in case it is still unclear

here is what i want:
your body
against my body
feverish;
your desire
against my desire
unrelenting;
nothing more.

only so much longer
i’ll last against this mixed signal
madness before i break
and i break still wanting
waiting for a promise
unfulfilled and this fuse
perishes before we can implode
together, slick and salty
and undone.

the lust

If every Sunday were as productive as this one, I would totally wish for a week of Sundays. But then it would be like that short story about some kid who wishes for a week of Sundays, and by the end of the week, the family is eating leftovers in 7 day old church clothes, which is not a very good Sunday after all…but frankly, this is not dissimilar to most of my Sundays. Suck on that, moralizing fable.

/Study Date/
you are so handsome
in your tiny purple apartment
in your tiny purple shirt
making scrambled eggs in the morning
tilapia for dinner.

i peel the skin from this clementine,
pull back the peel on the banana:
what is innuendo when it’s blatant?
every time i use the bathroom
i see a box of condoms, begging.

across the table your face
such focus makes me distracted–
it’s the intensity that gets a girl.
i am only 3 feet away
from an unmade bed, begging.

how many more sundays like this?
i’d give you
every. single. one.

song of herself

I rescued the bananas. They were so sad, sitting on the top of the garbage in my friends’ kitchen, tossed before their time, to accommodate their purchaser’s week long absence. I didn’t want to take them–I didn’t. Already beginning to turn brown, what could I do for them? Wait for the winter of their life, before resentfully forcing them into some banana muffin scenario. For now they sit coyly on my table, in a bowl I threw for the very purpose of housing fruit. The bananas tricked me, made me accountable and my guilt over their presence is disproportionately huge. I didn’t even buy them. Why should I care?

It’s been four weeks since my return to the States. Everything is my apartment is bananas: the books I bought for school but haven’t read; the rugs in the bathroom I keep forgetting to wash; the MacBook that taunts me with its light-up keyboard, begging to be put to better use than Facebook status updates.  I have sat down to write hundreds of times since coming back. I blink at the screen. I look at my nails. I eat a snack. I eat twenty. But there is no story to be told, and I learned my writing lessons well. What is the narrative arc? Who are the characters? It can’t just be a free-fall of feelings, an avalanche of emotion.

And then I chide myself, because I have *done* things since coming back. Surely I have. I drove 3 hours to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a gay resort. I baked muffins, crumb cakes, pies. I watched Eclipse, Jersey Shore. I clocked hours on my RA position. I caught up with some of the amazing, important women in my life. I mailed packages. I went to a party where five minutes into meeting her, a woman informed me of her support and affection for the IDF. But these things are unrelated, no consistent strand but the overbearing “I” of it all. So I decide to be less like myself, challenge myself to ignore my overly rational tendencies and do the opposite of the thing I think I should do. I go out when I want to stay home, I go to my favorite bar when I should work. I flirt with people who are vulnerable, I have sex with an old friend and enjoy it. I research publishing companies that work with creative non-fiction, and imagine ways to take a year off from graduate school.

And when I convince myself that perhaps I can be less like me, more like someone interesting, someone with a story, someone adventurous and lovable and unpredictable rather than reliable and boring,  I rescue the bananas. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Practical and unemotional, but it’s so like me, I hate it. I hate their stupid curved bodies in my beautiful round bowl, which previously housed Sour Patch kids and the cord for my external hard drive. Now that they are here, I can’t possibly turn away from them, let them rot without some kind of resolution. I owe them my time, attention, as I owe all things: the books, the rugs,  the blog, the friend, the graduate school.

And because in all of this, what I want most is for someone to rescue me, take me home, make me safe and loved and beautiful and wanted, I envy them even as I loathe them. And because I hate that I have wants and needs I can’t fulfill on my own, I will take care of the bananas and books. I will deny the wasteful desire to throw them out, the selfish desire to put off my life and my inevitable boring self for a little longer. I come back to me, indulgent but uninspired, efficient but exacting. Sure, I hate the bananas. But ultimately it’s me I can barely look at.

romance in the rose red city

The bus for the Petra, three hours out of Amman, leaves at 6:30am. We arrive bleary eyed with ten minutes to spare, and wait inside the Jett Travel Office for our ride. Our driver is a generously mustachioed man.  He is nothing but courteous, but his eyes, and the faint sneer along his mouth gives him away. He is ruthless with the road, speeding the bus along curves that rival Wad il Naar. Not before long, we are at the midway rest stop. The woman sitting behind us on the bus looks like Toni Colette, and when she walks in the rest area/tourist shop/convenience store, she takes one look around and glances back at me, “Kitsch, ” she declares. She’s not wrong. We arrive at the Petra close to 10am. The tourist center has one window open to purchase tickets, so we wait in the sun, which is already cruel. When it’s our “turn, ” we convince the man that we are Jordanians, and thus receive the national rate, a mere dinar per person, as opposed to the tourist price, 33 dinars.

Our hike between the mountains is stunning, thirsty work. We pass the spiritual provisions of protection, move deeper in the crevasses, and begin to see altars and memorials along our path. A lot of detail has been preserved, despite the efforts of some visitors, who treat the hollowed out stone homes as personal trash depositories or urinals. Because access is mostly unchecked, grafitti can be found in homes or structures off the path. Idiots with markers declaring their presence, their love for one another. The vandalism is not subversive or resistant as it is on the Wall, but a kind of place marker, like a photo, it begs the city to add another body, another existence to its memory. It’s hard to remain annoyed in the Rose City though: it’s a lovely combination of natural beauty, the layers of color in the stone, the rough shape of the peaks, and human effort, the elaborate carvings on the building fronts, the ingenious stone plumbing system that runs the Siq.

