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After a certain age there are particular roles I never get offers for. Roles like Slutty Student. Or Dirty Babysitter. Instead I get picked for Hot Milf or Sexy Catholic Teacher. Other times I’m absolutely no one at all. It always begins the same way. My loose skin is pulled taut in a cheap synthetic harness and pink glitter, like a washed up Hollywood starlet. I meet an absolute dirtball of a man in a well lit gas station. He never knows my name, or approaches me softly. Calluses anchor his grasp. His five o’clock shadow scrapes against the nape of my neck. A crumpled receipt slipped into the back pocket. The moment is pure transaction. His movement exchanged for mine. He rubs his wedding ring tan line with oil stained fingers and I understand then what he touches he stains. Lock the bathroom door and study the body until it loses its meaning, its texture. In the dream I watch myself in the mirror and can’t look away. It’s compulsive, this vanity. I’m watching myself in a dream watching myself, twice removed. I am both actor and director. Voyeur and masochist. My body is omnipresent and uninhabited. I move my limbs around like furniture. A hand to pull his hair, a leg to shift him this way and that. My orgasm is meticulous and practiced. You see each O shape of the mouth, see my complexion weathered and expiring slowly under the tungsten light. You see the years as they’re pulled from my face in erratic abrasions. Usually we know how it ends⸺you climax like a sinking ship. Somewhere on set, a psychedelic percussion begins. A line of faceless girls are being ushered like soldiers through the emergency exit. The sentencing remains the same, despite the execution. Despite the years between us. I remember now, I remember, I remember I remember, I keep saying, and I’m reaching towards them. They can’t hear me. They’re braiding hair and gripping melting popsicles. They’re injecting sugary plastic and dangling from the clothesline. They’re picking each other’s skin and slowly bleeding out onto the floor. The camera continues to roll. I’m still here, I always was, I never left. One crewmember is whispering about how soft their oozing bodies look in the viewfinder. Another openly sobs in the corner on the phone with his mother.
He hangs up as soon as the scene begins. He places fresh towels on the linoleum.
