The Question of Form and Purpose

“IMG_141155” - Nasta Martyn

I didn’t really believe her to be a lesbian. Yes, we had met on a dating app, but in those days I was suspicious of all women-of-ambiguous-sexuality, and especially those who squirreled their way into my life via the internet. It was a time when everyone, even the sorority girls, had begun to wear flannels and birkenstocks, those hallowed fashion items which had once been reliable markers of dykehood. You could trust nothing after that blatant appropriation. No sexuality was certain.

Anyway—we met at a cafe, this woman and I. And even as she talked about soccer (she was a goalie on a college team), wore her hair in the messy-bun-manner of mascs, sat slumped seductively in her chair, legs spread open in anticipation of possible finger-based sex—and, yes!—even as the lamp light glinted off her tongue ring which glowed like a pearl in the dark mystery of her mouth, I kept thinking to myself it’s so strange she’s not gay, she really seems like she would be. So it is that I am a master of self-delusion.

To tell the truth, I couldn’t quite listen to her words since I was staring at the ring the whole time she spoke. I found it sexy, while all the while worrying about what it might feel like when pressed against my more delicate parts. The reason, I should say, that I didn’t believe her to be queer was that she was from another country. Romania to be exact. And I had this idea firmly perched in my head that she accidentally fell into the gay side of the dating app in an act of cultural or linguistic confusion. This made things very awkward when, on our second date (I only call it “date” in retrospect), she pushed me gently into the grass in a park under a slivered moon, and began to undress me. The night air shocked me as much as this sudden foray into the land of skin and lips. Never had a partner exhibited such eagerness, big-toothed smiling as she pulled down my jeans like she was unwrapping a present on christmas day. I was a gift!

Somehow I never felt the ring; that little stud in the middle of her tongue evaded the tip of my own tongue as it dove into the warm pool of her mouth and sought it out. I wanted to touch the metal, but could never reach. And right there in the park she ravaged me. I don’t use this word lightly. It was a true ravaging, the kind I’d previously believed must occur only in those bodice-ripper books my grandmother read ceaselessly. (Oh, how could I forget the stacks of shirtless-men and white-dressed women holding each other on those cardboard covers!) When she’d done her job with me I—quite breathlessly—began to go down on her right there in the park, getting the knees of my pants all grass stained as I worked to repay the favor. Her thighs were stones and I was crushed between them, my head tight in the vicegrip of those muscled quads. I was in love or something like it.  

***

In my second year of college—that’s when this love affair began—I was very interested in theorizing about things. Forming opinions was my hobby and it did, unfortunately, sometimes distract from the theories of actual academicians and philosophers whose work I was supposed to be brooding over. But see, I had an aversion to the word “seminal” as in “seminal work,” “seminal essay,” or “seminal French thinker.” It recalled semen and this was something I would have no part in, not while my mind was pumping with exciting and firmly vaginal ideas. I was a feminist. At the time to me “being a feminist” meant that I was a believer that no man could, on principle, produce good ideas. Or at least, better ideas than the ones I was cooking up in the stew of my young mind.

It was only natural that upon coming home from The Romanian’s apartment the morning after that delirious first fuck, the first thing I said to my roommate and co-conspirator in armchair philosophy was that I had discovered something new and vital about bodies.

“What have you discovered?” Henny asked, looking up from their book on ungendered art of the middle ages. (I remember this because the cover had a painting depicting a very hot yet totally sexless image of Joan of Arc. In the image, Joan/John was dressed in full armor and was being burned at the stake in an incredibly erotic and completely vicious manner. My feelings toward that image—namely: horniness—distressed me greatly, and I had many theories about why this was [something about violence and desire and the ingrained sadism of the patriarchy and yadda, yadda]) “Was she gay?” Henny asked “The girl? The Romanian?”

“Yes, she turned out to be very gay,” I said. “But my theory—”

“Go on.” Henny folded the book in their lap and tented their fingers in preparation.

