We Write

A recent short piece

He writes about women like he’s a boy from the Virgin Suicides like women are really girls and they are so far away, so untouchable, so unknowable and if he did somehow figure out how to know them, to own them, that they might fix him.

I write about men like I want to unzip their skin and live inside their bodies, to consume them in a way. Maybe destroy them, maybe make them obsessed with me in the same way I am obsessed with them.

He writes about women like they are a song. A sweet three minutes and fifteen seconds of gentle crooning over too much guitar in his flat raspy voice and the women are cute turns of phrases over a melody and the bridge is their downfall.

I write about men like they are mysteries. Not like the endless array of space or the human experience of time but rather like an out loud wonder of what really happened to Natalie Wood. Men are a mystery that we’re all pretty certain we know the answer to, but we can’t quite prove it enough for them to believe it.

He writes about women like he doesn’t want to be fixed. He doesn’t want them to know him. Stay over there, just beyond arm’s length for his grabby short fingers.

I write about him as if my words could wiggle through his ears into his brain and they make him sit up in the middle of the night, sweat on his scruffy upper lip and he doesn’t remember, for a second, where he is but he can still hear my voice whispering—pressed right up against the curve of his neck—whispering his fucking name.