If These Thighs Could Talk

Remember when we crossed the bridges of London? of Paris? of Florence? The beaches of Goa? of Barcelona? of Cartagena? The streets of Bangkok? of Tokyo? of New York City? Nobody held your hand.

Photograph by the magnificent Mayan Toledano via The Arduous

BY ERICA GARZA

If these thighs could talk, they’d say:

Remember when we carried you to the finish line of that race in the 5th grade? You were terrified to fail in front of all those people. But you didn’t. You won. It was the first time you became conscious of this fact: fear doesn’t always equal truth. Sure, your lungs deserve some credit. But let’s face it. We were the main attraction that day. Steady, consistent, infallible. We made it, you and us.

Remember when you decided to walk up to him, that first him, and tell him what you thought? Yes, even when your knees got weak, your head got dizzy, your throat got tight (they’re such suckers for romance!) we held you up, strong and present. We didn’t let you melt into a pool of emotional goo.

Remember when you made that decision to open up, to allow that other him to enter, to fill up, to join you on that most delicious evening? We were there too. Inviting, welcoming, excited.

Remember when you made that other decision to refuse, to deny, to trust your gut, to say, “No, I don’t want to,” and so we didn’t; we took with us our decision and went the other way.

Remember when we made our way across the dance floor, even with your shaky hands and feeble explanation of not having any rhythm. Your hips told a different story, and so did we.

Remember when we climbed the steps to the top of Il Duomo? to Sacre Coeur? to the oldest nunnery north of the Alps?

Remember when we crossed the bridges of London? of Paris? of Florence? The beaches of Goa? of Barcelona? of Cartagena? The streets of Bangkok? of Tokyo? of New York City?

Nobody held your hand.

But, we, we held your body, your heart, your will.

You made the decisions, even when they didn’t make sense to anyone but you, and we collaborated, we conspired, we came through.

Sorry to saturate you in nostalgia, but now that we have your attention, may we ask then:

Why all the hate? You cover us up from the sunshine like you’re embarrassed to be seen with us. No miniskirts, no tiny shorts, no cute bikini bottom. You grab hold of us as if to strangle us, violently hold us up, then let us fall, again and again, cursing and ridiculing because of this thing outside our control – gravity? Ever heard of it?

And we’re tired, you’re tired, of all the stress you put on us. Let’s be honest, the lunges, the Brazilian workouts, the Pilates, the speed walking, the bicycle, it’s all good in moderation, but you only do this shit when you’re angry at us and you’re never patient. In fact, you’re demanding and cruel and we’ve just about had enough of you.

So ease up. We’re not trying to sound harsh, but all this shit you preach about, you damn well better practice because we’ve got a lot more to see and do in this life and it’s not going to be as fun if we aren’t getting along.

Love us.

Love,
Us

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Erica Garza's essays have appeared in Salon, Narratively, Alternet, BUST, Refinery29, Bustle, Vival, Mamamia, Role Reboot, Hello Giggles and The Los Angeles Review. She has contributed food reviews for the publications Maui Now and Brooklyn Exposed  and worked as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency in Manhattan. In 2010, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University and is now at work on her first book. Born in Los Angeles to Mexican parents, Erica has spent most of her adult life traveling and living abroad in such places as Florence, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bogota, Bali, Bangkok, Koh Samui, Chennai, Melbourne and the island of Maui.

Jessa Crispin's The Creative Tarot & Other Tarot Insight

The Creative Tarot is an amazing book that deals with using cards to unlock creativity.

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Originally posted at Ingenue X

I think the thing I love the most about tarot is the forced introspection; being put on the spot by your subconscious is ugly, but necessary. I've definitely twisted the responses in my mind when something was too real. You can draw another card or get another reading but you will always know what that first one meant and why it made you uncomfortable. 

I think of creativity in the same way; it depends on authenticity, and you can write the same poem a dozen times but it's never going to be good unless it's honest. The art needs the self to survive, but if you don't know who yourself is, how can you create? 

When I received Jessa Crispin's The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide To An Inspired Life, I was giddy (I love Jessa's site Bookslut) and anything occult + art = dreamy. Here was this beautifully packaged, thick sort of tomb of a book. Would it be academic? Theoretical? A nonfiction personal quest? It wasn't – it was a guide to through the tarot and each of the card's meanings, coupled with recommended art (film, music, etc) that pair well with the card. (Just as a side note: Six of Cups gets Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block and The Sun gets Rilke....I sigh dreamily). 

The Creative Tarot, Jessa Crispin

Crispin's idea here is to deconstruct and demystify both the tarot and the creative process, unblocking creators' lost ideas. It's true that writers or artists are always seen as struggling and manic and suffering – both as a result and as a way for – their art, and while this may seem desperately romantic, it's not always. To not create or to draw blood is an unromantic burden. Any process that demystifies that whole ordeal is welcome, I think, and I find it secretly funny that something so esoteric as the tarot would make art approachable. The book certainly has its audience – me, for starters. 