“It is all in the legs,” I began. What I had discovered, I explained, was that a person’s body led them to occupy a certain purpose in the world. The Romanian’s body was hard rock and barely-giving flesh. “My head felt like it was fifty feet under water. The pressure of her thighs—it was like…I got the bends…I had to come up for air!” I told Henny. The Romanian’s body had been sculpted, it seemed to me, for the express purpose of fucking women (expressly, me) against the grass and holding women (expressly, me) in the clamp of her thighs. She was made to use her body for sexual and athletic dominance, built to block bids for the soccer net. I didn’t know the rules of soccer nor had I seen her play, but I could picture her knees bent, standing in the rectangular frame of the goal, repelling balls with a purity of strength, her legs like tree trunks rooted to the ground. But this was how my theory went. It was like how different woods were best for certain structures. Oak was sturdy and stable, you could make a thick-planked floor from it. Walnut was for accent pieces like a credenza in a Victorian home. Hickory was for a southern cabin. Pine was light and pliable. You get the idea. The Romanian’s body was a thing of force and even if she’d wanted to be some coy femme, she couldn’t escape her destiny. It was written in her body.

“Okay, so you finally met a top,” was Henny’s unimpressed reply.

“It’s more than that. I met a natural top. She could be nothing but a top. It’s in her DNA,” I explained.

“The biological determination of sex positions,” Henny offered.

“Form, function, and fucking,” I nodded.

“Well, I’m glad you got railed,” Henny said, picking the book back up. “But I don’t think this theory is your best work. You’re still in a sex haze. It’s making you inarticulate and turning your thought lazy. Come back when you’ve rested.”

“But it’s more than that,” I insisted. “I learned something essential about the human body. Like, take you for example.” This made Henny pause.

“What about me?”

“You’re what—five three? And you have what is essentially a beautiful face. Like elven or some shit. It’s like…you want to be all masc and stuff, but you obviously have to work to overcome that if you want to dominate someone in bed.”

“That’s offensive,” Henny said.

“Come on. It’s just true. Like you can top, but it’s not natural for you. You are a big spoon personality in a little spoon body. A butch brain in a girly-girl's form. People look at you and think, ‘I want to throw them around’ not ‘I want them to tear me apart.’” I thought I was stating the obvious. Henny didn’t agree.

“That’s a heteronormative view on the relationship of bodies to identities. I disagree entirely.” According to Henny, I was replicating the idea of men (big) as tops, and women (small) as bottoms. In this way, I was just mimicking that prescribed physical dictate in my sexual relationships. “This Romanian being big doesn’t mean she’s a natural top,” Henny explained. “It just means you’re more willing to view her as a man and therefore more willing to submit to her. It’s honestly a restricting view of sex and I can’t imagine you’re having as much fun as you’re pretending to have with her.” Henny opened the book.

“Come on,” I pouted. “You’re just jealous ‘cause I’m the one who got laid for once.”

No reply from Henny, just the book angled so it blocked their face from my view with that burning image of the sexless Joan/John of Arc. They would have none of my ideas on the bodily determination of sexual purpose.

That night, Henny invited a very tall woman over and took her to their bedroom. All night long, I heard feminine screams of sexual ecstasy and in the morning, after the model-bodied femme left, little Henny with their skinny arms and pixie face just smiled at me and shook their head. “I shall overcome.”

***

Once, after we fucked, The Romanian and I were lying in bed not saying much of anything, half-dozing, half-kissing. It must have been two o’clock in the afternoon (this was the best part of college, really, the ability to skip off at any old hour and make love). I was resting my head on her chest, tracing her nipple absentmindedly with the tip of my finger, when her phone rang. She answered it. Someone from back home.

I couldn’t understand a word she said, which was a magical experience. Somehow, the more she spoke in this incomprehensible language, the more I thought about my own Americanness. Here I was, her American Girl. The difference settled between us and created a tension I wanted to break with my hands on her. She sounded happy and girlish in Romanian. She mostly sounded sultry and stoic when she spoke English. It was like she was two people living inside this one marvelous body. I wished I had another language I could crawl inside and become something different. But I was monolingual. Henny thought this fact about me was hilarious. “You can’t become any kind of intellectual in English. No good thought can be done in your own language. You need another substrate with which to have original ideas.” Henny spoke German, the language of Hegel, Marx, Bauhaus, and unhappy bureaucracy.

So there I was, listening to The Romanian’s other tongue. Or, that’s not right, English was her true other tongue. As I listened, I couldn’t stop touching her legs. Perfect, massive, meat boulders. I listened to her laugh into the cellphone (even her laugh was different in Romanian!) while I hugged her legs between my own and realized that these legs, her wonderful Romanian legs, were the thing I really loved about her, the power of them, the utter ass-kicking ability. KICK MY ASS, I wanted to shout. KICK IT!

