we were girls together

I saw a daddy longlegs on the ceiling while I was showering and didn’t panic, even when it started slowly descending in my direction on an invisible silken thread. Instead I grabbed a backpack, coaxed it inside, and let it out. This is a sign that I’m in a good state of mind. What I’m feeling is the opposite of panic. The circumference of your eyeballs seems extravagant. They’re very large. You told me no one had ever said so, though they’ve complimented your eyelashes and mouth. I’m sure someone you’ve met has noticed the same thing. Maybe it coalesced into an unspoken thought and maybe it remained sub-perceptual. It’s odd how the texture of someone’s skin can create feelings in others without closeness, without touch. We absorb so much we can’t put into words.

Can you be loved if you don’t feel loved? Is what I want simple or impossible? What makes someone act like that? I’ve let go all of my questions, which for so long seemed so important. The act of inquiring, the relentless search for the deepest truth. I thought that understanding would protect me. I understand now that nothing will protect me. When I look at the things that other people have, their houses, relationships, children, organizations, convictions, delusions, and faith, I feel our vulnerability acutely. Vulnerability is the human condition, which I spent so long rebelling against. I will fight it no longer—I will submit to being stripped bare in front of God. My intellect, intuition are merely gifts I’m borrowing, my body is only a vessel. N got it right when he said his partner could look however, as long as he could see her soul flashing in her eyes. You can immediately tell if someone is smart by their eyes, but intelligence is not sufficient. Neither is kindness. When you put your hand on my back I wonder if you can sense my soul through my body and that’s what you’re responding to.

I feel you so deeply with no effort. I feel you in my stomach, close to the knobs of my spine, which makes sense because the stomach is where feelings are stored. This is why hot girls have IBS. I feel you the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. In my tear ducts, you feel like a certain welling. With you, there’s no need to say I’m passionate. Everything is obvious. The way you watched my face during the movie reminded me of another time at the ballet in December. Time folded back on itself, and it was so sweet. Right now, everything is so sweet. When I think sweetness I think of the CoQ10 chews I bought on P’s suggestion that look and taste like starbursts. I loved so much candy when I was a kid, I wish you’d known me then. I had such a hard time being a kid, you’re the first person who I believe would really understand that. For so long, that incredible sense of alienation, an inability to relate. When I was six years old I wrote a poem. It was about angels and I could tell my teacher was impressed, and that was the beginning of my whole life. I don’t miss anything about being a kid except learning to read every night with my mom, and the way she would put my book back into a ziploc bag for the next day. I learned to read very fast because of her. Also because I was born voracious.

It’s so disorienting to look back and know that none of it was wasted. All that time spent worried for nothing. I would do it again, I would do it all over again, and I would properly enjoy it this time. I’m gonna go back and read the Ann Patchett essay. I’m gonna go back and read the Amy Bloom memoir. It’s so obvious to me you don’t know anything about John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands’ first date. It’s okay because I know. Well, he asked her out and they went to dinner and she wasn’t into him because they didn’t have anything to talk about. So he asked her what she wanted to talk about and she said literature, plays, the like. Two weeks later he calls her and says, I want see you again, I read this book and that book and that book—and I want to talk about them with you.

That’s how it started. I suppose he was an alcoholic, but so what. I don’t know when I started thinking conversation was the heart of romance. I guess my life started changing when I got the allergens injected in my lymph nodes, so maybe we should instead conclude that smell is the heart of romance. In Venice when I stay at P’s place I always sleep better. Close to the ocean. Some of the most fulfilling moments of my life have happened when I’m sitting all alone wracked with feeling, on a plane or just in my apartment, feeling like a beached whale. Fullness, intensity and despair. Whales thrash violently when stressed, just like me. I’m currently operating at a level of corniness where I’m ready to write poems about the 52-hertz whale. G#1 is the 12th lowest key on a standard 88-key piano keyboard. Take me out back and shoot me before I get too sappy.

I don’t think that the first line of Bruce Springsteen’s song I’m On Fire is creepy. It reminds me instead of the movie Pig, where Nicholas Cage goes on a wild mission to rescue his kidnapped truffle pig. You can love someone so far past reason and be unable to save them. I can no longer think about Orpheus and Eurydice without irritation, or The Transit of Venus. (I lied. I’m gonna go back and reread The Transit of Venus.) You can go to the underworld in an attempt to bring someone back, only to find out that the reason they ended up in the underworld is because they’re an idiot. Go figure. Well, idiocy is no deterrent to love.

I got a perfume in Japan that smells like hawthorn flakes. I used to eat roll after roll of them when I was a kid. We bought them from a Chinese grocery store called Big Crazy in Richmond, BC. This was usually after I was berated for an hour in piano class by my teacher, who was emotionally abusive and had a bad perm. Okay, one other thing I miss from my childhood was eating White Rabbit candies until the silver cap on my cavity-ridden tooth came off. And packets of WANT WANT Senbei Rice Crackers. And Tim Hortons iced cappucinos when I was a preteen with an eating disorder, and my parents tried to reason me out of it by telling me that I had to be a little fatter to grow a little taller. Over time, my mom came to worry that the way she’d raised me had made me too fixated on perfection. She thought I didn’t know how to be kind to myself, and she was probably right. For a long time, I didn’t know.

I think I know now. Though I did still think it was a bit too much when Amy started reciting Wild Geese by Mary Oliver during our therapy session on Tuesday. First of all, I can recite Wild Geese by heart, so there’s really no need. Second of all, my favorite short story collection is Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, you’d really think I know quote unquote I do not have to be good. But she’s right, she’s always right, I have to let her have that. The way I’m feeling now is that I want to track Marie Calloway and Chris Kraus down and give them both hugs. We were girls together.