Status Updates From Mrs. S

god i took a long break

“Being like everyone else is so difficult to resist. To love, just like that.”

“The language of sex. Sincere because it doesn’t not have to be. Only speaks to what is already in motion, sentences swallowed by their own action.”

“In order to explain I’d have to recreate an inexplicable context. The things I began to fall in love with. A school friend’s handwriting, the time I accidentally wrote her name instead of mine on the cover of an exercise book. What else? The bus driver, her hands around the wheel, an English teacher buttoning a cardigan. Obsessions, tangible, like a pebble in the pocket.”

“I hope she is only herself around me.”

“I want to tell her something romantic, something about the buttoning and unbuttoning of our hip bones. She adds parsley to the garlic, green on gold, perfumes colliding. But what is there worth saying. How language suffers compared to smell. The immediacy, a present tense left to distill in the veins, without explanation. I am increasingly dramatic.”

“If I could choose a different chest I would choose this water. If I could choose a different body I would choose this water. I say the last line aloud, river slipping on my tongue”