Performance of Everyday Life [Week 4]

September 30th, 2024: WEEK 4

Walk

Reading(that inspired the work): Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects 

Performance PromptWrite a scene in which the narrator “gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what [that] particular scene might offer.” (K. Stewart)

Media: Written

Dear Reader,

Names and specifics have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals discussed.

Tears:

    Gun's don't scare me.  They never have.  I own several, but as we sat together out on stoop of my building, overlooking the apartment complex's parking lot, I couldn't take my eyes off of the gun tucked in his waistband.

    "Just walk me down to the bridge," he said, alcohol on his breath, "no one has to know.  You can just say I kept on walking."

    "...you can tell them I went for a walk..."

    "... I just want to go for a walk..."

    He repeated lines like that over and over again, the word walk stuck in my mind.  It's really all I can remember of what he said from that point on.

    He dug his head into my shoulder and I could smell the oils in his hair.  Even in that moment, the touched a part of me that made me swell with lust.  I pushed it down.  Thank god it was easy enough to.

    I slid my hand down his back all the way down to his waist; we were both sitting out there in our underwear.  The night was hot and muggy.  He murmured into my chest... walking walking walking... He wasn't paying attention to much else and it was easy enough to pull the gun from his waistband and slide it far enough away that it was out of reach.

    He was safe.

    I looked up from the concrete steps and stared out into the dark quiet parking lot... silent cars like the stumps of a forest.  I pulled him into me as the darkness of the parking lot pulled me away from my home.  No longer focused down, the light in the entryway no longer kept my eyes from adjusting to the darkness.  His world felt small in the dark, but as my eyes became accustomed to the late summer Iowa night my world got larger.

    Depression is like a fog that you can't see through.  It's walking thigh deep in molasses.  His darkness and mine were worlds away.  I didn't hate myself for wanting him because I've never been able to tell if I want someone or if I want to fix someone.  Like the lights in the parking lot, the trucks with rust on doors.  I lusted for them.  A project.  Something else for me not to finish.

    And there we were.  Me looking up, holding a man who'd never be mine, but would always be my responsibility.

    A cool breeze blew through the lot and made me shiver.  The tears that fell my thighs burned like drops of boiling oil.

    I had to keeping looking out over the felled forest of automobiles to keep myself from doing something dumber than his threats.

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