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you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means
your life is over anyway.
A Primer for the Small Weird Loves – Richard Siken
There’s a week one spring when Chaeyoung falls so ill she can’t get out of bed.
It gets bad enough that the girls start taking shifts in her room. They bring water, cold washcloths for her fever, any medicine the doctor prescribes.
Lisa is a knot of nervous energy, pacing from the kitchen to Chaeyoung’s bedroom, down onto the street and the convenience store, back with food no one is eating. She bounces on the balls of her feet, wrings her hands. Thinks, useless. More pacing, because there is nothing else to do.
Jennie makes calls. She pushes back schedules with the agency and lists symptoms for the hospital. Fever, she says, more times than she can count. Fever so hot it hurts to touch. No, I’m not a relative. No, I won’t fucking hold–
Chaeyoung starts shivering during the night, and Jisoo climbs into her bed. Jennie finds them in the morning and nearly has a fit. Contagion, she whispers harshly, what if you get sick too?
Jisoo says, I don’t get sick. She grips Chaeyoung’s hand under the blanket. Territorial.
Chaeyoung whimpers something in restless sleep that is almost a word – it’s the first sound she’s made in days and surprise flashes across Jennie’s face. She leaves, and Jisoo stays where she is.
There’s a story that surfaces in the very back of Jisoo’s subconscious as she adjusts the edges of Chaeyoung’s blanket. An old story, half-remembered. More a fairytale than anything else, about love gained and love lost and feverish sickness. And flowers, Jisoo is almost sure there were flowers.
Chaeyoung is bone-pale and shaking, but emitting so much heat that it sears Jisoo’s skin. She bites her lip in worry, smooths Chaeyoung’s hair back. The younger girl moans in pain, it sounds a lot like Jisoo. There are no flowers here.
Come back to me, Jisoo murmurs. Burns her lips on Chaeyoung’s forehead.
She can’t remember if the story had a happy ending.
~
You get drunk the first time you kiss her, because you want to be able to say you don’t remember it in the morning and have people actually believe you. It doesn’t take much because you have never been drunk, before, just like you have never been kissed, before, which you tell her because it is your excuse. You say you need the practice and you look young and drunk and innocent which must be why she takes you up on it; you are young and you are innocent and she kisses you first so no one else (no one worse) can be first instead.
You will think this is pretty fucked up in the morning when you say you can’t remember anything and people (her, Jisoo) believe you. But you don’t think it’s fucked up at all, now, when you slot your lips against hers and her mouth is soft, and warm, and she moves against you and your noses brush gently and you can’t find it in you to think about why she is doing this when all you want is for her to never stop.
You have never kissed anyone before and you don’t know if you will ever want to kiss anyone else again.
You want every part of her: her mouth, her fingers, her breath. You want her inside you, splitting you open, you want her to eat you the whole way raw.
It chokes you, the wanting, it crawls up your throat and writhes beneath your tongue and you desperately keep your lips sealed because you are afraid it will spill out and everyone will be able to see the ugliness of it. The ugliness of you. For wanting her this way, for wanting her at all.
Heat rises in your face – lust or shame, if there is any difference, you can’t tell. You break away from her suddenly, desperately, you have made a terrible mistake and you know it. She catches your eyes and all you see is alien disgust. She hates you. She hates you. She hates what you are. She–
She is telling you that she loves you but she doesn’t, not the way you want her to. Not the way you love her. She is telling you that she loves you and smiling and holding your hand, and if you let yourself forget that she is lying you would feel happy. You do not forget. You are not happy.
Your fingers itch, touch me, or, touch her, and which is louder? Which will win? You sleep at night with clenched fists because you can no longer trust your own body.
What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?
But you know it already. You want her to grab you, choke you, push you to the couch and fuck you senseless, press your bodies together into a single line. Indivisible. Invisible. You want her to push the ugliness out of you, scrape you out until you’re empty, fill you up with something else.
Take me, you want to say, unmake me. Make me yours.
You’re sick and you want her, and you’re sick because you want her. You’re coughing and you deserve it. You can’t breathe and you deserve it. Her name spills like blood from your lips; warm, alive, wet. I’m here, she says, I’m here. She is very far away, you reach for her and miss. She catches you and holds you but you’re not really here and neither is she.
Unnie, you say, I’m not alive, I’m not, I think I don’t exist. She can hear you or she can’t. She cradles your head and strokes your hair, fingers cold, burning your forehead. She is crying, and that’s wrong because she never cries. Wetness drops on your face. She is crying, or it’s your own sweat. Fever rips through you. Eating.
Chaeyoung. She is saying your name. Chaeyoung, Chaeyoung-ah. It’s going to be okay. Chaeyoung-ah, stay with me.
Doesn’t she know that’s all you’ve ever wanted. Can’t she tell.
It’s very quiet now and dark and cool and it’s funny because you’re floating, which is funny because – because –
It’s still quiet and you’re still floating and it’s burning hot, dry heat, desert heat, you must be in an oven. You giggle and it’s too loud in the quiet. You’re in an oven. Hansel and Gretel, you’re being cooked, you’re being eaten. Your skin is crispy and peeling, it’s funny.
It’s loud, impossibly loud. You’re singing, or laughing, or screaming, and the crowd doesn’t care. The lights get brighter, the stage gets hotter. More, they cry. A thousand voices, a million, a monster with one mouth. Give us more. Give us all of you.
You can’t see them, the lights are too strong. You know you are lost, can feel the swooping, plummeting fear as your stomach drops out, as you run. You are lost and horrifically, completely alone. The stage is too big and you can’t see anything. Where is she? Where is she?
There’s a roaring in your ears and it’s bright now and you are blind and your brain is on fire. You liked it better when you were weightless, and now there is a sun bursting the paper walls of your skull, throbbing, spinning, burning. Your blood is burning. Your brain is on fire and you are on fire and you would cry if there was water allowed on the sun because it hurts. You liked it better when it was dark. You are melting down. Liquid plastic, liquid bones. If you had a mouth, you would call for her, Unnie, help me, because she always knows what to do. It hurts. Oh god. Is this dying? Are you dying? You would rather be dead.
Jisoo.
Chaeyoung-ah.
Ice. You sob, except you don’t. Ice. Relief bleeds. You are crying because it feels so good and you aren’t like her, you cry all the time. The cold, oh god, the cold washes through you. Extinguishes the sun. You tell yourself you don’t miss it.
It is very dark. Where’d the lights go. Hey, Unnie, what happened to the light.
Come back. Someone is brushing hair off your forehead.
She says, come back, Chaeyoung, open your eyes.
It is very dark, but she is telling you to open your eyes.
When have you ever refused her anything?