Since we’d begun sleeping together, I'd continued to develop my theories on bodies and their relationship to sexual purpose despite Henny’s distaste for the subject. I was objectifying The Romanian in an absolute way that made me feel helpless and deranged and heady and male. Sometimes I would objectify myself beside her in my fantasies. Once, while she was finger-fucking me, I pictured my body as a soccer ball she was kicking about a field. Oh, how lovely it was to picture myself rolling and rolling on the open green, the tip of her cleat slamming against me over and over as I rolled farther and farther away. I had begun to have recurrent daydreams about being a referee at the Olympics. Romania Vs. America. Women’s soccer. You can imagine how that went…

If her muscular body meant that she had an inevitable, inborn destiny to absolutely dominate other women in bed, then what did my body determine about my fate? I had taken a novel interest in my physical form in the time since we’d begun sleeping together. Before The Romanian, I had seen my corporeal existence as a nuisance. It was kind of how I thought about cups, which were an annoying part of drinking water, when the actual necessary thing was the water itself. You had to contain it to deliver it. I was the water, but I had to walk around all day being a stupid, fucking cup.

Often, after I came home from the Romanian’s apartment, I would strip naked in front of the mirror and stare at the different components of the “cup” of my body. My arms were different lengths. The left one ever-so-slightly shorter than the right. Maybe no one else noticed it, but you know how these things go. I noticed it, so it mattered. My legs were too short to have ever been useful in sports. I was wide-hipped and big-breasted, facts that often pissed me off when I tried to wear something masculine but ended up looking far more womanly than I intended, my breasts pushing an oversized t-shirt into something more like a curtain draped over a shelf.

But in The Romanian’s hands, my hips had purpose; they were gripped and steered like a car over a bumpy road. I was given direction. My breasts fit into her large, calloused claws and became perfect. In the past, I had always been the top in my sexual relationships, but now that I was being treated like a hole, I began to see other possibilities built into the shape of me. I was a house, the foundation laid and the framing set up. But what would happen when the rest was installed? The plumbing? The masonry? The goddamn interior design? What was I to become?

Henny wouldn’t let me discuss these questions with them; they had other concerns. For example, exclusivity was something Henny had many ideas about. Mainly: that monogamy was a backwards concept keeping us imprisoned and fenced off from what we “really” wanted. Henny became increasingly concerned about my relationship with The Romanian after a few months when it became apparent that The Romanian wasn’t going anywhere and was becoming nearly that dreaded thing, an INSTALLATION in my life— a GODDAMNED GIRLFRIEND.

To investigate the situation further, Henny organized a double date. They invited an older woman they slept with on occasion to accompany us. I brought The Romanian. We agreed to meet at Henny’s and my house. I knew it was a bad idea from the moment Henny’s date walked in. She was some kind of artist and wore paint-splattered overalls. Her hair was in pigtails that made her look like a child, or rather like she wanted to look like a child. She wouldn’t stop staring at The Romanian and licking her lips like she was a dish that needed eating. I became jealous; which Henny thought was funny. At the end of the night, the artist proposed a foursome. I gagged, Henny said “Why are you gagging?” I said, “I’m not going to sleep with my best friend,” Henny said, “I didn’t realize we were best friends,” The Romanian said she didn’t want to share me, which made me realize I didn’t want to share her, Henny gagged, I said “why are you gagging,” they said, “because you’re so fucking monogamized it’s like you’re a straight lesbian,” I got mad, I yelled that Henny didn’t know anything about love, Henny yelled back that they were going to go make love to the artist, the artist said “so no foursome?”

That’s when I took The Romanian to my room, and Henny took the artist to theirs, and all night our apartment echoed with the sounds of angry sex, though the direction of the anger was strange, directed as it was toward the shared wall between our rooms.

After our guests had left the next morning, Henny again insisted that I was becoming over-monogamized, and that I was falling into a trap of “imprisoned love” (this being, I suppose, the opposite of “free love”). I decided I wasn’t angry at Henny anymore because I realized that my love for The Romanian was indeed becoming a problem in the sense that it was getting in the way of my pursuit of “diverse experiences,” which amounted to a vague goal of having as many sexual partners as possible before graduation. After I cried during my third orgasm, and The Romanian held me and asked what was wrong, I knew I was in deep, because what was wrong was that I was in love. I couldn’t explain this to her, but I kept picturing that painting of Joan/John of Arc burning at the stake as I thought that love is being set on fire and I was terrified of searing flesh. I just wanted ecstasy without punishment.

