To forget my nights I spent my days by the water. I was sprawled out on a ledge that overlooked the lake beside an abandoned, boarded-up boat house. The pages of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior blocked the sun as I held the book a few inches from my face. I was thinking that women who wrote like this today were immediately dismissed as another disaffected nymph cosplaying as a writer. It was the first day of spring but it felt like summer—eighty degrees. Two men appeared in collared shirts and khakis like businessmen on vacation, walking over from the beach on the other side. My eyes remained on the story of a lawyer spanking his secretary but I zoned in on the men’s conversation trying to sharpen the far away murmurs into words I could make out. I swore I heard the one in the baseball cap say, “I don’t mind that view,” in a sardonic way, like he was cracking a joke about my tiny shorts. But maybe I was just being a narcissist and he was talking about the lake.
I was suddenly aware of my vulnerable position. Not my lack of clothes—I wore a tiny tank top that exposed my stomach along with my tiny shorts—but my proximity to the edge off of which I could be pushed at any moment. The drop was about twenty feet or so and the water was shallow. The water was clear as a translucent coat of nail polish, almost like a magnifying glass for the mosaic of rocks and seaweed underneath. The water’s glimmering ripples resembled veins if veins lit up like glow sticks. I looked around and saw no one but the men. No witnesses. Across the water stood ugly mansions that appeared, at this distance, as a series of crooked squares. There, construction workers dug into dirt with forklifts like they were playing a claw machine. Landscapers drove raucous lawnmowers that tore at the fabric of the peaceful atmosphere. The peaceful atmosphere was never intact—there was always something, the roar of engines or the whirr of helicopters. I looked back at the spot where the men had been idling and nothing was there—just sand with the imprints of their ridiculous loafers.
Muffled conversation spilled over from the other side of the abandoned boat house and I looked over and saw a couple sitting on the ledge, the boy’s arm around her. They spoke fast with increasing volume in another language and I surmised they were arguing. I wondered why people would fight in the midst of such beauty, how the vivid blue sky and sparkling waters didn’t shut them up. But I knew that to many nature was just a backdrop, while to me everything that wasn’t nature was merely a distraction. Love and passion didn’t stand a chance next to the colossal wonder of Earth.
The night before, I puked my brains out in a dive bar bathroom. The bartender was complimenting my song choices on the jukebox and oblivious to my blackout state. I tried to tell her telepathically that I needed to be cut off. The gin was like water on my tongue at that point. She wasn’t receiving my cosmic message. I walked in knowing that when I’d walk out I’d be falling and scraping my hands and knees. Sometimes knowing when to stop doesn’t help at all. It just makes you want to go harder to get the job done. The poet said it looked like I’d been playing guitar with my knuckles. In a sketchy Bushwick hotel he picked off the scabs with his teeth. The toilet wouldn’t flush and the window let cold air in. The bed only had a thin blue sheet as a blanket. I didn’t want him to think of me as a whore but I wanted him to fuck me like one. Afterward I curled my body on top of his for warmth. I wondered if this was the end—if the poems he’d been writing me were all leading up to this, and sex was an act of resigning my position as a muse. I decided I would be okay with that.
I finished reading Bad Behavior while the sun, like a halo over Mother Earth, painted me pink. Sunburn is nature’s hickey. A bee buzzed around me in circles and I slapped it with the book. The insect dropped into my lap with one last defeated vibration. I flicked it into the water and got up to leave.