She held me on her lap as we shared a cigarette in the frosty February air on the balcony. Her silk robe kept shifting and eventually she gave up trying to fix it and allowed her naked breast (tattooed with the Chinese character for hate) to be affronted by the biting cold breeze.

Anabel. The exhibitionist lesbian drug dealer from Brazil.
No shit.

Mornings begin with Topless Cleaning (during which she does the dishes in Egyptian cotton pajama pants and I try – to no avail – to be a little less self conscious of my own naked body). Then breakfast, which usually consists of left-over dessert from the party last night (this morning it's mud pie and Jello shots). Afterwards we attire ourselves according to the customs of the day or century we choose to live in and leave the apartment, picking our way through the living room, which is more often than not half-covered by people unconsciously waiting to awake to killer hangovers.

I left this morning dressed to next century's fashion: teal hair, cyberpunk boots, caked-on eyeliner, and a grey vinyl dress that ends just above my knees. Following the usual routine, I visit the coffeehouse, order an americano, and try to emulate the beatnik life by smoking too much and thinking about the last Twinemen song I heard and debating whether or not it would in fact be nice to go back to the days where we wrapped ourselves in animal fat to keep warm.

She wouldn't be back for me until two or three am, when she had finished her runs. I still wasn't allowed to accompany her. I'm starting to doubt that I ever will. I'm not sure if it's distrust or a cultural thing (an odd Brazilian need for privacy, perhaps?), and as little sense the latter makes, I hope it's that reason that keeps her from taking me along. If I think about it too much, I know it's not true. A woman that needs privacy doesn't strike me as the same type to take all her clothes off after winning a game of strip poker, just for the hell of it. But the hopeless, hoping idiot I am, I chose to believe it's true anyway.

That song is stuck in my head, the animal fat one.

I imagine what it would be like to go out into the forest in sub-zero weather and hunt down a bear, killing it with a bow and arrow, or a dagger, or whatever else makes sense. How do you kill a bear anyway? And then, as its eyes stop tracking and I can feel the warmth rising from the spilled blood, I would open my mouth and beautiful ancient words from viking-era Scandinavia would flow out, asking the bear and its protecting gods for forgiveness and permission to use the remains to perpetuate my own survival.

Deep down I supposed I would feel guilty, even if some light-filled goddess said it was alright. My survival over someone else's... Today I prefer Darwin. Kill or be killed. No moral issue. The philosophy of next century.

And then suddenly I don't feel so beatnik-y anymore. The americano still tastes fine, whether or not I can snap my fingers in applause. It's just as well, I'm part of generation z6.0 today anyway.

Anabel.

Dancing freestyle in those pajama pants to Paul Oakenfold, lots of hip action, singing along to the instrumentals in Portuguese, some words I recognize (amor, desejo, segredo), some words I've heard plenty but don't completely understand (injetor, cerebros, drogas, mutilacao do corpo). She transcends eras and paradigms with every flutter of those thick black eyelashes. I try to emulate that transcendence, but I've discovered that I have 3 or 4 default attitudes and sets of clothes that just cycle every week or so.

The gypsy.
The goth.
The hippie.
The cyberpunk.

Even those can be narrowed down into 2 groups, if you consider gypsy as a sect of hippie and cyberpunk a sect of goth. I can be so boring sometimes. I've been working on expanding my horizons, but as exampled with the beatnik deal, my brain just doesn't work in certain ways. Her brain works in all of them.

When I was young I would occasionally come across a mysterious, beautiful woman reading a newspaper in front of the grocery store and pretend I was her for weeks. Or maybe the exotic belly-dancer I saw at some music festival or other. Sometimes (rarely) I would find one of these angels/succubi on the television, and memorize the name of the show, along with the day of the week and the time of evening it was broadcast. These few women showed me who I wanted to be, and I was an addict to them.

I can't pinpoint exactly when I came to the conclusion that I could never be these women, and the next best thing was to be with them.

The first was Sheri, the artistic vegan Amnesty International member, in my senior year of high school. By then, I had become relatively outspoken about gay rights and started attending the school's gay club – HHART (Homosexual and Heterosexual Alliance for Reaching Tolerance), where I first met her. The attraction was instant. She had a Red Hot Chili Peppers tattoo behind her right ear and a Joy Division patch on her backpack, and I would sit with her during lunch on the floor and watch her paste sketches and paintings into her sketchbook, and then write prose all over them with various-colored ink. I wanted to be her. I wanted her to be mine.

I was frightened of these feelings and ran away, straight into the worst straight relationship of my life.

Then there was Alice, who, at the time, was dating my dear friend Bido. My brother always mocks me for my taste in people; the gaunt, pale, super-pierced, ultra-tattooed people have always been the most beautiful to me, and Alice was no exception.

However, I'm a strict follower of the “bros before hoes” philosophy, so I let her run through my fingers and watched from a distant as she hopped from one friend to another, never giving me a second glance.

Then, one evening, I went to a party with the bros (Alice tagging along of course), and then, half an hour after I arrived, Alice jumped up at the sound of the front door and as my eyes followed her through the living room to the new arrival, I was graced with my first glimpse of heaven.

Alice led her into the living room, full of people on their way to being wasted, and introduced her.
Anabel. Mutilacao da alma. Goddess. Nymph. Nymphomaniac. Life of the party, death of me.
And she loved me.

That was the first of many long nights of love-making in bubble baths, on kitchen floors, in city parks.
Alright, so most of the evenings we've spent together, we forewent the love-making and straight-up fucked.

I want to be her.

But here I am, trying to wrap my mind around Kerouac and thinking that hopping the next train out of town would give me some understanding.

She'll be here in an hour or so now. The April evening is cool, so I wrap my black vinyl coat closer around me and realize that generation z6.0 is pretty stupid for not realizing that vinyl does nothing in terms of warmth. I consider killing a bear again and feel guilty.

I waste the last hour sitting on the porch of the coffeehouse and listening to the young scene kids play the same four chords on their acoustic guitars. Never mind that I've given up on the beatnik lifestyle, I buy another americano and keep smoking, waiting to hear the bass line of “The Flesh” (again, Oakenfold) vibrate through the alley, signaling her arrival.

I know tonight I'll step into her car and nothing will be said (speech is pointless with the stereo that loud), but everything will be clear when I look at her and her face is smothered with one word, one of the few she speaks that I recognize:
Segredo.

I want to be her.
I want to be hers.