Once I met a girl who was the empress of her body. For me she twirled a crimson cape, and in this fashion I wrapped myself around her. If we lived in the same city, she said, we would ruin each other's lives. I can make myself so small inside my body, I seemed to want to say. 



The empress said I had a strange body smell. Left sheets of it on her skin and in recently vacated rooms. I knew what it meant, her smelling me like this. At that time I wore a stiff pink scarf that dwarfed my body. It looked like wall insulation, and functioned more or less the same.  



I carried a lemon and told her I’d packed light. She thought I meant illumination. We ate fruit at  every hour. She said, you must suck and bite at the same time, but still the juice ran. The fruit felt  like a tomato in the hand but tasted like stone fruit. Though there was no stone. 



A scientist assured that every glass of milk contained the milk of some thousand cows at least. I  didn't always try to make sense of information. In this sense, I was nothing like a robot. But  sometimes, when my psyche is most empty, I can sense my algorithm’s surface.  



Sometimes I tire of living in double. The red hand jolted from number to number as if startled at  time’s passage. A persistent state of departure. I began to get the certain sense – a sense that  everything could pixelate and darken any moment now. 



The hills that rose on one side of the train and the forest on the other. The brown plastic bin in  which I was bathed as a very small child. Every image-memory of her earth, of her body. Look,  she said, a cup of earth. It isn't baked. It means that it's still breathing. 



One Saturday we used my phone to record a video in the empress’s mother's mirror. Even empresses have mothers. In it, I am kneeling in front of her and reaching my hands upward toward her breasts. The camera shakes with her. Sometimes being alive is shocking.  



I have been to the city of her birth and the city of departure. I have been to the city of her  arrival. I have been to her bed and turned blank upon leaving again, again, again. Sometimes  when I smile I feel as though I am only baring my teeth.



In the land where my father comes from, every story is preluded with a rhyme: habu, nabu. It  was, and it wasn’t. Some things are from so long ago that you cannot be certain how they came to  be, or if they ever were. Sometimes I am certain I have never lived before.  



I was frightened by the ceaseless rain. I was afraid to make so much noise. She told me I walked  like a penguin, like an elephant, like a dragon-bird. The train began to move. The duck, I said, is  pregnant. It seemed the land was caught in a permanent state of grayness. 



We drove along the river in the dimming light, the hills studded with yellowing castles. The river  was brown and rising. It rose to lick the buildings on its edges. My head was always flooding too  and I often found myself unable to retrieve the words I wanted. 



Sometimes I cried because it was so tender, and sometimes I cried because I knew it would end,  would leave me in the gray. I promised her that I would buy a strap-on in Berlin and bring it to  her, but only brought a collar. I hadn't yet made up my mind. If this is what I wanted. 



The weather, what did it portend? The January verdure hurt me. My leather boots had creased  and cracked. When she told me you are lovely, I failed to believe her. Sometimes I forgot to roll  the cigarette with the glue side out. Living is really a long practice in portraiture. 

 

She liked it when I told her stories. Of the man who tied a leather cord around my neck and  tucked two fingers underneath. I suppose being alone is not the worst of fates. After her father  got out of prison, he was completely hairless. Still I’m not convinced I’d rather be a bear than  bald on every part. 



We ate hash cookies with lion's milk in the confines of her brother's quarter bar and I learned  how to say heartache in the country's language, of which my own derived. I tried to study the  moment, which began to feel so improbable that I wondered if I was really there.  



At the palace, the children assured us their guns were not real. I know, she said. I also knew. Of  course I knew by then about the end but didn't picture it would be so round and sealed, like a  child’s rubber ball. In photos, I’ve noticed, if I am not smiling, I look instead forlorn.



A person lugging a bicycle up a long flight of stairs. A person dropping the last letter of their  name. Often, I sang without realizing it. When I apologized for my eyes she said that is the  dumbest thing you've said all day, and so I apologized for having said this.  



The only thing that still connects us all is commerce and the kingdom of the sensual. Disrobing  in the dim red light and riding like we were going somewhere. I dreamt of a long, thin garden. I  didn't do this in a literal sense. She said I know you're sad because you're leaving. It took some  time to admit this was the reason I was crying.  



The sky was heavy and pressed against the earth tremendously. When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, the Tigris ran black with the ink of dumped books. This is so good, she said, when I had three fingers inside her. Eventually, the earth will tire of its heavy coat. Will disrobe.  



