-plus years and idle conversation about getting married. Sometimes, now, six years later, I wonder what happened to that simply happy girl in the photos, though I know I wasn't simply happy--the end of our relationship coincided with the deepest, most immobilizing depression I've ever experienced. I can't remember his smell now, or the shape of his hands, but I remember the word he used for me when we first met, and the feeling of those early autumn nights, and baseball, and Shakira on repeat somewhere far away.

Te regalo mis silencios
Te regalo mi nariz
Yo te doy hasta mis huesos
Pero quedate aqui

lo que tu quieras, respondí

Juan Luis Guerra: "La Hormiguita"



I am thinking of the shape of the boy's hips while he danced and I knew we were being watched. This is the gentle rock of the bachata. I find salsa more intellectual, more angular, I am used to dancing it with Aarón only and it is strange to be led into its patterns by anyone else. Merengue's quick rocking, my legs between his.

No es lo mismo, ni es iguál.

I can only think, hearing this song, about dancing. And how I want to dance with you, it's almost a more-than-bodily want, it's almost biological, it's the closest way of being with someone and it's what I want, I want you to be able to put your hand out, to take your hand and be led by you and to move with you and feel you and feel the happiness of dancing.

Luego reí
Y rompido el hielo
Nos mordimos los dedos
Nos mordimos los dedos
Como viola en un solo de chelo
Eres como una hormiguita
Que me besa y me pica
Que recorre mi espalda
Y se acuesta en mi barba
A estudiar geografía

my sweetest downfall

Regina Spektor: "Samson"

The feeling of being between places. I am on the bus to Lons-le-Saunier, I am on the train to Belfort, it is before sunrise, it is late at night. Pulled, tensile. I feel my heart expanding and thinning out. Transit, the safest place to be: nothing is asked, I can sit in the darkness outside the moving train. Inside the train.

The yellowed vinyl seats. Other passengers breathing.

There's nothing I regret, only things I miss. Now is for going into the world, finding the rest of everything.

You are my sweetest downfall/ I loved you first, I loved you first/ Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth/ I have to go, I have to go/ Your hair was long when we first met.

can/not

Ne me quitte pas: Jacques Brel

Please someone touch my hand so my body will stop shaking.

Moi, je t'offrirai/ des perles de pluie/ depuis un pays/ où il ne pleut pas

What it feels like: glass right before splintering.

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