A few months ago I took a tarot workshop that a poet and professor, Becca Klaver, was hosting. She (I love her work) does these workshops called Stardust Sessions because she's magical and more people should get together and tap into that power. We walked through a heroine's journey and used the cards to interpret out own experiences and fears and paths.

That day was a bright freezing day, and a dead bird turned up on the porch as I entered; another workshop participant and I looked at it and thought completely different things: she thought it was an omen, I thought it was gift, a gesture of love, brought by an animal. Who knows which? The bird would make its way into our stories that day – and it seemed there was a sense that the whole room needed to be free of something (of course, how fitting is the bird?)

Taking the class and receiving the book in the same week was kismet, really. I'd just moved into a new apartment, my brother was readying to move to New Orleans, I changed jobs, and my life felt somehow blank and charged at the same time. Suffice to say, my creativity was the last priority; it was sea change and I was flailing. 

The tarot, in a way, grounded me. It did so because its very foundation is a journey. So if it's always a journey, then moving forward can't be bad, right? I think with art it's the same. We're always striving and sometimes we just need to provoke ourselves to do so.

I looove this book. Read it. 

The Relationship Issue: Attachments, Obsessions & Desires

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

On any given day, a women’s publication will publish myriad ‘relationships’ pieces – and in most cases, it’s all centered on a sexual or romantic hetero dynamic. But what of our other attachments, connections, relationships and obsessions? When do we talk of those dreamy in-betweens? That very real cord between us & the vicious world? What of the things that we are constantly either drawn toward or running from – death, art, the friend we secretly desire, our hair, our body, our culture, our community, our children, our god? 

Luna Luna wants to talk about those things. We’ve always been obsessed with the grey area, the quiet conversations and the real, necessary, nuanced dialogue we have with ourselves and one another. There’s so much more to being a woman than dating a man, we’ve always thought (though, sure, we adore them). Let’s leave that at home, though, today. Let’s talk about the other things we attach ourselves to. Let’s admit that we’re preoccupied. Let’s admit that there’s more going on. We’re more than the surface. 

Today, I compiled a few brand-new pieces, along with a few older ones, that I think are necessary to the larger conversation around relationships. We'll be publishing on this theme all week. Here, you’ll find a diary of the pieces we included. You can start anywhere.

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THE RELATIONSHIP ISSUE

How To Have Sex In a Doorway

BY DOLLY LASSITER

This piece is part of the Relationship Issue. Read more here.

The cool club is Academia (accent on the third syllable in Serbo-Croatian, ak-ah-DAY- me-ahh). Belgrade is a dingy dirty, last-gasp-of-socialismcapital. You buy a fabulous pair of red plastic glasses with prescription lenses for $5. The Yugoslavian men and women are all willowy beauties,lithe and robust. They all speak English. You love it. And so do all the other students on your junior year abroad program. Everyone has florid affairs.

Your first night there you go to a party with a bunch of film school students and artists. It’s very dark. Pedja, who will go on to play Igor Karkakoffin the Harry Potter movies, is fascinating and quotes Emily Dickinson “the soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”Also “for love is immortality” and “forever is composed of nows.”

He is interested in talking with you. Whee! American guys are never interested in talking with you (you haven’t moved to New York City yet, theonly place in the continental United States an American male ever asks you for a date). It’s not that you have a predilection for foreigners, it’s thatAmericans have a distaste for you. Boo hoo. You’re too weird and you write strange notes to people (kind of like Emily Dickinson but without the poetry). Of course you make out with him.

When you are on your way back from the restroom, another looming man bars your passage, with such winsome charm, you can’t resist. His name isDragan, like the mythical beast. He’s not an artist, he’s a med student. He lives in a small apartment with his mom, dad, and little sister, where they brew their own wine on the balcony and ferment their own cabbage (you learn all this much later).

That night he’s smoking and decides that he’s the man to teach you everything you need to know how to say in Serbo-Croatian, essentially elaboratecurse words, sonnets of swearing.
He starts small: Jebem ti sunsa (may you get f*cked by the sun). Idija pitchka ti materinu (go home to your mother’s c*nt). He kisses you. Fall down down down into the ring of fire.
The next day you are interviewed on the radio. 

The interviewer’s first question, “how does it feel to come from a country with no culture?”

Ha ha! It feels great, you philistine! How can you call a country that invented pop rocks AND pop tarts ‘without culture???’ The land of O’Keefe,Coppola, and Whitman?

A week later you’re spending most nights at his family’s apartment. He has a futon mattress on the floor of his bedroom and a clock beside itshaped like a silver football with a red face. He is a serious student and a good son.

