Thoughts on Foraging

They make their way down to the beach. The sky swells with clouds above, harder and more material than the land. Elliot disturbs him; leading him down to the water, as if Will is the visitor. He’s taken off – and his blond head can be seen paces ahead, the same color as the dead cord grass that lines the path. Ahead, he runs his hand through the vegetation, picking up small things from the ground. He stops to look up for short stretches, then down. 

Eventually he rounds a bend and Will loses him, but there he is, waiting at the end of the sand path with the ocean behind him. He has a blade of dry grass in his mouth. Will decides he must think of himself as immensely charismatic. 

“Here,” says Elliot, and hands him a small, flesh-colored conch shell. 

“Oh,” says Will, “thanks.” He takes it. 

“Put it to your ear. You’ll hear traffic.”

“Traffic?”

“Yeah. Like, the sound of cars passing your window at night.”

“I thought you were supposed to hear the sea in a conch shell.” 

“Well, yeah. But it sounds the same. And you already have the sea. I thought you might want to hear the sound of cars, instead.”

Will looks at Elliot, unsure of how to respond. Silently he raises the conch shell to his ear. The sound is familiar; a static of particulate matter. He imagines the minuscule droplets of salt water colliding in air and tries to hear traffic, but he can only hear the sea; busy, verbal, dense. He takes the conch from his ear and moves to return it. 

“Keep it,” says Elliot.

“Oh,” Will replies, “thanks.” 

Elliot turns and walks towards the ocean as if he owns it, knowing Will will follow. It is annoying, slightly, but so is every small act of kindness, and Will registers he is upset about the conch, which he now pockets. He knows his life is small and sad to Elliot. His only consolation is that it will soon be Elliot’s as well. 

Elliot stands at the lip of the water, then walks further. It is freezing, and the wind batters their bodies, but he is now standing up to his ankles in the surf; his shoes still on his feet and his pants unrolled. Will stands gingerly at the edge, watching. Elliot turns, and then, all of a sudden, sneezes. It is a ridiculous, girly, high-pitched sneeze. Will watches with satisfaction as the blade of grass drops from his mouth into the water. 

“Bless you,” he says. 

“Man, don’t bless me. I am not about that God stuff. Hail satan, if you say anything at all.” says Elliot, – this is so obnoxious that Will has no response – “anyway, I should’ve known. I’m allergic to grass.”

“You’re allergic to grass?” asks Will. His tone of voice is almost mean.

“Yeah. Grass, dust, and horses. It’s a miracle I’m alive. I grew up in the city. For the first 5 years of my life the most I knew of grass was the fake turf we had for my dog. Plus, we had a cleaning lady, so no dust, and don’t even mention horses. Horses were practically mythical.” 

“I love horses. I love grass. I even love dust,” says Will. He loves dust because it means a room has sat, unchanged, forever. It means permanence, but he doesn’t say this. 

“Me too! I have to start a regimen of exposure therapy.”

“I can find you grass and dust, but I don’t know about horses.” 

“Maybe you can just show me pictures of them. Flashcards. I’ll train myself out of it.” Elliot is smiling again, and Will laughs, just a little bit. 

“Have you ever heard of Wim Hof?” he asks, offering more of himself to the conversation. 

“I think I might’ve heard of him.”

“He’s this Dutch guy that trains himself to withstand incredibly cold water. He can control his body temperature at will.”

“You’re beginning to make me think that my allergies are a personal weakness.”

“Well I’m not saying they’re not.” 

Elliot laughs. They are friends. It is this simple. 

Out of Body

x

My ex boyfriend was tall; but, perhaps out of respect for others shorter than him, was able to make himself, by optical illusion, (leaning,) into someone whose tallness was not a factor of his personality. I once told him, almost flirting, “I feel so bad for tall people. If you fall it’s such a long way down,” which in retrospect was almost a neg, a weird self conscious short person thing to say.

Let it be known, if he was a tree: Willow; he had long hair that used to fall down around my face like a curtain when we kissed. The first time we hung out (almost entirely alone,) he was visiting my college, having departed from the same institution a semester before. We watched the movie “Foodfight!”, together; in which Charlie Sheen plays Dex Dogtective: a cereal mascot come to life in an epic battle of the brands. It is known for its abysmal computer animation, but not for its plot, which under no circumstances can be followed, especially when the soft part of your arm is touching the soft part of your neighbor’s arm.

The first time we spent completely, entirely, alone, in my dorm room; we began to take off our shoes.

I said: “Okay. If you have a foot fetish, you have to tell me now.”

He said: “No, I don’t have a foot fetish, but I do crave Mommy’s milk.” 

He sounded dead serious. For a week I was partly convinced that I may have to brandish a nipple and speak in babytalk. This is a testament to how much I liked him. When I brought it up again, he was dismissive. “I was joking!” Oh. I can be very literal. 

But he liked me. He told me he had dreams about me. At many moments I felt myself caught in the beam of his gaze, conscious of being imperfect. Undressing, sometimes. When his face came too close – “too close” which always seems to be the distance needed for kissing. I have seen myself up close; the patches in my makeup, how small my eyes become without liner; the same I’ve worn since I was 15. I know men must have these same thoughts about themselves, but the romantic idea is always that they don’t. That men enter a space and map the room, and occupy it exactly as it should be occupied. 

I would like to think that this is that easy: that women have bodies and men don’t, or don’t know they do, or don’t know they have to. That, unlike me, men know what to do with their arms. But I know this to be untrue. My first boyfriend, in high school, could become so anxious as to be unable to bend his arms. He held them slightly away from his body. The action seemed protective. If you have ever watched a man under the age of 25 cross in front of you, alone, on the street, you can see almost a heat map of tension; there in his shoulders, there in his knees. With a larger body comes all sorts of new variables. You are not supposed to be large, in this world, even if it isn’t fat, per se. I imagine the sprawl of my semi-suburbia in miniature, like the diorama in Beetlejuice, and each time I enter a store or walk down the street, I imagine a man with a pair of tweezers, trying to fit me in. His hand is shaking, I can feel it. I am shaking; threatened constantly by others’ eyes. 

We are all meant to be dollike: to the powers that be, we are dolls. Dolls have no genitalia. The more I see the body as a gendered thing the more miserable I grow. None of the men I’ve been involved with have loved their bodies, either. If you cannot find a way to exist without feeling your body doesn’t, there is no moment of relaxation. This is how even sex became, or perhaps always was, unbearable for me.