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Where ‘Strangers Whisper Secrets in Your Ear’

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At the New York Review of Books, Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (While the museum is closed, you can check out the exhibit online.) What makes this review fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.

By showing amateur home movies in one of the most famous museums in the world, “Private Lives Public Spaces” asks us to see not just the aesthetic richness of daily life, but also to see it as a parade of minor performances: vacation as a performance of leisure, a garden party as a performance of sociability, parenting as a performance of love. Is there anyone who doesn’t sometimes imagine an audience for even the most unremarkable moments of her life?

The exhibit spans two floors, and while the upper level contains work by professional artists working with 8 mm film—Andy Warhol, Peggy Ahwesh, Cindy Sherman—the lower floor has a stronger gravitational pull, bringing me back to the home movies. Placards that usually bear the names of famous artists display suburban-sounding surnames instead: Levitt family. Thompson family. Hubley family. Descending to this level feels like dropping into the subconscious—a place not of art, exactly, but the deep place art comes from. Each film channels the gaze of an amateur—which is to say, a gaze tuned like a radio channel to the affective nuances of daily living: amusement, awkwardness, delight, and the extravagant devotion of love. Love gets accused of blinding us, or dulling our gaze, but it can summon our vision most urgently.

These are the moments that affect me most in these movies, these flashes of secret interior life suddenly surfacing: a boy’s hopeless giggling; a woman’s undisguised pleasure at her bag of potato chips on the train; the awkward silence of a boy at the end of the bar mitzvah banquet table, his forced smile; a woman doing a stately waltz, in a baroque ballroom, turning suddenly to flash a sly, flirtatious look at the camera. This secret life dwells in each of us, mysterious, wild, intimate, and these moments of rupture expose what so much art is chasing after: glimpses of the subterranean desires and pleasures and sorrows that are constantly lurking behind our composed surfaces, veiled by the costumes of our facial expressions and our social media accounts, our etiquette and our armor. The crippling fear of exposure lives uneasily alongside its opposite—a primal longing to be seen.

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Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude

Universal Music Group

Read an introduction to the series.

DJ Lynnée Denise | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,096 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

* * *

As a teenager, Luther Vandross co-founded his favorite singer’s fan club. I can see him now, watching her seasoned shoulder bounce and measuring the funk in the Black church two-step she makes in post–chitlin circuit venues. He’s standing stage left, holding onto the curtain for balance; he’s lip-synching every song, calculating the mastery of her diction and phrasing; he’s studying her like a text, setting the stage for his own practice — one that would place him at microphones behind David Bowie, Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand, Cissy Houston, and Donna Summer. This Luther was Twenty Feet from Stardom and rising.

Young but wise, Luther Vandross the teenage boy understood how Patricia Louise Holt from Philadelphia became the legendary kick-your-shoes-off and snatch-your-own-wig when the tension builds between music, voice, and audience type of singer. Luther Vandross presided over the fan club of none other than Ms. Patti LaBelle.

Strange things happen when an artist is moved to a new depth by another. We become fanatical about the fantastical beings who place us deeper into the abyss of craft. The management of details of who these artists are and how they come into being become a rite of passage. We obsess over the decisions they make to bring an album to fruition and take pride in knowing as much as we can, from the major to the minor: collaborations, music video direction, hair color, shoe size, inspiration behind the lyrics.  We fancy ourselves experts of our muses. And when it comes to Black music, the stakes are higher — people stay questioning our responses to the brilliance of Black artists; reading them as tribal reactions as opposed to a focused study of mastery. But no. I’m from the school of Luther — and by that, I mean I’m a listener committed to homemade scholarship, community-based research questions, and an organic framework to interpret the artistic offerings of those I crown as legends.


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There’s a strong chance that I became the unofficial president of the artist Joi’s fan club 25 years ago. For 25 years, I’ve paid attention to her musical movement and to the ways she holds court on stage. Today, I feel confident that if asked to write a dissertation that argues the genius of what I refer to as her crunk-funk sound, I’d have my Ph.D. Dr. DJ Lynnée Denise. Joi occupies space in the lineage of artists who thrive across genre lines. How is that possible? Ask Prince, ask Aretha, ask Nina, ask Stevie. Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk

The three of us — Joi, Du Bois, and myself — have something in common: Nashville.

* * *

I saw Joi for the first time while I was sitting in the living room with a group of artists I met during my freshman year at Fisk University. She was in a video wearing a trench coat, hanging on a meat hook in a blue-lit walk-in meat refrigerator. She was squirming on beat with the hope of being released. The video was for her first single, “Sunshine & the Rain.”

Black people live hyphenated lives, so it’s fair to say our musicians embody and shift the context of what Du Bois called ‘double consciousness,’ musical cross-pollination made available to the Souls of Black Folk.

It was Du Bois who taught me about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a masterful a cappella ensemble, who with their carefully crafted compositions saved the university from collapsing in the face of mounting financial struggles in 1871. They toured cities along the route of the Underground Railroad using harmony to trace the path of freedom before eventually landing a paid gig in England, performing for its Queen. Du Bois graduated from Fisk in 1888, 109 years before I did. In his famed essay “Of the Sorrow Songs,” credited by Black theologian James H. Cone as one of the first pieces of writing in the 20th century to treat Black music with serious academic inquiry, Du Bois reflects on Fisk’s institutional significance: “To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”

In 1993, I stepped onto the campus of Fisk University less than three months after the L.A. Riots. I had Latasha Harlins on my mind: a young Black woman who was gunned down by a Korean shop owner in South Central Los Angeles for allegedly stealing an orange juice. When the shop owner was sentenced to probation in November 1991, less than six months before a jury acquitted the officers responsible for the beating of Rodney King, L.A. blew up in flames. I arrived on campus with inspiration brought on by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insightful observation that riots are “the language of the unheard.” That outburst of symbolic rage brought me a sense of peace. With one suitcase and a green trunk plastered with stickers that ranged from images of Marley to Meat is Murder slogans, I showed up ready to learn and receive.

