Persephone Q’s Lesbian Experience With Depression

CONTENT WARNING: EXPLICIT GRAY AREA SEX/RAPE AND CONSENSUAL SEX; HUMOROUS MOCKING OF THE MALE GAZE THAT MAY STILL BE TRIGGERING TO READERS

She writes like a man because she wants to be Ann Patchett: (whose friend told her she wrote too much about herself, so she went on journeys to write about other people). She typed in the short matter of fact way she reported when she worked as a newspaperman, like Hemingway.

She writes herself like a man because God made man in his image, but I wonder if these man’s man writers are really as well read as they pretend: did they skip all the world he created before them as if the waters did not reflect him also? And only cherry pick the parts about themselves off the dead branches of Eden’s parchment?

How do you swallow the coconut’s soured, embittered milk baked in the sun of a discontent man? Write like a woman and they call it purple because it has color, it is not black, white, sparse, bare, and of a simple morality, short in length and capable of indelicate phrasing.

“She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards,” just how he liked it. Her stomach against the mattress, her breasts a breast the dirty pillows, cleaned his sheets and his dirty underwear she washes day after day, dissatisfied in her heart.

She thinks of when they first met, their hearts, chest to chest, making themselves the being Zeus had cracked in half and wandered away in daydreams like her eyes were watching God, as her girl thoughts wandered back to Koschei, Hades, and Nero’s Sporus: a ring of Ouroboros, of men that had led her off the natural path, untuned that one fate’s string of Athena, to snap out of it, bring her back to her senses, out of the Minotaur’s lair of bullshit, back to the earth goddess whose kundalini energy had become neglected, and lied to her again and again, fallow in her belly so filled with longing:

A ring she no longer wanted his hand. A ring of Ouroboros: no start, no finish; no foreplay, no orgasm, not even a cuddle at the end, not one lover’s whisper of, “Thank you for cooking dinner. I know you had a long day.”

“Write like a woman,” their dog barks and it brings her back to her senses. Her nipples grazed against the thin fabric of her patience, growing hard, he was rubbing her, wearing her away, hollowing her out to exhaustion over a sauce pan that simmered and then died. A thunderstorm, electricity cut out, pilot light dies, directionless in life. He doesn’t know how to fly, but demands to take the lead.

Sky and he sees his desire, mistakes it for hers, not seeing where the vault of the sky is separate from the vault of the sea. He berates her for not working for his dreams as he sees only himself in her, her life like an accessory to him that must upkeep both him and her as he lives for only himself: cuckoo in lover’s nest pushes her out of her own life, dismisses her agency.

Cook and clean and have no desires and you will be free in the cage of his unrecognized genius. Give it all up for the man who would be king of nothing.

She cries, “Like a dove, two lovers that share one wing. Why won’t you do your share of the chores? Why won’t you do your share of the cooking? Why do I do all the cleaning while you sit at home all day writing your novel?”

A bat out of hell spits out of her throat, punctuating every syllable of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, locked in the tower that Jane Eyre will burn when her cousin Charlotte Brontë comes to town this month.

She crosses the Wide Sargasso and rains down curses on him like it’s the fire next time. She goes a bit too far and crosses the line she knows she can’t step back from: a runner doesn’t reverse the marathon once she crosses the finish line: a woman can only take so much.

They poked through her shirt, his male gaze looking right through her, passed, over her like the blow-up doll he dressed down:

A party, an old friend’s engagement: he asks her if what he wears would be fine to wear to the dinner: basketball shorts with a beer gut and the one ball of his he’s never touched sits neglected in the garage.

She wants something later on in the night when she lies awake. Lies again and again. He lies on top of her, she lies that she came, he goes to sleep, she gets up. She finally takes something that is his and misses every basket of pick your own apples of their first date. The ball hits the backboard and the night air is refreshing.

“Is this story dissatisfying? Is it better than him?” asks the lesbian she’s fucking in his unfulfilled fantasy. They meet at her apartment. She’s an old sorority sister pursuing her double Ds: a doctorate in medicine and psychology.

She goes back and forth in her head whether she should leave him for her or not. She wants to get married. She wants to have a wedding. Just…not with him.

Any more red bulls and she’ll throw him into the sea with all the shining unicorns her tears have drown out so she doesn’t have to believe in fairytales anymore. No more prince charmings written by rabbits in the yellow wallpaper anymore.

