The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Author:Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

There are two different kinds of dancing—the kind that’s good exercise, but not good exercise for the part of my heart that isn’t just a pump, and then the kind that’s emotion through motion, a flight into presence—yes this is what it means to really let go to hold on to never let go to go on. And then one of the bartenders comes out to introduce himself, he says I love your dancing. Really, I say, because sometimes I’m the only one dancing for like an hour and I feel kind of strange. He says I love that. We hug, and then he’s touching me on the chest, and we’re dancing for a few moments before he goes back behind the bar. I always see him smiling in my direction, but before I was worried he was laughing at me—do you see how words can help?

One of my favorite things about bars is how people are always touching you. It’s the way alcohol opens up the pathway between felt sense and spoken, and somehow it took me over a decade of not drinking to appreciate the lowering of inhibitions that meets the way I want to be anyway, or gets closer. Except when it gets messy—the trembling of addiction, the plunge toward a stumbling self, the annihilating beauty, the annihilating beauty of what, the way he touches me so easily and I’m touched.

This sentence for his tongue in my mouth, for the corner at the Eagle where he’s sucking my dick and suddenly everything feels so easy. This sentence for when he needs to smoke and you know I’m not going out there, but then I realize it’s really inside, inside my head already because the smoking area is a covered patio with an open window that goes right into the bar but still I’m waiting for him to come back. This sentence for his shame, that’s what it is, even though he brought me to that corner the first and the second time around, that’s why he keeps leaving and pretending that nothing’s going on.

I should’ve left right when he said he likes Bangkok days and Berlin nights—or when I told him I grew up in DC but I hated it, and he said I’ve been all over the world, I’ve been to every city that’s worth anything in this country, and DC is dirty. Even though I’m pretty sure that in a different context he would say he’s dirty, right, that’s how these fags are, but then he was touching me and I couldn’t help thinking about how much I need this touch.

But what is the point of connection if it’s so disconnected? I won’t pretend that I don’t go home and go online, even though it’s way after I should be in bed or maybe not way after, but at least an hour, I won’t pretend that I didn’t already post an ad on craigslist but no one responded because I said I wanted to make

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