I am sharing here, an unedited writing piece, for the sake of showing process, that stumbled out of me for Between The Lines - a spontaneous writing happening held by Amanda Aileen Fisher of Abre Tu Boca, in Todos Santos.
The women met in a group in one part of Cien Palmas, an elegant courtyard of a boutique hotel and restaurant, and the men met in another group. We couldn’t see each other, but we, the women, knew where the men were — I’m not sure if the men knew where we were. We had both received the same prompt, but the gendered articles were swapped, randomly. Some people in each group received, written on tiny slips of paper: “She watched form the table as he got up” and some people received: “He watched from the table as she got up.” Both in English and in Spanish.
We all wrote for 10 minutes and then shared our pieces with the group. After a few of us shared our pieces within the gender-divided groups, the men came to join the women’s group. We had left them the less comfortable, less queenly chairs. And they sat down hesitantly. The giddiness and curiosity was palpable as the two groups merged. And the feedback from the those of the opposite sex felt charged. People mostly wrote of relationships, beginning or ending. And only one piece was sexual, which almost wasn’t shared, but was, at the very end.
Here is what I wrote, but only shared with the women, before the men had joined:
She watched from the table as he got up suddenly to blow his nose with a force no one expected. At first it was alarming, and she jolted a little, out of her dining room chair, but then a giggle hiccuped out of her throat, that also alarmed her, which then exploded messily into a full blown laugh. The strange sounds came from her lower throat, gurgling, and out of control, embarrassingly so, but too strange to be held back. And as he heard those laughs, as he blew his nose, he couldn’t help but join in, making new guttural sounds to accompany her throat laughs and his forceful nose blowing.
He stood there, suspended in the absurdity of the moment, locked by their mutual gaze, and in that moment, love bloomed out of each of their hearts, not with force, but with fast paced grace, like the time-lapse footage of a blooming, rose, looking fast and slow at the same time. It was like that between them, a recognition of something that had always been there, a root planted in nurtured soil, but that had not yet broken ground to the air above. It was as if the force from the body to make them let go, allowed the depths that they were both afraid of, to unpause.
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