Melinda Remora

Once you start living, everyone else want to latch onto you, commensally. Remora, sucker-fish, along for the ride but not steering the ship. Eating whatever scraps they can get from the actors, the king pins, the sharks of the sea - whatever they can get as long as they don’t take (a) life themselves.

Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!

She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.

Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.

She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.

She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.

I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.

(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)

That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.

Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.