Page 22 - WTPVolI Vol.#4

15
The Broken Circle
She lived on Folsom Street in San Francisco and one day she called to ask me if there was any nature here. She couldn’t see farther than the view out of her third floor windows,
of course bay windows, and maybe this was due to the fact that in some Japanese sort of way, all her life was work and shopping—though she did have to go outdoors to do both.
She would always insist that the best way to judge a Chinese restaurant was to order their duck and, yes, it was all in the skin, in the relative amount of crispiness to fat- tiness. She also swore she could tell the difference between any of the Asians there, whether they were Burmese or Korean or Malaysian, because she just knew, it was just so obvious to her.
That night we got way too drunk on flavored saké, she confessed the dull history of her past, about the American boyfriend who got her pregnant, forced her to get rid of the baby, who ended up stealing her credit card information, and yet, being who she was, or wasn’t, she forgave him. She cried and it sounded more like a flesh wound, a wailing, a long and throaty and powerful pain that didn’t seem at all Japanese and totally Japanese at the same time.
There was no consoling her. Not even when I tried to brush her thick black hair that was a little wire-y much to my surprise, this exotic mermaid of a human I had met through a friend of a friend. The mermaid who wore stylish pajamas, the little girl in a woman’s body who put a two-by-four across the floor at the entrance of her door to stop a mouse that had been terrorizing her and her roommate for months, as if a mouse didn’t have the skills to negotiate such a futile barrier, oh, the sadness of the lame, so girlish of an at- tempt. She had just wanted to find someone, anyone, to marry so that she could stay here forever and do her job at the cosmetic business and keep buying the nicest of shoes and skirts and chemises. She just wanted someone who could take her, so elegantly and inap- propriately dressed, to these mysterious places of nature where she could silently look off into the distance and think about if he had been a he or a she, and what if anything, she would have named the child who did not exist yet for her would always exist, not existing.
PhiliP James KobylaRz