The L to Brooklyn

It was like a fever. The ways in which risk ran currents under my skin was the way in which I  was being pulled by the city, submitting to its undying pulsating instruction. Faster, faster,  faster, it coursed in my veins. The eternal homosexual pulled by the city night. My risk was  historic, the danger wanted and expected and inevitable, not just by me here and now but  because the freaks and perverts before me had mapped the city with their lust, with their fever,  with the urgency to find what or who they couldn’t tell you. The way of so many deviants  before me, I made my way through the night, the staccato of my heels an address to the queer  lust that came alive at night, this night and every other night.  

** 

Dark light dark light slivers of light shifting, reshaping what we see and what is hidden, the  night denying the authority of our vision, obscuring and revealing just enough for us to move  into the poetry of the encounter, uneven verses emergent in our unknowing.  

**

In a way, it all seemed aligned. I had been thinking about Anne Dufourmantelle’s writing,  engaging risk as a crucial way of living. That was also how she died. She was trying to save  two children trapped in a current in the ocean at the French Riviera and drowned. I don’t want  to Save the Children. I was going to a complete stranger’s apartment, thinking this. The  meaning, in any case, seemed to be to experience what takes you out of familiarity, expands  the boundaries of you and provides an unexpected rupture of linearity.  

** 

Silently, you looked for permission as I stepped over the threshold. I gave an almost  imperceptible nod before I even got a proper look at you. I still remember you mainly in  fragments, face near mine, nails tracing up your arms, to your chest, your hand sliding up my  neck, flashes of memory, flashes of flesh. The firm hold as you pinned me against the door to  kiss me for the first time. I can still feel that door on my back. I remember your eyes, dark and  focused on my face as you reached down and gestured for me to move my legs apart. I  obliged immediately, noting in passing my breath becoming shallow as your fingers traced the  inner line of my thighs, inching up. You waited again. When I uttered a breathless “please,”  your thumb grazed lightly the lace of my underwear between my legs. A whispered “oh, fuck”  escaped you as you felt my wetness through the thin layer of material. You moved your thumb  on the fabric along my cunt, and I tried to move into you as I craved to feel your skin against  mine. You refused to quicken the pace. One of the first things I learned that evening was that  you were not going to give in so easily.  

**

I still remember you mainly in fragments. It only ever made sense in fragments. When I tried  to put them together into some sort of a coherent narrative, the meaning escaped me, got too  twisted, or one episode suddenly didn’t fit and I had to start from scratch. One should be able to tell their story as it happened but also as they please. Maybe not all of it was ever  necessary. And then it was possible that some of the things never really happened, but I  decided they did. I could be quite a fantasist and then forget about it. As far as I was  concerned some of the things I said I had done but hadn’t, I actually experienced, for they  became the very fabric of me. Who knows how much of this story actually happened. 

In school, I had to remember so many paintings’ names, dates, and where they were held, that  sometimes I thought I had the memories of seeing them in person. One time, when we still  spoke, I asked my mother whether the death of a neighbour I thought had happened was real  or a dream. 

And really, once the photos were gone, the memories became blurry, too. The chronology was  also unclear. I never looked at the photos when they were there, never remembered their  existence. But once they were lost, an unexpected void opened up. It wasn’t nostalgia – I got  over the loss of the old-school hard drive pretty fast, perhaps it even seemed liberating to be  this untethered to oneself. The void was not the memories but my memory itself. Not a  traumatic loss of, but a slow departure from, a realisation that what remained was shaky,  unreliable, unsupported. 

I began to make things up, to mix things up. I fused history and fantasy, and since when were  these things distinct categories. It was easy to do since I was always in a different apartment, a  different city, a different country, fucking someone different. There was no one witness to it  all. And then, I also found that others accounted for events in my life very differently to what I recalled or registered. A high school friend who witnessed both eventually made me realise  that what I remembered as my first kiss had in fact happened a few years after the actual first  one.  

What I remember are snapshots, fancies, tableaux, feelings. I frame the past through unspoken  desires. My future is based on whims, and so, really, I don’t have a future, not a narrative one.  I stretch and contract, me, my thoughts, fantasies, memories – sometimes they are contained  in a pebble, sometimes the whole of history is not enough. 

So there I was, memories scattered, the chronology shaky, and the attachment to reality  tenuous at best, an unreliable narrator of the self, its past and its present. It was as though the  history wasn’t here, or history wasn’t what happened. The future wasn’t just what was going  to happen. So there I was. 

** 

You got me right where you wanted me, almost beyond myself with want. I began to expand,  my desire moving me into a space beyond my body and into you. “Please,” I said, my eyes  imploring you to give me more. “Please what?” “Please, daddy,” I whispered, barely audible.  Suddenly, you pushed the lace of my underwear to the side and placed your finger right on the  tip of my hardened clit. I moaned on the exhale. “That’s right,” you grunted, beginning to  move your finger. I could feel my wetness on you, sensed how it pleased you to slide along  my slit and feel how much I wanted this. Briefly, you pulled your hand out of my underwear  and pushed two fingers between my lips. “Good girl,” you praised me as I took them into my  mouth, still looking at you.