Upon arrival, an upperclassman escorted me to Jubilee Hall’s third floor, and just as Du Bois described, it was pristine, brick-based, and towering above my West Coast head. In this place of Black music history, I had a room of my own and a branch from Joi’s family tree was down the street.

Joi is the daughter of legendary NFL football player Joe Gilliam. A member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was the franchise’s first Black quarterback to start as a season opener. Both Joe and Joi were legacy students at the historically Black public university Tennessee State, walking distance from Fisk.

The local artists in the room witnessing me witness Joi’s video for the first time knew who she was and dismissed my awe with, “Oh that’s Joi.” I was in her hometown. She was their hero. “Joi from down here,” they said with regional pride from blunt stained lips. “She been on that different shit for years.” I took that to mean Joi was ahead of her time and an inspiration to the folks who watched her take shape.

Her absence in the city of Nashville, or more accurately the ghost of her dopeness, made me think about what it meant to leave home in order to be seen. Like when your ambition outgrows your zip code and the only way forward, as you’ve been told through myriad migration narratives, is to move north from the South; even though what you offer the North is rooted in the back-homeness of the funky South. Joi journeyed to Atlanta — 250 miles below Tennessee. She complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant. So, when André 3000 proclaimed at the 1995 Source Awards that “the South got something to say,” Joi was one of the leaders in saying, through her music, what needed to be said.

[Joi] complicated the idea that Southern folks have to leave the region to become known or relevant.

After my encounter with the “Sunshine & the Rain” video, I listened to the song on repeat for what felt like a year. It filled the void created by LaFace’s TLC and the Sean Puffy girl group hip-hop soul phase that I struggled to embrace as I was figuring out my own listening practice on an HBCU campus where musical tastes were shaped, almost exclusively, by homecoming anthems and Top 40 hits. Don’t get me wrong, I loved to see the Chicago students at Fisk rush to the dance floor when hearing the first two bars of the “Percolator,” and I fucked with Mary J. Blige from day one and still do. But I had real questions about the war on originality that was creeping into the Black musical lexicon in a Bad Boy kinda way. The art of sampling was now complicated by intellectual property laws and there was less cutting and scratching, which meant that turntablism was, in certain ways, becoming a less crucial, or at the very least a less prominent, part of the sonic footprint of the culture. Plus, audiences of the music seemed to be growing less and less concerned with the original songs — and by default less concerned with the Black musical lineages shaping my ear as a DJ. It was a pivotal moment for me, defined by my acceptance of the loneliness that comes with walking against trends. I made up for it by going in deep. I had a campus radio show on WFSK where I organized weekly themes that explored different eras and genres of Black music: Black women funk artists 1970–1975. New Wave 1983–1987. Jazz trumpeters 1963–1969. In the face of my early days of digging through the crates, the corporatization of hip-hop was creating what music scholar Harold Pride calls “pedestrian listeners” out of my peers and further alienating lesser known artists whose work stretched listeners with innovation. For me, Joi was a bridge.

* * *

Dallas Austin is one of the minds who, alongside Pebbles, gave the world TLC. Around the exact same time, Austin was working on Joi’s debut album The Pendulum Vibe — together they created a call to arms for folks looking for sophisticated melodies and enough lyrical depth to drown in. Songs like “Fatal Lovesick Journey” had me pondering codependent relationships while puffing Black & Milds and drinking Alizé. There was well-placed wailing, playful and unapologetic sexual confidence, and a genre-defying Southern-rooted sound. Anti-formulaic, the music from this album spoke to my heart and gave me hope that Black America had something to compare to the brilliant U.K. soul coming out of London. Though raunchier in her approach, Joi was in the Mica Paris and Caron Wheeler category for me. I even had fantasies of her settling down in London like Jhelisa and her cousin Carleen Anderson did in the ’90s, leaving their Black American (Mississippi, Texas) imprint on the British sound and reinforcing Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic.

I recognized these women and Joi as kindred spirits. After about the 50th listen of the Pendulum Vibe (and after spending that year with “Sunshine & the Rain”), I sat myself down and said with all honesty, “This a bad bitch and the masses ain’t gon’ understand.” Predictably, critics have long used the abstract term the underground in describing the spirit of Joi’s work. I’m skeptical of the word “underground” because it makes an assumption about what success looks like and sometimes strips the agency of artists who don’t aspire to have commercial appeal.

But was I happy to have an “underground” to turn to when H-Town wasn’t enough? Yes indeed. Sitting with the work of these artists, both from America and overseas, felt like a humanizing way to break from the overly familiar. Humanizing because the music compelled me to listen with insatiable curiosity. Something that white men who own record stores and collect Black music are not only allowed but encouraged to do. Knowing that Joi existed was a way for me to stay aligned with wayward women. Excavating their sonic stories, the way Saidiya Hartman does Gladys Bentley’s, became a primary interest to me. Joi was a gateway into a world made up of women musicians who, compared to their male counterparts, were pushed to the sidelines of Black music history — Nona Hendryx, Lyn Collins, and the women of George Clinton’s P-Funk empire: The Brides of Dr. Funkenstein and Parlet. Embedded in Joi’s vocal cords is a deep knowledge of Funkentelechy and “Dandelion Dust” cosmology, a heavy load of legacy to carry. I was a believer. 

