The Giver and the Gifts

I just hoped that Brad wouldn't beat me before he abandoned me. Rejection, although it hurt like hell, wasn't injurious to one's looks or potentially fatal to oneself.

Sometimes, though, I wished it were. I wished, sometimes, that a homophobic Neanderthal of a man, horrified at the duality of my hermaphroditic sex, would pummel me with his ham-size fists until he'd killed me or would strangle me with his sausage-size fingers until he'd crushed my throat in his bare hands and the life from my beautiful, but repulsive (to some men) body. I wished to be stabbed or shot, that my misery and torment and self-loathing could stop and that I could be no more. For a fleeting moment, I thought, even now, of seizing the convertible's steering wheel as we streaked toward another sharp curve in the road ahead and of twisting it, with all my might, so that the car would leave the road and tumble, end over end, into oblivion, my rejecting suitor, so full of contempt and hatred, beside me as we fell and fell and fell.

Through my veil of tears, I saw an alcove in the rocky mountainside. The convertible slowed.

This is where I get off, I told myself, hoping I wouldn't be beaten or killed before I was left alongside the road, high in the dark mountains above the twinkling lights of civilization, such as it was, represented by my hometown, in the distant valley below.

When the car had come to a complete stop in the recessed space in which Brad had parked, he turned to me. Although it was dark, not dusk, now, I could still see his handsome features fairly distinctly, thanks to the light of the full moon that hovered above us. His face was impassive, like a mask. His voice was unemotional and matter of fact. "Recite the poem again," he asked--or ordered; it could have been a request or a command--"the one you call 'The Gift.'"

"Why?"

"I want to hear it."

Wasn't it enough to leave me stranded on the side of a fucking mountain, my dignity in tatters? I wanted to scream at him. Isn't it sufficient to reject and abandon me, after knowing how I feel--or felt--about you? Instead, my voice atremble with fear and sorrow and the wish, still fervent in my heart, that things could have turned out differently between Brad and me, I recited the poem again: