Before: Summer 1994
Humboldt Park: The Summer Before
I sneak away every day to see him. At night I sleep in the day’s t-shirt, to smell his scent. My husband, enmeshed in a pipe-dream business venture, notices nothing. He does not listen when I tell him that we need to change things. He barely listens when I tell him I am unhappy enough that I might leave,.
My arms are marked with bruises, blue and black fading to yellow-green around the edges. I tell myhusband they came from a mosh pit, the continuance of my eternal “hanging out with Sara” alibi. They are not from a mosh pit.
JP is only my third lover. There was Chris, from high school, a boy with good prospects and a scientist’s soul. There was David, who I married, a self-proclaimed bad boy, self-proclaimed musician. At the time he had seemed to be a great improvement over Chris’s post-virginal self-consciousness.
And now JP. We are still in love enough with our own myth to admire the contrasts of our skin in the sunlight. We amaze ourselves for hours at a time with histories and confessions, improbable coincidences. My great-uncle, a police sergeant in the thick of the 1968 Democratic Convention, turning the clubs and the hoses on JP’s mother’s cousin, a Black Panther.
We build our myth, backstory to eventual fame and majesty. Our ancestors spin in their graves, their descendants writhing naked on a bare mattress in August heat. We nullify every soul, living or past, with our hunger.
JP inside me is a revelation. He kisses me deep and whispers my name. He tells me that I am beautiful. He tells me that we will be together forever, that he would die for me. His hands twine into my hair and pull, yanking my head back as he drives forward into me. He pins me to the bed with all his weight against my struggling; his hands close tight around my throat. I gasp out our safeword, and his hands relax. I sink my fingernails deep into the skin of his back, feeling them sinking through the flesh. “Harder,” he whispers. “Harder.”
Afterwards, as we lie nearly sleeping, I tell him that I am falling in love with him.
The sun beats in through his bedroom window, over a Humboldt Park street. Below, the streets throb with the sounds of a busy crack spot. Sometimes men call from him from below the window, and he gets up and hangs outside to answer them. Sometimes he goes downstairs. Always, he comes back.
I sneak away every day to see him. At night I sleep in the day’s t-shirt, to smell his scent. My husband, enmeshed in a pipe-dream business venture, notices nothing. He does not listen when I tell him that we need to change things. He barely listens when I tell him I am unhappy enough that I might leave,.
My arms are marked with bruises, blue and black fading to yellow-green around the edges. I tell myhusband they came from a mosh pit, the continuance of my eternal “hanging out with Sara” alibi. They are not from a mosh pit.
JP is only my third lover. There was Chris, from high school, a boy with good prospects and a scientist’s soul. There was David, who I married, a self-proclaimed bad boy, self-proclaimed musician. At the time he had seemed to be a great improvement over Chris’s post-virginal self-consciousness.
And now JP. We are still in love enough with our own myth to admire the contrasts of our skin in the sunlight. We amaze ourselves for hours at a time with histories and confessions, improbable coincidences. My great-uncle, a police sergeant in the thick of the 1968 Democratic Convention, turning the clubs and the hoses on JP’s mother’s cousin, a Black Panther.
We build our myth, backstory to eventual fame and majesty. Our ancestors spin in their graves, their descendants writhing naked on a bare mattress in August heat. We nullify every soul, living or past, with our hunger.
JP inside me is a revelation. He kisses me deep and whispers my name. He tells me that I am beautiful. He tells me that we will be together forever, that he would die for me. His hands twine into my hair and pull, yanking my head back as he drives forward into me. He pins me to the bed with all his weight against my struggling; his hands close tight around my throat. I gasp out our safeword, and his hands relax. I sink my fingernails deep into the skin of his back, feeling them sinking through the flesh. “Harder,” he whispers. “Harder.”
Afterwards, as we lie nearly sleeping, I tell him that I am falling in love with him.
The sun beats in through his bedroom window, over a Humboldt Park street. Below, the streets throb with the sounds of a busy crack spot. Sometimes men call from him from below the window, and he gets up and hangs outside to answer them. Sometimes he goes downstairs. Always, he comes back.
posted by GJC at 8:08 PM
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