Discover more from Only Beauty Breaks Us
During my last week in Taipei, I made two new best friends, a couple of local gangsters. They’re kind people, really, though limited by the hierarchies and restrictions imposed on them. We spent one night together talking about blood, violence, imprisonment, and opportunities to cry.
Content warning: This work contains explicit language, sexual scenes, and references to violent abuse.
The three of us had beautiful sex.
Mark*: Er, Vicky, I think your period is here.
Me: Oh my god. I am so sorry.
Mark*: No don't be sorry! We’ve seen blood.
Me: ?
Kai*: Last week we were chilling. And our friend.. He’s a fucking psycho.. Started beating the shit out of this woman.
Me: What woman?
Kai*: An escort.
Me: Oh. Did you stop him?
Kai*: I couldn’t.
Me: Why not?
Mark*: I was there too. I didn’t know anyone in that room, except Kai*. It was so fucked up.
Kai*: Super fucking annoying.
Me: Annoying?
Kai*: There was blood everywhere. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Was there going to be a body? Would we have to help deal with the body?
Me: So what happened in the end?
Mark*: The woman lived. I had to haul her away. She weighed more than she looked. I had so many questions. Should I be gentle with her? If I was, would I face repercussions? How forceful should I be as I tugged at her legs? It was impossible to find the right balance. Anyway, my point being – the blood in this room is nothing compared to what we saw last week, you have no reason to feel embarrassed.
Me: Ok boys. I’m going to have to clean this up now. Do you mind sitting on the bed for a bit?
Them: What?! No!! Don’t clean. Why are you cleaning now? We’re having so much fun. Let’s keep going.
A part of me wanted to lecture them about how it’s always men who have fun and women who clean, but I didn’t.
Me: This is where I live. I’ll only tolerate mess to a point. The condition of this room has fallen way behind my threshold. It’s time that I clean.
Mark*: You can call a cleaner in the morning, after we’re gone.
Me: In the morning I have to work, right there on that desk. I won’t have time to wait for a cleaner to clean and then start writing.
Mark*: I have to go to my daughter at 9am. I don’t have time to wait around.
Me: Well. If that’s the case, maybe our predestined connection only extends to this point – as you Taiwanese people like to say. I must restore order in this room. As the Chinese idiom goes, if one can't manage the order of a single room, how can they handle the order of the entire world? After I clean, if there is time, and we all feel up for it, we could keep going. If not, I’m glad we have shared what we have.
The boys retreated to the bed and chatted between themselves. I scrubbed the yoga mats in the bathtub and tried to lift the red stains with wet wipes.
Kai*: Wow, this woman keeps a knife by her bedside.
Me: I know I’d lose in a knife fight, and all the martial arts I do are meaningless against prepared attackers. Still I’d really like to live, and I suppose the knife gives me an extra one percent chance.
Kai* smiled. I asked why he kept smiling. He smiled again and shook his head.
Kai*: It’s been sharpened, too.
Me: Duh.
Kai*: So ghin (a distinctive Taiwanese expression to describe someone who’s stubborn, unyielding).
Mark* laughed: It’s incredible how we randomly met this girl and she’s so much more gangster than all the gang girls we know. (Music to my ears.)
Kai* sighed: So much burden to bear. (He repeated this sentence a hundred times that night.)
If we kept fucking, it would have been cramped for the three us in the single bed. Instead we talked. Mark* lay on his side against the wall. I hung off the edge of the bed. Kai* was sandwiched in between, propped up by a heap of pillows. I told more stories. About how family and friends deserted me. How I was dragged through mud and forced into glorified homelessness. How I had been limping for most of the past year due to martial arts training overload. How for years I hadn’t cried in front of another person.
With the side of my face on Kai*’s stomach, I said: It feels as though no one is strong enough to hold enough space for me to unload. I’m never the cryer, always the counselor. Even when I went to see counselors, the stories I told made the therapists cry. How could they be first to cry? I was a paying customer, there to cry to them. If they cried first then there was no space for me to cry. Why can’t I cry? I have a right to cry too.
Clearly the boys had no one to cry to either. Hearing this they bobbed their heads, straining to keep eyes wide.
Them refusing to cry gave me permission to cry. My floodgate opened, filling the channels between Kai*’s pretty abs. I became distracted by several intrusive thoughts. The first being that although I didn’t orgasm during the threesome, this was a much stronger, more intense release. Another thought was that perhaps it is true that no one before was strong enough to hold space for me. Two men are stronger than one – simple math – evidently that’s what it takes. Has group sex been the answer to my problems all along?
Kai*: I noticed that when you talk about something sad or painful, the corners of your mouth compulsively twist up into a smile. If something is truly horrific, then you burst into a loud laugh that is frankly disturbing.
Me: I don’t like that observation.
Kai*: By the time I was released from jail a second time, I had lost the ability to cry completely. When I wanted to cry, the muscles around my eyes would twitch and freeze, I wouldn’t be able to blink until the urge to cry went away. It took months until I cried again for the first time, that was during a movie.
Mark*: You asked earlier why Kai* kept smiling as you talked about your life. It’s because he understands. We understand what you’re talking about. We have been through extreme situations, too. We get it.
Me: Was prison really that bad? Sometimes when I’m sick of running around, when I feel tired of constantly keeping an eye over my shoulder, I think to myself – what if I just get on a flight and go home? I won’t reach home. They’d take me at the airport, but I would have certainty in my life for once. I will certainly spend the rest of my life in confinement. And I ask, is that so bad? Under incarceration, my life would probably be structured the same as it is now: working out and writing. I wouldn’t need to move again, or think about what to eat for each meal. I’ll get my splits like Kai* did, and write a bunch more books. Maybe I’ll see my family again – if they wanted to visit, and were allowed to.
Kai*: Don’t go to prison.
Beat.
Kai*: All the people I met who had to serve ten years or longer, they were completely broken, lost their minds.
Me: But I’m tough.
Kai*: Not enough for prison.
We heard splashes of water and children frolicking from the pool outside my window. The sun was up. A new day was upon us.
Stay tuned for more next week.
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Posts here are non-fiction and adhere to journalistic standards. A note on formatting: pseudonyms are marked with an asterisk* at each instance, quotes recalled are not placed inside quotation marks, and sensitive information will be redacted to ensure the safety of myself and others.
Agreed, don’t go to prison.
Horrendous places and I have only been a visitor to one.
We don’t lock up animals like we lock up humans.
I’m captivated. Fuck. I’m so glad I found you. Brilliant piece.