Luster

by Raven Leilani

I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.

After the first two rides, I am enjoying myself, and not just because dying means I won’t have to pay my student loans.

Real

His joy is raw in a way that makes me feel like I can unzip my skin suit and show him all the ooze inside.

“You’re kind of aloof,” he says, and all the kids stacked underneath my trench coat rejoice. Aloof is a casual lean, a choice. It is not a girl in Bushwick, licking clean a can of tuna. “I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.

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 am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

The fluorescents wash him out, but on this occasion his neurosis is full bleed, and he tells me he does not like hospitals, because they smell like urine and synthetic gardenias, and also he is terrified of dying, and theoretically so am I, but theoretically, what if I’m not, though saying this out loud is ungenerous, and so I tell him, yes, living is definitely what I want to keep on doing, it has been great so far.

During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.

I was not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen.

I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

It is a foregone conclusion I will once or twice hurt someone’s feelings deeply because of something I say or a face I make, which I will of course think about when I ride the train home, and actually, forever, even though I tried to be merry and keep the conversation light, even though I can’t sleep and I can’t shit, and someone is dying but that one song tells you to slide to the left and you have no choice.

I look in the mirror and I do not hate how I look, nor have I ever, even though I am not usually the prettiest person in the room. My biggest issue when I look into the mirror is that sometimes the face I see doesn’t feel like mine.

While he collected disability, it was not enough, and he had done it, the thing that most animals do but which only a few animals grieve, he had been up close and found it fetid and strange, killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be Black.

Because she is thirteen, and I remember how it felt from the inside. I remember what I thought I knew about people, and the pride I took in being alone. But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.

I try not to be worried by his expression, but he wears it even after he removes his pants, the searching look of a person who keeps finding nothing, which gives me the impression that the nothing is me.

It occurs to me that maybe he is not interesting and is just older than me,

I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. I go to my room and get stuck in a Wikipedia hole about religion on Tatooine. I finish my costume and sit in the dark in my metal bikini, and in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.

It must be strange for every Black kid, when their principal authority figures break the news that authorities lie.

I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. 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.