Dear Jane,

I sometimes wear an old kimono I bought out of a by-the-pound box in a shop basement in Chicago and I listened to a podcast today about how I shouldn’t wear kimonos if I’m not Japanese and I haven’t let the thought sit with me very long and I remembered the letters we used to write to one another and how you told me you were regressive at some point more recently, closer to when I decided I wouldn’t speak to you anymore. You self-assessed in such a way in response to some ostensibly feminist thing I wanted to tell you. About the #metoo movement of all things. I mean, who would protest? But I suppose I understand the hell of being loose– a loose woman, on the loose, a free agent. Who could really be free of marriage after all? Marriage is freedom, which is why we always “try again”. It’s only civilized. A civilizing commitment. I never told you I would stop speaking to you because that seemed to just undermine the message. I’m sure you must’ve seen the end of our relationship, our demise coming, really, if we’re to be honest with ourselves. But here I am, writing to you because I picked up some old letters and was reminded of our correspondence. And the whole kimono thing reminded me of the hoary kimonos everyone seemed to be wearing in Salinger stories and frankly I can’t give that up and I think, neither can you.

Also, I dreamt of you. I kneeled on your neck, watching your blue eyes flutter Karen-tears. Yes, that Karen. The one whose female-ness is like a weapon taking the form, often, of tears and ignorance, but, I suppose, if it’s not all the crying and denial then it’s just drinking. And the love-habit seems more civilized, certainly. And so in this dream, you were the one who’d slept with my husband. Honestly, I only remembered it wasn’t actually you some time after I’d woken up and moved back into my body. Women are so interchangeable, when you think of it. I am nobody.

In case you’ve forgotten.

I have almost forgotten!

I don’t recall anything about you, I mean, about her. The friend that actually did put my husband’s penis in her mouth after saying, “I’m so weak.” I mean, we’re all just fake girls, all broken up, at odds. Or sometimes we’re nobody-boys. I was a nobody-boy for a while. That’s why my husband, well, my ex-husband, wanted to fuck me. He had a different nomenclature, he was good at naming. He said I was “one of those smart girls.” But you know, “nobody-boys” and “smart girls” are just about the same if you get my meaning.

Did I ever tell you about how I was born from my father, like Athena from Zeus? No, it’s true! My grandmother looked at him as he held me as an infant and remarked, “All he needs is a pair of tits.” And that’s how, cast in his image, but not quite, I first became a nobody-boy, a fake girl. Of course he didn’t actually have tits. And, what’s more, he happened to be the kind of man, I suspect not unusually, that liked hiding pain in his thoughts. Maybe not in them, maybe behind them? (I fear our language is so far, still, from the body that we hardly have enough prepositions! What a lack!) The churning of thoughts, the racing, they simulated life closely enough. Maybe my father was amputating actually. In fact, that was my ex-husband’s turn of phrase, he used to say, “I’m performing my emotional amputations.” So I worked for his love– my father, my ex-husband, the state, would have worked for God, too, if he weren’t so illusory. Because, you see, love is the opposite of emotion. And work is the opposite of death. Emotion casts danger and volatility, caprice, stupidity, brutality, vulgarity onto love. Emotion strips love of its lofty infinitude.

You may wonder how to keep everything from flying apart, untethered and loose. You may wonder how this doesn’t come to blows. Well, I chalk it up to a lot of talking, but writing is especially good for keeping crisis at bay. It partakes of the logic that quells emotion. Scoffing helps, too. We like to call it sublimating, though. It’s less overtly arrogant. It suggests we know what we’re doing and that we are actually quite sophisticated. It prevents resorting to the flagrancy of insults.

I’m still going through a divorce.

It sometimes does come to blows, surely.

I will be broken in two.

I have no memory left. Of the time we, any of us, spent together. Each new event does change the last, like a new color added to a landscape changes all the relationships and colors already there, everything bearing down, simultaneously. Or maybe just a thick slab of cadmium something-or-other right over the top of it all.

I am nameless.

I never took his name. Remember that guy we went to college with, Chris Thorpe? You always liked him, or rather thought he was handsome and also feared him. That’s what we call chemistry. In case you’ve forgotten.

