Metalworking I

I'd like to describe Jesse for you--his excellent forehead and distinguished face--and the meaning he has brought to my life. I could tell you the stories that make up the very marrow of our marriage: the ways he's helped me know myself, his devoted love of soul music, or the way that emotional subtlety and outrageous humor reside together so comfortably in him. I could tell you that our love both draws me out and steadies me on the beam. Or I could simply recount the time Jesse, not long after first meeting my mother, suddenly broke the reserve between them by dancing ahead of us across a busy street in Manhattan and singing, "I've got the rhythm of the city in me!" But then I'd be trying to convince you of something that is mine alone to know. There is no way to explain why someone walks into a room and awakens your most primal dreams.


In high school, I took a jewelry and metalworking class. I learned to use a blow torch and used most of the semester making copper bracelets and arm bands. The copper would come to me in square sheets that gleamed beautiful metallic shades and the edges were always precise and sharp, until I sawed circles and rounds into them, cutting amateurish designs fervently and haphazardly.
If we had extra cash, we could request to order sterling or even gold-plated silver for our projects, but the copper was cheap and abundant, provided for each student at no extra cost. I held each sheet I received by the machine-punched edges with reverence, because a single fingerprint ruined the sheen so easily— copper of course, patinas. Our Statue of Liberty is a fine example of this chemistry lesson. It is a substance in constant fluctuation, and I could only keep it pure and gleaming for so long. Fingerprints, the greasy sworls, would cloud and darken the brilliant amber metal quickly until it became dull brown in a matter of days.
The chemical process of a copper patina is a form of oxidization, by which the surface of the metal reacts with air and causes corrosion. The moment my short fingers touched it, it decayed, even as I cut it into thin armbands, rings, and pendants, attempting to fashion objects of beauty in a clumsy manner.
Senselessly, I saved every scrap of the copper sheets I had. I melted them with the blowtorch when I was alone in the workshop and the blobby shapes they cooled into became tokens I kept in my desk drawer for years. The bright vibrant and reflective stuff fascinates me, still. A house down the street from my parents has a copper awning over a large portrait window. When the house was built the copper shone brilliantly and was blinding when the sun set against it. Now, maybe 15 years or so later, the awning is green and dull, with large streaky white stains that run down the caulked edges of the window and occasionally across the glass. A gorgeous metal, a fast and faulty decay, and then a green and white mess—how quickly beauty fades.


I’m two months into a new relationship. I met a man on the internet. An internet dating site at that. This, I’ve come to learn, appears to be the utter pariah of ways to meet a partner amongst my friends and family. Not only do people consistently like to look shocked and then confused, asking how I could trust the internet and what if he would have been John Wayne Gacy… but apparently they also like to cuckold the whole notion of meeting someone anywhere other than a set number of places—school, work, a bar, the grocery store, etc (bars, good God, bars of all places seem to be more acceptable). My 82-year-old grandmother is particularly confused—in her opinion the whole operation is akin to a fortune teller conjuring up a blind date for me, replete with crystal ball and smoke screen. Maybe it does seem a little suspicious, that we should have started talking purely based on a whim decision on both of parts to initiate a stream of e-mails knowing nothing other than what we wrote in a form-based profile, but nonetheless… it seems to have worked.
It’s strange and wonderful, and totally, inevitably frightening. I am scared witless. The first time we met in person I had electric currents running all over my body like so many eels, alive and twisting in my blood.

The first time we slept together was violent and cataclismic. My whole body shook violently; I was hyperventilating. I clamped down on him with such force I thought I sure must have been hurting him, and indeed he gasped breathlessly, but he didn’t stop.

And then something unbelievable happened. Pictures sharp as photographs or oil paintings, photorealistic details, colors that were hot and bright, flipped in my mind like a rolodex possessed. The wood in the fire, tattooed with our initials in some goofy and childish proclamation of my love. His eyes, laughing at me as I stumbled awkwardly onto the pier. His hands, flexing and clenching, tendons rolling like fog over mountains. His arms reaching around me in the middle of the night and pulling me towards him, hard. His cheeks, his hair. Then the fire, then him, then the fire again, flames hot and leaping into the October night.

I could hardly bear to look at him, my heart became so full of fragments of images, and when we came against each other in a heavy dual whimper, I could have burst with the effort to not say it. I love him, I love him, I love him, and he is the shining sun, and he is the damp earth, and he is the end of all straight lines, the beginning of all perfect circles, his heart and hands are the only things I desire, and later I put my head against his chest and felt his ribcage vibrate as he laughed, and I could have crawled into that empty space and lived forever.

I want every morning to start like that morning I woke up next to him. I want every night to end like the night we slept together, exhausted from the furious way we join and separate, magnets polarized and then not, as simple as light switching on and off and on and off and on and on and on.

I want him desperately, in ways I’ve never wanted anyone before. I want him, not anyone else, not a single thing other than what he is. I suppose part of the heaviness comes from that singular fact—it is him, not what he represents. Not the love that he could give, not the security that having him around offers me. It’s him.

The whole world is sharp and bright, and the thing I am most scared of is degredation. I'm scared that like all things, something will cause this to fade. The intensity, the newness, the reality of him and me and the deep, cavernous feelings that rise up like magma at inopportune moments that cause me to forget to breathe...


In any case, he is still so new and brilliant, bright gorgeous copper flashing in the sun, that I am blind, all the time.