March - Like Lions 8 страница

Jasmine looked down at her tea. She was overwhelmed by how amazing all of this was, and she wanted to convey it, but it was hard. It took too much out of her. It was strange, the idea of happiness being so tiring, but a large sense of that happiness had come from relief. I had never realized how much alienation and isolation she must have been feeling because of how hard everything was. She wasn't trying to be so radically different to cause problems, but because she simply had to be in order to survive. Lydia seemed to get that about Jasmine, and wasn't going to make her compromise.

"Even when I told her that we had been calling the baby 'they' when we refer to them so people don't make them an object with it, she told me that the pronoun 'it' didn't have to be a bad thing. In The Color Purple, the pronoun 'it' is god and it is everything; the animals, the trees, the people. She told me all of this, but then still used they and them to talk about the baby because I had not given her permission to do otherwise. She was telling me, reassuring me that 'it' didn't have to be bad because she knew that people weren't always going to get the more neutral pronouns correct. I'm still going to use they, but it's nice to know that other ones are okay, too. It's just so nice to have someone who gets what I'm trying to do."

Jasmine opened her hands around her tea cup on the table in an exasperated moment. I moved my chair closer to her so I could put my arm around her. I didn't know exactly what to say, or what I was allowed to say, but I took everything that was happening as a good sign. Jasmine needed a doctor that would treat her body like her body. She needed someone who trusted Jasmine's instincts so she didn't think that everyone out there was trying to screw her over or get something from her that wasn't theirs to take. Lydia, apparently, had also worked in a rape crisis center and the birthing center also had information on abortion.

"It's all the same experience, I know, being pregnant and then giving birth. She's a midwife and she will deliver our kid, but it's nice to know that though it's all the same, from one pregnant person to the next, it's also very, very different."

I nodded. I knew what she was talking about. I thought of Mikey and Alexa's marriage, their five kids with biblical names, and their perfectly clean and organized house. It was the same story that everyone told, but it wasn't. To say that Mikey and Alexa fit the mold of heterosexual white USA was a lie. Jasmine and I didn't want to be that either, and I knew Jasmine didn't just want to be another young mother. I had a lot of hope that Lydia would provide that to her. A lot of hope. The fact that Jasmine had said our baby when she spoke made my heart leap, and it made me feel included. It made me feel like I had a say in things again, and I realized the relief that Jasmine must have felt upon first meeting Lydia. Suddenly, she was included too. Now I was.

"I think you made a good decision, I really do," I told her honestly. I rubbed her back and leaned my head on her shoulder. I didn't want to say or ask anything more than that.

She nodded against me and kissed the top of my head. "Thank you, Frank. For sticking around and dealing with all of this."

I moved my head to look at her, amazed at what she was saying. "You don't have to thank me for that at all. Don't ever do it again."

Jasmine nodded, a little shyly, and then she suddenly remembered. "Your surprise. Here, hold on a second." She got up from the table and went over to her bag in the next room. There was some rustling and then she came back, one arm behind her back.

"Now, after I have just spent nearly an hour telling you about how different I want all of this to be, and how I didn't want us to conform to any old pregnancy narratives, I present you with my first ultrasound photo."

I got out of my chair. Jasmine was standing at the beginning of the kitchen, where the living room also began, in her small apartment. She was walking closer to me, but that was too long to wait. Now that I was being presented with information, I wanted to know. I wanted to see it. I walked over to her and tried to focus in on the gray blob that was the person inside of her. I asked if I could hold it and she let it go, telling me she had another copy. This one was mine to keep. I had to sit down for awhile after that, and I just stared at the photo. I couldn't see much of anything because the person wasn't even close to being fully formed yet, but I could see something. I could see some life inside of Jasmine, life that was growing and reproducing itself, waiting around until it could actually live. I touched the photo, where I thought the little blob was our kid - our kid! - and felt self-conscious. Was this what everyone did with the ultrasound photo? I didn't care. I wanted to touch it, I wanted to touch Jasmine, I wanted that kid to be out right now so we could see them.

I looked from the photo to Jasmine's stomach. She was still standing in the doorway and my eye level matched up perfectly. She noticed me looking and put her hands over her stomach, suddenly self-conscious as well. She came and sat down at the table and I tried to shake myself out of my reverie. There were still too many pieces for me to put together for the kid. I still didn't have enough knowledge yet about them.

"When are you due?" I asked. I had flipped over the photo and saw the weeks marked out on the card, but I was terrible at calculations. "Can I ask that?"