He LOVES his Zippo lighter (spoiler alert: within a month of beginning to date you, he gives up smoking) and his Jack Daniels and his Levis, precisely rolled up at the hems. Part of what he loves aboutyou is that you are from the land of his loves.

His family has a house in a tiny hamlet in the country, Vojska, or “Soldier,” an ominous moniker in a land destined for endless strife, where you cango out and pick the chartreuse green peppers, sun-warmed tomatoes, and spiky little cucumbers for your evening salad.
And you have lunch the next day at a long table full of extended family and neighbors, a chicken running around our feet, then later getting up todance the kolo together (if you can dance the hava nagilah, you can dance the kolo). This is your fantasy of a fantasy. Roast lamb, Srpska salata, freshbread, homemade wine mixed with cold seltzer. People singing and sweating together. Dessert is kasten pire (chestnut dust – superbly delicious).

But sometimes you just can’t wait. And you don’t want to be in such close proximity to people sleeping in wedlock and a younger sister, so therefore you must gather these rosebuds while ye may, which happens to be on a dark and deserted street in central Belgrade. (aside: look up the etymology of wedlock, what a somber and scary word for marriage!)

Tips: do not choose a residential building, as people may come and go at all hours. Find a storefront that is locked and shuttered and clearly closedfor business. Look for an entryway about 4’ deep – you want to be just a little visible (ie, not an entryway where someone else might come lookingfor some al fresco privacy), but neither a very shallow entryway where your licentious activity will be clearly visible. It works well if one of you is wearing a long flowing Victorian overcoat (think French Lieutenant’s Woman), ideally with a hood.

Dragan braces himself against the door. You’re not wearing any underwear, so that’s good. His strong and tender hands slide your close fitting,stretchy knit skirt slowly and sinuously and seductively up above your hips and he has his way with you.

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Dolly Lassiter is a filmmaker and writer.  She has taught film production, directing for the camera, storytelling, and led workshops with students and faculty at Bryn Mawr College, Hunter College, and Cornell University.  She was a Hepburn Fellow for film and video at Bryn Mawr College. Dolly works as the chief digital officer for a small nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness in NYC.  She co-founded an online video company dedicated to making it easier for all families to eat more healthily and sustainably. Dolly was a Producer and Correspondent for the PBS news program “Need to Know.”  She is currently co-directing a film on bacteria and our overuse of antibiotics. Dolly leads a long-running meditation class for adults with mental health issues at St. Francis Friends of the Poor and, formerly, with women veterans who survived military sexual trauma at the VA Hospital. Dolly is the author of JOY(reversed), a weird little multimedia meditation book for beginners with super-short videos, audio clips, photos and other resources, (written under the pseudonym Sarah Shine).  She writes about meditation and daily life at micromeditation.org. Dolly is also a pseudonym. She lives with her partner and two kids in leafy Park Slope, Brooklyn.

I Should Tell You

BY ERIN KHAR

This piece is part of the Relationship Issue. Read more here.

I met him on a Thursday. Or was it a Wednesday? It might have been my birthday. Maybe it was someone else’s. Those sorts of details, the ones I usually remember, are all unimportant. We met. And I knew he liked me. And I didn’t like him. That might be a lie. I might have liked him. That’s unimportant now. 

If I were to tell you the truth, I would tell you that I met him in Paris, on my 21st, no 22nd birthday. But, I will tell you that I don’t remember because you don’t really want the details. You want to believe that no one existed before you. You want to believe that no one, especially not him, has known the mole just below my left breast, or watched me sleep, always on the right side of the bed, with 2 pillows please, and I can’t sleep naked, I have to wear underwear because I have an irrational fear of something crawling up inside me, up between my legs when I sleep. If I were to tell you the truth, I would tell you that he knows those things about me. And that truth would burn you and you would take the fire and throw it at me. 
So, I say he didn’t matter. I don’t tell you about the snowball fight on the banks of the Seine, on a magical February night. The streetlights made the snow gold, and we slid down gilded patches of ice into each other’s arms and made confessions and declarations, as kids passing by doused us with powder, because it was Mardi Gras. Did I mention that? No, of course not. 
Instead of telling you that I loved him grandly and absolutely and savagely, I tell you that he meant nothing. And then I remain silent. I imagine that this is better for me, to be loved excessively by a man I feel nothing for. I shouldn’t say that and I won’t, but I care for you, and despise you a little too, for loving me, for knowing that you will lose me, for trying to mute that sharpness left behind in the heart he shattered. 

We sit across a table, a table marked by an ocean of time and other love, bolder love, but to you it is just a table. And you take my hand, to get my attention. Your hand is bigger than mine. Your hand is older than mine. Your hand loves more than mine. I focus on the table, the grain of the wood, the grooves, what made them, where the wood has traveled. Your hand over mine, I touch the table and try to recall where I am and who I’ve become. I say my lines, the words you want to hear. The words seem to come from someone else’s mouth. A waitress appears, and you are distracted, and I release my hand from yours.