“How do I break out of it?” I asked Henny in the morning after I kissed The Romanian goodbye.

“You sleep with someone else.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid I’ll hurt her,” I said.

“The second you start worrying about someone else’s feelings more than your own, you’re already in the prison,” Henny said.

But how could I escape? Love wasn’t something you could shake off like a dog shaking off pond water. The solution came when The Romanian returned home for the break to visit her family. While she was gone, I met an Uruguayan at a party. What fascinated me most about the Uruguayan was that she, too, had slept with the Romanian. Apparently, they’d met at some freshman mixer for international students and had a brief fling. I wasn’t jealous. Quite the opposite. Something about the fact that we shared The Romanian drove me wild, especially because the Uruguyan was clearly still in love with The Romanian and would obviously rather have been fucking The Romanian than me—which, like, fair. The feeling was mutual. Still, it was strangely exhilarating to be having sex with someone who also preferred to be having sex with someone else, and for whom, that imagined someone else was the exact person you yourself would have preferred to be having sex with. The Uruguayan and I had sex with our eyes closed. I know this because the one time I peeked I saw that her eyes were closed too, and we were both just blindly jabbing each other and picturing The Romanian. When it was over, we lay in bed and talked about our shared love.

“She loves you,” the Uruguayan said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because when I asked her to meet up, she said she was in love with you.”

“That’s pretty definitive proof,” I said.

“Why aren’t you with her now?” she asked.

“Because she went back to Romania for a week.”

“If she loved me, I wouldn’t sleep with anyone else.”

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t take this guilt trip, so I left.

When I got home, I burst into tears. Henny asked me what was wrong. I told them about what the Uruguayan said, and Henny said that, of course, I wasn’t over The Romanian yet because I had simply picked another person who knew the Romanian. Therefore, I was essentially still having lame, loyal, mental sex with The Romanian only with the Uruguayan serving as a kind of sexual avatar. If I really wanted to break the monogamous love spell, according to Henny, I had to have sex with someone who bore no resemblance or connection to The Romanian. I tried again with the German girl from my course on Goethe. But it was awkward. She kept quoting the Young Werther the whole time we were fucking. I left depressed.

“It’s not working, I’ve become a monogamist,” I told Henny. “I love The Romanian. I love her body. I love her thighs. I love her, I love her, I love her.”

“No. You don’t love her. You’ve merely become a fetishist,” Henny argued. According to Henny, I was a fetishist because, counting The Romanian, the Uruguayan, the German girl, and the French exchange student from high school, I had now slept with “too many foreigners for it to be a coincidence.” It was now in the realm of “exoticization.” I argued that it wasn’t fetishization, it was “cultural exchange,” but Henny maintained that it was a sign of some perversion in me that needed to be rooted out. She took me to a lesbian bar and encouraged me to sleep with more people, and I did, but this made me realize what I missed about the Romanian. There was her almost unbelievable level of attentiveness; she was watching me, listening to me, anticipating me at every moment. I need only pick at a cuticle once before she was there, kissing the tips of my fingers, asking me what was bothering me. If I brushed the hair out of my face when leaning over a book, she would proffer a hair tie like a sacramental wafer, like the elastic itself was a kind of communion.  And mornings, when we woke together, I could depend on her arm being there, wrapped around my waist – a constant blessing. Don’t get me started on the slope of her neck. I wanted to ski my lips down it.

But what I missed most of all about The Romanian was that she was that rare thing in the lesbian community: a top with a heart.

The top shortage in our town was no secret. It was a problem in the lesbian community at large, so much so that tops became a sought-after commodity. It was economics, a basic problem of supply and demand. The tops became cold and cruel because they could be. They were selling what we were all buying. But The Romanian had never used her special skills for evil.

Henny, a top themselves, had a theory as to why there were so few tops in the lesbian community. “Women,” Henny lectured, “are taught to be holes. From childhood, it's all about lacunae for them. They’ve been holes so long they never learned how to be fillers-of-holes. That’s the problem.” Henny’s persuasiveness lay in their voice. They had a way of pronouncing things with such finality that it didn’t matter whether what they were saying was bullshit or not. You just had to believe them. Or at least I did.

As so often happens, sleeping with other people only made me feel bad about myself and more obsessed with the person I was trying to distract myself from in the first place. What’s worse, I began to stop thinking of The Romanian as “The Romanian” and slipped into the unfortunate habit of, at least in my head, referring to her as THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. This was devastating in its own right, and it was certainly not something I could admit to Henny, who would think the title was, first of all, embarrassing, and second of all, incorrect.

