lycanthropia

Our practice can help us separate pain from suffering. Pain is the sensation; the story around pain is the stuff of suffering. The arrow of pain doesn’t necessarily have to be followed by the arrow of suffering, when you make the distinction between the sensation of pain and the story surrounding and amplifying pain. What I often say to myself when I am in pain is: “I am in pain, but I am not suffering.” I say this to remind myself not to amplify the pain by building a story around it.

We also need to let go of our expectations of a good or bad outcome regarding pain. Sometimes something can be done to alleviate our pain. Sometimes there is nothing to be done about pain, except to experience it. So be it. Our expectations of being pain-free can fill us with anxiety and disappointment. Our practice is to learn to accept pain, bear witness to it, and remember that it will change for better or for worse. Pain then reminds us to open to not-knowing.

When I sit with a dying person, I try to do whatever I can to help relieve pain and suffering. Sometimes there is something that can be done: kind words, medication, meditation, physical touch, or simply bearing witness and being present. But maybe there is nothing but suffering and misery. I need to respect this experience of being trapped in misery. At the same time I know that suffering and pain are transitory, and if I look deeply enough, I see that beneath the misery is an unconditioned realm that is free of ill-being.

I try to open to both suffering and freedom from suffering. If I see only suffering, then I am caught in the relative nature of existence: we are nothing but suffering. If I see only the pure and vast heart, then I am denying the truth of our human experience. I also need to let go of my expectations of a good outcome, even though they may give inspiration and energy to my practice. I have learned that my attachment to a pain-free outcome can cause more pain and suffering. At the same time, I do the best I can to help.

Imagine sitting with a dying person, someone in intractable pain. Imagine feeling his pain and suffering with compassion and kindness. Now look through the pain and suffering to the very ground of this one’s being, that unshakable heart, where all categories, dualities, cravings, delusions, and dislikes have never been. See her true nature, free from all ill-being, and at the same time, see the truth of this one’s suffering.

For many of us, our pain has brought meaning and depth to our lives, and guided us to our spiritual practice. Our willingness to be with pain and suffering and at the same time see the dying person’s or our own true nature is one of the most important capacities of a caregiver.

This is why you are encouraged to explore your own pain and suffering as a way to uncover the unmoving truth within your own being. This may lead you to see in a pure way the basic goodness that is the true heart of all beings, that which connects us in the spirit of non-duality. You will see the truth of suffering and the truth of well-being—and the truth of their interdependence. Your own willingness and practice foster your ability to look through the pain deeply, with stability. So please become a good friend to your pain and try not to reject it.

Sometimes sitting with people who are in pain and suffering is pretty hard to take. We want so much to do something; we may feel helpless, heartbroken, and even angry. What can we offer? The treasure that many of us forget is our compassionate and equanimous presence. This presence also exists within the one who is suffering. Often there is nothing to do but be present for pain and suffering just as it is. Our ability to be present for suffering can help the sufferer also be present. Remembering our strong back and soft front, we can offer equanimity and compassion and perhaps inspire the same for the one who is suffering.

[from Being with Dying by Joan Jiko Halifax]

[Warning: yet another breakup post, even though I wanted to write about something else. But apparently I have bits still lodged in me that I need to cough up out of my system, shrapnel or phlegm still working loose—]

So I resist the temptation for days but finally break down, awash in premenstrual hormones and—voluptuous, glowing with concupiscence, welling over with affection and desire—text him the single word, “Love.” I sigh at myself but conclude this is harmless enough. It could be worse, anyway—if I were in my twenties I’d be showing up unannounced at his house in skimpy outfits, or calling him nineteen times daily, or god knows what else. When I obsess, I don’t do it by halves. When I love someone, I love them in that kind of frightening totality that often understandably alarms them.

The next day he sends me a brittle email in which he rather condescendingly decides that (paraphrase) “perhaps we can now be in communication without causing any harm.”

But he has misunderstood me. I don’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to send him love, which I did. And then I fell into a tempest of menstruating and weeping and impotent rage.