"Yes, you can ask that. I'm okay with you asking questions now. I feel better about this whole ordeal. Even though I do still conform to certain narratives - like with that photo - I feel like it's different enough to be okay," she smiled, and then remembered the initial questions. "I'm due in September. During the middle of the second week, although giving an actual date is a little ridiculous because it never actually happens then, unless you have a c-section or it is induced."

I nodded. So Alexa was right. Our kid was going to be a Virgo. I smiled again and looked down at the photo. "Thank you," I told her again. "I needed this. Can... can I ask you something else now?"

I stumbled over the question, unsure if I wanted or needed to ask it. Jasmine, though a bit weary, said I could go ahead with it. "What's so wrong with this narrative? Why can't we act like some of the people we've read about, or seen act, when pregnancy entered the picture? I mean, I thought you liked books? Why haven't we talked about books in so long?"

She sighed, thinking about it. "I mentioned The Color Purple. "

"But that's not the same. We used to just talk about books because they were fun. Same with art. We talked about books and art because they were beautiful and nothing but that. We didn't make them too serious, we just shared our thoughts. I kind of missed that," I confessed. I didn't want to make this into too big of a deal, but I needed the release. I wanted to talk about something that was beautiful for beauty's sake, art for art's sake. I had been working too much and it was getting to me. I was tired all the time, and when I was this tired, I wasn't dreaming. The dream that I had had after Alexa's was the last one I had in a while and it made me realize how much I enjoyed my time there, simply because Alexa told me stories and then Gerard showed me his art. I missed creating, I missed just talking, I missed loving Jasmine without the weight of reality over our heads again. This reality made me happy; the photo was still under my palms and I felt it radiate between me and the table, but that was different. I felt like I couldn't be happy about it because it conformed to a narrative, because then that made it into a stereotype, when before narratives used to be just so beautiful.

"I miss it too," Jasmine confessed, looking down. "It's just been hard, recently. I see all the flaws in things now. I see how they can be used as tools to pacify people, to trick them, and to be used against them. I see the oppression working in things that used to be beautiful. I worry that I've found myself trapped in a narrative that I can't get out of, because this is reality, and I can't leave it."

"But you can. That's what art is for. It is and always has been that tiny escape for a little while."

"But I'm so busy. I have - we have - a lot to think about now."

"I know, and I want to think about it, but we can create beauty in that life, can't we? Or else why bother?"

She looked at me skeptically, but didn't reply. She began to gather the dishes and I went over to help. We got everything cleaned up and put away, leftovers into the fridge, before I turned to her. She was leaning against the counter and I stood in front of her. I kissed her on the mouth first, and then asked if I could touch her stomach. She sighed, and was about to say something about narratives and breaking the structure, when I countered with: "Maybe there is a reason that the first person who wrote a story about pregnancy or love or something like that wanted to touch the belly? Maybe there is a reason behind it, maybe there's not, and maybe I just want to touch you because I think you're beautiful. Maybe the reason I want to do this is not because I read it a long time ago and now I'm trying to reconstruct this fantasy. Maybe this is how I feel about you, about them? Is that so wrong?"

She didn't respond to me, but she took her hands away from her stomach. When I still didn't move, she took my hands and placed them there. I couldn't feel anything but her skin and her stomach rumbling, but that didn't matter. It was the idea of her, of us, together, that I wanted to feel with my hands. So I could feel what was real and what was happening right now. Not in the past or in the future, not what someone else had said about what was going on, but what was right now.

"Do you ever wonder sometimes that I don't love you because it's easier to be straight in this city than to be gay or because you're pregnant, but because I do really love you? That, as much as I know and you know that society is fucked up, that we can still be happy together? If only for a moment?"

I put my lips to her stomach and I got down on my knees. I hugged her from the waist and she placed her hands gently on my neck. She took a deep breath before she spoke.

"In the morning, I am happy. I wake up and I'm alone and no one else is around, and I think it's then that the only way I could be happy is if I was alone the rest of my life."

"You're not alone."

"The baby doesn't count, Frank. They isn't even legally a person yet. I could get rid of they tomorrow and I could live alone."

Her sudden harsh response surprised me. She was so full of conflicting moments and in my own despair and elation, I was letting myself go too. I hugged her leg, trying not to seem as if I was grabbing hold of something that wasn't mine "No, I mean, me, Jasmine. You're not alone because you have me. Gerard. Everyone. We're all linked, remember?" She was silent for awhile, but she did not push me away. She was listening, but still not convinced. "Look, I know you don't believe me or see things the way I do. But trust me when I say that I don't lie. I have no reason to."

She was quiet for a long time, and I held her as close as I could.