* * *

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been one of those people who rolls their eyes when I hear my favorite song from a new album that I’m spending time with being played on the radio. I’m suspicious of what becomes widely accepted, afraid to see the artists I love hand over their authenticity to the police of mediocrity guarding the door of pop music in America. And yeah, everybody gotta eat, but why eating gotta equate to contractual agreements that alter your purpose? Prince’s decision to pen the word “slave” on his face in the ’90s gave us an idea of what can happen when sitting down at the negotiating table with corporations who measure your worth by your marketability. Our collective ear becomes less sophisticated, we develop a forgetfulness that separates us from our pasts. I wanted to keep Joi in my personal library of “underground” artists where she was protected from the fuckery — following her own North Star to musical freedom like the Jubilee Singers.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity. One minute she gives you seasoned performer on a FunkJazz Kafe stage alongside Too $hort; then range and multidimensionality on stage with FishBone and De La Soul the next. I traveled to see both of those shows from Fisk University, leaving “the yard” for places like Memphis and Atlanta to experience Joi in action. My fellow Joi-chasing friend and I coordinated our travels so that we could make it back in time for 10 a.m. classes the following morning; driving along the highway, we passed various symbols of the Confederacy — flags, bumper stickers, and Cracker Barrels. We were two women from Cali on a mission. We invested time and our scarce college-level income into loving her work because Joi always delivered, which made the payoff immediate.

* * *

Between 1996 and 2006, Joi recorded three more studio albums. Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, from 1997, became a highly desired cult classic, shelved before its release due to the collapse of EMI. It was then picked up by FreeWorld, Dallas Austin’s newly formed label following EMI’s collapse, which folded shortly after. Fortunately, it can now be purchased through her website, a gift for fans who were searching high and low for a copy. Her next two albums were 2002’s Star Kitty’s Revenge and 2006’s Tennessee Slim is the Bomb, which was released on Raphael Sadiq’s Pookie Records. The music industry’s instability led Joi to reissue both albums independently, in the spirit of Prince. He had become one of the first major artists to market his albums through a personal website to be in direct conversation with fans in an effort to cut out the middle men — middle men who were typically attached to the bodies of white record company executives or Black music moguls like Berry Gordy or Suge Knight who modeled their music businesses after them.

Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for at a time when Black radio was pinned under the thumb of payola. She’s cut from the same cloth as Jimi Hendrix, Betty Davis, and Vanity.

In addition to her solo work, Joi had a major hand in shaping the Atlanta Dungeon Family/Organized Noize sound. She sang background on Goodie Mob’s classic first album Soul Food. Equally impressive was her work on projects with a range of artists like George Clinton, Sleepy Brown, Big Krit, 2 Chainz, Queen Latifah, and Tricky from London. She collaborated with Raphael Sadiq’s on his Lucy Pearl project, replacing former En Vogue songstress Dawn Robinson and adding a welcomed edge to the group’s live performances. In addition to studio collaboration, she joined Outkast on their final tour in 2014 and was a backing vocalist for D’Angelo’s The Second Coming Tour in 2015. And still, with curriculum vitaé in hand, Joi found time to help, as she would say, “wipe down” a few aspiring singers through her artist development business, Artisan Polishing.

* * *

The very first time I met Joi was in Nashville in 1995. With the same woman I had traveled to Memphis for Joi’s shows, I was trying my hand at concert promotion. We had a little money, a venue, and enough love for Joi’s two-album catalog to take a chance. Within a week, Joi agreed to perform for an amount that had little to do with what was acceptable for her craft and effort and more to do with her willingness to help us see our dreams through and to come home to show her people where she had been. It’s no small feat to have Joi on your roster of events as a young promoter in the industry, and she gave us the cultural capital and experience we needed to break into that world as young Black women. Almost a decade later, I would connect with Joi again when she was featured in an event I produced in Brooklyn called Slum Beautiful: Music from the Gut of Black America in 2010. The title of the event was taken from a song from Outkast’s Stankonia album. I wanted Joi to do the work of reminding New York of its connected history with Black Southern culture and people — it’s a city that tends to forget. The next time I saw Joi was in Atlanta for an event I organized called Erotic City Weekend, bringing the work of Prince and Joi’s unique performances back together again.  

In 2015, I made my way back home to Los Angeles after being away for nearly 20 years. Synchronicity had it so that Joi had left Atlanta and moved there a few years before me. We connected on a more personal level and spent significant time talking about our shared love of the many interconnections of Black music. It was through our conversations that I learned about the Caravans, a 1950s soulful gospel group that featured among its members Shirley Caesar, Inez Andrews, Albertina Walker, and James Cleveland. They were responsible for ushering a new style of gospel that complicated the notion of sacred music with their collective blues ministry sound. She also encouraged me to pay closer attention to Parliament singers Glen Goins, Garry Shider, and Walter “Junie” Morrison, as their voices, too, embodied the tension that exists between Black faith and psychedelic funk. I learned in those moments what it means to be a student of the artform you’re undertaking.

Shortly after landing, I began creating events in L.A. and inviting Joi to make various appearances. My work had taken a turn over the years. I was excited about my developing relationship with the academy, as I had become a lecturer at California State University, Los Angeles in the Pan-African Studies department. I worked closely with the department to shape the social experiences of Black college students who often found themselves at the mercy of and/or ignored in official university events. In 2016, I invited Joi to conduct the Q&A following the screening of the Afro-Punk documentary with the festival’s original founder and the film’s director, James Spooner. During the conversation, Spooner shared with the audience that it was the first time he had been invited to screen his film and talk about the roots of Afro-punk since his departure from what had become a corporate funded cultural institution. Most recently, I invited Joi, along with Jessica Care Moore, to be on a plenary for a conference I coproduced with UCLA in honor of the late, great Aretha Franklin. What I love so much about Joi is her proven record that she is committed to blurring the lines and steeped in the art of interdisciplinarity. She engaged with students, wowed faculty, and in the process, brought a funky sensibility to the art and practice of scholarship. Upon spending a considerable amount of time listening to her latest album, I decided to visit Joi at home, which brought our multi-decade relationship into its third dimension. 

