"You need to curl out and fly away"

Lots of weird things have happened to me recently in conversations with different people.

 A friend told me that . . .

1. something I had written made him feel aroused and dirty. 
2. if I ever wanted to seduce someone, I could do it with that voice (we were talking over the phone). He promptly asked me to stop talking that way.
3. I talk a lot but say nothing. 
4. he couldn’t have sex with some girl, because he was thinking of me 
5. of course -- there was no doubt in his mind that I wore the sexiest underwear in our group of friends
6. he didn’t like it when I said the phrase e-driven-mindfuck 
7. it’s impossible for women to masturbate.
8. I have a strange geographically indefinable accent.
9. that I seem to be one of those girls who have been physically abused and emotionally destroyed by lovers.
10.  he had other motives for getting me drunk the other day. 

 I wonder if I’ll ever be able to escape these feelings.  - The urgent desire to scream until my lungs explode.
Maybe this is what it feels like to want to create violence. To be the spark that sets off the fire.

Because there are these brief moments of insanity when I’m convinced that crushing myself against something concrete and unforgiving until it hurt might just be better than this.
Momentary enough to recognize the images immediately upon surfacing as internal manifestations of my own unexpressed fear, hurt, anger, outrage, animosity, indifference . . .. So I push it away in order to keep moving.
But the pressure remains.
Making it difficult to draw breath.
To see colors with my eyes closed.
To imagine what it would feel like to not feel like this.

I wonder, most times, if I’m the kind of woman you’d fuck without first taking off all your clothes.
If you’d fuck me, even though you wouldn’t kiss me full on the mouth.
If I’m that woman you’d call late at night – when you’re drunk or desperate or both.
When there isn’t anyone else.
Even if you don’t love me.
Even after you’ve said as much.

And what makes me that way?
The late night faceless conduit to satisfaction rather than the emotional or intellectual bridge to the same.
There has to be someone out there who will not define me and my worth only by my sexuality.


And so I say ...
To love you feels like the remembered scent of lilacs.
The sickening sweet aroma that burns the nose.
The back of the throat.
Something that evokes a sneeze.
Like the sun after times of darkness. Your voice – a vessel of madness, that flicks the tongue and curls the toes.
Words like magic spells that cut me down to size, hold me prisoner within the gap between your teeth, weaving imaginary realities about the way it might feel to love you.
Like the remembered taste of desire. Caught like a cold.A mistaken temporary ache in the bones.

To love you feels like a choice I couldn’t make.

A failed attempt to obliterate a memory.


 "The story one has to tell won't be anything important. So one can just as well write it down. Take the edge off this incurable propensity for writing, simply by giving in to it without taking it seriously. If the trick works, one is saved for the time being. I close my eyes and what do I see in my mind? Nothing important, as I said, and you can tell it's not important because it comes of its own accord, effortlessly, without being forced, no pattern, no significance. A page is torn from a notebook; once again the work schedule isn't followed and you make no progress in the grammar book. A few titles scribbled down, tentatively, as they come, something already worked out in the head, as it turns out, little stories, for later. When, if not now?"    -- The Quest for Christa T., Christa Wolf