"There is a book I like, a book I don't know if I told you about," she said. I stayed in my position, knowing that moving and making eye contact could cause her to lose her sure footing. I only told her to tell me, and that I wanted to hear. "It was called The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I know it's not that good, literary speaking. My professors would probably tear it apart. But... I like it. I always have. I read it all night in undergrad and it pulled me in. There was a quotation in it that I had always liked and it's something like 'we only accept the love we think we deserve.' So many people could tear the quotation apart, but it means a lot to me. It's cliché, now, but I've never known how much love I think I deserved. I've always been baffled when people say they love me, as if they have found out my own secret - that I love them - and they are teasing me with it."

"Jasmine," I hugged her legs. Her hands were barely touching my shoulders now and I wanted more contact. I wanted... "Jasmine, you deserve everything. I love you. Please believe that."

"How can you give everything to two people? It's impossible."

I couldn't take being on the floor anymore. I needed to get up, to look at her, to have her see how honest and serious I was. I didn't quite know how to explain myself, how this even made sense in my mind, but it was true. It was just as true as anything else, how I could love Gerard with everything and love Jasmine too. I tried to find words to explain the complex recesses of my emotions. "I can love two people with everything because we are so small in the face of it all. We are so small that the tiniest touch in the emptiness of this world encompasses infinity. We are so small and insignificant that everything is all we can give to keep ourselves alive. And I want to stay alive. Everything is so fucking hard right now and I'm terrified half the time. But I am still here, trust me on that. I am still here. This is everything I have."

Saying those words out loud made me feel how drained I really was. I was keeping up a wall between myself and the real world, not processing how shitty my job actually was and how tired I was. I was getting too much information all at once, and though I was excited, that excitement was wearing me out. Reality confronted me all around and I had no idea how to process it all. I wanted to find some joy in the small moments of life, in the ultrasound, in Jasmine and her presence, in Gerard and his art, but it was getting harder and harder to do so. I was ready to be done, to check out, and just sleep for ages. I felt as if I had exhaled the world for Jasmine to keep her going, and now I needed to rest.

I sat down at the table and took a while to collect myself. She came up behind me and asked if I was okay. I told her I was and then she pushed me the way I had just pushed her. She said if I wasn't going to let her get away with the emotional bullshit, then I couldn't be a hypocrite and think I could get away with it too. I laughed - we both laughed - and it was a stress reliever. I felt so much better in my own skin, and then, the entire side of my story fell out. All the demons that I had been keeping inside, the fact that I'd have to tell my parents and I didn't want to, going to the doctor and feeling distanced from sickness and heath, the stress and the worry and the money, my job and the cashiers that kept calling me faggot and Max, the back production guy who was avoiding me now because he heard the faggot remarks and didn't know how to deal with his own job harassment. I wanted to quit so badly and my body was screaming out for it too. I couldn't take another lonely night, another morning coming home and not seeing anyone, not having anyone else around.

"I'm probably up then, when you're coming back. Come and see me and we can be alone together," she stated, honestly. I smiled. We both leaned on the table, exhausted.

"I want to quit," I said and then hating myself for admitting it. I needed this job. Especially with the baby on the way. The baby was more important, but I was running out of internal resources.

I was surprised when Jasmine said, "So quit. You can find something else. Maybe Mikey can help. He has a lot of prestige in his job and likes you more than you think. Even if he can't get you something, you'll be okay."

"But...." I said, looking at the photo of the ultrasound. Jasmine shrugged.

"That's my body. Worry about your own. If you're tired all the time and can't help us out, then, you're just as good as if you had no money at all or if you were miserable all the time. I needed to be happy in order to know that I could do this. So do you."

I nodded, baffled. It made perfect sense. I couldn't believe I hadn't turned her logic back on myself. I had just been chastising and disciplining myself from afar, trying to please her. But I wasn't pleasing myself. I felt this huge weight lift itself off of me. It flowed down my arms and into my legs and out onto the floor. It was a flood, and it felt fantastic. I groaned and leaned over the table. The clock read nearly ten. I couldn't bear leaving for work yet, not right then. Not when we had come so far.

Jasmine told me to call in sick, and it didn't take much persuading. I used her phone and apologized profusely, but I really didn't feel that bad. I made the right decision. I felt a second wind come on as soon as I hung up. When I turned around, Jasmine was standing by the entrance to the living room. She smiled at me and then motioned with her arms to come over to her. She looked nervous, but was sure of her actions. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me quickly, before pulling me towards the bedroom.

