Nonfiction | Diary

Postcards Against Purity

POSTCARD #1. Birmingham Zoo You ask the kids to name their spirit animal. I listen and wait my turn. Butterflies, bats, beavers, and jaguars. Nannies pushing strollers behind elegant mothers. I want to say I’d be the tigress, claws pitched open, teeth angling to slice– or the giraffe one head above the tallest oak tree, bird’s view, soil […]

POSTCARD #1. Birmingham Zoo

You ask the kids to name their spirit animal. I listen and wait my turn. Butterflies, bats, beavers, and jaguars. Nannies pushing strollers behind elegant mothers.

I want to say I’d be the tigress, claws pitched open, teeth angling to slice– or the giraffe one head above the tallest oak tree, bird’s view, soil packed beneath my hooves. Instead, I say I’m not sure. Because you know the curl of my body after a long day–those comma comma comma tangled limbs–the snake-like coil of a creature sprawled across red dirt, seeking sunlight’s steady furnace. I know how to use the world to warm me. If I pose. If I wait. If I prepare. The cold inside.

POSTCARD #2: Tannehill State Park, Iron Mill

I stumble across a copperhead lounging on an afternoon stroll with the kids. “Careful Mommy, it’s a bad snake.”

I fight the urge to touch its slender coil, the curl that resembles my own. I admire the snake her polymorphous punctuations, the way it uses its body to mean multiple things, from slither to silence to question. 

“Don’t touch it, Mommy! You’ll die!”

Indescribable, how much I want to run a finger along its desiccated golden head, the way I want sex to remove me from this insatiable mind, this restless body, this reckless longing. There is no excuse for what I want except the act withheld, the mystery that prevents me from touching and taking.

The kids tattle-tale as soon as you get home. “Mommy wanted to touch the poisonous snake!” You shake your head and laugh; it’s not surprising. Ready-made dinner would be surprising. A snake is a fact of nature.

POSTCARD #3: Drawing of Alabama State Dinosaur, “Mosasaurus”

There are words left in the pockets of winter coats. Words left in footprints across a taiga. Words left in puddles outside train stations. Words that cannot cross borders and adopt new lives. Words soft as bone marrow, bitter as milk thistle tea.

There comes a time when confession doesn’t spare us the gulag. A time when disloyalty renders us guilty by association.

I tend the guilt of waiting wives, head throbbing from the stories they tell me–these missing women. The ones behind the mask of jalapeño dip and margaritas. The one in the mirror saying, insisting, “No, not me… I didn’t…”

The ones that stayed faithful–deserving wooden icons in village churches but my voice is a cracked choir bell, too brittle, nowhere close to Herzen. I cannot pay tribute without accepting my complicity.

In my fears, I am closer to Mandelstam than Herzen. The postcards serve me when I can’t pull myself together for a poem. I scribble thoughts for the purpose of sending them away. Stamps blaze across white space like footprints. Perhaps I write these things so you might find me. Perhaps I imagine a trail.

I mailed the Mosasaurus to a cousin in Boston whose address I knew had changed. The postcard intended for the person that replaced her. A stranger I don’t have to see.

POSTCARD #4: Panama City Beach, “It’s always a break!”

We write our teens because everything is a surprise, begonia blossom, thorn’s sudden hiss–sex and lips have not matured into entitlements. We journal the incredulity of new expectations. 

We write marriage because it cannot be real. Isn’t this a story? A sitcom? A Netflix trope? The way marriage drains a bed of its buoyancy. The way a man looks through his wife after tracking another woman, his gaze uprooted, loose banks, she is an invisible river, the water he knows to wade, invisible summer dress and sandals. The way a man takes offense at his wife’s clothes–“that skirt is too short for your age, too revealing, whose eyes are you courting”–because he resents and feels threatened by her sexuality. 

Mixed pride at her sexiness (not hers, his– his) and rage at suspecting it might not belong to him. The subtext of possession. Despite the promises of patriarchy, a man remains suspicious. Maybe he knows. Maybe he saw the postcard.

POSTCARD #5: Disneyland, Epcot Center

Possible attitudes found in abstinence pamphlets: 1) you are saving yourself for marriage 2) you respect your body 3) men prefer virgins 4) virgins are hot 5) men don’t want to marry used goods 6) wouldn’t you buy a new car rather than a used one? 7) your body is meant for one man 8) men will protect your body 9) if you don’t protect your body, men will rape you 10) if you drink alcohol, you might lose control and more 11) sex is not about losing control so much as it is about fulfilling G-d’s plan for your body 12) virgins are hot 13) virgins are the number one search on pornhub 14) if you want to get a man, be a virgin.

