Blue Light | Cortez
My phone can hear all my thoughts and feel all my fears, and it has noticed that I haven’t gotten my period this month. In response, it’s feeding me videos and infographics germaine to new mommies. I have been learning a lot. Newborns don’t have kneecaps, for instance. It takes three weeks for infants to begin producing tears. Babies have no sense of their own identity until they are six months old. Before that, they think they are their mothers.
***
My roommate has been delivering me a lecture on ethical non-monogamy all morning. I offered that my boyfriend and I practice something more akin to un-ethical non-monogamy, in that it is quietly understood that we sleep with other people, but it isn’t something we feel the need to parade in each other’s faces. Our arrangement is simple and it works for both of us. We see each other on Thursdays. We have a sushi place and a cocktail bar. His apartment has a doorman and tiny jets in the walls that spit out air freshener, so the entire building shares a uniform lemon scent. I like that he never has anything in his refrigerator. I like that I get complimentary coffee in the lobby when I leave in the mornings, I like that he sends me a car. I do not like returning home to my nightmare roommate, who believes I am the enemy of all things progressive and ethical.
I work for a music discovery platform. I write blurbs for bad indie bands. Last week, I referred to an electric baseline in every single assignment of mine and nobody got mad at me. My roommate is a copy editor for an athleisure brand. We both work from home at our kitchen table. The flexibility in our schedules gives my roommate a plethora of daily opportunities to explain to me how her sexual exploits with men are actually queer, and to tell me how I’m a bad person. This morning, she’s fixated on the latter.
“I just don’t think this is healthy or sustainable at all for you. It’s important to be in dialogue with your metamours.”
The term metamour, she informed me last week, refers to your partner’s partners. This drawing up of contracts and memorization of vocabulary words represents, to me, the death of eroticism.
“They’re all probably 18. We would have nothing in common.”
My roommate has to log on to her morning meeting, so I am spared the sermon on the inherent power discrepancy of age gap relationships.
***
My favorite thing my phone has fed me has been the online account of a Brooklyn collective of hot, tattooed doulas. They all have multiple children, but manage to stay exceptionally thin. On top of motherhood and birthwork, many of them also nurture artistic practices like painting and embroidery. Between professional photographs of sandy-haired women giving birth in water, I can watch videos of the beautiful doulas offering encouraging mantras.
You are magic mama!
They say to me.
Your body makes miracles, mama!
***
My roommate is one of those ex-Christians who is now over-correcting. Immediately after her engagement to her college boyfriend dissolved, she started devouring thinkpieces and zines on polyamory. She has a rolodex of boyfriends now, various bartenders and line cooks who go home at the end of the night to their cool, open-minded live-in girlfriends. Together they use safe words, fill out consent checklists, attend ticketed sex parties in basements. Only someone with biblical training could manage a sexual awakening so oriented around rules and reading.
She reports that she’s never felt more “held” or “in community.” But every night, when one of her seven boyfriends leaves, she sleeps alone. Comforted, I assume, by her really good boundaries.
Tonight, in bed, I’m worried I can feel the muscles in my abdomen slackening and separating, making room for new life. I wonder if my boyfriend and I will adopt a similar policy on pregnancy as we do monogamy. My stomach will expand, and then it will deflate, and he will regard the change neutrally. If I’m lucky, perhaps our child’s high school graduation will fall on a Thursday.
***
I fight the urge to inject some real truths into my morning talks with my roommate.
“I worry that my bisexual identity is erased by my hetero-presenting relationships,” she says, too flippantly not to be rehearsed.
Most people, throughout the course of human history, have lived short, profoundly violent lives, I imagine saying back to her.
“You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but many of my male partners are extremely feminine in energy.”
Everything outside will soon be on fire, but it is igniting so slowly that by the time we all catch on there will be nowhere to hide, I’d like to reply.
I actually had a girlfriend for all of high school. I’m waiting for a strategic time to deploy this fact on my roommate. The cognitive dissonance on her face will be delicious. You are gay?? But being gay is good!! And you are evil!!
***
I’m writing a review for an album I haven’t listened to. I learned early on that I could get away with rephrasing the bands’ press emails, listening to a single or two, and then plucking a few words from my word bank– ethereal, ambient, ultra-bright, unflinching– and scattering them at random.
I pass my laptop to my roommate for proofreading. She is insufferable, but a highly skilled editor.
“I definitely like it, I just think it needs more in the middle.”
She types furiously. I brainstorm events likelier than childproofing my boyfriend’s luxury apartment, where everything is rigid and mirrored and steel. Christ’s second coming. Universal healthcare. Robots taking our jobs. My roommate and I establishing a polyamorous homestead upstate. Me, her, the baby, and seven semi-present father figures in the Catskills chopping wood and picking berries and raising a child with big ideas on land stewardship and unconventional family structures. Acid begins to rise in my throat.
She passes me her edit.
This experimental Brooklyn duo is one to watch. In their new album, {x’s} synth coexists with {x’s} guitar– think analog vs. digital– past vs. present– folk meets trip-hop– to create the band’s signature, atmospheric sound. A closer listen to {x’s} dreamy vocals reveals a poignant narrative on the culture of isolation in the online age. The album is a love letter to nostalgia. Very thorough, for an album she also has not heard.
The rest of my duties won’t resume until after lunch. I hover my mouse over the document intermittently, so I still show up as “active” on my boss’s end.
I stare into the blue light. I think I really shouldn’t be calling him my boyfriend. It’s just been a little while since I’ve seen anyone else. The word keeps leaking out.
Across the table, my roommate is working on the subject line of her company’s new size inclusive collection. She’s debating between:
Made to move, for everyBODY
or every-body
or everybody,
or EVERYbody
“Two words: every body.” I offer.
“You’re a genius.”
***
A beautiful doula on my feed, bloated with life, sits on an antique, velvet armchair. Light pools and snake plants dangle from loft windows behind her head. Don’t feel guilty for resting today. Whether or not you know it, you are working hard. You are doing the most important job in the world right now, mama.
I am in my bedroom. What is my mid-twenties wisdom? My girl self might like to know. What I’d tell her: it will always just be you in your bedroom, wondering how things will turn out.
***
Over Thai, I ask my roommate, innocuously, if she would ever consider having children. “I mean, I do think it’s somewhat irresponsible, given the climate.”
A pious, canned response I could’ve predicted.
“But also– I know this will sound silly– but, I’ve been doing so much work disentangling from how I was raised, and I feel like I’m mothering myself right now. Like, how am I supposed to guide anyone else in the world, when I feel like I’ve just been born?”
I begin to see clearly how it will all happen, everything staying the same. I will angle the bassinet in my room so that it doesn’t bump up against the radiator. The neighbors will receive a nightly symphony– my roommate’s adventurous roleplay scenes, my offspring’s primal wail.
Across town, my boyfriend will sleep peacefully. Should he stir, he will take a few steps, appreciate his Manhattan view. So still in the middle of the night. He will see his reflection in the window, his image imposed over the landscape. He will consider jerking off. Spreading his seed across the skyline.
More about the author:
Cortez is a poet and short fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. She is an MFA candidate at Stony Brook University and her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail.