A nightmare in which a lesser woman wins a grander prize. Wait, I was awake when that happened. I spend an hour reading Seneca to try and forget my jealousy. A fantasy in which a greater man settles for me. His feminine signature on the forms. A lesson radiating through history in slowly expanding rings. Apollo, take this gun and whip the sun to pieces.

Morning, Tokyo. So many passerby in the crowd. Spittle in the imbroglio. Molecules in the storm. Staring into faces and thinking, uncountenanceable countenance. Reading a magazine article about death. Watching a world champion perform and crying like a firehose into my phone.

Make no mistake. I know how you would opt to describe this, but my love for you is not maternal in any way. I do not simper. I do not whine. I am not obsessed with your presence and your absence. My love is unstructured, undisciplined, inhuman. I love you like the twilight loves the pines.

Night, Tokyo. Losing respect for myself and others. But rest in this muddy puddle with me. Don’t rationalize this. Don’t explain this away.

Can I talk clinically about how much I love you? Can I stand in the center and scream it out loud? I’m special, but only when I put in the effort to be. So am I really special at all? Feels like such a thing should be more effortless than it is. Did your bidding, but I shouldn’t have. You saw my face and knew it too. I hate that you put me in that position—or did I do it to myself? That’s why we aren’t friends, in case you needed that information. Strawberry is abroad and I would feel better if I could explain this to him. This man has lived with me and understands that my pettiness is a spirit I need to periodically expel and jar, like a snotty growth behind beveled glass. My pantry, a curation of every minor hatred, floating in apricot jelly.

It’s my brother, that angel, that inherited all the family sensitivity. I could never be like him, no matter how much I tried and still try. I know in my heart that beribboning my helix is only the infamous mean streak, so I intend to make the most of it. At first I hesitate, screening my reactions through a sieve, thinking, be gentle, if only because you will regret it later if you aren’t. Then my killer instinct kicks in and seizes the remote, changes the channel. No, be surface-level. Reveal enough to seem real, but keep your feelings to yourself. Preach authenticity, despite having never practiced it. You are the perfect politician and your agenda has only ever failed when you did not follow your instinct to be as fake as possible. It’s survival, and it’s also a desire you have, which you must honor. Admit it, you love this. You love the delicacy needed to pull off your artifice. You treasure the artistry involved in making people feel like they know you, like they have some special insight into you, like they can talk to you like no one else can. You love that first phase almost as much as the second, when you flip the script, cool off, pop open the lid to show a brief flicker of irritation, but always plausibly deniable, scoot away from the table, leave them holding knife and fork, still flushed, now questioning everything.

Only to Alvin, walking together on the sidewalk by the wetly red parade of hostess bars, in a moment of weakness or strength, do I admit to this, to the unforgivable: I’m good at performing. It’s the only positive thing about myself I’ve ever said to him. He smiles so tenderly that I realize that he either really gets it, or really, really doesn’t. I’ll never know which one. One thing is for sure, and that’s that he understands the risk he’s taking. But do I?

I want you to love me, and then hate me for it. I want you to have a good time that I planned out perfectly. I want you to yearn for my respect. I want you to push past the other pupils, burning for me to teach you something. I want you to live out my lessons and for your gratitude to be tinged forever with the pain of my indifference, which you intuit but cannot prove. I want you to guess at what I don’t say, which is that I would never trust you with a single real thing. I want you to suspect that I only humor you. I want you to love me with every figment and bone, want you to see me in every piss and dream, want you to fear me in every single segment and dimension, want you to hate me so much you’d destroy me in a second, as violently as you could, and all this while holding your phone with both hands, trembling with adrenaline, lost in a pack of endless ice, thinking maybe it’s nothing personal, maybe I did just forget to text you back.

Getting a spam email and thinking, no way, I’m still in her address book? Yes, way. Wayfinding into heaven and finding myself just as lonely there. Peachy, plummy skies turned to a carpet of frothing stars. Looking up: how to say “I wish you could see yourself how I see you” in Japanese. Looking up to see the planet directly opposite my front door. Seize this now, this sparkling deepness in time. I’d let you kiss my hand if you wanted. And that’s not all.

Out of the blue, out of the amber. How many people who knew me for only a brief time still remember me, years later? Hear my name and know it as my name, and not just a mess of phonemes most popular among depressed parents of girls? Recognize, in the milling of the crowd, the habits that I don’t and never did, because they show up in motion and not in the mirror? See my eyes in the pockmarks of the bark? Look at a tone, crushed crystal on the stand, and then recall the tremble and slant of my hands? The way I smiled when I thought, incorrectly, that I’d managed to conceal the obvious?

And when they see the pockmarks, the eyes, the hands, the name, what then? And when they send the email, how many deep breaths? On your marks. On your guard. I’ve been told that I am dangerous, that I am strong, that I am cold. And that’s not all. So when you recognize, in the staggering of the clouds, the signs of my predator’s drive, do you rush to hide your herd?

You say it twice because you think I didn’t hear you, but I did. My instinct to deflect your compliments is as strong as pain. I think I might sooner take a bullet than praise. So shy, but I don’t want to be boring. Plan the murder of your inner child. Life comes back anyway. It always does. Quiet, my show is on. I break open a door and confront my stalker. I yell at him to explain his fascination with me, in the frame of the open doorway, this girl broken out of the wooden horse, and he is sat in a desk chair by a dark window, not as hideous as I wanted, briefly speechless.

Draw your own conclusion. Fine by me. I can’t control how I’m perceived. Die in your own dream and leave me to mine. No, wait.

Telling Alvin I’m trying. Feeling lost. Streaks on my calves from the knee-high grass, pebbles under my nails from the charcoal in the sand. Flashlights, dark sides, crossing the road to the wettish purple against the rocky cliffside. Performing for an audience and selling it, until I don’t. Choosing you, over and over, until you won’t. Soaked through my shirt, in different formulations.

Crying on the train, because I’m happy. Fluid blisters on both big toes, under the skin. Sorting through a bag of fireworks on the front steps. Laughing out loud as they explode, briefly explore the columns, and then die. Overexerted, overtested blades of light, their spluttering waking up the shades of heaven. Four meals, cold-hearted. Can’t find a balance. Don’t want one. Pale, sparse cornflower blue from the windows, and there it is, dreamless, seamless, already living in the mourning. Sorry, but I insist on having a life. Sorry, but this is enough. Sorry, but this is what I want. However ruinous. However overdetermined.

Hard to write anything but fragments, these days. The bigger the feeling, the sharper, the smaller the shard. Digging painfully into my body when you put out your left hand and I don’t take it. Or did I imagine that? How much have I imagined out of the convenience of desire? Only the torched rings in the sand know.

Ears ringing when the master approaches. He looks into my face and I am not sure what he sees. Sit down, he says, which I guess answers that question. Later, Alvin finds me.

Never were, never weren’t. The issue is, activism is embarrassing. The issue is, you save lives by inventing fertilizer. With your yellow-tinged and square-shaped glasses, your physical abuse of your wife. I can’t watch this happen, but I can live it. I can bear to have you stare at my breasts at the beach, in the cold rain.

I couldn’t have been more vulnerable if I had said I love you. Are you interested in my point of view? Are you or aren’t you? Garbage in, garbage out, and you and I, in the middle of the chute, with our mouths open. Agape, even. The frame, the painting. How can this sunscreen have probiotics in it?

My house is full of cowards and I can’t stand it. Your only crime is working hard for your family and I hate you. You are boring and your mind is the deadest thing I have ever experienced. Soggy-eyed roadkill could be no deader.

These roads are filled with animals and I see the confusion in their eyes. Your only sin is trying to look up my skirt and I love you. I’m convinced your mind must harbor something of interest. The fault lies in me for not finding it.

Access, enter, probe. Crossing a threshold. It’s deeper than we realize. Meatgrinder is the operative term.

Yes, this, all along.

Hand me over to the force, pat me down gently. A kiss between the eyes. Palm me off to a man who will not dare to love me. Scratchy trumpet sound as two typhoons make impossible contact. Defy tradition but more than that, defy categories. Single me out. Watch me leave. Sit on the train and think of my brutality. Small-scale, accruing until it explodes in a profusion of petals. In a fictional city, you hold my hand as I hop the fence, as we cross a border.

Shit, what now? What then?

I reread my writing and wonder how I got so angry. These feelings don’t fit comfortably against such a soft, impressionable heart. These feelings compress me into arrest. I keep throwing my body against the barricade and refusing to flinch.

I need to say that I hate nature and I love cityscapes. I love neon ripples reflected on glass. I love knitted telephone wires. I love concrete heaving hotly in the sun. I love greenery only when it grows, panting and emaciated, out of the tar. I’m mad because no one will ever love me like Michael Mann loves the American city. Through close reading, with passionate understanding. Some men get one half but rarely a second.

Ref, do something!

The rain falls apart on us when you see me differently though I have not changed. I don’t understand why my feelings aren’t a pillar inside me. They reshuffle for a joke, disintegrate. They do everything but stay the same. How can they change so much? And so quickly? Dealing thunder, dealing red and blue. Bushel of nectarines, capsizing.

I write and post this too quickly because it scares me.

I cut my hand and he loosens his grip. He twists his hip and I tighten my grip.

Awkward, to be developing an attraction to Alvin that is not sexual but not solely intellectual, and as a result feels impossible to understand. I can track him around a room without looking, so there is, at minimum, some level of physical magnetism. For what reason, by what instrument, by whose hand have I been pulled into this orbit? Viola, or wrench? Virgin, or wretch? Long is the shiver of the satellite existing in the exhale of the unknown. Relationship like ritual, community like circle. For the first time, I believe in past lives, in tiny cogs of fate that rise and fall in the vast mechanism. Floor-to-ceiling curtains billowing in the breeze, hiding half a crying face.

Okay, Emma. Okay. Keep it light. Don’t make this heavy.

I don’t have a template for nonsexual mentorship from a man to a woman. Not my father, not my husband. Not friendship, not entirely designed as a relationship of equals. That’s what trust is; relinquishing the upper hand, graciously. That’s what trust is; knowing it go either way, and not needing faith or transaction. In a world where we all have a valuation, he reminds me I am worth nothing but a handful of aniseed. In a place ruled by the petty simplicity of give-and-take, he has never asked for anything from me.

Awkward, to be developing an attachment to Alvin that is already fated to end, and not necessarily well. Awkward, to be so fearful of overstepping, but more fearful still of being forgotten. It’s just, only with Alvin do I feel understood. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it is only with him that I do not feel alone. And yet, all this must coexist with the evolving laws in the distance, beyond the train doors, in the lathe of lightning. Okay, I know already. I know that I will lose him to the crowd. Put the cuffs back on me and drag me back into the dark. A stripe of red on the concrete, I do not protest. Just grant my only request. In the time left, let me do what little I can. Standing manfully by the mirrors of the lighthouse, let me protect him with all that I have.

I meet a man in a hotel lobby and within an hour, he is telling me things I don’t think even his wife knows. I sit and blink empathetically. You might think this is some sort of layered feminist statement but it isn’t, I have always understood this role and I play it with equal gusto for both men and women, but it’s mostly men that really need it. I’m convinced that the rabid dogs on the beach are angels fallen from heaven. They race into the embrace of the waves and defecate onto the warm sand. They open their mouths and because no blessings come out, they must bite instead, but I know it is all a misunderstanding. I just have that kind of face, the kind you want to say things to. I know it when I see the foamy, omen-studded fangs. For a scintillating, shit-stained second, I am ready to let the world go in a flood of blood.

Facing this, I think, unoriginally: It doesn’t matter and it never mattered. It doesn’t matter how pretty you are, how quick-witted. It doesn’t matter how many men you comforted from across the table. It doesn’t matter how many times you told a lie, how many times you hurt a child, how many times you chose right, whether deliberately or inadvertently. It is only the teeth and then the water that will decide the life you have left. For this alone, I have sworn to always hate seventy percent of the Earth. I tell myself that this is not fear, that it is honest risk assessment. But if I only learn the difference ex post facto, did I ever?

Notice how I used “ex post facto”? Am I cool or what? Notice how I called myself both ugly and pretty in separate paragraphs, as though trying to split the difference between humility and confidence? Do I want to eat my cake and have it too or what? Notice how I’m doing a weird fourth wall break here, as though to speak directly to you, yes, to you? Yes, yes, you, you?

I come back after two weeks to practice and when I half-bow through the door after the flight of stairs, I am shocked to see the relief on Alvin’s face. Tossing and turning in the night, I’d told myself he would not notice I was gone. Tossing and turning in the current, I’d told myself he didn’t care enough to notice. In the long summer of the opening door, I finally catch that wave. The water surges and pulls me in, but I wash up on the sand, greenish spit across my smile, sparkling foam on all my limbs. In the end, as always, the only one I was fooling across the table was myself. I wake up at four in the morning again, after fourteen days of perfect sleep, and I think, yes, there it is. I was never where I went. I was always here, embedded in a glittering lucky prism I do not deserve and cannot really understand, but where I am wanted, yes, where I am wanted.