Your bag is empty.
Some doctor said neurodivergent people see soul before ego. We fall for who someone is before we’ve met who they pretend to be. I happen to do that, and I don’t have a “physical type” because I’m attracted to intelligence. Yes, that’s as dangerous as it sounds.
The first soul I heard before I saw it clacked. A tongue stud against teeth, 1996, behind the counter of a pizza-by-the-slice place, back when pizza by the slice became a bougie affair the way Friends changed American coffee house culture. Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
But the packaging. I have liked boobs since I saw them with sentient eyeballs. Not admired. Not appreciated the form. I wanted them in my hands and on my breasts, and I want to be clear about the distinction, because there are women who like breasts the way people like architecture, and there are women who want to press their chest into another woman’s chest until neither of you can tell whose heartbeat is whose. I was the second kind at fourteen, in a Catholic school desk, while a woman with a laminated poster explained the Assumption. Mary going up to heaven, body and soul, assumed whole into the sky, and I sat there thinking about breasts with a focus the Church would have envied. They wanted me to contemplate the mystery of a woman’s body rising and I was contemplating the mystery of a woman’s body, full stop, which as far as I’m concerned, is the same devotion at a different altitude. I confessed a lot of things at that school. Never that. Some sins you don’t give away because they aren’t sins, they’re information, and I was fourteen and already smart enough to know the difference even if I wouldn’t have language for it for another thirty years. I wanted the weight of one in my palm, that specific weight, like holding a water balloon you’re not allowed to drop, and the small stupid thrill of a nipple deciding something on its own.
One Halloween, a group of us decided to go downtown to a rave. I have no recollection of how my pizza breast woman got invited. We all went to her place and put on ballerina tutus with our 20 hole Doc Martens and I suggested we use MAC body paint as a shirt. It was Halloween. No real fairy in a tutu would have something covering her 19 year old breasts. I want credit for the engineering here. I invented a costume whose entire structural premise was that I would have to touch her chest for an hour. The Church taught me nothing about desire but it taught me plenty about ritual.
So I painted our torsos silver. Neck, arms, back, stomach. Breasts. Mine and Opal’s.
The paint went on cold as a stethoscope and took a full minute to warm, and you could watch the goosebumps come up underneath it like something moving under ice. I did her collarbones first because that felt like a legal way to begin. Then the shoulders. Then down. Her ribs jumped every time the sponge came near them and she said nothing about it and I said nothing about it and we both held our faces like two people filling out paperwork at a bank. I painted around each breast in a circle, closing in, taking my time, and there is no innocent explanation for a circle. A circle is a decision to arrive late. She smelled like flour and Malibu and a cigarette somebody else had smoked, and I remember being jealous of the cigarette, which is the state I was operating in. The tongue stud clicked twice. My hands were silver to the wrist for two days and I didn’t scrub hard, if I’m honest.
She knew by then that I liked her. I’d confirmed it through a school friend who was her coworker, which at nineteen is how you say a thing without saying it.
All night we tweaked out underground Edmonton, a local newscaster in his underwear dancing on a speaker. I was with Opal. Bouncing our breasts together on the dancefloor to Out of Space by The Prodigy is the most Sapphic cinematic moment of my queer lifetime. Silver on silver and slick with it, the paint moving off her onto me and off me onto her until by two in the morning I was wearing her chest and she was wearing mine, which is the closest I have ever come to a transaction I’d call holy, and the bass came up through the floor into my sternum and sat there like a second pulse, and every time we hit each other, more of the costume left us, and neither of us mentioned it, and neither of us stopped, and the strobe made it happen in still frames. One frame of her mouth open. One frame of her mouth closed. One frame of nothing.
We went underground at 11pm and reemerged into the sun at 8am, in costume and winter coats, passing commerce and communications experts on their way to their corner offices. Two silver girls in tutus at a crosswalk, holding the night between us like contraband.
We ended up back at her place. We laid together in her bed. Side by side. My entire body melting, blue balls in my womb. The ceiling had a water stain shaped like Manitoba. The silver was gone off my stomach and still on my knuckles. She breathed like someone doing an impression of sleeping. I counted it. Somewhere in there, the breathing changed and I never found out to what. Four inches of mattress between us, and I have crossed entire countries with less courage than that gap required.
Nothing happened.
I will never know how she felt about me that night.
I’d go to the window in the wall on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton and order the Pig Kahuna for another year. Slowly. And she’d pick up the honey last, always last, and tip the bottle, and I’d wait for the line to form, that thin amber line, thin as the string on a hood, and it would hang there deciding, and stretch, and catch the light like something pulled out of a hive still warm, and keep coming, slow, slower, and she’d move her wrist in small circles so it landed everywhere it was supposed to land, and the line would get thinner and thinner until it was almost nothing, almost, almost, and then it would break. Every time it broke, I paid and left.
That was the relationship. Twelve months of watching the honey.