You order dessert and I think about lying in bed under a heap of duvet, naked, with the man who broke me. It was far too cold to go outside, and we were starving. Starved from hours, maybe days, of learning the contours of every inch of our intertwined bodies. Chestnut cream and creme fraiche in a bowl, a big white ceramic bowl, swirled together, and a sprig of mint, and spoon feeding, and bliss. I had never been happier and I left the bowl on the floor next to the bed, which I would never do now. Now, I would take it to the kitchen and wash it. Then, go to the bathroom, turn on the light, and look at a stranger’s face staring back at me in the mirror. 

You’re asking me something? It shocks me a little, forces me to come back to the table and the hand and the waitress and the dessert. What am I thinking about? I should tell you that I let him in. I should tell you I wrote him long-winded love letters, exposing all parts of me. I should tell you that I waited for him to make up his mind. Did I forget to mention that he had a girlfriend when I met him? Well, he did, and I waited, and he chose me, and I was a fool. 

But, I don’t. I tell you about a story I read about bailarinas, taxi dancers, like in Sweet Charity, but in Queens. They’re mostly Dominican, paid $2 per dance. And, sometimes they get paid $40 to sit there for an hour and make small talk like they are on a date, or $500 for the night, and some of them prostitute themselves. Some of them have kids. Some of them wait for the men to leave their wives or girlfriends. And all of them are lonely. 

I talk too fast and your eyes are kind and your cheekbones high and I study your golden face and I feel guilty. I tell you about Rosa, one of the women in the story, who has been a bailarina for 14 years. She’s waiting for her life to change and she doesn’t know how she got there. And, I don’t know how I got here. 

I don’t tell you that I feel like Rosa. He didn’t pay me to dance. He paid for pieces of my heart. He paid for them with scraps of time and lovemaking and promises. I don’t tell you that I feel like Rosa now, that I pretend to be here, participating in a relationship. But, I am there still wandering in bliss and loss and ecstasy and devastation. 

I know it’s unfair to you. I am paralyzed. I resent you. 

Somewhere between the table and the dessert and the bailarinas and the check, you mention a trip to Paris. We should go to Paris together. You want to see the city through my eyes. I tell you I would love that. I tell you about The Catacombs and Place des Invalides and the many corners I unearthed in that city. This seems to please you and I’m nauseous. The years between now and then do little to protect me. I excuse myself.

There’s a line for the bathroom. A petite perky blonde woman ahead of me strikes up a conversation about how long she’s been waiting. I listen to her complaining and watch us in the mirror on the wall. She is small and light and I am tall and dark. We are both waiting. Rosa is waiting. The man at the table who loves me is waiting.
 
I waited for the man I loved to make up his mind. He did. He chose me and we left Paris and came to Los Angeles and he began doubting his decision. He should have told me, but he didn’t. I sensed it and the doubt worked like a knife, shaving off flakes of me. Slowly, or quickly, we unraveled from each other and I made him leave, because only having a part of him was far too painful. 

The petite perky blonde has finished and it’s my turn. I lock the bathroom door behind me and weep. The wound has festered long but the tears are fresh. I don’t, I can’t allow myself to linger here too long. I remember you, at the table, waiting. I look in another mirror. I don’t know how I got here. But, I know I cannot stay.

I return to you, at the table. Your hair reminds me of wheat and I soften. You take my hand. I should tell you, but I won’t that when he left, I did too. I won’t tell you that he came back and when he came back I had already disintegrated. I was so deeply entrenched in self-destruction that I couldn’t find my way back. I wanted to love him again. I wanted to go back to the midnight walks and the breathless proclamations and all the tiny discoveries that felt so big and the submission to this wave of feeling that I could not contain. I broke his heart too, and left mine there. 

I won’t tell you, but I should, that he taught me how to have a broken heart, that he taught me how to surrender, that he taught me how to be humbled by the pain of loss. I came to you broken and I don’t want to love. And, I know that when I leave you will have taught me how to love and that part of loving you is letting go, letting go of you, untethering you from my limp heart, so you can find a less broken heart who can love you back. And you might hate me for this, but I will have enough love to do it anyway. 

I take your hand from across the table. I think you already know.
 

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Erin Khar lives, loves, and writes in New York City and sometimes other cities too. She was the recipient of a 2012 Eric Hoffer Editor's Choice Prize for her story, "Last House at the End of the Street," which was published in the Best New Writing 2012 anthology. Her work has appeared many places, including  Sliver of Stone,  Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, The Manifest-Station, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Dr. Oz. The Good Life, and as a regular contributor for Ravishly. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir. When she’s not writing, she’s probably watching Beverly Hills, 90210.