And frankly lists are the only way I can explain it anymore, tell anything how it is, because it’s this AND this AND this AND that AND that AND this, all those ands jostling against one another and colors blurring where objects touch each other and the swirl of it deplaning and debriding and degloving and decomposing in mid-sentence and moving on to the next, the next, the next, the next. I think for no good reason of my pink lava lamp, lumpy inside with coruscating molten emotion. I despise him AND I miss him hourly; I am disgusted with myself for still loving him AND I can’t touch myself without bursting into tears; I am enraged by his uncaring formal brittle prissy email, which reads as if composed by his robot butler, AND I wake up at three in the morning reaching for him. It’s been nearly a year. I haven’t even seen him since last August. Just how many more seasons of 30 Rock am I going to have to watch before I get over this guy? Who’s just a guy, just a forty-something guy with dumb sneakers and bad posture? Just when am I going to be done with this stupid fucking breakup already? I’m sick of it, sick of him, sick of myself. I am sickened and fuming and shaking and defeated that I am still so painfully in love with someone who clearly cares so little for me.

He thinks it would be “grounding” to talk. That it would be “helpful somehow.” My translation: “You will accept that we are better as friends and you will quit being sad and in love, and then I won’t have to feel guilty for first betraying you and then completely abandoning you.” No. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t need another friend, I have friends, and the friends I have are amazing. Be friends! the very idea is insulting. The way he addresses me, using my full name, is insulting. All along he’s kept saying this stuff, like we should spend time together because it will normalize the situation and help us accept it and and and and and. And there is nothing normal about this situation and anyway I don’t want to accept it, so fuck that noise.

I go to bed menstrual and tearful, wake at 5 a.m. in pain and the usual dramatic quantities of blood, and, half-asleep, email Exurbia Community College to say I will not appear on the 9 a.m. panel about feminism, which has a title like Why I’m Not Afraid of the F-Word. I drink cold tap water out of the bathroom sink, swallow three ibuprofen and go back to bed, wake at nearly noon and read his email, eat a handful of almonds and one of blueberries, seething but not even knowing it. Drive to teach, crack jokes with my students and push them as hard as I can for an hour and a half, drive home, eat leftovers, still don’t know I’m angry until finally I talk to my best friend and suddenly am yelling into the phone, to my surprise.

Me: Why am I the one left holding the bag? Why does he get a free pass out of this?
S: You can’t know that—you don’t know what’s going on with him.
Me: But why am I the one who can’t stand the idea of being friends? Why am I the one writing all the poems? Why am I the one reaching for him in my sleep at 3 a.m.?
S: Because he’s probably playing poker at 3 a.m. He’s an addict. He’s doing what he does.
Me: Then why do I still love him?
S: Because you do.
Me [yelling now]: I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF IT.
S: Yes, you are.
Me [yelling and crying]: BUT I STILL LOVE HIM.
S: Yes, you do.

Then I went to therapy where I repeated this messy stichomythia, Lauren making me FEEL MY FEELINGS and all kinds of crazy outrageous UNSEEMLY shit like that. I demonstrated the waking-at-three-a.m.-wrapping-my-arms-around-air maneuver, laughing, and she told me that made her feel really sad. Then I started to cry. We’re like that.

The thing I am grateful for, through all this, is that it can be both/and instead of either/or. I miss him and think of him constantly, AND I am able to go to Giuseppe’s with Beth and have amazing gluten-free fettuccini al salmone with asparagus tips and that gorgeous soft house Chardonnay of theirs, which is like a pale golden Vermeer-colored light reaching down into my soul and illuminating the dark corners. I reach for him in my sleep and wake myself up grabbing air, AND I turn over and pet the cat, keeping her eternal vigilant post at the window, guarding us from hobgoblins all night long, the breeze from the window ruffling her hair, and she mrrrtles a little at my touch but doesn’t turn her eyes away from her watch.

The catalogue, in short, it is saving me. Fiery longing can coexist, and quite companionably it turns out, next to curiosity, interest in frozen cherry and almond milk smoothies, and the ability to mail poems to literary magazines, to read submissions for our literary magazine, to comment on papers, to read Chaucer and Whitman, to play Scrabble, to sit in the grass with the cat, or curl up with her under the yellow quilt, to watch Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr and to worry about my hair (the break-up induced blonde highlights are growing out, and I can’t decide if I should color them back to brunette).

As long as I accept my fundamental shallowness and my insistence on having chocolate with breakfast, I should be fine.

