LILLIAN LIPPOLD
Oxnard
- A hybrid-genre contemplation about returning to one's hometown
I’m sitting on an abandoned play structure in Oxnard. Nothing is difficult when we are together, so here, things look strange. We haven’t been like this in a while. I’m obsessed with taking pictures on disposable film. You’ve got a new cell phone. There’s a car in the parking lot, fifteen feet from me, but I’m not expecting trouble because that isn’t you, Oxnard, is it? The view from here is astounding. I’ve got chills. The Ventura city lights on the mountain are pretty gorgeous now that I look at them.
I swear I’m with you though, Oxnard, my vantage point, growing up, falling down, metaphor. It has been difficult getting by without your emptiness to companion me.
This is the set for enough horror movies, me and the car and the undeveloped camera to protect me, so I face the parking lot, never avoiding the fact that I could be killed if someone tried. I’m hoping the New Year will be kind enough for me to survive it, but then again, I haven’t been sleeping, so how good has it been really? You tell me I look for omens far too often, and I do.
The car has a headlight out, and I’m raising my eyes to check on it every few seconds while listening to the same song again about a river I’ve never seen. No US state looks the same as the next of them. Would someone know to look for me if I left right now for Alabama, told no one, just caught a Greyhound with the 200 dollars I’ve got and no phone charger? There’s a couple, emerging from the car watching me, who’s had some deep conversation. Obviously, it’s not the first because during that, their right headlight went out.
My coffee’s getting colder, and my dad only eats meat and blueberries these days. Oxnard. Sour blueberries, a taste like the lake water from the little pond in the house where I grew up second. I’m getting better at fueling my body, not good enough, but this city-town is beautiful, beautiful and distracting. I’m trying to be more in the where that I am in. No one knows truly how much I love being in associated place, my body in my body in my shoes.
Anyway, Ventura is beautiful, and Oxnard is probably much more than a metaphor if I ever took the time to know it correctly or learn to drive. The drought-resistant trees are still green despite the desert, and I find myself surprised that so many people own raincoats here. It is uncharacteristically cold for the season.
My hands are freezing. The people in the car have climbed together into the backseat. I just felt a patch of warm in the air, drifting through me, but I’m not sure where it’s come from. They’re having sex, that couple in their car with the missing headlight. I know what car sex looks like. The last time someone fucked me in a car, she parked outside the fire-station-turned-speakeasy across two streets from my too-crowded, wealth-infested college dorm, and I fingered her below me until 3 in the morning. I’m nearly positive she faked it. She must’ve been at least a foot too tall for the backseat. Then, when we found ourselves watching Rent in her New Jersey basement bedroom weeks later, she didn’t want it anymore.
Oxnard, the queers have a problem accepting lovers when they’re easy, when you’re not ducking down below the cop-lit windows, pressed together, cheeks and sweat, blending into each other like this, this, this is what our elders fought for, our bad behavior and worse sex in the back of a car and then our silence when we finally find ourselves alone, in bed together with a safely locked door.
I’ve lost the story here. I tend to when sex is involved. There aren’t swings on this playset, which child-me would’ve thought stupid. I write with a wrecking ball and a wide lens nowadays, in three different notebooks for two stupid hours because I can’t say what I mean. I write the way my elders taught me, deathful without absence, opening beyond and beyond still, a wit that crackles into the Pacific.
The car is pulling away now, rocking up and over the speed bump, and I am wishing I gave a little witnessing wave for the sake of good neighborship, a proof that sex doesn’t just tumble off into the abyss once you’ve finished him off. The writer keeps the score. My bluntness is no mistake. It’s been bred into me like a racehorse who’s always willing to say a bit more than that which should be properly allowed.
Attention is difficult for me because I see well and without a quiet enough place to pick the important things and live with them. I miss my own warm body next to yours, you who holds my hips gentle like the violin bows they’ve become. The drought-resistant tree next to me looks like an angel if I glance up too quickly. The car is gone, thank god, because a mother and a son have just walked by me, and I already didn’t know what to say to them.
Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer obsessed with Place and queer utopia. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in many university pubs and other mags. They definitely love you, too.