A(UTONOMOUS) S(ENSORY) M(ERIDIAN) R(ESPONSE) — JULIA LoFASO
/She shaves your beard. She strokes your forehead. She reads you Lord of the Rings. She is not your mother, not your girlfriend, not your wife, not your lover. But she is gentle, with soft skin—you feel like you can feel it through the screen—and wide green eyes.
You’re a sensation seeker, always have been. You move like smoke. You like cats better than dogs. You’d follow a jangling arm of bracelets for miles and you’d let anyone filled with the right kind of light place a sacred cube of sugar on your tongue, then stretch your long, lean self paws-to-tail to let its warmth spread through you.
The girl on the screen is not here, but she is filled with light. She can get you through the cruelest months in your cold city, until you can fly to a place where all the colors bleed so deeply your eyes spring tears, where every girl is beautiful because she isn’t yours, will never be yours. The girl on the screen will never be yours, either. She belongs to every searching blue-lit face, to power lines that speak in sparks, to cables and fiber-optics, to hands that see without touching, hands that know.
The science is not there, say the experts. But you are there and she is (sort of) there, and that’s enough.
Then again, maybe she is your mother. Maybe she’s everyone’s mother. It’s so hard to remember way back when your senses were blurred wide open, shortsighted eyes enraptured by the crinkle of balled paper, hands flailing to reach a soft thing you stuffed in your mouth until it soaked with the smell of you, of her, of all your animal mothers. Back when you were all sensation, lantern-thin skin incandescent.
Julia LoFaso's writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Conjunctions, Day One, Wigleaf, New South, PRISM international and elsewhere. She lives in Queens.
