I AM

The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore.

My mind’s racing, but my hands are bound and my tongue’s tied. A knot, a nothing: that’s what I am, sitting alone in a stranger’s bedroom. The unscalable wall and everything hidden behind it; I’m that patch of promised land—the athletic, tomboy fuck that you’ve been searching for.

I’m the end station, the one on the dirty, washed-out corner where there’s the shitty little waffle shop with the cracked, hanging sign that also serves booze. Patrons press their fingernails in the yellow laminated place settings, unconsciously tracing the arcs of the silver military jets that are in that moment flying over their heads, miles above in the clear blue sky. Zoom Lens, Flight Patterns, powdered sugar and Grand Marnier. I’m the winding street covered with worn-down cobblestones that leads you, one slick and shiny square after another, to a record shop where you don’t speak the language.

I am the feeling you have as you pick through the crates; you keep your shoulders hunched while you chew on a plastic stir straw. Nonchalant.

I’m the fact that on a certain number of certain mornings, you’ve wanted nothing more than just to die, to have everything stop and then go on without you on it, like the melancholic feeling on a merry-go-round in those awful minutes of slow down, when you look forward to and at the same time are sad about the fact that you’ll have to soon get off.

If that’s the case, than what is even more me were the moments when you walked down the gravel path, clinging hands with each parent, one on either side of you as speakers crackled back to life in the summertime trees and the song of the carousel came back on.

You turned your head and watched that proud, glittery world start turning without you.

(The tinge of regret is smothered out by a glorious thought, "You're going home." You know you’re right.)


ulaan baatar, mongolia