Finally, for your entertainment or maybe mine, an email to my beloved BFF, who’s a Zen priest and therefore knows the story to which I’m referring:

I finally figured out, 24 hours later, why I’m so irritated by his wooden email. It reminds me of that story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones where an old lady has been supporting a monk for all these years and she wants to test his Zen, so she sends him the young lady “rich in desire”? And he says something pompous and frigid and condescending and turns down the young lady? And the old lady BURNS HIS STUPID MONK-HUT DOWN HAHAHAHA because he was such a self-righteous ice cube.

That’s why this email chaps me so. Because after ALL THESE YEARS does he not know me but at all, that he’s all using the passive voice and being formal and standoffish and prudish and I TEXTED HIM THE WORD LOVE and his is not an appropriate response to love. And yes, as the Zen people say, the practice of a lifetime is the appropriate response.

But, okay, I will level with you, and then I swear this will be the end of this ridiculous post—it’s spring break, this next week is spring break, and last year we went to Tucson and Madera Canyon and we fought the first day (a bad fight, I had to ask him to let me out of the car and walked for a few minutes alone, looking up at the moon and asking her for strength as tears rolled down my face and he followed me in the car), but after that we actually had a wonderful time, intimate and close, and it’s all too easy for me to romanticize it, the hummingbirds at our window every morning, the dinners we made in the cabin’s tiny kitchen, the hikes walking hand in hand.

And, that was a year ago and this year he’s going to Texas and New Mexico alone, and that’s just how it is. So I’ve got to plan as many nice things for myself this week as possible, as many ANDs as I can fit in. Yoga four days this week, that’s without doubt. Maybe a Scrabble evening with friends, definitely working on new poems with my silly but fun new marker/ posterboard system, hanging out with Alison who’s here with her family from New Mexico, watching season five of The Wire, keeping myself busy and happy and distracted even as the ringing AND of loss and longing still sounds down in the marrow of my bones.

[Best Marlo Stanfield quotation from season four: "You want it to be one way...but it's the other way." Yeah. You're not kidding.]

in which the abandoned row houses are also characters

Lying in the dark, dabbing on eye cream and half-asleep already, thinking, I let her down, I cannot tell her what she needs to, must believe. Thinking, I am barren myself, how can I hold out any promise to her, even though I feel it in my bones to be true? That her glow will not be wasted? That she will meet someone big-hearted enough to meet her head-on, and fully? Then I think: I am the bad witch at the christening, I can’t hold out any hope. All I have to offer is what the poet called “that consolation prize, literature.” All I can say is that when men and women again and again backed away from me in a cloud of many words, so many words but at the heart of all the words burning the single bright rosebud NO—when they all found me wanting and pushed away from me, I wrote. I wrote straight out of that rejection. Everything I’ve ever written has come right from that fire.

So if I am honest, that is all I can offer. Not a promise of a someday brave-enough, man-enough lover. But of what to do when again and again there isn’t anyone true enough for what is au fond a relatively simple task: just being there day after day, like coffee or bread or dogs or shoes. (I don’t find it impossible to do—difficult, yes, but not impossible—and have never understood why other people find it so hard.)

(I know when I see my ex-partner next, if I ever do, he will say how much he’s missed me. And I will smile, with my head to one side, not a pleasant smile, and say, “Yet not prohibitively so.”)

Write, sweetheart. Don’t waste your time writing to your beloved, now, but write it bigger than that. Write love poems and epistolary poems and furious blood-curdling cold hatred poems. That’s all I have. I’m sorry. I wish it were more, or different, or more peaceable.

But the truth is that what I have is no peace. I have only those ragged, uneven ink tattoos that prisoners make on the backs of their own hands.

