Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

If I can’t be a woman who is effortlessly beautiful, I wish I could be one of those women who, gracefully or ungracefully, move through the world unconsciously, with a kind of peace about their physical form. I have never had that peace, I have always felt tortured about my looks.

(I have always held that the most handsome men live in the country, while the most beautiful women live in the city, which is why in both places the pairs are unequal).

She took a breath after all of it was finished and laughed, not the laugh of a disturbed person, but the deeply ironic laugh of someone who has never lived without the company of pain.

What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there.

I have not encountered a generation of students as committed to improving their structures, institutions, and worlds as you are. I am impressed by you, and terrified of you.

Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval.