Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and

am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.

There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts,”

He was red in the face, and perturbed. He reminded me of some New England preacher from the nineteenth century—a transcendentalist Unitarian with strict principles. He seemed vegan. I liked it. I liked his arrogant anger.

She had fallen inside of and then climbed out of her pain so frequently and for so long that she could not cherish it or give herself any sympathy.

I couldn’t know the depth of what she had felt—she had gone so much further than I ever had—but I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.

Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?

That if you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits. Truth could be found only outside the confines of morality. Art needed to be taken and rejected on its own terms. Art was not the artist.

The sight of him, the fact of Vladimir’s bound body, chained up in my hideaway cabin in the middle of nowhere, was fantastic and absurd. If someone were filming me, they might have seen me bite my palm in disbelief, cover my eyes, run my fingers through my hair, laugh, crouch, rise again, and put my hands over my face once more in shock at what I had done, at the spoils of my desire, the outcome of my obsession.