I have almost forgotten.

Anyway, I ran into him at a wedding. At the time, he was attending “a little law school in Boston, maybe you’ve heard of it?” He joked smugly. He remarked that I was still my father’s property and hadn’t successfully side-stepped the problem simply by not taking my husband’s name. I am nobody. I have nothing to say.

Remember when one could smoke in restaurants and just sit there and wait for one’s coffee date while properly lighting a cigarette? The Double T Diner near campus held on for as long as possible, remember how they enclosed an entire smoking section in glass? Control. Acquisition. Habit. How delightfully civilized! Instead of all of this dreadful scrolling we’ve gotten up to. Death by chyron - well, that sounds at least mythological enough to be romantic.

Maybe that scrolling, the infinitude it promises, gives us the illusory extension beyond the sum of our parts into realms of spirit. This extension is accepted by our husbands and fathers and bosses and mirrors. Those who would make us proximate to the sun. Would show us ourselves in their images. Caught between fake girls and nobody-boys like a free fall that lasts forever. Falling forever is really just a way of measuring space with time as a function of gravity given to us by the fathers of calculus which is, in the end, a best-fit apparatus, but it’ll do. It’ll do. Did you ever hear that joke about the physicist and the engineer wanting to fuck that girl? That’s how it was told to me. Do you think it would hold up if we switched around the pronouns? But I digress, and that is a way of being in a hell of “looseness”, unhinged. Hysterical. Illogical.

I will be broken in two. The one becomes many, the split of consciousness, of being born. Born in divorce, from oneself, from our sex, from all of those civilizing habits. The numb acquiescence to birth itself.

A man conjured me with his smile, saved me from becoming loose and unhinged by marrying me. Publishing me. Made me proximate to the sun through his eyes. He made me visible even to myself. Split me in two.

Do you remember how I used Otto Weininger to begin my book of dreams? And then, my now ex-husband, he wrote the afterword? A manly segue in and out of the world! I don’t resist so much, because somehow they are clever in a savant-ish kind of way. And so when Weininger says “assuming that woman could ever describe herself with the necessary precision, it is still not certain that she would show the same interest in those aspects that primarily interest us.” So that is why we split up, no? You’re no feminist, I know, that’s the whole crux here. So maybe you don’t feel all broken up. Even Weininger suspects you might not: “Even assuming that she would be able and willing to recognize herself as accurately as at all possible, the question still remains whether it would ever be possible to bring her to talk about herself.” Indeed. Maybe, not. I suspect maybe talking is a bit possible, but writing, god no!

Then you slept with him. At least in my dream. And so I saw myself kneeling on your neck and whispering. I was whispering because it’s all the raspy sound I could force through my throat, the opposite of restraint, just pure rage, thwarted of course. I whispered close to your face: “You decimated me.” And you cried, but that was just your sex-mechanism. You meant it for him or it was just your reflex. I don’t suspect you were trying to seduce me in that moment. Although, as I think about it, I recall your certain delight in the idea that I might be your mother. You never truly passed through my birth canal, though. Remember that “smart girl” in college that insisted on Oedipus returning to the birth canal? Tess Sterling. She collected dead leaves that she used to invite people to a tea party in her dorm room. She’d excluded me, quite flagrantly, when delivering your invitation to the room we shared at the time. She was obsessed with Calvin Gevin, (whom she ended up marrying, incidentally), but at the time he and I had something going on. I’m sure he’s gay, but I am also sure every man I’ve ever been with is gay. Do you remember the time Tess grabbed me as I stood at the threshold of Randall Hall looking out at the rain falling on the quad? And she tried to get me to dance with her? I suspect she had some notion of “abandon” running through her mind. Little did she know I didn’t enter the body for such pursuits and I certainly would not at her behest. All of this abandon and crying, you must understand that I simply don’t possess it in my toolbox because my father gave birth to me. You see? I know, I know: you don’t see, you’re “regressive”. I’ve been duly forewarned.

So alas, I promised myself I would not speak to you again and this letter, just a transgression, is ultimately silent.

Until again, Gabriella