"Do you know what they do to people who can't walk?"
--Dustin Hoffman
While I still have the ability to tell you about absence, one arm naturalized into a broken wing position, held in against the chest, spine tilting my larger breast to the right when I do not consciously fight my posture, my pelvic ligaments sliced by this American Baghdad butcher, who did for invasive orthopedic surgery what Henry Ford did for automobile assembly, so that my legs which I once long ago could command to motion, control through my own methods, on my knees, grabbing arms, standing, then pivoting carefully, hoisting myself, now dangle in useless, delicate constrictions of pain, echoes of foot fusions I should have fought, made my father annihilate me, as he no doubt wished, as sinister in the height of his strength as Kevin Spacey, when Kevin still had the intangible qualities of a box office draw, a zenith created by what? Talent? A slow dance with Helen Hunt, perhaps, in the usual mawkish morality tale?
In American Beauty, Spacey might have been an impersonation of my father, a slightly better constructed version, and thus worthy of my arms around his neck, inside the bubble of our own slow dance, lost into the unity and vulnerability of the other, the silent dialogic I wanted with this man, circumstances not sparing me from the observation of the fact that he had it with Gail, and you did too, as well, at your senior prom? Or at a wedding buffet? His arms encircled around your waist, in rhythmic accord. When I tried to believe, I bargained with your despicable icon to allow me to know this fullness of womanhood, as is proper, and if he does exist, I'd kill him, for he denied me this, but once, when John snuck up behind me in his winter jacket so I could feel how cold his hands were, but all I knew was the blood pounding in my temples, the knowledge in my soul that such a love with his arms around me, his children in utero, was the fulfillment, completion, and the loss that now defines the end of my life, tears still welling in my eyes, never to be held by the right one, the man who could see and read me, wrap his arms around me, insist we have a proper lunch as husband, as wife, dancing to the marvelous climax of the falsetto in the transition of Taupin's expression of passion from "we all fall in love, sometimes" to the somber melancholy of Curtains, I cannot even construct a false memory, never knowing your binary freedom, the right lover's hand cupping my face. There is no pill for this empty space, never shall be.
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