When I pressed a button for water I worried it would never stop. When I walked through  automatic doors I worried they wouldn’t close behind me. I didn't blame anything on anxiety, but perhaps I should have.



I vowed that this would be the year when I would claim again my mind as mine. This effort  demanded vigilance. When my photos appeared full of blanks, I shook off the fear that my  indexed life would crumble with it. I didn't know what sort of artifacts I’d leave behind or who  would find them. I fear reduction to a pulsing dot.



I volunteered to converse with a stranger while both of us were blindfolded and videotaped but  feared I'd never see the footage. When asked if I believed in god I was surprised to hear myself  say yes. Although I did not believe. Indeed, I never saw the footage.  



Still I felt that language was always on my side. Could dip my body in its vat and disperse into it. I was fond of listening to a single song on repeat. This sort of obsessive behavior could nourish me for weeks. It has been a while since I've seen a truly ghastly thing in the flesh.  



I have a special terror reserved for instances of absolute arrival and departure. The instant of  breach, when everything goes all blue and malleable and never to return to its prior state of  being. And then the invisible strictures of habit reclaim us, and objects reclaim their edges.



Something that I wished to know is if the quality of my melancholy was identical to everyone's,  or if everyone had a personal flavor of sadness. I wish I didn't spend so much of my living  imagining alternate possibilities. This produces a constant state of alienation from the actual.



On the U-Bahn, I watched a man wrap a rubber band around a phone and charger till it  snapped. Here, I said, taking my hair tie off my wrist, an automatic action. He doubled what had  been pressed against me so that it held the phone against the necessary metal surface and then a  light appeared. 



When I was small I only knew one word in the language of the old land. It was a word made of  two words, and I used it when I drank the thing it signified which I drank nearly daily. When I  grew I learned more words. Still, I couldn’t drink the language. 



I went with my cousin Zoe to study our never-mother tongue at her university. The professor  wrote the German-Kurdish dictionary. Outside the classroom, I picked up a spiral plastic hair tie.  It was pink and shiny. Automatically, I bound my hair with it. In this way I am bound to the  language. 



It rained so much the Rhine swelled from its banks and lapped against the edges of the villages.  Though the river flowed and emptied what it carried to the North Sea, it could not be contained.  And so the only way to go was up. 


 
The blooms arrived some weeks after I did at the familiar threshold of my double doors. Though  the note was translated from data into printed ink, I could feel her in the space between the  letters. My body, then, felt suddenly soft and very much alive. 

 

Certainly we moved mostly by smell. I was always turning on a dime. I didn’t know what drove  me forward through the swum hours. The pool between us and between my selves. The building  turning on themselves and tessellating. 

 

I imagined everyone in their own fur crown. I petted the roughage of our sex. I read a stranger’s  poem in the raised echo chamber of an abandoned spy station, and my words were funneled  back into my ears. The stranger’s poem was sexy. 

 

A case containing an instrument, musical or otherwise. Tools for various sports. A printout of a  PowerPoint. A cardboard box permitting a persistent meowing. Either inside the box there was a  cat or the box was an elaborate and affecting prank. 

 

I swore I saw a cockroach emerge from the cup holder, but later, I said that I couldn’t be certain.  The present must bump against and activate the past. The essential fuel of forward motion. A sort of temporal chemistry. The present, a situational performance. 

 

All along the saved screen was something I had passed without seeing. Sometimes I look like a  beautiful woman. Sometimes I look like nothing at all. The gap between somewhere and  nowhere is a gulf and insurmountable by time or space. You know, there’s only one way to go. 

 

In the entrance to the museum, a giant flog fashioned from dozens of black leather belts was  being pumped hydraulically from side to side, grazing the floor erotically and swishing against  the white wall. I found that the oversized whip seemed to soothe my hangover. 

 

I live the kind of life in which I meet many people who later figure prominently into my life. I  suppose almost everyone’s life resembles mine in this way, but still, it seems extraordinary. You couldn’t tell from looking but sometimes I suspect I am the happiest person for miles. 

 

I think I could entertain myself simply by watching the birds in a city. For a silent lifetime. I am wary of collapse. Spatial or temporal. On my desk, her Rose of Jericho is in a  state of resurrection, unfurling itself wide open. But when I leave the city, I will leave it there.