Henny’s theory of love: there was no such thing as “the love of one’s life,” no such thing as one perfect person for everyone. Matches made in heaven, soul mates, those were inventions. See also: the institution of marriage, the concept of money, God, the genre “paranormal teen romance,” “penetrative sex” as opposed to just “sex,” consciousness, math (but especially calculus), morality, the climate crisis (they believed in global warming, but they thought there was something suspicious about the “arbitrary labeling of things as ‘crises’”), grades (especially in classes they were failing), artistic merit, objective beauty, marathons, migraines, PMS, gender, the 9 to 5 workday but DECIDEDLY NOT 9 to 5, the 1980 cult classic featuring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and the “greatest lesbian comedian of all time” (Henny’s words) Lily Tomlin. This list of social constructs shifted so often that it was hard to keep up. But that was Henny. They loved creating a taxonomy of life and tearing down the curtains of social-normative beliefs, which veiled “the world as it really is.”

Anyway. If love is a social invention, then it is to some extent an illusion, and I had to disillusion myself. I simply had to come up with something to break myself of the habit of obsessing over THE LOVE OF MY LIFE/The Romanian. My plan for said disillusionment was to focus on the fact that there was some essential topic we were not connecting on. I needed to reframe us from “lovers” to “incompatibles.”

The solution came when something shifted in my brain. A phrase lodged itself into my head. I did not know where the phrase came from. It was just there one day. “The American Context.” It must have been said on some podcast I was listening to, or in a lecture, or maybe Henny tossed it out on one of their interminable rants. But it was there. A phrase as scorching and indelible as a burn on the arm. The American Context.

What did it mean, exactly? Well, it was what I lived inside of, it was the CONTEXT. How could I define it? You couldn’t define air. But it was this THING. A solid truth. I breathed, ate, slept The American Context. It gave my life shape. It bred me and raised me. My flesh had accumulated on my bones, my cells had multiplied, my brain had developed in this context.

And this was the thing The Romanian would never be able to understand. Once I saw this, it was easy to start finding differences between us. For example: The Romanian always drank tea, while I took coffee. The Romanian had never seen the movie The Breakfast Club. She knew not the particular joy of getting dangerously drunk and shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July in the annual rote celebration of national independence, the true meaning, weight, and symbolism of which was now long gone and replaced by the inane desire to drink Bud Light by a lake. She didn’t understand how Tex-Mex could actually be better than actual Mexican food. She had not gone trick-or-treating, then returned home to hear her mother fret over the possibility that razor blades were hidden in her Reese's Cups. What about school shootings? She did not have that essentially American fear in her. Moreover, she had never been inculcated by American propaganda then slowly, through a long process of reading Twitter rants and growing to resent Boomers, turned so strongly against The American Context as to believe that 9/11 really was a conspiracy, that BUSH DID 9/11, and that the JFK assassination was an inside job, and that all those things one had been taught to love about the country were merely decorations—lights and ornaments and garlands draped over the dying tree that was America.

I convinced myself of this difference between us in the way one convinces oneself of anything; with force and stomach aches and self-talk about MIND over MATTER. The Romanian, for all I loved her, for all she did for me, could never understand me because she could never understand the context. I told her as much. She had been formed in a different world. It wasn’t going to work.

“I thought things were going well,” she said.

“Don’t cry,” I said. She wasn’t crying. I was.

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s exactly the point,” I said. The snot was bubbling now. “We don’t understand each other. We are made of different stuff. It’s not a personal problem. It’s an issue on a national scale.”

“You’re breaking up with me because I’m not American?”

“It’s deeper than that.”

“Is this something Henny told you to do?”

“It is something I am doing on my own.”

She sighed. She hugged me one last time in her bear arms. I felt faint. She was perfect. My body felt like a child in a cradle. Then she let go. I was free and heartbroken. But I had escaped the trap. Henny and I got drunk. I moved on. I graduated. I thought of my lost Romanian often. I grew up.

***

In talking about being twenty, I almost forgot that I am, in fact, not twenty anymore. 33 is just past the crisis of 30. I’ve resigned myself to aging…for now. I’m sure another crisis awaits at 40. These crises are the mark of my life. The mark of a woman’s life.

