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Honorable Mention, 2002: Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction, Brown University |
Betrayal |
| by Anna Henderson, '03 |
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1.Desire It is easy to fall in love with bodies. I Breathe skin, lose time to anticipation and pleasure, hair, lips, thighs; tangled in another person, I am lost in a jungle. Transcendence. Society teaches us to break a body down: we love legs, butts, breasts; we take images and splice them into the form of our perfect desire. Like Pygmalion we are desperate to breathe life into our conception of beauty, our imagination of a perfect creature. Reality is easily redrawn around a body whose presence in a place reorganizes the map of the world. Nothing exists but the texture of skin, its taste thick in the mind's imagination. Against our animal world, ideas and numbers seem strange, misplaced, insignificant to desire and love, to connecting with another's warmth. Trying to fulfill a fantasy, it is the dreamer who is recreated. It is time that is filled in. 2. Characters To a moment we are only characters. In this moment: David, the long-term boyfriend (now). Moa, at first betrayer, then clown, then you (then). There is the self who perceives, creates, and ultimately longs for the deep and endless fall of vertigo (lost between the now and then). And there is Love, so mysterious and evasive that I sometimes believe it is a character, alive, weaving tendrils around us (love plays with time). But the descriptions might switch names. I could be the clown, and it could be you who plunges yourself into vertigo. And maybe only one character could play all the parts. There are several combinations to fit several moods (this is my version that fits my now). 3. Eternity The moment has a way of leaking into other moments. Other moments with other lovers leak into the memory. The lovers, like muddying watercolors, swirl into each other. I wonder if I only have relationships with myself. I ask myself the same question over and over till it feels like I am banging my head against a wall, "What do I want?" I look into my heart but it is hard to see through the haze of time and desire. Sartre writes that we are indoctrinated with the values of our societies. We can never be or know ourselves till we escape these. Sartre draws one single path to freedom, this is radical choice, choosing something totally unconnected to anything, in practice this could only be a random choice. I wonder if the river of myself can branch, if I can reach out? I imagine sailing away on desire. What could be more random then feeling affinity for someone unknown? So when I am swept away by bodies, I am swept fresh and clean, left on a brink where my life flashes and I am ready to drop it all. A month ago I caught a glimpse of Beauty. Every night since then I have dreamt of her, and woken up next to Dave, her smell almost still in my mouth. 4. Ascent There is the climb; long, tedious, we stretch ourselves across time. Slowly up and up and up. All for the imagination of a plateau. Flat high land, eternal comfort, definition. We are praying for serenity, screaming for calm. But like Ulysses' journey home all we have to live for is that climb. The top could only be a swift fall down into oblivion, a welcome mat to the void. Or it could just be too blatant; you would be a you with definitive details. 5. Or There are moments that are eternal. Eternity is just that- a single moment. Time is the process of reincarnating ourselves into that moment over and over. So I find Moa over and over, but she is only a line out of a flash of lightning I once saw. And that was only the brightness I found inside me when I first recognized myself. 6. Moa Moa is the type of person who expects that she will die young. The pre-acceptance of approaching death is a denial of STDs, bad people, and gravity. She is convinced that there is something wrong with her uterus. She thinks she can't have children because she has never used contraception and hasn't gotten pregnant yet. Moa lives by assuming her life is already wasted. She has aids. She has cancer. She woke me up one night to ask, "Anna! Do you think I might actually be an alien, put here to steal human secrets - and the aliens, from home, can see everything I see, and I never even knew…" The pre-acceptance of death means no hesitation, no holding back; means climbing on the roof of a house to get a better view of the stars - and then jumping across to the next house's roof. It means not worrying about classes (perfect for me because I had dropped out), it means no guilt for anything from picking her nose and eating her bugers to smoking hash five times a day. Moa emits a relaxed energy that casts a shadow of radiance on everything. Being friends with her allowed me, for the first time, to escape what had seemed absolute: the high school training of cool, self-consciousness, and the general feeling of inescapable smallness and uncertainty. She was probably as unaware of this as I was of creating a space for her where she could talk about what she thought and felt and cried. Moa lives in Stockholm, but for me she exists on the paper of letters and postcards that she sends to fill my walls and leave me watching for bits of her I recognize in the lines of other's bodies, in the energy of a night sky, in laughter that erupts and I know falls back to those eternal moments. 7. Unwritten words.
