commander

• I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that.
• The house is what he holds. To haveand to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow.
• Even the Commander is subject to its [her bodies] whims
• a museum guard/ a midwestern bank president/ a vodka ad
• He looks over us as if taking inventory
• as if i’m a kitten in a window. one he’s looking at but doesnt intend to buy
• It’s a bargaining session, things are about to be exchanged
• this is freedom. an eyeblink of it
• I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands
• How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation
• I didn’t want to sound begging, but I wanted what I could get
• It wasn’t the first time he gave evidence of being truly ignorant of the conditions under which we lived.
• The sexual act, although he performed it  in a perfunctory way, must have been largely unconscious for him, like scratching himself
• He was no longer a thing to me, that was the problem
• To him I’m not just a boat without cargo, a chalice with no wine in it, an oven- to be crude- minus the bun. To him I am not merely empty
• He’s not saying bitch in his head. In fact he’s positively daddyish
• I’m just and ordinary kind of guy
• Women can’t add… for them one and one and one and one don’t equal four
• when he looks up at me it’s at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience.
• Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
• He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world
• like a bracelet, where the tattoo is, a Braille he can read, a cattle-brand. It means ownership
• He is not a monster, I think.
• already withdrawing from me, distancing himself
• I am above him, looking down; he is shrinking