* * *

In 2018, Joi sat her ass down in a studio and pulled diamonds from a year of solitude to create her most recent album, S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove. The journey of the album begins with three words that push us to the other side: Bitch I’m Free. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is what happens when anticipation meets expectations. It is noteworthy that this album, too, was produced independently. Joi’s is the only voice on the album. Don’t be fooled into thinking that there are three other bad bitches in the studio making it happen. It’s just her. She wrote all the album’s lyrics, arranged all its vocals, and produced some of the tracks. She used very little of the vocal compressor, an effect that most contemporary singers rely on, creating distance between authenticity and the voices you think you love.

Here I was, 25 years after seeing her on a screen swinging on a meat hook, sitting in Joi’s L.A. studio — a live/work space she calls “The Funky Jewelry Box.” Inspirational posters and Dolly Parton, Led Zeppelin, Natalie Cole, and Minnie Riperton album covers draped the walls. It was an incubator for critical artistic thought up in there.

As I settled and began to think about questions that would unlock the door to the mysteries of this project, Joi unwrapped detox products from Dr. Sebi that Erykah Badu had sent her. “It’s a perfect time to fast,” she said, while removing the bubble wrap from a dark brown bottle of bodily goodness. She sat at her recording station in an electric blue velvet cushioned vintage chair, “a rare find from a spot in L.A.,” she bragged, “undiscovered by hipsters and still affordable in its dealings.” The chair, shaped like a throne, was perfect for the matriarchal-themed nature of this album. Above her was a classic studio microphone that looked committed to its job and familiar with the racy nature of Joi’s spirit. There’s an intimacy between the two. We agreed to listen to the album. She pressed play and guided me through the sonic journey — joint in hand, ears on guard.

Joi’s racy songs stand out on the new album, and they have a long history. On “Narcissia Cutie Pie” from Pendulum Vibe, the artist explores sexual fluidity and bright dark fantasies about the spectrum of desire, while songs like “Lick” from Star Kitty’s Revenge and “Dirty Mind” from Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome help us remember sex as a powerful creative tool. S.I.R. Rebekah HolyLove builds on Joi’s collection of sex-positive cantatas with “The Edge,produced and arranged by Joi with additional editing by Brook D’ Leux. A bass-heavy funk monster that promises listeners a key to cities where “we can fuck until the dawn, making love til’ cherries gone.” Another Paisley Park parallel. I mean, yeah, you’re married boo, but this is a complicated situation, the song implies. Cheating could become an option if good dick [or fill in the blank] is involved, and not many of us are willing to share that kind of ethical vulnerability on wax. And I don’t mean no disrespect to your official union, she asserts, but you fuck me right and you’re mine tonight. We never once forget that Joi is a human being dealing with the most undesirable and the most pleasurably outrageous scenarios that life asks us to consider: infidelity, heartbreak, orgasmic accomplishments. The appeal is that she’s aware of the costs. I’m standing on the edge with you / so if I jump will I fall or fly

S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove is a tribute to an album culture long forgotten. With the push for iTunes singles and music streaming culture, the intimate relating of album between artist and audience has been compromised. The album holds its own against a culture that produces music at a rate almost impossible to enjoy, I’ll be listening to S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove for years to come, and The Pendulum Vibe brought me here years ago. Joi said she drew from various experiences to produce this album. She continued to work on other major projects (both in television and music), without compromising the integrity of her solo work. In her words: “I have one of the most peaceful lives [of] anyone I know, but I recognize that solitude and peace is something I earned and it was necessary for this particular juncture.” 

* * *

Writing this piece felt like that time when Patti LaBelle and a fully established writer and producer, Luther Vandross, shared a stage one glorious night in 1985. It’s that moment when student, fan, and gatekeeper of the musical masters graduate into a league of their own, with a platform to articulate the many ways they’ve been shaped; a tribe of fellow artists marked by the legends. And because Joi’s work has been canonized by a global community, my work to unpack her work is really a citational practice. S.I.R. Rebekkah Holylove, is on a Black Atlantic continuum — a fantastic voyage will be had.  Catch up on your future. 

* * *

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne
On Watching Boys Play Music, by Eryn Loeb

* * *

DJ Lynnée Denise was shaped as a DJ by her parents’ record collection. She’s an artist, scholar, and writer whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Lynnée Denise coined the phrase ‘DJ Scholarship’ to reposition the role of the DJ from party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian, and information specialist.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Bigamist’s Daughter

Steve Chenn / Getty, Photo Illustration by Longreads

Robin Antalek | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,599 words)

In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and that woman was pregnant as well. My father’s new wife had left her family and three small children, and then she and my father had created a subset family, making us a complicated algebraic formula, resistant to logic. He and his new wife lived together somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, commuting distance to their jobs in Manhattan, where they had met. For a while they lived in his red Volvo wagon that smelled of his ever present Camel cigarettes.

Once, way before my brother, he drove us in that same red Volvo wagon down the wide tree lined Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to a pre-war apartment building overlooking Prospect Park for a visit with his parents. The adults gathered in a room with windows that offered a view of the tops of the trees while, at 3, I remained in the kitchen with the housekeeper and a parakeet in a cage in front of a window that looked out onto a brick walled airshaft.

The bird turned its back on us while I ate Milano cookies. When dinner was ready the housekeeper took my hand in hers and led me into the big room. I was too full to eat the bright pink roast on the broad, gold-rimmed dinner plates, or sip from the tiny glass of tomato juice resting on a paper doily on a miniature plate. I know the attention on me was uncomfortable and confusing. My feet dangled from the chair in patent leather shoes and I was reprimanded by my father more than once for kicking the bar that stretched between the legs. Tucked in the large bureau behind me was a Batman and Robin coloring book, a gift chosen I supposed because of my name, not gender, along with a fresh pack of crayons, promised to me only if I ate my entire dinner. Later I am shattered, inconsolable, my face rubbed raw against the shoulder of my father’s tweed coat as he carries me from the apartment, a piece of meat still lodged between my cheek and molars.
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No Time Like the Present

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Robert Burke Warren | Longreads | April 2020 | 5 minutes (1,174 words)

What day is it?

