A list of undulations
Article by Raychel Stark Art by Perry Davis
PREFACE:
In another life, I crave meaningless sex. I am in a transient search for quick intimacy. I like the rush and enjoy the struggle. I watch as the waves crash, leaving only room for a short breath until the next. The sea tiptoes up slowly, quietly, timidly. Opposing undulations, the sea falls dramatically, with speed and thunder. The noise excites me until it doesn’t. The tide eventually calms, revealing the sad ocean floor. Every seashell, fish, and weed that lies beneath.
UNNAMED I:
I enter your room and am flashed with a bright blue light. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to yours. The smell of pot, moldy towels, and pencil marks drifts through the air. I want to ask you what you’ve been drawing and if I could smoke some of your weed. But you talk, and I listen. We sit on your couch, the stiff nylon particles of the cushion poking into each of my goosebumps. Already, I begin to morph into your belongings. You decide to put on a TV show I don’t care to watch because I know my eyes will only dart toward yours. And suddenly, our shoulders touch. There’s a quick, charged static that only happens when you're young and in constant need of lust.
You imagine that I have done this before, that I know what I’m doing, and that I will be good at what I’m doing. But I’m only sixteen. This excites you. I’m untouched, waiting for you. I know little, and what I do know, I don’t believe.
Your breath is suddenly on my neck, causing a chill down my spine. I lay my head against your heart; each beat lasts a lifetime. Little beads of sweat fill your palms, jumping out of your pores like sudden trails from tiny snails.
As you strip and show me the vulnerability of your skin, I rage with jealousy. With each layer you shed, you become more and more confident. And there, your naked body lies — the tiny curls on your legs like fine gold shells. Your body is a thin coat of skin covering your sharp muscles. I wonder where your organs are kept. Mine protrude loudly.
Your finger grazes my neck, and my body feels cramped as if stuck by your single touch.
UNNAMED II:
I’m high out of my mind. So young and so immature. I’ve never felt this feeling before. Emerald surrounds my vision. Or at least that is what my friends repeat: “You’re just greening out. Everyone goes through this.” I’m with men I’ve never met in a dark room lit by LED lights. They are laughing, entertained by my rambling in the process of finding a horror movie to amuse their average boredom. I stare at the ghosts leaving the screen, finding me, and searching through my body.
My friend approaches me slowly as if she senses the ghosts, scared they may escape me in screams. She’s leaving and tells me to come with her. We walk toward the ominous outdoors, the cool breeze brushing against my cheeks, creating marks of red on my chalky skin.
And, suddenly, you appear. As if I’m dreaming, in a haze of fog and demons, my own sort of devil arrives. You hold me up as I fall from the weight of being too young for drugs and alcohol. I trip to and from your arms as we stumble towards an unknown destination.
Without warning, a pool emerges. I’m plunging in; my toes skim the concrete ever so slightly; a squeal of thrill exalts into the air.
All at once, I’m free from the burden of chlorine smells and other people, the constant, agonizing splashes that sting my eyes. And I’m alone with you. Under the shower, I finally ask you your name. Maybe I already know. Something about the place of a cleansing ritual with another body incites sensation. No longer is soot brought to the surface, but rather arousal. I am content in drowning. My hands glide over your slimy body and grip your wet hair.
UNNAMED III:
I’ve been eyeing you all night, unaware of the prospect of something and someone new — a whole new landscape in front of me — valleys of confusion cloud my vision. Crowds of people separate us; it feels like a maze hinders our meeting.
Finally, the labyrinth unwinds, and our hands ever so slightly graze one another in our meeting. While we talk, you slightly nudge my shoulders. I’m embarrassed and curious. I don’t want to be seen in my small hometown as an outsider; women are my competition, not my lovers.
Her voice is sweet as honeyed dews that drip from the budding lotus flower. Her slow words fill the air, causing me to evade any other sound. All I can do is behold and stare. I spent so much time concealing, unfeeling those tingles and bursts of curiosity. And, then, I just don’t. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Maybe it’s the rich desire to be wanted that I crave from everyone that swarms the room.
I let you in, and I let myself out. Suddenly, I’m standing there exposed in front of all my female enemies, and I know now I can’t ever return.
UNNAMED IV:
I’m surprised to enter your room with its fluorescent lighting. I saw you in the library and immediately sent you a message.
“Let’s hang out.” My confidence gleamed through the single text.
Now, I approach your bed slowly, hesitant that it’s the wrong move; should I sit in the chair facing your bed that you ostensibly placed?
