I feel boys

There is this passage from the book "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood: "What I do with boys is nothing to worry about. It's normal. We go to movies, where we sit in the smoking section and neck, or we go to drive-ins and eat popcorn and neck there as well. There are rules for necking, which we ovserve: approach, push away, approach, push away. The boy's mouths taste of cigarettes and salt, their skin smells like Old Spice aftershave. ... I don't feel about these boys the way girls do in true-romance comic books. I don't sit around wondering when they'll call. I like them but I don't fall in love with them. So partly the boys are not a serious matter. But at the same time they are.

The serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don't listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theatres, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I'm tired of them it's an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual.

Only some of this has to do with sex; although some of it does. Some of the boys have cars, but others do not, and with them I go on buses, on streetcars, on the newly opened Toronto subway that is clean and uneventful and looks like a long pastel-tiled bathroom. These boys walk me home, we walk the long way around. The air smells of lilac or mown grass or burning leaves, depending on the season. We walk over the new cement footbridge, with the wollow trees arching overhead, the sound of running water from the creek beneath. We stand in the dim light coming from the lapposts on the bridge and lean back against the railing, their arms around me and mine around them. We lift each other's clothing, run our hands over each other's backbones, and I feel the backbone tensed and strung to breaking. I feel the lenght of the whole body, I touch the face, amazed. The faces of the boys change so much, they soften, open up, they ache. The body is pure energy, solidified light."

When I read this passage I understood exactly what she ment. When I sit next to a boy, not even touching him, I always feel the presence of the body, it is sort of a foreshadowing, a premonition. I feel the forms of the room and the forms of the boy in me, unconsciously. Sometimes I feel as thought the boys' bodies have a force that draws me to them. What I unconsciously feel about their bodies tells me a lot about the boys themselves. Bargayott once asked me: "Do you want him? (not going to mention any name)" and I said to him: "First I have to sit next to him and get a feeling of his body (but not really touch him) and see how he moves; only then I can truly tell you if I want him."

by valjusha