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment…is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.” (Simone Weil)

Wake at ten and don’t get out of bed until two, paralytic. In the night, three in the morning, be awakened by overwhelming desire for the ex-lover, your craving for his breath, weight, scent, voice. Suffer astonished the visceral totalizing reifying memory of being locked with him tightly, both of you always a little surprised by it, that in middle age and after nearly five years you still had so much passion for each other. Feel it all over again, in a writhing, face in the pillow, frightening kind of intensity, thankless and grim. Having fallen so hard for him in such a lasting, domestic as well as cerebral, kind of way. Feel that permanence still ringing in your bones. That you were entrusted with beekeeping something sacred, and he has departed with such apparent willingness from it. And that you are left here alone, as Winterson said, on a rock hewn out of your own body, alone keeping the sacred fires. Write poems as tatted doilies that don’t soak up nearly enough blood, microscopes rather than telescopes to plumb a fathomless night sky. Go six months without so much as seeing him and then be awakened in the middle of the night almost able to taste his mouth he seems so near, and it is as if no time had passed at all, so sudden and uninterrupted as to make you laugh with astonishment. Distract, distract. Play Scrabble in a coffee shop, drink cinnamon plum tea, rosy and honeyed. Drink liquor only because now you can. Chat with friends, chat, chat. Take a cold shower and chair a twelve-step meeting in your black leather jacket, because you’re a rockstar. Laugh breathless at yourself, as in love as any schoolgirl. Light the pomegranate candle and look at his picture, which a friend has called sinister. Know that the circuit breaker of the body cannot be turned off no matter what the disaster, no matter how thorough his betrayals. Know that hugging a pillow can open the heart chakra from behind, through the shoulder blades, and induce sobbing when the chest feels wrung dry. Know that if he came through the door, even the cat would recognize him, would turn her belly upward for kisses. Know that he won’t come through the door, won’t call, won’t write, is gone. Feel the body opened, emptied and waiting, poised like a clear glass in the seconds before bright water could be poured in.

I feel completely fragile and confused today, like an egg being candled from the inside out. I keep forgetting my medication, maybe this is to blame. Maybe the anaesthetic from a very minor dental procedure this morning. Maybe the psychic wear and tear of chronic teaching anxiety, usually most terrifying at 2 a.m. the night before. Maybe the wind, the stars, an influenza from the heavens. Maybe none of these.

Someone is right now, honestly, practicing the accordion. I can hear them from my backyard. My neighborhood is anachronistic at times.

I came home from the dentist and passed out, the ephedrine in local anaesthetic always hits me right in the middle and I feel that whole heart-pounding, chest-turning-inside-out thing. It’s as if I’ve eaten way too much MSG. So I came home and faceplanted, but tossed and turned and drooled, and then just woke up suddenly thinking very vividly of this passage which was written by my ex-boyfriend to his sponsor, the day he broke up with me:

[redacted because writing not mine]

I woke up from my involuntary nap feeling panicky, with my age completely visible in front of me. Not some other time, but now. I keep having this vision, I see myself at fifty, at sixty, at seventy, still lying in the same bed, my body mine as it is now, the same shapes of me but less defined, with softer wrinkled skin and long gray hair, partnerless and intact, as a friend said nothing going into the body, nothing coming out of the body. A long deep sterility or barrenness I am destined to inhabit. I think menopause is barely around the corner, yet even carrying this much age I cannot write the poem of the salt marrow, the useful poems my friends are writing. I’m glad someone is writing them, but I wish she were me. No matter if there’s a book, there will never be a baby; no matter if there’s a baby, there is no turning back. It sounds or is so facile but I keep having to realize on a daily basis that I will never be 25 or 35 again. As much as I wish he, my boyfriend, had drawn different conclusions from his spiritual awakening, I know very well what he is talking about. It’s one breath.

I became a Zen student circa 2001 because I was so aware of the nearness of death. It seems that’s something all serious Zen students give a lot of thought to, death. We are in fact kind of obsessed with it. My then-husband and I watched the movie Alive, which, kind of ironic that title, and afterward I shuddered late into the night thinking not just, I am going to die, but more, I am actually dying right now. And I was drawn into Zen practice because it was the only spiritual discipline I could find which admitted that.

Poets of course are the other group of people in our culture obsessed with death. A trusted friend for two decades, Richard Ray sent me this sweet yet skeweringly accurate discussion between a poet and a novelist who are married, Naeem Murr and Averill Curdy: “My Poet / My Novelist” (originally recorded in 2008). So many, i.e. all, of the things of which Murr gleefully accuses Curdy, are true of me as well, and I was often teased about them by my novelist, when I lived with one. And I suppose they are true of most of us who write this kind of deep lyric writing, we are far more obsessed with the dictionary and death than we are with narrative elements.

