On/Off

excerpt of essay • Amanda Lezra

You turn off the light. You’re seventeen. You’re about to have sex with a woman you just met, somewhere deep in Queens. It’s raining and the city smells like scorched sugar; the woman’s eyes are turquoise and she has a bruise on her chin and she tries to open her front door with four different keys until someone with a greasy beard lets you in. His pupils are planets. The room is covered with half-naked corpses with sloppy grins drying on their cheeks. The woman takes you to her room and tells you about the love of her life, Anna. They were together for five years. Anna was perfect. Anna died two weeks ago. Heroin. You reach out to touch the woman with the turquoise eyes but she swats your hand away and tells you to take off your clothes. “Don’t look at me,” she says, and you say “okay.” You step over corpses and let yourself out at dawn and drink black coffee on the subway. You burn yourself. You try to call the woman a few weeks later. She dies. You stop sleeping.