
LOOKING AND HURTING by Alice Rowena Wilson
In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and even when she forces herself to look at other people, she doesn’t see their faces but instead the overlay of his face, their mouths and faces moving and talking in a sick parody of his mouth and face, and when she glances across and sees him talking to another woman, it is as if she has been punched in the chest, it takes the wind out of her, she wants to cry, to scream, to cradle the other woman’s head in her hands and press down on her eyeballs until they turn to wet, soft mush. She spends so much time repressing this jealousy, certain that it is neither good for her nor appropriate for her feminist commitments, that it is a relief to simply thirst for blood.
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