POSTCARD #5: Picasso’s sculpture garden Cap d’Antibes

I text a selfie to my father–simple picture of daughter grinning near azaleas. Unremarkable kindred mammal. It is a fraud. I know this because he replies “beautiful!” and I must read my own text before digesting his reply.

There is the female. The animal. Some man’s daughter. Some man’s ex-girlfriend. Some man’s wife.

There is no such thing as a female selfie in a culture sustained by norms of male privilege. There is no way to see the girl outside the covetous male gaze. 

Semitone, major ninth, minor seventh: I am everything you said.

POSTCARD #6: A moon across the desert in New Mexico

The fetish of female chastity and virginity is not about the hymen so much as performed ignorance– a pedophilia more blank than the face of a toddler. Virginity is a series of performative gestures that include the entire body, the blushes, the downcast eyes, the folded hands, the assumed modestia. A costume meant to illicit desire. One costume among others, catering.

Why do we veer from costume to costume?

A heart can harden into an idol; a heart can turn solid and dense as the text of a family Bible sprawled across a coffee table.

POSTCARD #7: Parthenon

In the novel, husband and wife: he remembers when he loved his wife so completely that he felt compelled to own, swallow, imbibe, re-live every moment of her–taste every shadow, experience every variant, admire every form. She is the one that got away from the others. She is the one that belongs to him. If there is a score, he won.

In murdering the free woman he loved, the husband creates the wife to replace her. A trophy, a golden symbol. Like all gods, the husband discovers he cannot make love to a gilded statue. What he owns cannot beguile him. If she cannot say no, then how can she meet him in the ravenous space of yes?

“Are you mine?” 

The world’s oldest question is one that cannot be answered. We seek physical evidence, a sign, a confirmation. The insistence on the presence of hymen, a unpenetrated wall, is part of cisgender socialization. 

What is a hymen if not the fundamentalists’ favorite telescope, the tool that grants access to the most private parts of a woman’s body?

POSTCARD #8: The Washington Monument

Possible responses upon learning that your fiancee is a born-again virgin: 1) do you have a hymen? 2) where is your hymen? 3) where did you lose your hymen? 4) is this your first time being born again? 5) have been been a BAV before? 6) how does it feel? 7) does this include oral or anal sex? 8) I’m looking for a marker here 9) it doesn’t matter to me, really 10) I wish you hadn’t told me because now I’m not sure how to gauge your response when we have sex for the first time, I mean, I won’t know if you’re faking the first 11) or feeling the first 12) or faking it feels good 13) I won’t know what you’re faking 14) define fake.

POSTCARD #9: “Sunday in the Park with George” by Georges Seurat

The clouds are heavy today, weighing down the sky. Planes draw slow lines, accidental triangles. The dread of terror amounts to inconstant terrorism. The color of my eyes: cumulus.

Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera. Given a park, a bench veers baroque. Given a sky, an accordion emerges roccocco. The world trembles; the alchemy of April.

You wish we’d been virgins when we got married. Believe the bodies we failed to touch would not come between us. 

I dream about about the lemon pie I didn’t sample more than I imagine the pecan pie, my favorite. The one I always order with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. The one I love enough to know how I prefer it.

Emil Cioran: Chastity is a refusal of knowledge.

Ignorance is not a moral perspective so much as an aesthetic preference. You wish you’d never tasted another pie before settling on your favorite. I wish I’d tasted every pie in the world if only to be more sure of what I like. Above all others.

POSTCARD #10: Wolftrap Park, Virginia

Emil Cioran again: But some things you learn don’t bring you closer to knowing.

Knowledge that deprives me of sleep: the precise measurements for Mom’s blueberry cobbler recipe.

We can agree that virginity is cultural construction which says more about the performance of purity than the content of an individual’s mind. For he who has imagined a woman naked, Paul’s dilemma. Lust is not an extension of the heart but of the imagination.

We can agree that it’s hard to walk through the snow without leaving footprints. We can admit it’s impossible to keep anything pure white. Acknowledgement is the honor we pay existence. To acknowledge is to touch, to sully, to render marked.

The myth of purity muddies the water. If purity is a form of power, it is a power one loses by experiencing life.

POSTCARD #11: The Seine, Paris

Leonard Michaels: Adultery has less to do with romance and sex than the discovery of how little we mean to each other.

Nights I don’t want to forget. Mornings when I wake with the taste of former lovers in my mouth–vivid flashbacks, a mirage into something, the girl that held ideals no man could touch, the man I invented to suit me, the end of the costume leading to a house. This brick would be the same dense shit no matter who the occupant. 

The problem with marriage is structural– it’s the building not the occupant. And the problem with purity is living. The problem with purity is just life.