And what have I done in these intervening years? I’ve become a performance artist. I’d wanted to be an academic, but I didn’t have the patience. Then I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t like the long hours one needs to spend alone with oneself. But for art, I had the style. I had the ability to plan. I lacked the shame that would be a hindrance in this field. You’d be surprised how successful one can become stripping naked in front of oil companies and rolling in a baby pool filled with black water. I was invited to do a show at the MoMA just last year. Henny came. They’re at Columbia now, lecturing on the anti-phallus as a marker of 20th-century art. In a concrete room, as I wailed in an adult-sized crib surrounded by plushies I’d sewn in the shape of yellow cabs, and as a film I’d made about the gentrification of Brooklyn was projected on the wall across from me, Henny’s and my eyes met, and though I did not break character, I felt a sudden rush of violent anger and passionate lust. We made love that night after the show. I stayed a week at their apartment, drinking espresso in bed, rising late in the day, and, after they’d gone to lecture, I would spend the morning running my finger along their bookshelf (they no longer had the book with Joan/John on the cover) and taking long showers before preparing for another performance. It felt right. They won’t commit, but we’ve been more or less a couple more or less ever since.

So why do I now think of The Romanian?

I’m sitting here in my studio in Georgia—the Republic, not the state. An international arts organization has given me a residency just outside of Tbilisi. I’m supposed to be working on a project about the falsity of borders. But I don’t have the heart for it. My work’s been corrupted, all because of another woman here that I met at dinner the other night. She was from Romania. Lavinia is her name. A fiber artist based in Bucharest. We’d been seated together across from a couple from Seoul who did collaborative sculpture. A lull in the conversation came, and I turned to Lavinia and said, “I once loved a woman from Romania.”

Lavinia hmmed and nodded. “Who has not loved a woman from Romania,” she said sagely. “What happened to your love?”

I looked at Lavinia. She was older than me by twenty-odd years. Married and divorced twice already, she’d told me over the baked trout, and happily single now. Whatever happens to love? I was not sure it was possible to lose it. (Henny, even now, is skeptical of the whole business of love, and when we get off the phone with each other, the most they say is “I care about your safety.”) No, one does not lose love when they’ve found it. It is possible to neglect love, to strangle it with doubt, or to smother it in an attempt to define it. I had not stopped loving The Romanian, but I had let her go.

“I told her we didn’t understand each other,” I told Lavinia. The dessert had been served. Dry chocolate chip cookies that we all chewed then let the crumbs grow soggy in our mouths before swallowing. Lavinia was holding a bite of her cookie in her mouth, so I went on. “I told her she did not understand The American Context, and that we couldn’t work because of this.”

Lavinia nodded some more, then swallowed. I watched the loose skin of her neck shift as the cookie traveled down her throat. “What is this ‘American Context?’” she asked.

I laughed then. Louder than I’d meant. It was sudden hysteria. Embarrassing. Odd. Awful. I tried to stop laughing, but the couple from Seoul had turned to look at me, and their eyes were wide with confusion that was quickly shifting to worry. I knew that if I didn’t stop laughing, they would think I was having a psychological break—an event unfortunately common at artist residencies. I pulled myself together at last. Lavinia’s face had remained blank the whole time. She now raised her eyebrows at me, waiting for an explanation.

“I don’t know,” was all I could say. “I don’t know what it is.”

After dinner, I returned to my room. There was no way to explain the outburst. Inside the little studio with its spare bed, the single chair, the desk, the clean wood floors, I went to the mirror and undressed. I looked at my body. I touched what I had thought of as the essential Americanness of it. There was something insubstantial there. Like trying to hold water in your hands with your fingers spread.

I wished briefly—more of an image than a wish—that all those years before in that park, when The Romanian had crushed my head like a grape between her legs, that I could have said what I’d been thinking in that moment: that I did believe in the foolish things I was supposed to think were inventions, and that I believed my purpose had been realized in that night with her under that slivered moon.

About the author

Elizabeth J. Wenger (wengerwrites.com) is a queer writer from Oklahoma. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Los Angeles Review, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Wenger holds an MFA from Iowa State University. She is a PhD student at the University of Utah and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Okie Modern.

About the artist

Nasta Martyn is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator, poet, and writer. She graduated from the Academy of Slavic Cultures and has a bachelor's degree in design. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in art history. In 2005, she created a series of graphics dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster, and in the same year, she wrote the series The Red Book. In 2022, she participated in international exhibitions in China, Taiwan, and the United States. In 2024, she received the Jury's Special Prize for her poster in China.