Elisa Albert - After Birth

I never had the cliché fag sidekick, dish about shopping and boys. Screw that. I had arrived at an understanding that straight women and gay men were uninteresting. Anyone interested in sex with men, no thanks.

Lesbians and straight dudes: so straightforward. It was all on the table. (Also they wanted to fuck me.)

I could not seem to be able to have sex with a girl, though; that was the only problem. I loved women, and loved women who loved women, but I remained stubbornly, fundamentally interested in the idea of dick. I liked being naked with women. Liked putting my mouth on girl skin. But I couldn’t get the love palsy with a woman. A few tried to convince me I was just not ready to admit the truth. That I should run headlong into the particular discomfort a woman provided. Much confusion.

Important lessons were learned, however. Stand up straight, stop smiling all the time, stop trying to make everyone like you. Call it feminist. Call it whatever you want. Relax your face. Don’t be so friendly and agreeable all the time, don’t put yourself last, worried about everyone else’s feelings first.

Liz and I criticized each other constantly and immediately after graduation had the most insane hate-fuck of all time, after which we happily never spoke again.

Pricing and stocking dairy at the co-op.

Walker’s at Nasreen’s. I can’t stop looking at pictures from last year on my device. I can’t deal with the child as he is today; I’ve just barely wrapped my head around the child as he was months ago. In a year I’ll be looking at pictures of him now, getting teary, wondering where the time went.

Back to work, deadbeat , Naomi tells me. You coming to New Year’s Eve? Gonna be amazing.

What happened when the band broke up?

I played with a few other bands for a while. Sort of for hire, but none of them worked out. Energy wasn’t right. Not like the energy was right with Kelly and Stef and me either, though. At all. Stef was the worst. Most insecure girl you’ve ever met. Determined to make everyone else feel as bad as she did at all times.

Yeah, you can kind of tell.

Kelly was great, but so, so depressed. She just withdrew and withdrew. There was nothing anyone could do. The harder I tried, the more gone she was. She had her drug friends, and they had this, like, private language. She was already long gone when she died. It was kind of anticlimactic.

Yeah, so it’s not even exactly sad.

It’s just kind of this relief.

But you can’t explain that to people.

No. The sadness is kind of just incidental.

What’s this about Stef becoming a born-again Christian and starting some sort of Christian rock camp — is that true? And there’s a documentary about it?

Rocking Out: Badass Like Jesus.

So then what?

I did nothing for a long time. Fucked men who required my full attention, lived weird places, whatever. OD’d. Spent some time in the hospital. Wrote. Traveled a bunch. Just took off, no place to come back to.

Where?

Rome for a while. Frankfurt. After the worst and final guy. Maine. New Mexico. An artists’ colony in Wyoming for two months out of every year. Life feels really full when you never stop moving. Until it doesn’t.

What was the hospital like?

Are you asking about ECT? It was not like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Once was plenty. I don’t remember a lot of it.

Abruptly she picks up her device.

No one calls me anymore.

No one calls anybody anymore, I don’t think.

Six A.M. Walker’s howling. I get him, let Paul sleep in.

Thank you, babe , he says from under the pillow.

Kitchen. Make oatmeal, fill the sippy. Assist with spoon. Invent a game with blocks, which buys me about six minutes of peace. When he tires of the blocks, he toddles over to me and buries his face in my leg, shrieks with joy, blows a raspberry, laughs his ass off.

Boobie? Boobie?

I’m not saying it happens every minute of every day, and I’m not saying it renders the other stuff unimportant, but there are moments of the most crazy all-encompassing joy. What a phenomenally beautiful kid. A funny, dear child. Kind and open and loving. Love bug , I call him. Monkey. Shmoopee-doo. If the world interferes with him, with what is loving and open and funny in him, I will rear up in full roar. I will break the world’s neck with a swipe of my mighty paw, no warning. Anything fucks with this kid, I will fucking kill it.

It’s the wildest thing: I really and truly love him more every day. I had no idea. You supposedly fall in love with them the moment they exit your body, but in the aftermath I was just like WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT. And I have to believe he was just as much like “what the fuck” as was I. And there we both were. The relationship develops, the getting to know each other. I mean, he’s completely and totally dependent, which is very intense, but it’s not love. Over time I have to let go of him. That’s love. That’s the work.

But what if I fuck with this kid? What if I interfere with what is loving and open and funny in him??

We watched a movie last night, me and Paul. One of those wacky road comedies in which a box of human cremains figures prominently. At the end, the devastated/hilarious widow scatters said cremains off a seaside cliff and winds up, thanks to the wind, covered in most of it herself. Whenever you see cremains used in the plotting of a comedy, you can be sure that no one involved knows anything whatsoever about death.

Paul could not understand what it was in that dumb-ass movie that I objected to. Sometimes I get lonely in my darkness. Marriage is tough. You have to try and be your best self at all times. The horrid, petty, lying sack of shit you know in yourself has to be daily wrestled to the ground. And it’s not like your heart curls up and dies; it continues to want and want and want. It, too, must be wrestled to the ground.

As soon as we turned off the movie we could hear a bat in the eaves. Me me me me me. Me me me me.

When he was asleep I masturbated to a guy I loved for a few weeks once, our whole relationship naked in my apartment. I remember him in perfect detail. It never would have worked out between us but Oh My God.

The bats kept it up all night. Meemeemeemeemee.

This house is a nineteenth-century mansion; I forget to see it sometimes. I sit in the living room and marvel. Vast space we’re growing to fill. I wonder if we’ll have another baby. So ripped apart. Like thrill seekers must feel when they jump out of planes. Broke me. Killed off the old self pretty thoroughly. That other woman is gone. That girl.

I think I expected to feel like Walker was some extension of ME, a little piece of ME. It’s not like that at all.

you know she had the baby in your whirlpool, right?

yeah she warned us. jer got all misty about it.

Cat wonders what I’m up to, wants to hang. I don’t need her anymore. I have a real friend now!

Little under the weather , I lie. Plague of day care.

Bat in the house, I text Will.

Nothing you can do about it but chase them out with a broom. Usually they show up in the fall, but it’s been so warm the last few days, maybe it woke up confused. They say the next global pandemic will almost certainly come from a batborne pathogen.

Wonderful. Thanks.

New Year’s Eve.

Bryan’s back.

some party in troy…he chimes. wanna go?