The road rushes past me, I sit very still staring hard at the yellow highway lines that shoot straight ahead forever, but in my mind they begin to curve and slide into the outline of your body.
I am waiting.
8. Falling in love I had met Sim in the autumn; from a distance I admired him. He was tall and thin, pretty faced, blond hair. He is forever engrained in my mind running towards me, arms outstretched like a child. But that is from the beginning. We were only acquaintances when we got together. One night, drunk and silly, we were dancing and then kissing and then leaning against the bar. He was wrapped all around me and said he did not like to just casually kiss people, and would I like to start a relationship (despite not knowing each other). Everything was slopping and spinning, the world seemed to loom and stagger and I was already falling into his arms. It went with the scene, so I took him home. Undrunk the next day we walked the city talking and talking till it all seemed right and true. And the next time I went to meet him he ran, arms stretched as far as possible, to me. 9. Betrayal I love the smell of stale cigarettes. It makes me think of waking up in my room on Via Bon Tempi, Perugia, Italy. Moa's eyes are still closed but I see her hand fumbling in search of her Camels on the floor. She lights a cigarette and takes a long drag before opening her eyes and sitting up. Waking up in Italy means always being able to go back to sleep. I am always waking up in Italy, going back to sleep only to wake up in Providence, late for class. How do you measure the closeness between two people? Moa and I spent every minute of every day together for the nine months we were in Italy. Time with Moa was elastic, each moment was possibility. Driving me to the airport to go home, curled against the back seat, we held hands whispering everything we could think of. She swore to always tell me everything, the full truths, the truths behind truths, no matter what. We clinked our piercings that we had gotten together: the ball in my tongue against the spike in her lip. There were moments where we were lovers. We once talked about whether we should be, but that was when we were wishing everything had unfolded differently. Every Friday, one o'clock, we all met at Porta Pesa and walked over to the soccer fields to play till we were bruised and tired. It was a ritual of strangers, mostly people we had met in bars the night before. One Friday when Moa didn't show up everyone got really anxious. It had been four days since anyone had seen her. By then I was pretty sure that she was at Sim's and would meet us at the playing fields. (Sim lived next to them) The night before a missing persons report had been filed for her with the police. Ed had seen her last, four am Tuesday morning; he had walked her to her door. Where could you get lost between door and room? I was meeting her for lunch Tuesday, but when I got to her apartment I could tell her bed had not been slept in, it was cold. Somehow I knew I could recognize the creases she would leave. They were not there. The moment she came out of Sim's it all became staged. She grasped my hand and led me away to a pile of wet leaves. We sat on hill overlooking the soccer field and she told me that her and Sim had realized they were in love - this happened three hours after he and I had broken up. (That had been a week before, which meant that they had first hidden their being together, and when they couldn't stand it anymore they went into hiding) She was going to move to England at the end of the year, to be with him, they were each other's destiny. I didn't want Sim anymore, but three hours was not enough for my body to realize our separation. I hadn't been in love, but the idea of love, or desire for love was connected to my most delicate, buried parts. When we broke up I felt like my world crumbled into a collection of broken pieces. Now he and Moa were in love. I couldn't be angry at her. 10. Written Words Shocked by the idea that my friend, my favorite playmate, could have betrayed me, I thought I would leave and wander the world aimlessly. I finally understood where Moa was the night before soccer. I was standing with my friend Akasha, and since he had put the shock of this understanding in me, he was holding me. Akasha first told me about searching for a friend back in California. He had found her body in a river. Then he told me to think. In that instant it all felt like my choice: Moa in a river, or Moa with my lover. Inside the warmth of Akasha's arms, inside his unwashed hair smell, I thought that this could all have meaning; I could write it. I wanted to write stories, write characters. I wanted to write worlds into existence. I thought the more experience I had the more I could write. I did not realize then that there is just one moment on repeat. 