(I have two dictionaries similar to the one Murr describes, which thoughtful exes procured for me in happier days; I think one cost fifty cents in a garage sale and the other, truly gigantic, cost $5, and has its own table, where it sits with a globe on top of it. An acquaintance, seeing it in my apartment, jestingly asked if it was my book of magic spells. Clearly he was both ignorant and percipient, and I never asked him over again.)

Then too, so many female friends going through deep changes right now. Everyone swimming in her process, barely keeping her nose above water, and I can’t help or even give hope from where I am. I am about to turn 42 and I live in a 400 square foot rented casita for $635 a month and I don’t have a lover and I don’t know anything. I teach 24 students twice a week and I can’t help them either.

Despite its very real seemingness, I get a bottle of kombucha out of the refrigerator and take my meds dutifully, in case all this is just wonky blood chemistry. Ashtanga class is tonight. Now I am truly a white single middle-aged woman, having used the words “kombucha” and “ashtanga” IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH. Someone show the lady what she’s won.

This terrible fragility.

So confused. How can I be this old and this confused. I feel terror, and simultaneously as if inside my chest as if there’s a nest of little brown-speckled blue eggs. But how can this be. There can be nothing left to be born in me, I feel while only halfway through so nearly finished with this life. I dream dreams and wake up having already forgotten them, no one is there to tell them to, to ask about, it’s okay, but honestly there is no one to take a walk with, holding hands like schoolgirls, watching the neighborhood cats come out at dusk and stretch and begin to hunt, no one listening deeply to each other’s deepest allegedly most alien things. Because where are you, my lost black valentine.

I have decided the secret to blogging is not to plan and edit every single word I type.

I am in bed clutching a hot water bottle between my thighs, the pain was so bad as I drove to class today that I had to call a friend’s voicemail just to tell another person, someone, anyone: oh, ow, ouch. Then I hung up and hummed and moaned along the highway, wondering if I would pass out. I remembered a little song I used to sing when I was a menarchal girl, dazzled by the output of uterine pain my small body could produce:

pain is but a sensory input
pain merely comes from your nerves
yet when you feel pain
you loudly exclaim
because when you feel pain, it hurts

I like how this patently ridiculous ditty nonetheless tries to contain the dialectic, even though I was thirteen: pain is both a mere excitation of neurons and, also, it hurts like a motherfucker.

Now the pain is back and I laboriously pull off jeans (so much harder to do now that we all wear the skinny kind) and pull on sweatpants and clamber into bed and put the hot water bottle, well, let’s be honest, it’s kind of draped over my crotch at the moment, which is throbbing but not in a good way. It’s hard to breathe when it hurts like this.

But the cat is happy I’m in bed, sitting here purring and washing herself serenely, and I can finally blog about what’s been on my mind for the last twenty-four hours.

(Which is mostly, honestly, my ex-boyfriend with whom I’m still in love.)

But it’s also VIDA. And this whole issue of women’s underrepresentation in literary publishing. Poetry Magazine was plucky enough for a quick head count, and so was The Southern Review, and both journals found that men submit to them more than women. Why, they wondered artlessly, would this be so?

I have a folder full of addressed stamped envelopes and carefully folded poems in my desk, the existence of which offers me several clues as to why this might be so.

First of all, women don’t have as much time and money to submit. And it does take time and money. You need a familiarity with the magazine/book publisher to whom you’re submitting (and that means either access to a good library, or enough income to subscribe to the journal or buy the books). You need postage and you need a computer and a printer. And you need the education, the MFA or PhD or however you acquire it, the familiarity with tradition and conventions and the breaking of them, in order to make your writing any good at all in the first place.

But that’s the cherry on the cupcake, really. Because what you really need, in order to send out stories and poems into the world? is self-confidence. The bomb-proof, Kevlar-coated, unassailable kind, because it will be immediately assailed. You need the confidence to turn around a polite rejection and send new poems to the same magazine immediately, without blanching, without quivering, with a big brassy grin on your face.

Maggie Gyllenhaal encloses her SASE.

And that, I would humbly submit, is what many women understandably don’t have.