I obliged as you told me to unbutton my shirt. Your tongue flicked one of my nipples at the  same time as I felt your finger back on my clit. My body short-circuited and I could no longer  tell where I was being touched and licked. That you, a total stranger, could make me feel like  that, turned me on even more. I was sliding down the door that was still supporting my back,  my hips pushing forth to feel you more on me and in me. You were holding me up and against  the door with one arm as your other hand worked my clit faster and harder. I moaned into  your ear until I finally felt the waves of orgasm, the first of the night, crashing over me.  

** 

I wanted to expand. I wanted to be bigger, to examine the boundaries of me and puncture  them, calculate risk against safety. 

Earlier that same day, I was on a different date. Enticed by the intellectual promise, I allowed  an expansion of my usual dating pool and now sat across the table from another femme. So  prompted, I extended my wrist to her across the table when she asked for a whiff of my  perfume, but felt embarrassed by this theatre of seduction. I had wanted to see myself on a  date with a sex and kink writer and therapist, but the premise was already proving more  exciting than the reality, the infrastructure too pronounced, the femininity too architectural,  the seduction too obvious. The danger of dungeons and spanking benches she evoked seemed  too contrived to compel, too prescriptive and contractual to push me into real danger which I  had craved. 

It was not enough to do all that in the predetermined space of sex, as part of a scene,  surrounded by all sorts of accoutrements. I wanted to transgress my sense of safety in a real way, in the world, beyond consent and safe words and a boundaried agreement. In an  encounter with a stranger, these couldn’t exist.  

** 

A sharp, anonymous buzzer let me in. Lines of pale, cadaver-blue-white halogens paved my  way as I entered the stripped-down lobby. It had tried to be somewhat glamorous once but  was now dishevelled, austere, paint peeling. The large ceiling-high mirror covering one whole  wall was matted and muffled my reflection. Surreptitiously, I started down the hall, locating  the elevator, all shineless steel and no longer reflective glass panels. I noted in passing the  apparently transcontinentally translated smell of a dishevelled elevator. I pressed the worn-out  button and was lifted, slowly and bumpily, to the 11^th floor. The opening door unveiled the  grimy hall, too brightly lit, an empty booming sound somewhere in the building as a  neighbour slammed their door. The dark brown paint covered all the doors. In the silence, the  elevator started moving again. Its shuttering movement reverberated an eerie, foreboding echo. I braced myself as I located the right door and knocked. The negotiation of the threshold  was uniquely and exclusively mine. I stretched, expanded, melted into the night, carried  through the currents as I relinquished resistance and control. 

** 

Right as I reach to remove your undershirt, you hesitate. I suspect I know what’s coming but  let you tell me. You look down to me and say something I don’t expect, asking me if I’m okay with your scars: “Do they not freak you out?” and I am taken aback and unprepared because  your scars are sacred to me. I want to kiss them, run my fingers across them, have my hand on  your chest and feel the long, thin, thickened lines as I touch you.  

I want to explain to you how I see you. At the Lesbian Herstory Archives, I felt yet again the  stickiness of lesbian writing. Hours deep in Joan Nestle’s correspondence, the letters she got  in response to her Heresies article on butch-femme relationships, to her own letters she had  sent, turned me on and made me heavy with anticipation, the compulsion to write, to trace  your body and my desire for it with my words. I want to tell you how your perverse  masculinity makes me feel, how it makes me gasp, your chest, your scars, your short hair,  short nails, your big angular hands, what sensations it inspires in me to just think of them and  to remember them on me. I was curious about, trying to sense, how Nestle would write about  her lovers’ chest scars, the way she wrote about touching her butches with such specific  intensity and localised tenderness. I was trying to describe how it feels and what it means to  exist in a lineage of lesbian thought, the urgency to read and write and talk and fuck and flirt  as part of the process, and how it brings me closer to the history we share and which I want to  write, which I need to be part of. 

** 

I let go; I wasn’t sure how. Your body was stable, steady, and reassuring on top of mine,  solidly keeping me in mine. Your lips marked your way down the folds of my body, producing  jolts of energy I felt shooting out everywhere. The first light flick of your tongue on my clit  made me gasp. I had not anticipated to be pinned down by an immense wave of ecstatic  overwhelm so immediately. I had expected a searching, experimental first approach and was ready to offer direction. Instead, your tongue moved so lightly and with such intensity that all  I could do was to fall back down on the couch and moan despite myself.  

I felt myself surrender, I heard myself talk, my hands reaching to your dark hair, keeping you  firmly between my legs and your mouth on my cunt. There was an honesty to this abandon  which I rarely experienced. You worked on my clit with a solemnity that betrayed your  devotion to making me writhe under your touch, to serve. 

