This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Here’s a peek behind the curtain: The day that you’re hearing this episode is not contemporaneous to when it was written. On The Slowdown, we work ahead a bit, both so there’s time to edit scripts and mix audio, and also so there’s time for the team to step away from our desks.

When you hear this episode, I’ll be in Alaska. I’m going for a quick trip to join my friend Rhoni for the tail end of her summer in Homer, where she’s been on a writer’s residency. The day I fly out is my thirtieth birthday.

I’ve been feeling anxious about turning thirty. Lots of my peers are having big parties or planning international group trips, or, I don’t know, getting married. I’ve been in a difficult season of my life the last few years. The idea of actually pulling people together to celebrate the current reality makes me want to crawl under this desk and pretend I don’t exist.

I worry about not being desirable enough, whatever that means. It sounds absurd when I write it down — yet in the dark, insecure parts of myself, I worry that if I am not the object of someone else’s desire, that I will never be happy.

But the version of myself I love most is not the one refining her own beauty — it is the one who is going out into the world and seeking beauty. Sharing beauty in this big dumb adventure that is life. So I said yes to Alaska.

Today’s poem shows us how our desires are about both projection and possession.

Story of My Life
by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Two desires, like twins I tend to:

the one to be
and the other to hold.

The first looks like envy,
when the brunette in cowboy boots cycles past
smoking a cigarette, her hair in a French braid.

She isn’t sweating
like I am, through my shirt for the third time today.

She doesn’t hurry.

Or later, in the park
where I am killing time, when the woman
on rollerblades shows me the shape

of what I sit on the edge of,
the same cobbled circle as always.

Looping and looping in a short dress.
Pixie cut. Perfect port de bras.
Her own music in her ears.

I read a book about a woman
who loves a man.
I relate. My own music.

Now the other desire cries out,
as though I can only neglect him for so long—

And there he is, this time
taking the form of a skateboarder
so lithe and dark-haired it hurts to look at him

though of course I can’t stop,
knowing I’ll have to go eventually, or he will,
and then I may never again have the pleasure

of looking at him. The pain I mean.
In my teeth.

I think of an Elaine Scarry line—
“The first demand of beauty is to keep looking”—

but when I go to look it up later, it’s not there.

In fact, I wrote it, in my notes
on the book where I thought I’d find it,
the one about beauty and justice and error.

He’s not very good.
At skateboarding, I mean:

he can’t quite clear
the base of the statue that’s drawn him here
and keeps tumbling away from his board.

Scarry says the first demand of beauty is replication.

I’ve already written this poem,
in this park, though it was a different statue
and a different man.

Is desire without pain possible?
Is desire possible without pain?

Really, I want to know. 
I want to stop writing this poem.
I want him to say Yes.

And how graceful she is, avoiding his orphaned board
as it rolls her way.

“Story of My Life” by Jameson Fitzpatrick from PRICKS IN THE TAPESTRY © 2020 Jameson Fitzpatrick. Used by permission of the poet.