A crack in the earthenware plate of the chicken tangine and Persephone returns to the first spring of her regret: the galactic mass. It rumbles to bursting, screaming, “I don’t want to be his anymore.”

She cries for days and years at its loss. What did she gain from this man that always seemed to take and take? Even her mourning sickness he looked at with a perturbed look in his eye: like she was a stranger that had gotten in his way, disturbed his day by blocking the sidewalk as an oblivious tourist in the Times Square when with all contempt one must walk through it with one’s relatives visiting from Kansas. God, what an agony that is, as you’re stuck in between such people and begging your family to go anywhere else.

<“Really, it’s the worst place in the city. Literally, please! Let us go to the East Village. To the Harlem Renaissance! Anywhere, but this vomit perfumed, Coca Cola’s theme park where culture hides in the dark recesses of overpriced theatre tickets as Alexander the Great leads the Hollywood stars genocide of the great stage actors with their terrible ‘method acting’ that makes Chekhov choke in his coffin and Sarah Bernhardt burn with Ophelia’s revenge in Hamlet’s heart. Let me take you to the Vineyard so you can get a taste for raw theatre.”>

Why did he treat her emotions like an inconvenience to him? He was a writer. Shouldn’t he be sensitive? Or was he the only one allowed to feel in this relationship?

He asks her that night if they can have sex. “I can’t,” she says. She doesn’t want to. “I’ve got my Charlotte Brontë tonight.” He rolls over. She reads a few pages. She’s been trying to finish for months with no luck. Her eyes tear: the pages, her bookclub, she hasn’t gone in ages. She couldn’t keep up after he got fired from his job she picked up more hours in the Garden of Eden.

She dog-eared every page with the mark of Cain. Their dog barks. He wants to be let out. The agony of holding it in is too much for him and he shits on the floor while she’s putting on his leash.

“This is bullshit,” she thinks. It’s his dog. He got it after they moved in with one another. He didn’t ask, didn’t tell her. She came home one day and he was just there wagging his tail at her. He’s never taken him out once since he got him.

When’s the last time he took her out somewhere nice? She’s feels like she could burst any moment: she’s so fucking pissed off as she scrubs the floor at 2am. His dog’s already gone back to sleep. She’s too tired and too sweet to blame him.

Months go by; a year goes by: he still doesn’t have a job. Still no novel. Still forgets their anniversary.

One of her girlfriends come over. He stares at her chest. She tells him later that he tried to come on to her while she was in the bathroom. She tells her she loves her as she’s fingering her in the bed, in her freshly laundered sheets. She’s finally able to come to her senses: with this woman her legs shake.

A breast in his hand is not the same as two breast an’ her bush: it feels so much better than the next man she’s with.

She wanders further and further from that goddess’ path; her eye wanders into the tangled web of Arachne’s mahogany curls cascading over her exposed shoulders, like flowing water out of Aphrodite’s pussy: ripped, white jeans unbuttoned: pink ribbon in her hair on Christmas morning: blossoming galaxies like fresh scented stars’ supernova burst and fade with lips tinted in love’s white hot rouge, sugarplum swollen lips from kissing. Fading with the afterglow, the miracle of love is born anew in her heart.

Her old boyfriend is tearing up a laptop, cracking it over a table. She’s gone and his novel has gone straight to Kindle.

A galactic jackass, a James Joyce sharting out the Odyssey: his poetry so terrible it reads like a fart joke. He’s a fucking clown. Yes, her boyfriend, but also Joyce is a jackass and half of Ulysses is about his wife’s flatulence. Banned or not, it’s a bore and I recommend sticking to Tolstoy.

He loses his mind over the stupidest shit. He could have thrown away his rough draft like Stephen King told him to, but he stuck with it until the end. She left him.

They sip hot chocolate by the fire. It is warm like the laugh in her eyes. Her eyes burn with an unbridled, passionate mischief. They burn their lips in a hot kiss.

She’s won the race: the long game, the long con on man’s short cummings. She’s got the girl he’s lost.

The dog wags his tail and they are happy as they walk him down Hudson River Park. Ocean breeze, Summer has no more cares in life. Little babies growing mass in ultrasound image of sperm donor, she is filled with Joy to have left him.