You could feel my growing desperation and you refused to speed up. You kept your pace  steady and the flickering tip of your tongue at just the tension-inducing distance to make my  hips move closer, my cunt push itself onto you. Yet you remained unmoved, steady, deliberate  in your work. The accumulation of lust and the tension produced in me a feeling of being  submerged in a deluge of sensation. It travelled across my body in all directions at once, or  became altogether directionless, keeping me suspended, travelling the waves replicating the  pace of your tongue.  

** 

Every few seconds, or minutes, or hours – I felt floating outside of time – a pronounced, small  wave amplified the feeling, emerging from the wall of sensation, each time pushing me closer  to an orgasm. Each of these little flickers cause me to relish my slut, spreading my legs more  and more, pulling my knees up to expose myself to you more entirely and completely. I often  might remain restrained even as I edge more closely to an orgasm, afraid that a change in pace  or position will ruin it. I stay still and keep my orgasm in focus.

This time, though, it was inevitable, and I thrilled for my slut to become more embodied,  physical, and grounded. I felt emboldened by your reassuring steady work that made it clear  that you knew how you were making me feel and you weren’t going to stop. I moaned loudly,  told you how good you were making me feel, circled my hips and ass to push myself onto  your mouth, ran my hands through your hair and felt the movements of your mouth on my  cunt in my hands on your head. The lust made me move beyond myself and into you, onto  you. 

** 

In the spirit of embracing risk and danger that night I arrived at a wilder, rougher, more  sincere expression of my desire to be fucked. The hunger found its way through my psyche  and made itself known with all the new and unexpected force and intensity. 

** 

Such sensations must somehow find a new kind of language, unafraid of itself and its  intensity. A language between, beyond, through the used cliches and familiar phrases, a  language so granular in its precision that it sees and accesses the atomic scales of desire. A  language of an expansive grayscale, not naming or circumscribing the liminal, the  unarticulated, the felt, but a language that in itself participates in creation of such spaces, that  enables them and becomes intertwined with sensation. A language that in itself becomes  sensation, an articulation that is felt as brushing against my clit, a slick, wet, textural utterance, that remains a graze on my wet cunt, your sigh of disbelief when you touch me to  realise how wet I am. How can a word touch, how might language itself trace lines down my  body – these questions indicate pools of sensation that must stay close to the body. 

The frustration of the impossibility of completely bridging this distance is a crucial part of this  working out. This edging practice of almost getting there and then retreating for an absence of  a lexicon that can serve to equate the feeling of an orgasm is an important practice of trying,  of getting so close that you’re rubbing yourself against the edges of language but can’t find  the final impulse, the full articulation of the orgasm. The question is how to attend to the  untranslatable not to describe it but to live through it in language and body alike. 

** 

I didn’t want to retreat into safety. A lover who offered a mystery, a challenge, a working out  of myself was where I wanted to go, stretched out of my limits, beyond myself. No way back,  no retreating, no becoming smaller. I wanted experimentation, claiming more space, new  space, new bodies, new openings, new desires, higher theory, more complexity, more bravado,  conceptually, erotically, theoretically, and emotionally, each crossing an aggressive reach for  something else. Through repetition to transgression, through familiarity to danger, through  risk to more engagement, from circularity of desire onto its hermeneutics. 

**

I feel best when I’m out of balance, at my most profoundly creative with my orientation  askew – erotically, as a writer, in my body. In motion, in between, when my materiality  collides with places, time zones, other bodies, when I overwhelm myself with art and theory  and lovers. I allow myself to reintegrate later, to edit.  

** 

I longed for manifestations of embodied erotic entanglements with the city at night. What I  have known was between the lines was the ease and the dynamism of movement that the  expanse of the city allows, the ease in itself erotic. It imbues the cold drab lifeless halls and  elevators with promise, leaves the crooked pavements and sticky subway seats fizzy with  anticipation.  

It is only partly about what awaits on the other side of each door covered with peeling paint,  at the end of each halogen-lit hall. The flow of the current is endless, pulsating, unrelenting. I  never know what is behind each door but I submit to the current, my mind pliant and my body  porous. I feel myself expanded by the night, fragmented by the night.

---

I am an art historian, curator, and a professor at University College Dublin, Ireland. In my work, I focus on lesbian art from Central and Eastern Europe. My book, Lesbian Bones: Theorising Queer Women in Polish Art, is forthcoming in September with Manchester University Press. I am also pioneering the field of Central and Eastern European lesbian studies. I edited a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on Central and Eastern European lesbian studies (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjls20/30/2) and I sit on the editorial board of the Journal.

In my creative writing, I write through my positionality of a femme lesbian, merging autotheory and autofiction with historic and theoretical approaches to erotic dynamics between femmes and butches, transmasc people, and trans men.

Instagram: @aleksandra.gajowy