Luster

by Raven Leilani

Of course, it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn’t considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we’re alike. He has no idea how hard I’m trying.

He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.

I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at Union Square, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down.

The spasm of the radio frequency around Rebecca’s FM preset and the long, sulfuric miles of sky beyond Weehawken, opening my eyes just as we pass through the tunnel, halfway into REM as Rebecca parks the car and walks up to the mailbox with Walker on the side, the act of her getting the mail such a sweet, quotidian thing that I pretend to be asleep.

I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.