I looked at myself for longer than needed before coming. I practiced my orgasm face, knowing the fate of our meet-up.
You seem surprised by how I look. I regret my smudged eyeliner. I frighten you with my wide eyes, which glare ever so slightly when you start to speak. Yet, once I jump onto your bed, I watch the crease between your eyebrows unfasten from its fixed position, locked in constant agony and disgust. I pay close attention to your body language and attempt to mimic it so we are in sync. Our mannerisms naturally fall into rhythm. Instinctively, I jump onto your body mid-sentence, and we kiss.
I’ve realized, by now, at the ripe age of eighteen, that I’m not intimidated to make the first move. I don’t prefer it when you, her, him, or they touch me first. I’m never embarrassed to be the teaser. I have a strong sense of confidence that only stays in bed.
I like to interrupt our pasted lips with commentary, and you like to respond with a joke. We long to continue this pattern, so we sleep at mine. And, while you sleep, I comb your hair with loving affection, even though I already know on this first day that it’s all transitory. To you, it’s transactional. Your inch-closed eyes belong to others, lavished and lost, and I can never hold you hard enough to make you stay. I can’t continue praising your skin and your hair in hopes that our mouths will blend once again.
You tell me when all is gone that you feel I have “objectified” you once or twice. You tell me I invited you over to just have sex. I tell you my intentions were always to please and tease you. Yet a woman must never be in the place of asserting herself. My confidence shattered. Without warning, I’m a wilted, fragile flower. And, as your words poison my petals, my sporadic self-assured sexual vivacity fades.
Despite all I said, I never liked you very much.
Yet it’s 2 a.m. and I want to know why my hands are still twisting knots in my hair, trying to busy themselves from writing, “Let’s hang out.”
UNNAMED V:
I don’t know how we met. We just clicked. I’m writing this crying. It might be messy. I miss you. Maybe I fall in love too easily.
Our texts about sex were fleeting, hormone-driven, and reminded me of being too young to know. I still don’t know. But when I see you for the first time, we both erupt in smiles. We transcend flashes of lightning as our thunder and spark ignite together.
We rush to your bed once we enter your room. I’m aroused by your sweet smile with its one missing tooth and your quiet nervousness. Smoothly, the skins of our bodies attach to one another. I caress the bump on your nose and the cut on your lip, amazed at your silence as you watch me fiddle with your face. Like a psychic running their fingers along the lines of palms, I long to read your mind with each exchange of touch.
I realize, with you, that I don’t know what my relationship with sex was and is. I read out loud the stories of my past “lovers” to you, and you listen intently, transfixed by my words. You might notice I am sick of rushed intimacy.
We enter a house party linked at the hip. We go downstairs and request the DJ play “212.” The basement is crowded with motionless people. They stare at us while we dance.
I fall in love with you to Azelia Banks.
I fall in love at your name or our songs, at your whispering glance or your unrushed come-ons, at your fidgeting fingers when your patience is gone.
I fall in love with your slightest of smiles, to the opening of your pupils and the twinkle of your eye, to your shape and your form.
I fall in love in my room in Bemis when there’s no one around, when the night is at its darkest and there isn’t a sound, when I feel all alone and can think of you.
I fall in love so easily.
EPILOGUE:
I strangle myself with my scarf, adjust the zipper of my jacket, take off one sock, then the next, throw my shoes, and walk toward the menacing expanse. My hand shakes with frostbite running up my fingers. I reach out for something, someone, and am only met with the cold grasp of the wind. Seeking a thrill, one that I can’t name, one that holds no object, I walk into the water. My feet sink into the unveiled sand, filled with its withheld secrets.
In this life, I watch the steam rise from our bodies and wonder how they do it — the ones who make love without love. Do they know that underneath the flashes of ecstasy lies the ocean floor?
Like a beautiful swimmer glides, strokes of butterflies enter my body as your fingers are hooked inside me. Faces red as steak, wet as we escape the water, we are children playfully searching through the sand for a shell to gift one another.
My vision clears from the beach fog, and I realize I walk alone. I’m isolated with the cold and the wind with soaked clothes that stick to my skin. The prunes on my hands mock me, indicating I’ve spent too much time lingering here, reminiscing on my past. Those that have touched only my skin. Those who moaned in my ear, and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union. And those that have touched my heart, stirring something deep inside me.
In this life, anything at all is painful, a graze upon my shoulder, a lip brushing my forehead. I hear the questions and the answers in one sound that climbs and climbs and then is split into two selves, the tired antagonisms. And the scent of the salty sea drifts through the air. How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?