The most famous of these feats is easily the Khazneh or the Treasury. As you walk the Siq, it appears hidden between the dipping wall of the city. When you arrive at the opening, it stands uncovered, breathtakingly beautiful and huge. Like the city itself, the Khazneh has undergone numerous defacements and sieges, but the level of detail that remains is mind boggling. I can’t imagine how long it took to carve, top to bottom. I think that the entire time we walk through the city, past the tombs, past the theater. I imagine growing up here: the kids must have had a ball, climbing the walls, daring each other to go higher, higher. The city is sprawling, and we walk for hours, stopping every so often to buy water. As you go further into the city, the prices of conveniences like water increase steadily, so by the end you are paying 2 dinars for a small bottle. My mother stops to look at jewelry at each location, finally settling on a ring, while Rachel and I attempt cheeky and strategic photographs that both attest our incredible journey, and mask our complete exhaustion. By the time we have reached the “end” of the walking tour, we are out of time and mostly energy, and cannot take the horse ride to visit the Monastery, which is further up in the mountains.

We turn around and begin walking back and we are approached by all the same peddlers trying to make a sale: 14 postcards for 1 dinar, a carriage ride for 10, a horse ride for 12. Though any form of transportation that isn’t my feet is tempting, I hate the way we always have to haggle over prices here. I know they are inflated, and I know I shouldn’t pay, but short of that one time in Jerusalem, I usually play softball, coming down to something I think is reasonable but not cheap, rather than arguing on and on. My mother doesn’t feel this way, and will nickel and dime it until the Petra crumbles, if I let her. So I tell her I want to walk instead, and we do. Our feet are blistery hot in sneakers, and my skin is gravelly with sweat, sunscreen and dust. I give in at the very last stage of the hike back to the bus, talked into a horse ride by a old man in an a’baa. His name is Hameed, his horse is May’s Eyes.

Hameed immediately engages me in small talk as he leads my horse, asking about my trip and where I am from. The feeling of being on a horse is frightening for a second, but then easy, pleasant. As I chat, I relax, and Hameed gives me the reins. He asks if I am married (no). He asks why I am not. I don’t give the whole reason, just a bit about how great being single is, how nice it is to answer to only oneself. He disagrees, of course, advising me that god-forbid, once my parents are gone, the only way to be happy in the world is with my husband. Since rejection isn’t working, I flip the script, and ask Hameed if he’s married, which he is not. When I ask why he hasn’t heeded his own advice, he tells me a sad tale of love lost. He and a girl, May perhaps, were in love, but her parents wouldn’t allow it, and wanted to marry her to a cousin instead. When May refused the cousin, he threatened the family in some way, apparently having enough influence on them that they agreed that no matter who she married, it would never be Hameed. Since then, she has not married, and neither has Hameed. He seems old to me, and I can’t imagine the girl is still bound by her parents, so maybe this story is just tourist fluff. Or maybe they are two lovers infinitely deferred, she in the clutches of her family, him plying horse rides and tales.

Later on the ride, Hameed asks why I was resistant to ride the horse earlier, and I explained about haggling, so we agree together on a price. Then I tell him, sheepishly, that I am also concerned about being too fat for the horse. Here, he laughs, claiming that if the horse was bothered, it would simply throw me. As though to prove the point, Hameed shows me how to make the horse jog a bit, and the feeling is even more exhilarating than before. We are not going very fast, and though I am terrified I will be thrown, I feel light and happy, leaving all the shifty sales people and awkward negotiations behind. When we arrive at the stop, Hameed asks me if I’d like to ride the horse all the way up to the bus stop. The path is out of sight, behind some of the smaller hills. He tells me he feels very comfortable with me, and would really like to take me all the way back. Recalling Bradley’s joking warning about being trafficked, and my mother’s general disapproval of my going off alone, I decline the offer. He makes it more forcefully a few more times, and this new push makes me unsure of him, uncomfortable when before we had been so easy. I get off the horse, and walk back to the bus, but the feeling of riding, that complete joy, stays in my hips, and I can’t stop smiling from it.

Outside the bus I see our smarmy driver waiting for his passengers, and he waves us onto the vehicle. Inside, another Jett agent is sitting in my mother’s seat, checking for tickets, writing down names. He is lovely, deep olive skin, green eyes, black hair. The radio is playing Arabic songs we both know, and more than once we are both singing quietly to ourselves. Since we both have the aisle of the first row, we are only a foot away, and I can’t help but look at his profile, clean and clever angles. Mostly done with his work, he turns to chat with me. His voice now is lilting and fast, spoken with the telling Egyptian “ga”, and I have trouble catching what he says, but we talk for a long while anyway. He is from Masr, has lived in Jordan for years, worked the Petra circuit for 6 years, though he has only visited once, two days ago. He works in tourism now, but he used to teach, studied political histories of several middle eastern nations, and consequently now speaks English, Arabic, French, and Turkish. Despite his fluency, we carry on in Arabic. He chuckles when I make him repeat a sentence slowly, three times, but is patient enough. I tell him a bit about myself, and why I speak as I do, and he seems genuinely intrigued, sometimes even impressed. He asks if I am enjoying the conversation or if he is actually annoying, and I’m so glad to reply honestly. It’s been one of the nicest parts of my day. Can I be a total girl? I developed a big old stupid crush then and there, when he told me Forsa Saida (here, happy chance that we met) , and taught me the appropriate response (i’m happier in meeting you), which I’d been meaning to learn about anyway. It becomes like a private joke, Forsa Saida, and he says it several times before he really does have to leave, but not before he buys me a soda for the road. I’ll be honest. I’m a little gay for Ali.

The drive back is long, leaving at 5, arriving in Amman at 8ish,  but I smile anyway. Over the curves in our fast bus, past the driver’s raised eyebrows, into Amman. What a good fucking day it’s been in Jordan.