We sat down on the bed. It was clear that she wanted to lead this and I didn't want to misinterpret anything, so I waited. She placed her hands on her knees, trying to organize her thoughts. "I know what you mean, about how giving everything can mean infinity. At least on a logical level, I know that. But I don't know what that looks like. I don't know how to experience that." She looked at me, nervously. I thought I knew what she was getting at, but I waited for her to keep going. "I want to know what infinity, what everything looks like. What it feels like. I don't think I've ever really known. In spite of all that I've done."

Now, she was done. She looked at me for an answer, and I swallowed hard. I nodded. I leaned towards her, curling her hair behind her ear and then placed my mouth over hers.

Jasmine and I had had sex a lot in the past. We had had really good sex, too, and some not so good. But even in our bad moments, they were not caused by a lack of feeling on either one of our parts, but an intrusion of something we couldn't control: memories. Jasmine was prone to flashbacks and triggers, and sometimes we'd have to stop halfway through and she would need to rest and be alone for awhile. It had happened a handful of times in our undergrad, and even in those moments of extreme stress, we were still there for one another. The first time it happened I had been scared to death, but she warned me. She told me how to deal with it (stop, don't touch, ask to touch, say her name and sometimes the date/time so she'd realize where she was) in the past and though it took awhile for me to remember, I did and things were okay. The next time it happened, I was a lot better at making sure she was okay. It didn't happen that often, but even through the pain and darker extremes of sex, we knew how to handle ourselves. We loved one another, but our relationship was different. I wanted to think that I had given her everything, but the truth was, I wasn't entirely sure how to do that myself. I loved Gerard with everything I had, but I realized that even in our relationship he was the one who was giving me everything; I had asked him to take everything from me that first night. He had always been the one showing me how to do it. And though I had learned from him, I had never figured out how to replicate it by myself.

I tried that night with Jasmine. We both tried. I thought it would be easy to recreate everything between us, to capture infinity - it was everywhere and everything, right? But there was a big difference between anything and everything and we had to work through that together. I wasn't trying to recreate what I had had with Gerard seven years ago or replace it any way. There was nothing that could compare or ever would compare. All that I was trying to do was to create something beautiful that I could hold onto the rest of my life as well, so that maybe one day, when I was very, very old I could have a pocket full of all these memories like tiny brass coins and I could remember what it was like to feel like I had infinity in front of me and a long way to go until the end.

Jasmine and I kissed at the edge of her bed for some time before I began to move my hand from her neck, to her shoulder, hip, thigh, and eventually, her stomach. She began to lie down and I placed myself over her waist and lifted up her shirt a bit. I touched the smooth surface of her belly, running my hands just under the rib cage and finishing between hip bones. I undid her pants, but I did not take them off. I kissed from her navel down and then began to slide off her pants. She helped me as I got to the awkward part near the ankles, and then she sat up as well and moved her hands on my body, too. She placed them on my fly and I put mine over hers and encouraged her to keep going. We took off my pants together, too, but still left my boxers on. She lifted my shirt over and above my head, and then, when she laid back down, we got rid of the sweater she was wearing. She lay on her side, and I moved to her back so I could undo her bra. I kissed her hips and ran my hands down her lower back, squeezing slightly to give her more support. From my angle, I could see what a small belly she had, extended more in her position. It made me smile and I touched it one more time before I undid her bra and she lay back and took it off. I touched one of her breasts with my hands and then watched her reaction to make sure they weren't too tender. She responded well, and so I kept going. They felt heavier in my hands than before; not that they were any bigger, they just felt different. Fuller, older, more mature. Jasmine had always been really self-conscious about the size of her breasts and used to always joke about how one day, she would eventually go through puberty and they would be bigger. She was a 36A - I knew from undoing and then finding her bras so many times in my apartment - but she sometimes barely filled those cups. Her breasts were still small, they usually filled the palm of my hand, but now it felt as if I had to hold them up more, as if they had gained gravity and weight. I hoped the change was a good one for her, and it wasn't too alienating.

We didn't talk as we undressed one another, but our eyes locked a lot of the time. We gave consent with small nods and suggestions about where to place hands and bodies with our own hands and bodies. She smiled at me a lot, especially as I moved from touching her breasts to lie on my side, right next to her. We both looked at each other with a grin and nodded, then reached down to pull off our pants together. It was childish, I knew, a sort of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" type of mentality, but we didn't care. Our sex was serious, but it also needed to be playful. As soon as we were both naked, I turned myself over and nestled between her legs. I was on my knees and then crouched down, kissing from her breasts down to her navel again, as I gradually touched her vulva with my fingers. She quaked a bit at first from anticipation, but settled down into it as I moved gently in and out of her, and touched her clitoris with my thumb.

Her eyes closed as I touched her, and I found myself gazing at her stomach. I looked at her pale skin and knew that things would change from here. That nothing would be ever the same again; not only would her stomach grow larger, but after she gave birth, there would be stretch marks on this skin. I remembered what it was like the first time I had touched Gerard after being apart for so long and realizing that he had aged even more. I remembered dealing with his age to begin with, finding the age spot on his hand and freaking out. Jasmine was young, we were both twenty-five, but I was still dealing with my own added years sometimes. I'd walk by the mirror and not recognize myself if I forgot to shave for a few days. My skin was much courser and dryer now than it had been in the past, from working and just from getting old. I was amazed with how soft everything of Jasmine's was, and it made me so much more aware of myself as male, as something distinct from her.

But were we different? Did it matter that she had what she had and I had what I had? That Gerard had what he did? Every single body was different and every single body aged. How was there any difference between anything? I touched skin because I wanted to touch the person underneath. I touched hair and kissed lips because I wanted to be a part of them any way I could. And I went inside of people and let them go inside me because I wanted them - not their parts - to be inside of me. I wanted us to be together, I had their trust. I let them invade me, because I invaded them. We were destroying the other person at the exact same time we created something new. The orgasm was called, as Gerard told me, le petite mort. The little death, but also, I was sure, the little life.

I couldn't help but stare at Jasmine's stomach. I knew they was not legally a person yet, and they was not coming for a while, but they drew me in. I was curious. I was confounded by reality. If I touched skin because I wanted to feel the person underneath, how did my attraction to they come about? They were not a person yet; they had no personality. But I touched Jasmine's skin, her stomach, in hopes of getting underneath, of knowing they. It was pure biology right now, though. It was a blob of an ultra sound, lights and darks on a photo. It was pure biology. I had to care about biology again. It was so important, it seemed to contain the secrets of the world. The fact that people could reproduce, that something so distinct could make another, that two people could make another, and that I was somehow apart of it. I didn't want to be too consumed with the base pleasures of the body, but in that moment, biology, like the stars that Alexa talked about, made me feel pretty small and took me up in all of its wonder.

I thought of my hand moving, my fingers moving in and out of Jasmine. I dropped down lower and began to put my mouth on her. I thought of how she tasted, how she smelled; her biology. Biology was not a destiny, Gerard told me, but it was wonderful. The variations, the adaptations, the evolutions. Jasmine's magazine was doing an issue on Evolution right then, she had told me ages ago. I wanted to take pictures of us, evolving together in that instant, and publish them for all the world to see.

She began to tug on my shoulders, wanting me to spend no more time with my mouth on her. I was hard and ready to go, but instead of climbing back on top of her and having sex in the missionary position, I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to just lie down and let evolution happen over us, on top of us. I sat up on the bed, and motioned for her to come over. She was wary at first, unsure of the position, but when she got on my lap and eventually sat down, it began to work. She wrapped her legs around my waist and did the same for her. Her arms were on my shoulders and she began to lift herself up and down, using me as a base. We sat up as we fucked, and our hips moved together endlessly. She had all the control this time around. I had given her all that I could, and that was everything. It was the world. It was biology. She moved her body and I touched her body; I appreciated her rhythms and her upcoming growths. I accepted her moans and her spasms, as she accepted mine. We moved together, because we could. We moved together, because it felt good. We did things the way we did them because that was what we loved. This was how we gave everything to one another. This is all infinity ever was.

When we were done, Jasmine lay down, flat on her stomach and looked to the wall. She remained naked, which was another rare thing for her. Usually she would put on underwear after we had finished, but she stayed like this. The blanket to the bed was halfway up her body, leaving most of her lower back exposed. I was naked too, right next to her, on my side. I touched her back and trailed my fingers up and down her spine and ran my fingers through her hair. She shivered, but didn't tell me to stop.

"I want to call in sick for work, too," she told me. I told her that she should, like she told me, but she shrugged it off.

"Do they know you're pregnant there?"

She shook her head. "I haven't told anyone that you don't already know, other than Lydia. I don't want to tell other people. I don't want to share this."

I kissed her shoulder and nodded. "It will be hard to hide it in a few months."

"And we need to tell our parents soon, too," she added. She sighed, and then flipped over. She pulled her still naked body close to me and I wrapped my arms around her. I stayed propped up on my side, but I kept an arm on her hip. I had no idea if our sex had filled her expectations of everything, but she seemed more open, more willing to communicate with me and experience the world as we saw it.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14