In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or read them) every day, while social distancing at home with my wife and son. Like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, I am “unstuck in time.” Surely, many days have passed, but no, it’s been only one or two. A week seems a month, a month a season. Last week? No. Yesterday.

I know I’m not alone. “March was the shittiest year ever,” goes the meme.

Whereas once we lamented “Where does the time go?” meaning it’s racing too fast, now we move through denser space, longer minutes filled with yesterdays for which we pine, and tomorrows we either fear, or fixate on with rapacious longing. Or both. Routines — job, school, shopping, socializing — are disrupted, crippled, or gone. In this strange, new “now,” we fill space with worry and/or desperate hope, visiting a conjured future and/or hazy yesterdays, all out of our control. Unstuck in time. “The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” Too true, Bill.

And we don’t know what day it is.
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Molly and the Unicorn

Rankin/Bass Productions / Topcraft / ITC Entertainment

Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words)

 

My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons: Terrifying burning bull! Handsome prince says “damn!” Unicorn!!! But no scene hit me with quite the power of the one where the sad old bag Molly Grue meets the titular (last!) unicorn for the first time.

If you’re not familiar with this movie, allow me to express my condolences. It’s a batshit Rankin/Bass adaptation of the Peter S. Beagle novel of the same name, and it’s about a unicorn — but it’s not the magical creature that I’m interested in here. The character Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman, a scullery maid we meet as the unicorn is being led to safety by an inept wizard named Schmendrick (ha!) for reasons I won’t go into now (but really, stream it, you won’t be sorry). Her reaction to encountering an honest-to-goodness magical beast isn’t fear, or awe. It’s grief-stricken rage. “Where have you been?” she howls. “Where were you when I was new? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?” Even as a child I knew anguish and sorrow when I heard it — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the word “melancholy,” but I understood that she was no longer the kind of woman to whom beautiful things happen, that to be a participant in a beautiful thing you had to be beautiful yourself. I felt that with every inch of my weirdo 5-year-old heart, and now, at 42, it resonates with a power that’s almost unbearable.

I am this, now. That feeling of loss, of being too old to be graced by magic — that’s no longer a hypothetical. My young maidenhood wasn’t spent sitting around under trees waiting for a unicorn to come to me, but I certainly looked for magic in places sacred and profane (mostly profane). I was blind to any beauty I might have possessed. I spent a lot of time apologizing for my body when I first started using it to have sex, a practice meant to head off any criticism my partner might have had, but which I now realize was insane and a perfect way to kill the mood. These days, I catch myself reflected in a window every now and again and feel uncomfortably sure that the tired-looking marshmallow with very dry hair squinting back at me no longer remotely qualifies as that kind of magic bait.

Mind you, youth doesn’t appeal to me, personally. Young men are sexual blanks to me — boring, unseasoned chicken breasts with nothing interesting to say. Give me your grizzled Gen Xers, your gray beards, your potbellies, your crinkled eyes. Give me your hearts heavy with regret, your gorgeous tattered men. I’ve always been more attracted to men at least a decade my senior, and once in my early 20s I slept with a man in his 40s because I wanted to see what that was like, to feel like I was giving my young body like a gift (for the record: it was lovely, bittersweet and poignant, yet deeply hot). Physically speaking, I no longer feel like a gift to anyone, not even to my own husband, a man contractually obliged to accept my body even if as a burden. In the increasingly rare instances where a comely stranger flirts with me, I hear Molly Grue’s voice: How dare you come to me now?
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My Body Is Not a Temple

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 10 minutes (2,540 words)

Your bread is making me sick. I don’t have to eat it. I see it. Everywhere. In every tweet, every photo, every message. It’s spread from all over my social media feed to all over my news feed. Always that round pebbly brown and beige crust. Rustic as fuck. Even if you can’t touch it, smell it, taste it, the starter is the proof. That cement-looking mix with the gas bubbles shoved into those mason jars everyone seems to have. When I see it, all I can think is: Desperation. I think: That bread can’t save you. You will die, maybe even sooner rather than later  — despite the bread. Because that bread is made of yeast. And that yeast is alive, just as you are alive. And just as your body does, it reacts to the world unpredictably. So, if it makes you feel better, write down the exact ingredients, the precise measurements, but your recipe can’t account for random events and neither can you. As uncertain as you are that that starter will turn into that bread is as uncertain as you are that your body will survive all of this. Neither is trustworthy.

I get it. I also operate according to the delusion that I can control my body. That I created the way I look. That I deserve all the credit and all the blame. That it has nothing to do with the food industry pushing synthetic shit down my throat or the healthcare system for ignoring that fact, or anything, you know, cultural or political. That the foundation for my well being resides entirely within the four walls of my flesh. It’s the physicality of it, I guess — I inhabit it, which automatically makes it seem as though I have authority over it. But that’s where the body, the reality of it, collides with the reality of a virus. The way you can’t see it; the way it invades you, invisibly. It exposes the human body for what it really is: something that is at all times at the mercy of the unknowable. But when have we not tried to conquer the unknown? It’s human to want to survive, but humans have also created conditions in which what we conceive of as the ingredients we need to survive — the natural world, a peaceful coexistence within it — is opposed to our daily lives.

* * *

“Humans currently find themselves in a kind of alternative world. Put more simply, everyone is out for themselves. They no longer notice all the things that are wrong around them,” says the pale cachectic man with the unfortunate bangs who lives in the cabin in the woods in the German crime series Pagan Peak. “People are constantly trying to wield power over others by exploiting them. Criminals, corrupt politicians, greedy managers, unscrupulous investors. The whole rabble. These people are causing the whole system to collapse. Everything’s falling apart. And what remains?” At this point the man has moved to his doorstep with the eastern European immigrant he is speaking to, both of them looking up at the stars as the snow surrounds them: “The woods. The sky. That remains.” It all sounds very Rousseau-ian (and Herzog-ian), until you realize this same man has spent the entire series killing one person after another — a “greedy manager,” a “corrupt politician,” an influencer, and even, inadvertently, a child — as a means of re-establishing, “order between man and nature.”

