Hot:

–––––––––– 1998 ––––––––––––

Her lips were pouty in a way that melted me. She was starting to cry. “I don’t know you,” she said.

“You know me. We talk all the time.” I wiped her cheek.

“We talk about art, we talk about philosophy, we talk about books, we talk about me. We don’t talk about you. I don’t know you.”

“That is me. All those things, they’re me.”

“Oh, your books and the music, that’s you? That’s not you.” Her Russian accent came out when she said her Os a certain way.

She trembled in my arms. I was holding her but she was alone. I might as well have been a blanket, a shirt. I tried to console her.

I told her a story from my childhood about playing Kick the Can with my friends. I thought it would help her to know me better. It didn’t work. She was still crying.

What did she want from me? I had worked at this. I had read, analyzed, I had absorbed and I had studied – all so I could be a better man, a better person. Didn’t she see that?

What more could I offer her? What more did she want from me?

I had told her stories from when I was a kid. Embarrassing moments, triumphant moments, tragic moments, whatever I could remember that would help her see the arc of my life. To see what I had become.

“Why are you still crying? What’s wrong?”

“The other night, when we were in the city, and we were just walking around in the fog. You talked to me. I was so happy. It felt like you were letting me in.”

We had left the show and just started walking. We talked all the way across town. I had told her stories, just like the ones I was telling her now. What had changed? I wasn’t keeping any secrets. What did she want to know? What was so revealing in that fog around us?

“It’s not what you tell me. It’s not the stories. Sometimes you let me in. But most of the time you keep me out.”

I didn’t understand. I had shared everything with her. When we were in bed she was the air, the room, the world. How had I kept her out?

I never knew. That was the last night we spent together.

–––––––––– 2009 ––––––––––––

She was convulsing, hyperventilating, sobbing. She had been raped – more than once.

For years she had tried to deal with it, handle it, control it. Therapy, meds, counseling, a new boyfriend who could help her in ways no other man could. She had worked at it, worked away at it.

A hit of medical grade marijuana, and a childish pseudo-argument between me and her boyfriend – two men she was on the verge of trusting – triggered something in her.

All of the anger, frustration, horror, guilt and despair roiling inside her, erupted and covered everything with ash.

We stared, caught ourselves staring, but we couldn’t stop. She screamed, folded into herself, exploded and collapsed.

Like the planes disappearing into the towers, the Michael-Bay-explosions that followed, life had come too close to art at that moment. I wasn’t there. I was watching this on a screen. I was pulling away from it, trying to gain distance.

But I didn’t want to pull away. I wanted to hold her and tell her it would be okay. But it wasn’t my place to do that. The man she loved was right beside her. But I knew, instinctively, even if I was the only one there, the last thing that would help her would be my embrace. That much I knew.

She began to describe the physical memory of it. “I can still feel him; his shape; the way he took up space inside me. That won’t ever go away.”

I remembered. With each word she said, I remembered what he felt like, the way he took up space inside me.

I was 5. He was in college. Very few people in Korea got into college in 1972. His family was proud of him. My parents told me to look up to him.

His father had taken off his shoes. Then he took off his socks. He rubbed his right foot, below the ankle, just above the bullet hole that had healed into a dark crater.

The good son peeked out from his room. He smiled and motioned for me to come. He told me it was a secret when he raised a finger to his lips.

I walked over. I was smiling too.

“We’re going to play a really fun game,” he said as he locked the door.

She wept. She remembered out loud. The images of my own molestation, my own rape,  was playing to her vivid narration.

But I no longer felt it the way she did. All I had left of my memories was the ash. Everything else had been burned away. But like the frozen shadows of Hiroshima, they remained in the place where the person once stood.

Two days after we witnessed her painful, hideous, shocking, healing and miraculous moment of self-awareness, her boyfriend – my best friend – sent me this:

Just a thought: molestation is the ultimate act of objectification, even if you weren’t aware – especially if you weren’t aware. So you were objectified as a child – sexually – in a world that saw you as invisible. You are taught this lesson: when people objectify you sexually, you become visible. Unfortunately, you are living in a culture that sees the Asian man as asexual. You go through adolescence and your twenties seeking sexual attention. It isn’t just validation. It’s the only time you feel that you really exist. The early childhood sexual trauma further complicates this by making you very particular about who you let into your personal space – welcome to a psychological conflict.

I’m sure your big brain has already completely, or partially, figured this out. If so, consider this my attempt to understand my friend. If not, smoke some stems, think about it, and get back to me.

I had never let her in. I had never let anyone in. She had sensed it, had felt it. She knew it then.

I turned 39 nearly four years ago. And for three of those years I sat alone and took apart my mind – one regret at a time. I examined each one carefully. Then I gathered up all the parts and put them back together. On Friday night, I found a leftover piece.

I’m looking at it, trying to figure out where it fits. But I wonder now, if it’s a piece at all. I wonder if it ever belonged.

Like a bullet in your foot. It heals into a dark crater over time. If you take out the bullet, you have to heal again.

But the bullet is gone.