11. Vertigo Sim was a void to fill with the need to hold onto something. I remember one day going home after a few days of him; I was completely blank. He had wanted to come with me, but I had said no, and I didn't know why. Walking home I had had nothing in my head, I felt strange and numb. I was an inanimate shell only able to move mechanically: Clothes off, in shower. I could not feel the water, I stood there turning it hotter and hotter, not feeling a thing, watching my skin turn red. A month into Moa and Sim, I came home to find her cooking a cauldron of leek and potato soup. She told me that she had been stirring it for three hours, her head was empty, she could not feel response to anything, there was nothing in her mind. On the wet leaves, Moa told me that she wished we were in love instead. A few nights later, at a club, I tell her I'm going home with Kalle. She grabs me and asks me to kiss her as if I am madly in love with her. The world was spinning against glasses of vodka. I leave with Kalle, so we can talk somewhere a little quieter. We don't speak any of the same languages. In the doorway he removes all my clothes in one motion. I have one memorized drunken line, "I can't have sex with you!" Which he doesn't understand. Me, naked, in his bed, wanting, not wanting to make love. "But you want to?" he asks. "Yes, but….I am American…." I don't know what that means, but I can't explain my indecisiveness any better. Later, when I tell this to my roommate she makes me parade around our flat screaming, "Sex is not a sin!" Even though that is not why I didn't sleep with Kalle, it still feels empowering. Another drunk, another club, Moa grabs me, we are leaning against a wall kissing, I remember her hands. I still feel them against the silhouette of me. That week I sleep with Kalle. All the details of him and me evaporated by the time the sweat had dried sticky against our skin. After telling me about her and Sim, after I am dry of tears and thoughts, Moa tells me how her sister once tried to commit suicide. She has never told anyone about this. It has nothing to do with our conversation, but we are exhausted, the sun is too bright, she has betrayed me. Her mother had told her that the suicide was just a call for help, but her sister told her that she had really meant it. There is a new level of proximity between us now; something has been penetrated. We have hate and love and broken bits only we can feel and only we can place back into space. I don't remember much else of the day except us walking and walking the streets of Perugia, circling the outer wall of the town, trying to see how high up we could climb on it. My only image of Kalle is from waking up early the next morning, him lying there handsome and naked. The condom was still on him, dropped and stretched. I stared at it thinking that this is the final product. I left before he woke up. 12.Everything I have left out. I don't think there is a clear line between friends and lovers; we just make love differently to different people. There is something I first found in Moa that I have since been searching for by falling in love with phantoms I cannot hold onto, they just pass over and haunt me. I am writing these moments back into existence because I don't understand why it all unfolded the way it did. I want to know what it means in retrospect. Sim went back to England and never called Moa. I picture her standing in Sweden, suitcase packed, waiting, ready to go. He never talked to any of us again- except a long letter to me, a year late, about Buddhism and hash. I am writing these moments back into existence because I want to know what it means in connection to moments of now - I love Dave, but I am still searching for something outside of him. At night, I lie in his arms and travel to worlds weaved of desire. Do I ever really return? 13. Circus of truths I get angry at Moa after I go home to America and she writes me her truth behind truths. She tells me of bleeding inside, of fear and desperation, of all her sad and lonely. She is tired she says; she was just too tired. It is a process of playing games inside games till the world loosens a little and moments come freely. I think of her when we first met, she was learning to juggle in the kitchen. I think of us running through empty streets of fresh morning, holding hands, late to catch the sunrise. Moa is only a lonely clown she confesses. I think of her goofy grin and elf voice. I remember us inventing the world together, over night stars, and that is when I feel betrayed. 14. Closing the past So I am left to reincarnate into moments so fresh in my mind they smell of blood. I breathe life into them by splicing beauty from everywhere and refilling my thirst for stairs that go up forever. I can run and run into outstretched arms, but no matter how fast I go I still have to climb those stairs to myself. So maybe I am the only character. And if the then cannot contain this story maybe it is now. 15. Now I am magic to Dave, in his eyes I collect sunshine. He thinks I am a gazelle, wild, gracefully running full speed ahead. I wonder if he knows that I can't stop running, and that I don't know where I am going: following phantoms, jumping into dreams, and crashing into statues I think I can make come to life. I am running just to see what is over the edge. |