Surrealist Journey Home from the a Wwoman’s Perspective

By: Michelle Wilson

1.

It’s snowing in Brooklyn tonight and the subways are pooling 

wet. I shift my book so it’s being carried by both 

my hands and for a moment I feel a hunger

so sharp it cuts me through, a bullet moving cleanly 

through and out the flesh. But not like a bullet at all. 

I require a more intimate form of violence — 

my old friend, the knife, the only appropriate metaphor. 

A heavyset man in a yellow jacket stares 

at me from around a corner of the stairs. I move. He moves. 

In my mind flashes of Lacan. Of Breton. 

Lacan said “La femme n’existe pas.” (“The Woman does not exist.”) 

A clump of cells in the far-left corner of my stomach think 

this man is about to teach me that there is. 

Once I went to dinner with an older man in a darkened restaurant

where all the walls were draped in claustrophobic red velvet. 

In the corner of the booth he massaged only the palest parts of me: 

my palms, the undersides of my forearms, traps, back, reached 

around to my stomach. At this I recoiled. 

He bit me, hard, where the skin of my neck met my back. Once. 

And again. The animal in me stilled. 

What I remember most clearly is the hot flush

 of shame, the knowing gazes of the seven waiters bustling 

to and from the table. What did they know? Did they know 

how my body reacted, the flashes of pulsating wetness 

so acute, so foreign, so familiar to me? Which is to say, 

Did they know about the shame? Mine. 

The man’s slender hands were deceptively strong. I felt 

two imprints where the pads of his thumbs had pressed 

into my shoulder blades for days after, painful, 

like his fingers had burrowed into me 

and were pushing against the muscle from underneath. 

When I climb into the train car all the seats are covered in cling film. 

Mercifully, the man in the yellow jacket doesn’t follow. 

The train hurtles into the dark tunnel with the doors on both sides open. 

Through the window I can see a man in a neon orange construction vest three cars down. 

There are men in every car, all dressed the same, sitting up or lying down in 

their offensively-colored vests. None meet my gaze. The one to my 

left stands the whole time, unmoving as the train stumbles and jerks. 

When we pull into my stop there are icicles hanging 

down from the ceiling and coating all the support beams.

For a moment I do not know what I am looking at: a static sea 

 of wax and resin, of metal arrows pointing every direction. 

2. 

I exit the subway to a flurry of snow, more than before, large flakes prancing 

through their newly-claimed dominion. 

It takes me several minutes to light a cigarette, my sixth 

of the day. The smoke mixes with the steam of my breath 

so that I cannot tell one from the other. I delight in the snow, 

its cleanness and its newness, nothing like the dirt 

of the smoke, the dirt of the sleet, the dirt of my soul. 

The cigarette tastes acrid but I smoke it through anyway. 

I drank 17 tiny cups of tea today in a (male) stranger’s apartment. I hate 

the bitterness but I enjoy the ritual of it all. 

The repetitive pouring into one thing 

and then another and then a third thing. 

The steeping and the pouring. 

The pouring in and the pouring out. 

In the train on the way to his apartment there was 

a clearly unhoused man walking rapidly down the car dragging 

a black cart with a birthday gift bag in it. He stopped 

at every person sitting, asking, 

“Are you hungry? Are you hungry?” 

The snowflakes turn this way and that, unwilling to land, to 

mix themselves with their soiled and blackened brethren on the 

ground. From the window of my apartment you can see 

a curious optical illusion. Between two buildings the snow looks 

like it is falling upward, spiraling in a vortex all the way. 

Knowing this is not so does not make you able to see anything else. 

I took up smoking only recently. A cigarette is like 

nothing else I have put into my body. I take it in and I feel empty, 

and whole, not a disparate collection of mechanized parts, 

bubbling and churning and breaking things down and pushing them out. 

Eating is a radical act. It drags the self back down from the cerebral and into 

the body. Eating for the Woman is a radical act, I should say. 

Or it is for this woman. 

I drop my book three separate times on the way home, 

my traitorous fingers seeking the warmth of my pockets, 

an escape from the pack-animal-feeling of winter. 

When I get home I paint my lips red with too much force, 

not for me, and not for that unseemly thing, Beauty, and not 

for anyone but for the soft lining of my stomach, warm at last.