One bastard of a bitch

I've been looking through my memoriesI've been tryna see your faceBut you're moving like a mysteryAnd you look the other wayIf you found me in the pouring rainWould you let me in?Would you look into your memories?Tell me where you've been?

She breathed a sigh of trepidation, leaving her orange juice and lemonade on the table, and she hesitantly climbed up the stage. She came to the bar with him, straight out of the office, so the stairs, however short, gave her some trouble: her slacks almost got caught on one step, and her high heels weren't helping, either. She wore a three-piece suit to work that day (as she does everyday), and her overall look, although can be described as Kafkasque pimped up, was tasteful, and absolutely intentional. The suit was serious; the heels were screaming playtime. She revelled in such polemics in life, in principle, and barring that, in dress. She wore the feminine almost begrudgingly; as if a cloak to be discarded in a land of permafrost. It was her madness tamed to modesty, and she knew it. She navigated the stairs slowly, and with a slightly - only slightly - visible sigh, she made it to the stage.

She turned to the audience, illuminated by the unintelligible politics of the disco ball, making the men look like lost souls and the women like bad sex-dolls. No matter: they came to enjoy in the bar, amid its noise, light, and alcohol. Of course everybody knows that the bar is almost an excuse; what they came to enjoy was each other. Thus the age-old mating dance between man and woman becomes eternal once more, and ever. 

The music began. It was karaoke night, every Thursday, and he had goaded her into singing for him. She obliged, knowing that she could never be as good as him on stage, but willing to make the effort for the team in this march of the pawns owned by the ever-golden, young gods of sex. 

She took a deep breath, and started to sing. It was K-391's Aurora, albeit one octave lower, mercifully, for her. The original F#m would have killed her trachea and made her sound like a chipmunk reading Derridean grammatology.

When the sun is going down
I feel you coming closer
Counting in the dark, I feel at home

Hesitantly at first - so many hesitations tonight! - she started to sway to the beat of the second verse. Sheathed in that sinful stilleto, her right foot started intuitively tapping in time to the bass, and, as in sex and music, a primal urge was awakening. It was as old as the mating dance itself; and there was no need for language, for any introduction, for any of the flaccid, "Do you speak English?" introductions one hears from pretend cosmopolitans who are in fact always homesick. None of that shit. It flowed through her now, the heat of this almost caveman music. She closed her eyes and sang, as hard as she can, an ode to the goddess of dawn.

I see you light up the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora
I see the stars in your eyes
Believe in your lies, Aurora
Mine for a moment and then you're gone
And I'm still holding on
To a light in the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora

She opened her eyes, and find them locked, like a magnet to the Earth's true north, on his eyes. She forged on, dancing with her shoulders, knowing full well that if she danced with her hips he would be hers. It was a dangerous bet: she liked him first, after all. It was a power that even the most basic anime in Japan recognizes: who loves first is the loser.

Feeling almost like a secret
Hidden in an emerald sea
And I'm drowning in your green eyes
Got that power over me
If I told you how I really feel
Would you let me in?
Would you tell me all your secrets?
Tell me where you've been?

And then, just as swiftly as the intution comes that we all know one thing and that is it, she thinks, "Enough odes. Fuck all these apostrophes. Fuck all of you." She started gyrating, her arms over her head, in time to her hips.

When the sun is going down
I feel you coming closer
Counting in the dark, I feel at home

The beat becomes primal: the bass almost a penis too big to fit in a mating dance, but oh so pleasurable. She gives in, like Moby Dick taking his last dive:

I see you light up the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora
I see the stars in your eyes
Believe in your lies, Aurora
Mine for a moment and then you're gone
And I'm still holding on
To a light in the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora
I see you light up the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora
I see the stars in your eyes
Believe in your lies, Aurora
Mine for a moment and then you're gone
And I'm still holding on
To a light in the sky
A dance in the night, Aurora

As the song fades, her blazer somehow unbuttoned through all the gyrations. She opens her eyes. The audience applauds, and, like a babe regretfully returning to its mother, she returns to orbit. Before she leaves the stage, more careful this time - for descent is more dangerous than climbing - she catches his eyes amid the crowd. He looks stoic, unimpressed, as though bored by the whole thing.

Image credit: https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/634655772459775449/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mental disorders: Thoughts on a whatever something or other

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color sche...
Read more

Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr...
Read more

Of finding something again

Image
I just sleep. I sleep to rest, to be away from the world that has given me so much and that I am not a part of anyway, to reset, to die. If only for a while.  I wake up and look at my phone, as all of us do now. The world painfully worlds, with no pauses and preambles: it elbows you in the face with all its glory, its vapid bitches, and all the iterations of the Andrew Tates of humankind. In everything we have a choice, save for one: this world. It is the ultimate given, the ultimate, ungentle, fact, and that we are in it. It doesn't stop. It can't; it doesn't have to. Immediately upon waking I close my eyes and dive deep into the recesses of whatever that was young that's left of me to desperately hunt for reserves of a desire to get up from bed, to work, to be . Two days ago I joked with my lover that I had been tired since 1984, and I think I mean it.  If not for him and another friend that gave me the time of the day in the MMORPG that I returned to, I would have ro...
Read more