I am sitting next to a goddess, a goddess but also a demon from Hell; smoking her cigar while I chew the tip of my pencil like she’s fresh from purgatory—so fresh, so clean, so sinful. Everyone knows not to mess with WOMAN, that’s what we call her. She’s so overtly, sexually, innately, a WOMAN. Fist high up in the air, dyke-y (she’s so, so gay) and you can tell she can’t give a rats ass what you or I think about it. Her name is so gay too, like After Ellen gay, Ashton. Ashton the goddess of sexual tension. Her pinky toe touches mine and I flinch, and she smiles like she’s conquered Egypt. I can tell she was a pharaoh.
I know this woman, I know her delicateness and her toughness. I know her touch and I know her balance. She’s perfection.
Ashton: This is so bullshit. This authoritarian state of mind control. These expectations of us, like we’re lab rats. ‘Good, good. My, the people are turning out nicely. Just what we expected.’ It’s so 1984.
(She’s talking about an assignment we’re doing for American Literature, a declaration of our infinite support for the war. There is no stance on the subject-we are told to write, and we do so accordingly. Not to would reap punishment even I could not fathom.)
Me: It’s really not that big of a deal.
This is so her. When we first started seeing each other, she’d hold my hand at school and kiss me on the lips in front of teachers and students. She said ‘to hell with holding back’. She wore a tux to prom to ‘confuse the masses’. I was embarrassed and ashamed, afraid of everyone and everything, as if at any given moment they would all break out and scream, “QUEER!” I could not imagine anything worse.
Ashton: It’s so totalitarian. I feel like that chick from V for Vendetta, one wrong move and the Fingermen comes running after us. Why do we do this? Do we hold a sign upon our breasts declaring ‘take advantage of us, we’re weak, useless little puppets. Do what you want, who are we to question the almighty, the knowing, the omnipotent school board?’
(It’s ridiculous. She’s exaggerating. She takes the thesis as a declaration of all the society, as if this one paper represents everything that is wrong with America. I want to scream but I also want to applaud her. After all, we need this kind of eccentric anarchist to balance the scales.)
I listen to her gab, watching her long legs move restlessly, watching her crossed arms, the small tattoo of a bullet on her wrist. Her eyes penetrate mine and I find myself going cross-eyed, trying to see if they are really windows to the soul. If so, I think she has none. Ashton stops talking, but it’s while before I notice she’s just staring at me. Like she’s waiting for me to agree, or maybe yell back that conformity is easy and comfortable, and I like easy and comfortable. I’d like to tell her that she makes me more uncomfortable than I can even describe, but that I like this feeling, that being uncomfortable can be a good thing.
She stands and holds out her hand. I take it like a small child being led across the street, and she walks me to her truck. In the car, she blasts something foreign, and I stare out into the road, reading the signs passing by. She pulls up, not into my driveway, but onto the clearing on a low cliff. From here we can see the dip and curves of the small valley, the city with it’s neon florescent lights, beyond that—the brown murky waters of the river. Narrowing my eyes, I can even see a bit of the mountains toward the horizon. It’s almost ten, and the night sky is dark and forbidding. I feel like a trespasser and I jump out of the car, and Ashton comes to my side.
She kisses me like it’s an obligation. She kisses me like this is what you do on cliffs, under the sky. You kiss. Then I sit on the hood of the car as she smokes below me. When she talks, it’s like a river flowing. I get lost in her words, and just watch her dark hair disappear into the masses shrouded by night.
When I was nine years old, my grandfather took me to the courtyard of a villa, off the coast of Spain. Everything seemed so rich and exotic, the beautiful pale beach, the white buildings with red roofs. Little children played not far away, their nanny’s watching from a safe distance, and old couples sipped Palomino wine from crystal glasses, staring at us like we were outsiders. And we were, in every sense of the word. I felt so typical, so white and touristy. I didn’t deserve such a jewel, and in the end I hated my grandfather for showing me a place in which I would never belong.
Ashton: You seem so far away.
I say nothing but watch her eyebrows tilt, her smooth skin sparkle in the air. The wind plays with her hair like she’s a perfect, porcelain doll. A goddess in form and figure.
Ashton: I took my first girlfriend here. We sat, our feet dangling mid-air. It made us feel beautifully dangerous, like jewel-thieves on the run. We made love beneath that tree—(she points to an olive tree)—and we promised we’d always be together, throughout the years.
Me: what happened.
Ashton: What one does for someone is never enough until it’s too much, if you know what I mean. She found someone else, and so did I. And so will you.
I try not to think about what she says, and what this implies. I know she’s right, I know that she’s the villa in Spain and I’m the tourist. I’m here now, but soon I will move on. But I cling to her like a precious sand dollar from where the water meets the land. Ashton holds my hand, hers is so much smaller and softer than mine, which feels calloused and awkward. I kiss the nape of her neck, her hairline, the little freckles I love so much. She wraps her arms around me and we lie on the earth, still and silent.
But I'm sure that with some editing, this could be very good! 