Dead to The World

but boys aren't into spina bifida -- a truism from a child recur to a pretty boy ensemble

It is a rare event I wake with him standing over me at the foot of the bed, but I was that oblivious Friday morning, neither hearing the phone nor his entry as he moved to my left, tapping me tentatively, warning me about the necessity of tactile contact, something he believes in rather too literally. While speaking with the case manager about supplies, he forgot himself and caressed my stomach, bare of my aunt’s 1960’s rayon blue evening blouse, in an erotic and rather intimate gesture which leaves little to the imagination, and caught himself while looking at the victorious smile on my face. I won. This is our most vulnerable congruence with each other, that phrase about fucking me to death not beyond the realm of possibility. Any other woman would have seized this opportunity, particularly in light of the battle we waged with each other toward the beginning of May about the physical boundaries already transgressed, but the work week had been wearying, holding well over a cup of urine in my bladder which would have gushed in a not easily removed transference, so I kept the irony to myself, merely chortling you are going to meet mio padre sooner than anticipated. And a part of inner conscious cynicism  says okay so what? You’ve proven black men do have different standards, according to the norms of social intelligence on such issues, your cousin was right. He cares about you. Possibly you don’t care any more after ten weeks of ying yang.But I do care, to the extent humanly possible beyond my scar tissue, and in such moments as these, his masculinity is desirable, the major stumbling block being that we’re caught in a Christian allegory of unintended lust restrained by the virtue of economics. He may be mine, as long as the welfare noose remains inviolate. Is there anything beneath the surface of this state funded contract, should it be removed? Does everything have to be recast as a rhetorical construct? (Yes)

There is, as well, the simple aspect of a woman’s wistfulness to have to learn what its like to be desirable as a woman first to an ambulatory male, her last cognitive worthwhile years on the wane. My marital affairs don’t count here, as these were simply the dowager’s circumventing life-long rejections, the same rejections the daughter of the black alpha surgeon in Code Black understands, playing a character afflicted with spina bifida. I never had these peer experiences on serial television when I was coming of age. Ironside, just as my martial affairs, doesn’t count. Burr deployed a gimmick to extend his viability as Perry Mason.