A few months ago, I pulled out an old manila folder marked “SUBMISSION” (which always cracks me up, privately, because where is my folder marked “DOMINANCE”?). I had resolved that if my romantic life lay in tattered ruins, I could at least work on improving my shabby professional reputation. Inside this folder I found things which horrified me—kind letters from publishers, handwritten letters with specific suggestions, letters entreating me for more poems at a later date, letters to which I HAD NEVER RESPONSED.

The worst of these, the one that made me feel positively ill, was a handwritten note from Jorie Graham, on Ploughshares stationery, advising me that she had solicited too much work for her guest-edited issue and therefore could not take my poems, but that they were “lovely” and that I should send them “and more like them” to Ploughshares in the spring. The letter is undated, so I don’t know when she sent me this. I don’t even know what poems they were, because I didn’t take note of which ones I’d sent. I hadn’t done as she advised. I don’t even remember receiving the letter. I somehow blocked the whole thing completely from my mind.

Why would someone get a letter like this and never respond? Why would someone hear only the rejection part, and tune out all the acceptance?

(Those questions are rhetorical.)

Next month, at the Exurbia Community College, I will be on a panel for women’s history month. A panel called something like Why I Call Myself a Feminist. We have six minutes apiece to explain why we are feminists. Really I find the whole thing kind of bizarre—the fear of the word, the justifying of it. When, as Ani DiFranco asks, why can’t all decent men and women call themselves feminists?

My ex-boyfriend calls himself a feminist and one of the reasons we got together is that his politics seemed unimpeachable to me. But it turns out that anyone can be impeached. It turns out there are feminists who don’t believe that sex trafficking is the clear result of the market’s insistent demand for something of which there is an unendingly inadequate supply, never enough female flesh for male desire, but merely an area of the economy desperate for legalizing and trade regulations. Like Amsterdam. If I ever hear about Amsterdam again I may throw up in my mouth. (Like these hilarious ladies from Dodie Bellamy‘s blog.)

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll talk about that on the panel, because of the whole involuntary-barfing thing. Instead I’ll probably drone on and on about wage and income disparity and violence against women in their intimate relationships and, yes, professional glass ceilings, like the one in literary publishing. But the truth is that I privately keep thinking that my poems don’t get published because they are, because I am, not good enough. And more truth is, I sometimes think I should have been okay with a more permissive stance on sex work, because sex should be open and free and liberated, and porn and sex work can be/are also beautiful sacred things, and why couldn’t I be down with that, like Annie Sprinkle and Violet Blue and Betty Dodson, etc. etc. (Which is really another blogpost, which I have already written but haven’t had the courage to publish yet. Because it’s half-theoretical and half-personal.)

Anyway you can’t tell the truth to college kids, because it’s too real-time and life-sized and chaotic. You have to tell them something graspable, something to give them hope. You have to be a little bit funny but not too scary. They already think I’m freakish enough for asking them to write “humanity” instead of “mankind” in their papers, and for insisting on calling them “first-years” instead of “freshmen.” We’re in the backwater, here in Arizona. Shocking enough for them that I teach in jeans and sneakers and often go braless.

(Though actually ever since I got a comment on a student evaluation, “Instructor needs to wear a bra!” I always try to remember to put one on before I go teach.)

In other, not unrelated news, I have found the best cosmetics blog in the entire world, Foxy Voxy’s Academic Beauty Collective. My heart fairly swells with admiration for Ms. Voxy and her courage in trying out expensive blushes and eyeshadows, and teaching us how to use all those mysterious cosmetics brushes that come in all those bewildering sizes and shapes. And we can be safely nerdy on her website, and freely admit that we don’t have the foggiest clue as to how to get the eyeliner from its pencil or pan onto one’s lashline. I have read the plays of Shakespeare, but I don’t know how to put on eyeliner! In this as in most things, I blame my mother.

(I’m kidding. My mother tried to teach me, but I paid no attention.)

So, thanks to Ms. Voxy, I have already acquired a fabulous lipstick (Shiseido Natural Red) and an extremely important hair serum called argan oil, which is the only thing ever to smoothe my sun-damaged frizzies. And, in keeping with the rest of this post, we can feel reasonably good (or, well, okay, less awful) about consuming argan oil, because it is purportedly grown and harvested and crushed and extruded and so forth by a collective of Moroccan women!

There’s a moral in all this somewhere but I’m in too much pain to extract it for you.

she wore shiseido red & we drank tea by her side