It felt uncanny to watch a show I initially knew nothing about hew so closely to the current moment. To watch a story about nature’s dominion over man, man’s belief in his dominion over nature, and death after death after death, as the same narrative unravels around me. Gregor Ansbach, the man exalting the natural world while executing those who populate it, is in tech, because of course he is: he is Jeff Bezos is Jack Dorsey is Mark Zuckerberg, wealthy white tech entrepreneurs convinced they can transcend the limits of the planet. Men whose ambition of immortality extends from their professional legacies to their own physiques. You knew the homemade artisanal bread trend came from Silicon Valley, right? “Ever looking for spiritual leaders to guide them out of moral bankruptcy, and to connect them back to the offline world they had previously abandoned,” Dayna Evans wrote in Eater in 2018, “the disruptors, engineers, and tech bros of Silicon Valley and beyond had found themselves a new prophet.” 

But bread is no prophet, and it was never the point. The point is supremacy. If you can fix anything mechanical that comes your way, you can fix anything anatomical that does, right? The body is just a machine, yes? These men flex in confirmation by troubleshooting themselves just as they troubleshoot everything else; self-improvement through intermittent fasting, through silent meditation retreats, through fitness trackers. Having mastered the virtual world, the physical world they rendered redundant is now all they live for — these laymen we turned into Gods for creating proxy lives, have turned “real” life into a luxury only they can afford.

The shift toward more stasis, less action, more inside, less outside, more ordering, less making, has been a long time coming. It’s hard to know how much I have chosen this life of constant internal work — thinking, thinking, thinking — and how much I’m just succumbing to a general cultural gravitation. And yet those afforded the least time to cultivate lofty internal lives are now the ones rescuing everyone else. The doctors, the nurses, the pharmacists, the grocery store clerks, the delivery men and women, the sanitation workers. They are the only ones that we really need; the ones whose pictures have not been painted, whose music has not been composed, whose words have not been written, because of all the other work they have to do. The only work that matters, really. It’s emasculating, to feel like this — to be completely useless in the final analysis. For your only means of helping to be by doing nothing. 

At the same time, it’s hard to shake this creeping sense of betrayal. That one’s lifestyle is being pathologized. Those of us who live primarily a life of the mind — the academics, the writers, the coders, the designers, the people who work in their basements and living rooms even outside of a lockdown — have lately been lauded for our proficiency at staying in. But it’s a compliment that drips with denigration. It says your lifestyle suits a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic…but not much else. The question I keep getting, “How do you live like this?” implies that my life is the symptom of an illness. It does not imply that it is the symptom of an economy in part created by those same techies who originated it, who profit from the rest of us being unstable — working from home, all the time, no guarantees — and who clear the landscape of any other option. To be told that to protect ourselves within this isolation we must do everything we’re in the habit of not doing (standing up, working out, eating well) lays the blame at our feet. To be told this in the exact moment that old habits provide the only solace (dressing for comfort, comfort eating, even comfort watching) keeps us on the back foot. But, then, not budging is also our thing.

The return to old movies and television shows isn’t just because the production of new media is on hold. They are both a reminder of a world — a time — outside the pandemic, though even then it is near impossible not to infect the past with the present (social distancing most notably). We are going back to plague art for a guide, it seems, but we are also going back to other works that appeal to specific feelings provoked by the pandemic. At Vanity Fair, K. Austin Collins wrote about hearing someone sneeze within his general vicinity and then sprinting home to shower before throwing on The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 thriller about a research team in Antarctica riddled by an elusive alien infection. Of course, it’s the blood test, the “peak set piece,” he focuses on. “What’s clear is that for everyone on screen, the question of their own blood, and not just that of their compatriots, is a mystery. Their eyes shift from I know I don’t have it to, in the moment of being tested, Do I?” he writes. “The central condition of The Thing isn’t just the isolation or the infection, however. It’s the unknowing. The uncertainty one might have about even their own body.”

That’s it. That’s the thing (hah). The untrustworthiness. The lack of trust in anyone, including yourself. How unsettling. The most unsettling. What’s the point of having agency, of being self-actualized, when your physical self might betray the whole thing? Even despite the face mask and the hand sanitizer and the social distance and the exercise and the salad, so much salad. That very slight discomfort behind my eyes, the sinuses quick to congestion, the minor wheeze when I jog in the afternoons, the almost imperceptible dryness in my throat — is it the pollen in the air? The dry heat from the radiators? Or is it the thing? The thing that I expect to get but not really. The thing that I expect to kill me but not really. But will it? All that fast food I’ve eaten, all that exercise I haven’t done, will it finally catch up with me? What did all those survivors and all those asymptomatic people do? Did they get eight hours of sleep every night? Did they stress less (you know stress immunosuppresses, right)? What choices did they make that their bodies chose life?

“Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety,” writes Michelle Allison in The Atlantic. “If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging — in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.” What she is really talking about is all that bread, all those greens, all that running we never did before. She is talking about tricking God.

I don’t believe in God but that doesn’t mean I’ve escaped Christian morality; it’s baked into our bread (sorry, I’ll stop talking about bread — you first, though). And root vegetables. And hundred-mile Peloton rides. Ever heard of “moral treatment”? It’s the treatment of the mentally ill by manual labor, sanity “through self-discipline.” It reminds me of the people who suddenly start going to church when something bad happens, like they can hedge their bets by  paying their dues before Jesus gets wise. Or addicts who think they can wipe themselves clean — of all those cigarettes, all that alcohol, all that sex — by loudly getting healthy. All those people on social media sharing their kale-stuffed recipes as though the virus will give them a pass for good behavior. As Allison wrote, “clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret.” (Comfort eating, on the other hand, exclusively does.)  That’s why the scariest Covid-19 stories are the ones about the healthy kids who died anyway, the adults with “no underlying conditions” who were swept away. And still there’s an explanation: They were just unlucky edge cases. There was something about their bodies the family didn’t share. Some reason. Something knowable.

