My Crush Who Looks Like Me Hasn't Texted Me Back
JULIE CHEN
1.
My Russian art teacher de-poses, takes one hand out of her scarlet, permed hair, the other off her hip, to cross her arms and reprimand me for failing to sketch her chest. I’d left a blank spot. She grabs the pencil and with a single, lateral slice below the armpits — there. The chest that nursed three children, that glares lumpy and misshapen under sequined sweaters, at eye level to my preteen self sitting in the same metal folding chair every Tuesday while my brother’s at piano. The chest, singular, with sibilants instead of plosives, smooth curves instead of 80085.
I’m good at still lifes, but I can’t draw figures, even when my teacher poses for me like a bowl of fruit. I hesitate, I use too many lines when a single one would suffice. The resulting image looks like it’s made of only elbows. At least my body is so, elbowing its way through crowded cafeterias, brain creasing at sharp joints: you love me, you hate me. But not all elbows are excruciating.
Elbow macaroni and cheese is soft and wet.
The way to draw a figure is to let the pencil fall from the crown of the head to the feet in spare, continuous curves. Afterward, cut in the chest, elbows, and hips as perpendicular dashes.
2.
I think tattoos are corny when most people think they’re cool. This makes me cool. I have a tattoo. It’s a chrysanthemum, because I’m Asian, from Google Images. I emailed the picture to a tattoo artist offering 50% off on Groupon. She traced it onto my shoulder, then drilled it into my skin. My bones rattled like scaffolding in an earthquake.
I liked it, I was excited, I concealed myself under sleeves during summers home, feeling that same rush from when I’d win hide-and-seek as a child, by curling like a dead centipede inside the washing machine. I finally came clean to my mom who told me, “I gave birth to you with pure skin.” I felt more excited by the explicit transgression, I became bored, I felt embarrassed, by this symbol of a time when I was young (still am) and believed my body could become special, inscribed with a copy of a copy of a copy.
3.
If we touch each other’s elbows we become mirrors. Palms up, forearms parallel, dry skin, the wenis, not a real, Latin medical term, I’ve learned. I can’t look you in the eye, just stare at your philtrum.
A splatter of moles on my left cheek. Circle tattoos on your shoulder, how original for us twentysomethings sitting on a mattress far apart, then closer. A dried flower blooms at the bottom of my stomach. Its tea is the color of honey, or pee. I like to imagine eyelashes entangling during kisses, though mine are too short. I’ve plucked them out one by one, asking binary questions. I can guess the reasons I do things and they aren’t pretty.
The smoothest part of the body might be the back of the ear, because it’s juxtaposed with the most vaginal part of the body, the ear with its layered folds. All I want to do tonight is draw a body covered in ears, a body that will listen to what it tells itself.
1.
My Russian art teacher de-poses, takes one hand out of her scarlet, permed hair, the other off her hip, to cross her arms and reprimand me for failing to sketch her chest. I’d left a blank spot. She grabs the pencil and with a single, lateral slice below the armpits — there. The chest that nursed three children, that glares lumpy and misshapen under sequined sweaters, at eye level to my preteen self sitting in the same metal folding chair every Tuesday while my brother’s at piano. The chest, singular, with sibilants instead of plosives, smooth curves instead of 80085.
I’m good at still lifes, but I can’t draw figures, even when my teacher poses for me like a bowl of fruit. I hesitate, I use too many lines when a single one would suffice. The resulting image looks like it’s made of only elbows. At least my body is so, elbowing its way through crowded cafeterias, brain creasing at sharp joints: you love me, you hate me. But not all elbows are excruciating.
Elbow macaroni and cheese is soft and wet.
The way to draw a figure is to let the pencil fall from the crown of the head to the feet in spare, continuous curves. Afterward, cut in the chest, elbows, and hips as perpendicular dashes.
2.
I think tattoos are corny when most people think they’re cool. This makes me cool. I have a tattoo. It’s a chrysanthemum, because I’m Asian, from Google Images. I emailed the picture to a tattoo artist offering 50% off on Groupon. She traced it onto my shoulder, then drilled it into my skin. My bones rattled like scaffolding in an earthquake.
I liked it, I was excited, I concealed myself under sleeves during summers home, feeling that same rush from when I’d win hide-and-seek as a child, by curling like a dead centipede inside the washing machine. I finally came clean to my mom who told me, “I gave birth to you with pure skin.” I felt more excited by the explicit transgression, I became bored, I felt embarrassed, by this symbol of a time when I was young (still am) and believed my body could become special, inscribed with a copy of a copy of a copy.
3.
If we touch each other’s elbows we become mirrors. Palms up, forearms parallel, dry skin, the wenis, not a real, Latin medical term, I’ve learned. I can’t look you in the eye, just stare at your philtrum.
A splatter of moles on my left cheek. Circle tattoos on your shoulder, how original for us twentysomethings sitting on a mattress far apart, then closer. A dried flower blooms at the bottom of my stomach. Its tea is the color of honey, or pee. I like to imagine eyelashes entangling during kisses, though mine are too short. I’ve plucked them out one by one, asking binary questions. I can guess the reasons I do things and they aren’t pretty.
The smoothest part of the body might be the back of the ear, because it’s juxtaposed with the most vaginal part of the body, the ear with its layered folds. All I want to do tonight is draw a body covered in ears, a body that will listen to what it tells itself.
To me, "kaleidoscope" (v) means to playfully shift your perspective.
/// Julie Chen (she/her) is a writer from San Jose, CA, living in Brooklyn. She was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Fellow researching a creative nonfiction project on the Chinese community in Prato, Italy. Her poetry and prose is forthcoming/published in Hobart, CHEAP POP, The Shanghai Literary Review, IDK Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She also makes music as Slime Queen. Her website is juliechen.neocities.org. |