Diorama
In my new neighborhood, people leave their curtains open at night so you can look in their windows and admire their color schemes and sconces and $200 pieces of coral used to accentuate their coffee tables and bookshelves.
Everyone locks their doors but leaves their windows gaping like mouths, so you can hear exactly what they’re watching on television as you walk by.
Women weep openly from second and third stories, waiting to be seen or heard.
Men pace naked in their street level living rooms, unable to see beyond their own reflections in the windows.
In my second floor walk-up, I leave my own curtains open and sit by the window as I listen to voicemail–no discernible voices or personalized messages, just background noise recorded at an outdoor concert many miles away.
3:21am
I was pulled from sleep by the voice of the man next to me saying, “Sarah, you’re grinding your teeth.”
Perhaps it was the tropical heat hanging over the bed, or the mind-fogging sleepiness and jet lag, but for a moment, I thought I was somewhere else, in another bed, lying beside a distinctly different man, myself a slightly different girl.
Later the next day, I recalled similar experiences from childhood. When having sleepovers at friends’ houses, occasionally I would be jarred from sleep in the middle of the night and for one stretching moment, have absolutely no idea where I was or how I came to be there. The feeling in this moment is at once strangely pleasant and completely terrifying, like feeling nostalgic and homesick for a place that no longer exists, if it was really ever there to begin with.
Approximate Contact
There is a period of time, before the first intentional brush of a hand across a cheek or thigh, the first more-than-friendly embrace, the first meeting of lips, that is so completely charged with the electricity of possibility, bouncing back and forth between skin and eyelashes and teeth; the man and the woman draw close enough for the finest hairs on their arms to rise up and touch, then the man or the woman pulls back—this awkward and instinctual dance repeats, again and again, the elastic space between their bodies becoming charged with heat and intention—each instant of approximate contact spreading outward like fingers fanned.