What we do know is devastating enough. Which is that even if we do everything right, we are still at the mercy of an unpredictable virus and a healthcare system that is as capricious. Bureaucracy is a body too, one which, it has become increasingly obvious, is itself disintegrating. Without it to support us, we attempt to keep ourselves in order, in hand, in control. It is a task on a larger scale, perhaps, but one that is not so different from trying to command the recalcitrant yeast in our kitchens. Maybe that’s why I gravitated toward Eliza Hittman’s new indie, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which navigates the labyrinthine bureaucracy around abortion in America and serendipitously got a wider release because of the pandemic. The film follows a 17-year-old girl on an odyssey from Pennsylvania to New York in the hopes of terminating her pregnancy. When Autumn’s hometown clinic initially confirms she is pregnant, she is told she is 10 weeks along — two-and-a-half months in, plenty of time to abort. Preternaturally resigned, Autumn doesn’t react much beyond a brief wince when the doctor introduces, “the most magical sound you will ever hear,” before the “wow wow wow” sound of the unwanted fetus pulses out of the machine beside her. But she can handle it  — “I’m fine, just tired,” she says days later. This is in New York at her Planned Parenthood appointment, right before she is told she is 18 weeks pregnant, not 10. She’s not fine then. 

I read April’s response to hearing she is in her second trimester as betrayal, by both the health institution and by her own body. The system she can’t trust is all around her, but also within her; the first deception was by her own body, falling pregnant without her consent. Her devastation is born of the realization that not only can no one else in her life be trusted, she can’t even trust herself.

* * *

“If we cannot escape death,” writes Allison, “maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.” But that’s hard to do when the only thing you can really do is nothing. When you can’t manifest the one thing you want in the place that invented manifest destiny. When the entire plan is based on the lie that our bodies are not destabilized by forces as unpredictable as the system in which we find ourselves. Which is the reason we all feel so defeated despite all the vitamins and the pilates and the hand washing. To expect yourself to be responsible for your body, in all its uncertainty, is to underwrite an existence which is at odds with itself. Mortality has no more morality than a virus. Both are unreliable. Both are indifferent. Both affect us as they wish no matter our desires. 

Convention dictates that I end this on a hopeful note, but our culture pits hope and death against one another — and death is always the eventuality. Of course, definitely, wash your hands, social distance, of course, of course, but don’t expect a guarantee. And don’t expect that that uncertainty must be tragic. That our bodies can’t ultimately be controlled means that we are fundamentally free from trying. So sure, make bread if it helps you feel better. Or don’t. Just know it’s all the same in the end, and the end is baked into the beginning.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Little League, Revisited

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Little League World Series / Photo illustration by Longreads

Adam Kuhlmann | Longreads | April 2020 | 17 minutes (4,265 words)

It’s a cold, gray morning in late December, the week that sags like bunting hung between Christmas and New Year’s. I pull my mother’s Subaru alongside a large cinder block building identified only by a street address peeling from a rust-pocked and dented steel door. I see no functional windows, just a few square cavities that have been boarded up from the inside.

My wife, Mysha, eyes the grim façade from the passenger seat. “Is it strange,” she asks, “that Chase takes lessons inside a commercial slaughterhouse?”

Chase is my nephew, an 11-year-old with the eyelashes of a Hollywood starlet and a penchant for neon athletic wear. During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, he had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

“It gives him a leg up,” my sister had told me the previous night after Chase went to bed. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, she explained the nature of today’s competitive child-rearing: how all of a kid’s activities — from his first birthday party to his college admissions — must be coordinated and enhanced, for a fee, by biologically unrelated adults.

At 39, with no plans to father a child myself, I am free to pass judgment on all manner of parental behavior without worrying that, one day, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. So, I reminded my sister about the 1990s, when the most we’d hoped for was piano lessons. As for getting into college, I told her about the Friday night before I took the SAT. I’d stayed up late, crowding around Betsy Newman’s backyard fire pit. I’d joined a boozy, a cappella rendition of Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” My test prep had consisted of just saying no to the nozzle of a can of Cool Whip, a triumph of restraint I’d managed without a glance of adult supervision.

My sister patiently absorbed my nostalgia. Then she added: “Chase wants this too. He loves baseball.”

I couldn’t argue with Chase’s results. Last summer he’d been selected for the all-star team of his neighborhood little league. My sister sent us photos of the boys celebrating at a local Mexican restaurant. In one close-up, Chase’s arm is draped over the shoulder of a boy with the same tousled hair spilling from the same star-spangled hat. With the other hand, he is slugging a yellow concoction from a goblet the size of a table lamp.

During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, my nephew, Chase, had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

Looking down at her phone, Mysha confirms the address, so we slip into a small parking lot in the back of the building. Though it’s no more welcoming than the front, at least we find no sign of doomed Angus cattle.

Inside, the facility’s décor hews to jock brutalism. Forty feet above us, fluorescent lights hang from metal beams, filling the cavernous room with a stadium’s ice-blue brightness. The atmosphere is warmed only by the sound of classic rock rattling from speakers bolted to the walls. Black netting curtains off a pair of batting cages, where a few stocky teens hack at soft tosses. The floor is covered in green artificial turf studded with five-gallon buckets, around which cluster litters of scuffed baseballs.

