A very good hug
Unknowability is not the barrier to desire, but its bridge
I’m thinking about desire again. Not only the easy, carnal variety—though that too—but the deeper, more complicated kind, the kind that opens a door you didn’t know was a door, or makes you write poetry you spend years blissfully misreading.
Some people arrive already half-translated inside of you. Vika was like that. I looked at her and felt the sudden, unreasonable grief of not yet knowing her.
Others come at you sideways.
Once, my lover and I went on a date with a third person. We had dinner. Talked for hours. They offered everything yet revealed almost nothing, and I felt an old want rise up on its haunches. Not to possess, but to witness. To be a reliable narrator to this stranger even when I had nothing to work with but the surface of an evening.
Is desire just attention that has finally found somewhere to land?
I began to study them.
There was something stubborn inside the softness, eyes dark and fathomful, two stones sinking into black waters. Ink traveling the everywhere of their skin, peeking out of shirt collars, sleeves. I felt the urge to follow every line to its conclusion, knowing none existed. A watery blue on their forearm, obscured by a beaded bracelet, a copper cuff. Amid the wild black tendrils, a tuft of gray at their temple, like ash left after a good fire.
Every detail about them begged a story. I wanted to know them all. I couldn’t know them all.
Their smile arrived intermittently, through clouds. I became desperate to part them, as if fog was something a person could wrestle.
What I mean is: the temptation to know that dark, to press my palms against its depths, to build something small and forgettable there, a nest balanced on the thin skim of water.
What I mean is: The unknowability of a person is not a barrier to desire but its bridge.
At the end of the night we kissed, the three of us—a small ceremony the suburban street had no frame for. The clouds parted. I didn’t have to fight them. My lover kissed them first; I watched the way you watch something that will later visit you in the middle of the night.
The kiss was good, but it was the hug that left me reeling.
The hug was the whole night arriving at once.
They hugged as if they had survived something enormous. Like we were returning from the same war without realizing it until now. Their hands slid along both of our waists. Their hands carried the rawness of rivers, holding harder than ambition, harder than time. As if somewhere an old story was falling from my viejo lips, rippling out and out towards eternity, and their touch already belonged inside it.
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Kaleidoscope of Romance - LGBTQ+ Extravaganza
Yours,
Anna
P.S. This month’s Hot Box is from my favorite astrophysicist—Michelle Thaller, who I first came across in the excellent documentary series, How the Universe Works, which is on Netflix, I think. In this rapid-fire interview, Michelle gets into how perception literally shapes our world, the theory that the universe is two-dimensional (!!), and so much more.
P.P.S. “The Kookaburras” by Mary Oliver
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,
asked me to open the door.
Years later I remember how I didn’t do it,
how instead I walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.
P.P.P.S. “I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.”
I love that line so much.
Its confession of smallness—of failure, yes, but also clarity. The speaker has failed to open a cage for the titular birds. And for herself, too.
To be “not yet” a god is to recognize how little we command, how lightly we touch the living world. Even the “palest flowers,” the most modest forms of beauty, remain beyond our authorship.
There’s humility too and regret, but also a kind of freedom. If we are not sovereign over beauty, we can perhaps at least be its bearers.
To turn away from control and toward attention—toward the patient, reverent act of noticing what always (already) exists without us.
"The unknowability of a person is not a barrier to desire but its bridge." Whew! Adore this observation.
That video was so cool!! I had no idea it was a woman who discovered the sun is made of hydrogen! I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that our perception of the world shapes our understanding of it. It makes me think of the double slit experiment, where the very act of observing or measuring the particles changed their behavior.