Autumn

She loved fall. Except for the nipple soreness. The newly brisk air would keep her nipples at a near-constant perk, often to the point of pain. But even that she kind of liked, because she was a nipple-forward type of person. Not in a strictly sexual way, but in an emotional, near-psychic sort of way. She swore her nipples once saved her from a murderer in the woods, but she had also been heard to claim that smoking cigarettes saved her from that same murderer, and no one really believed she had been that close to a murderer anyway. Not that she cared. She knew what happened, and anyone worth anything could see that nipples and cigarettes had both played a part and in no way canceled each other out. 

People were always doing that to her, trying to tell her it was impossible to hold two truths at once. She didn’t believe that, she knew that being able to hold multiple, even conflicting, even opposing, truths about the same thing was the mark of highly-developed, potentially even genius, mind. She had first read that, or something sort of like it, on her first boyfriend’s MySpace. He had broken up with her to spend more time on his art (using a silver Sharpie to mark up road signs with his tag, “Mr. Shiznit”), which was, frankly, a blessing. She had only just seen him shirtless for the first time, and he had had the tiniest nipples. Like the nipples you’d see on a newborn baby, hardly bigger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. They were impossible to look away from, and she worried she might lose her mind completely, mesmerized into catatonic hypnosis by these tiny pink eyes on his chest. They were like the snouts of two miniature porcelain pigs, and they changed everything she thought she knew about the love of her life. She wasn’t brave enough then to break up with someone for something like that, so she’d sat in her room for two days trying to think up an excuse. She couldn’t say they’d been growing apart, not when they’d only just kissed with their shirts off. She thought of saying that she’d gotten so sucked into their relationship that her friendships were starting to suffer, but she’d spent their entire date on Thursday (walking from school to the park, and then to the bus stop) shit-talking them, so that wouldn’t play. Perhaps she could say her grandmother was desperately ill and she needed to be by her side, in order to change the channels between talk shows. And then he called, and miraculously let her off the hook. It had been a really magical two weeks (minus the last two days), and she was so heartbroken she almost cried, but she was too happy. She was thirteen. 

It was then that she began to realize that she not only possessed nipples with a sort of sixth sense, but that she also possessed a sort of sixth sense about other people’s nipples. She felt she never really understood a person’s face until she saw their nipples, and only then would the entire picture fall into place. Not just of their face, but of their essential spirit, of who they really were deep down, perhaps even unbeknownst to themselves. But not unbeknownst to her, because she had this gift. She could probably monetize it, if only she believed in monetizing one’s natural abilities. Which she didn’t: She felt it was a grievous sin to charge others for what God had given freely, which was why she was broke. These gifts of hers, of course, were also a burden, as our greatest gifts always are. Every man she ever dated, and a few women, too, had somehow sinister nipples. Whatever their personalities, however they treated her, however kind, or funny, or quietly strong they seemed, their nipples indicated they were weak-willed, or vain and cruel, or would’ve been close personal friends with Richard Nixon had they been alive and around him at the time. Oddly, her own nipples had no intuition in this sense, otherwise she’d never have gone to bed with these people in the first place. They were related but separate skillsets, her own nipples being more concerned with ax-murderers, global political shifts, and, when touched by another person, a deep, agitated longing, a sort of nostalgia for something like home, or childhood, or a half-remembered thing from the past that may never have existed at all, like Dunkaroos. Which isn’t to say she didn’t like them being touched. She did; it made her feel like a poet. 

Needless to say, in her early twenties, she went through a period of resentment. Her gift kept getting in the way of her relationships, so she began to mistrust it. Or to mistrust herself, and the way she interpreted the signs. Perhaps, she thought, these nipples that seemed to evoke a lack of inner fortitude were actually just an inherited physical feature from some subpar ancestor, and she was just picking up on that person’s energy. This turned out to be wishful thinking. Sooner or later the person would reveal themselves, and she had to accept that she’d been right all along, naturally. She finally realized that she had been given this gift in order to become a paragon of radical love. She was able to see the inner ugliness of those she loved, and choose to love it anyway, to love it so hard that it might heal their core wounds and wash away that very ugliness. If they couldn’t accept that from her and change their essential natures, that was on them, and she was free to move on. That’s what had happened with her last boyfriend. He was handsome, he was charming but authentically so, and he cared for her, deeply and tenderly. The first time they lay together naked, she considered his nipples, nestled in a field of dark chest hair still glistening with sweat. They were well sized, slanting up slightly towards his shoulders, not so much puffy as somehow pouty. And they spoke to her of a man who, however happily accommodating he seemed to be, could not abide things not going his way, and would try to control her, to talk her out of being who she was and doing what she needed to do. And so she knew this secret thing about him, but boldly loved him nonetheless. 

They were together for a year, and then they broke up, and they couldn’t agree why. He said it was because she was cheating on him, which of course she was, but he couldn’t seem to understand that that wasn’t the truth of they were breaking up. Or, at least, not the only truth. The other truth was that they were breaking up because he was so controlling. He was perplexed, seeing as he had never once been controlling of her in their entire relationship. But deep down he was controlling, she knew, and it was only a matter of time before he started acting on it. He claimed that she was trying to rewrite reality to paint him as the villain so as to not have to take any accountability for her actions. Which was ironic, really, considering his denial of his own nature. “But it isn’t true,” he shouted, “I’m not like that! What’s true is that you were cheating on me!” And there it was again, someone trying to convince her that two things couldn’t be true at once. Yes, he could blame her for the breakup, and she could blame him for the breakup. He let out a frustrated yell. “But actually, you can’t!” 

“There you go,” she said, “trying to control me.” It hurt, really, to always be right.

But anyway, she loved fall.