I spot my brother-in-law, Clay, seated with two other men whose buzz cuts and taut expressions would fit in on the bridge of a naval destroyer. They lean forward from metal folding chairs, studying the ritualized movements of their boys. Nearby is a makeshift pitching mound, where I spot Chase moving into his windup: a fluid and compact gathering of 100 pounds of muscle and bone. His pitch sails high, pulling out of his catcher’s crouch a college-aged man in gray sweats. His bottom lip is swollen with tobacco, and he pauses to discharge a brown stream into a soda bottle before offering my nephew a blunt appraisal: “You’re overthrowing again. What happened to your release point?”

Chase cocks his head thoughtfully. “I forgot to reach out with it.”

“Right,” the coach says, demonstrating with his own right hand before returning a dart to Chase’s glove side. “Fix it.”

In his plush suburban home, Chase is a merry prankster. When he was 4, he stood on the carpeted mezzanine, reached his hand between two wooden balusters, and dropped an untidy sock onto the face of my sister, napping on the sofa below. Here, in this Spartan box, Chase’s aim is nearly as true — but he is all business.

We slide in, and the fathers stand to make room for us in the self-consciously gallant way of Southern men. And suddenly I recognize that I am easily the smallest person in the seating area. This includes my wife, who at 6-foot-1 dwarfs me in a way that attracts stares in public.

Out of the corner of my eye, I track a wide throw that tips off Chase’s glove and bounces once on its way toward our congregated shins. I bend and manage to spear it with my right hand.

One father draws out a whistle through his teeth.

“Once a second baseman, always a second baseman,” Clay says.

I toss the ball back to Chase, who registers the deed — and our presence — with a stoic little nod.

“College ball?” asks the other father.

Before I can laugh, say “no,” and explain that this catch had been the most graceful maneuver I’d accomplished in 20 years — indeed, I’d just tweaked my back and would require, this evening, a liberal application of Tiger Balm — Clay jumps in.

“This guy played in the Little League World Series!”

I wince.

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On Vanishing

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Lynn Casteel Harper | Catapult | excerpt from On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,925 words)

 

I have officiated only one memorial service in which I thought the dead person might come back. Dorothy was 103, and she was known for surprise reappearances. Dorothy had resided in an independent living apartment at the retirement community, and I had visited her on the few occasions when she had come to the Gardens to recover from an illness. I had learned over the course of these visits that as a teenager, she had left home to become a stage assistant to Harry Houdini—against her parents’ wishes, of course. What did a nice Methodist girl, a preacher’s daughter, want with an older man—a Vaudeville magician, no less—rumored to be a Jew, the son of a rabbi? Only after Houdini and his wife, Bess, visited Dorothy’s parents and promised to care for her as their own daughter did her parents relent.

In Houdini’s shows, Dorothy would pop out from the top of an oversized radio that Houdini had just shown the audience to be empty, kicking up one leg and then the other in Rockettestyle extension. Grabbing her at the waist, Houdini would lower her to the floor, where she would dance the Charleston. In another act, she was tied, bound feet to neck, to a pole. A curtain would fall to the floor, and voila!—she would reappear as a ballerina with butterfly wings, fluttering across the stage. At the end of each night’s performance, Dorothy stood just off stage next to Bess to witness Houdini’s finale: the Chinese Water Torture Cell. A shackled Houdini was lowered, upside down, into a tank of water from which he escaped two minutes later. Dorothy knew how he accomplished this stunt—what was often deemed his “greatest escape”—but she never broke confidence.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Lauren Markham, Ariel Levy, Brooke Jarvis, Audrey Gray, and Chris Dennis.

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1. The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed

Lauren Markham | LitHub | April 6, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,529 words)

On solitude, snow, and finding reasons to write.

2. A Missionary on Trial

Ariel Levy | The New Yorker | April 6, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,340 words)

“Renée Bach went to Uganda to save children — but many in her care died. Was she responsible?”

3. Why Old-Growth Trees Are Crucial to Fighting Climate Change

Brooke Jarvis | Wired | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,253 words)

Science has a lot to earn about the way ecosystems hold and process the Earth’s carbon, and how efforts like reforestation can help improve those systems’ effect on climate change. Two things are clear: Virgin forests sequester a lot of carbon, and humanity can’t keep clear-cutting forests and burning fossil fuels the way we have been.

4. The Baller

Audrey Gray | The Delacorte Review | April 1, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,492 words)

Weary and frightened by the scary science she encounters on the climate beat, journalist Audrey Gray finds hope in the form of octogenarian Ed Mazria, a former basketball player turned architect turned climate evangelist, who has an actionable plan.

5. Push Play

Chris Dennis | Guernica Magazine | April 6, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,969 words)

“It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.”

Body of Lies

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Deenie Hartzog-Mislock | Longreads | April 2020 | 13 minutes (3,341 words)

About two years ago, I stopped feeling beautiful. Around that time, my husband stopped touching me. “I don’t feel sexy,” I told our therapist from the gray, tufted chenille seat adjacent to my husband’s. I kneaded a wet tissue, worn into holes, between my thumbs. “When he doesn’t touch me, it makes me feel bad about my body. And then I treat my body poorly, and then I hate the way I look and feel.”

I knew better. I knew our lack of sexual intimacy wasn’t about the soft, expanding skin that stubbornly clung to my midsection, or my thighs, so much thicker, dimplier now than they used to be, my entire shape a soft, aging pear. So different from what it was when I was a dancer in college, spending whole days in pale pink tights — when I was leaner, younger. I knew this was about him, his childhood (always the childhood), his work, and his insecurities. But I needed my therapist’s advice. After two years of starts and stops, his reasons for not wanting to have sex, however valid, floated from his mouth and immediately vaporized into thick, gray clouds that followed me around, threatening to dampen my self-esteem at any moment.

It’s my body, isn’t it? Do you not love me anymore? Through the dim light of our bedroom, after another botched attempt to physically pull him out from under the emotional weight he couldn’t seem to escape, I would ask these loaded questions while tears careened down my cheeks and onto the crumpled sheets between us. No, I love your body, he’d say. Of course I still love you. But I didn’t believe him. And sometimes I still don’t.
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