❝leah / lee / leander❞ (lunistice) wrote in spaceodyssey, @ 2014-04-24 04:09:00 |
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The spring thaw shortly melts into an oppressive, languid heat which nobody will shut up about. It gets so hot you can feel the air pressing down on you, biting at the skin with hot steam; it gets hard to breathe and the city stinks with gently cooking garbage. Everybody hates it except Lee, who is ecstatic. Except for the smell, anyway. The first sunny weekend everybody who forgot to buy sunscreen roasts stinging needle-red, but all of Lee toasts a golden brown. (Infuriatingly, her skin refuses to burn no matter what she does. After a dozen friends suffered terrible sunburns they're all ready to murder her for gleefully flaunting it.) She’s less depressed. She goes outside more. She sits in front of the building, talking to the little old ladies sunning themselves there. She spends a lot of time on Michael’s fire escape, her legs in shorts dangling through the gaps in the bars, singing Joplin, fingers sticky with nectarines and dark cherries.
Last month, she had a big fight with Rich, during which she was quite proud of herself for standing up for herself for once — Lee did not appreciate being screamed at for the sin of having a boyfriend, and Rich's proprietary flip out over it is really weird considering he has never once wanted to fuck her — and when she went crying to Stanley afterwards he let her move her stuff into an empty room and hasn't been asking her for the rent, like he usually does not if you have a good sob story. Michael had been confused as to why she didn't just move her stuff in with him. She's already there all the time anyway. Even Lee can see how much sense it would make to just put her stuff there, what little there is.
But she can't.
Where would she hide, then? When it gets too bad, that sadness that sometimes hits her so hard it knocks her off her feet and she can barely breathe, when her head gets too crowded with voices shouting and competing for her attention, telling her kill yourself, jump, do it, they’re watching you, it’s poison, poison, poison, she runs away and hides. If he never sees it, he doesn’t have to know. She’s always claimed during these times that she's ill and doesn't want to spread it to him — which is not an unbelievable white lie because she was sick off and on all winter, she caught every single bug going around — but if she moves in with him, then he’ll see it. It’s inevitable. He’ll know.
And he won’t be able to deal with it. Nobody ever can; they’re terrified by Lee’s abrupt plunge into subreality, how easily she breaks from the real world. The physical evidence that there is something wrong with her mind, it scares her, too.
In the meantime, she’s still working, though with other photographers. She shows up more in magazines, art ones mostly, though it makes Lee nervous, because she knows she’s unreliable; it’s only a matter of time before she stops being able to do this, the way she’s had to quit or been fired from every other job she’s had. People get sick of it when you're late all the time, or stop showing up at all. And she has no plans for what she will do after this. She had once, but not anymore.
It means Lee spends a lot of time looking at her body. Seldom by choice. Actually she won’t look in the mirror when she gets out of the bath, averts her eyes, wraps a towel around herself and only looks up when she’s covered again. But there’s a lot of pictures where she’s wearing not much or nothing, and sometimes she looks at them, or sits around in not much or nothing waiting for someone to tell her what to do. She doesn’t really understand why her body, a freakshow in the everyday, is somehow elevated to Art by being on the other side of a camera lens. Because a bunch of men decided it was so. She hates it, actually, being an ideal and not a person.
Lee has always felt strange and uncomfortable in her body, and having it touched in a sexual way hasn't helped. What has helped is being wanted and loved in spite of it — Lee no longer insists for the lights to be off, or shies away, or moves his hand when he puts it between her legs — but her discomfort has never gone away, exactly. And she's confused as to why, because now she's fucking someone and using those parts and it doesn't make her break down into tears, so shouldn't she be 'fixed'?
She trusts him. She does. She does. She lets him touch her wherever he wants, and he can kiss her or touch her when she's asleep and she'll sleep right through it, never waking in a disoriented panic. When he kisses her in the morning sometimes she wakes up slowly and pulls him down on top of her and makes him late for work.
But she still feels like a stranger in her own body.
When they go to Coney Island for her birthday, Lee is happy, outwardly — very excited to see the sea, she runs out in her bare feet and shorts and gets wet up to her knees, talking nonstop in the aquarium, Lee is an endless reservoir of fish facts, apparently — but she can’t shake the sense of unease that settles over her like a second, too-tight skin.
Because she can’t swim. She searched high and low but could not find a single swimsuit that adequately hid her sex, and she can't be seen in public with Michael as a boy, kissing him as a boy, holding his hand as a boy. That might be, she realises, something she will never be able to do in public again. There are a lot of things she might not ever be able to do in public again.
But then she never thought she’d be here, either. More or less happy. She spends most of her time with someone who understands her usually, who cares what she has to say and isn’t just watching her mouth move, who is excited to come home and see her there. Every time like it’s the first time. When he asks how was your day, he wants to know, and when she says bad he says well everyone else can go fuck themselves then, they’re all a bunch of assholes. When he’s absorbed in work in the evening he’ll still reach down and run his fingers through her hair the way that she likes. It’s strange and wonderful to have somewhere to go, somewhere stable.
Lee wouldn’t trade this, these quiet nights in, this routine, predictable and safe and full of comforts like eating every day and sleeping on a bed, not a bus stop. But neither can she help that terrible yearning, the dark, dry taste of loss.