Freesia McKee: A Work of Creative Nonfiction • Cleaver Magazine

Freesia McKee
Tender Experiments We Could Conduct Together or Alone

after Tyler Friend

1. We could go to Kwik Trip at 9:00 pm and pretend to shop while flirting over chicken tenders and red Gatorade.
2. We could go to Hilltop Bar fifteen minutes before closing and walk into the novelty brewer’s barrel because of its fifteen-foot height.
3. We could have a theoretical debate and a duel.
4. Some of us is imaginary, some of us is true.
5. I continue dating only people who’ve owned motorcycles or are considering purchasing a motorcycle.
6. I never join Tinder but we pretend we met on Tinder.
7. You play out the script we’re cowriting we sit on barstools in Madison.
8. Because I find it romantic, I tell you on our road trip about bisexual epistemologies.
9. A thousand nights in this town, and none of them completely with you.

10. The back of my car: a bedframe. And, a pile of books.
11. In my apartment, you say, “You have the most amazing book collection of anyone I’ve ever met,” and it’s the sexiest compliment I’ve ever heard. Instead of having sex, we look at books.
12. We recreate our first date twenty-four times, kissing along different places on the hiking trail.
13. The backs of my knees on your shoulders, you bookmark me.
14. We recite Edna St. Vincent Millay under the full moon and stars we barely name. I hover between your chin and ear, resizing, a nocturnal hummingbird.
15. The sober versions of us hook up mindfully, presently.
16. After I break up with you, I transcribe the forty pages of poetry I wrote during our brief relationship.
17. After we break up, I do not force dating a new person.
18. I swallow every river boat adjacent to this river town and it works less well each time.
19. In an uncrowded bar, everyone hangs out on phones. The walls start pushing in like a Nickelodeon ‘90s episode, a show we all forgot. We lace our legs into the metal complication of each other’s barstools.

20. I ask: Is the catchphrase Love Wins another false promise of happily-ever-after?
21. I show up for a nightcap at your house. We sit in the cold and you smoke.
22. We have a breakup conversation as house music from the early 2000s plays on your portable speaker.
23. Women lead you on and women leave. Women lead me on and women leave.
24. We stop drinking and have a real conversation.
25. We glue our palms together like performance artists from the eighties. This way, I think, you can never leave me, though I am the one leaving.
26. I go home alone. You walk me home.
27. I realize I stayed in my long relationship because it meant I got to sleep with my arm around her every night.
28. You walk into the bar where we once met. You say, “I don’t want to crowd you.” I say, “Will you sit with me? I’m so lonely.”
29. I wrestle back the genre of small-town love story from Hallmark movies and country songs. I view the city-dwelling love poem as somehow more progressive than a love poem that takes place in a town.

30. I forget, when I leave, to pay for my beer.
31. Netflix’s binge watchability cockblocks me. People don’t go out anymore. We once put your TV on wheels. I unfurled a half-mile of orange extension cord from my mouth.
32. I pull into a gas station and cry on the phone about how much I miss you.
33. I see your Volkswagen on Highway 10 while I’m parked on the phone crying about how much I miss you.
34. I zigzag across the county to forget you. I hang out with people who talk about terabytes.
35. I drive to the town of Scandinavia via golden country roads. Adrienne Lenker sings, and I weep about you on Main Street.
36. I want more than it is fair to ask.
37. During our breakup conversation, you build a fire in your backyard. I toss in drafts of old poems.
38. Lesbian bookmarks keep my places in the lesbian poetry books I read to forget about you.
39. In our breakup conversation, we debate whether or not I am visibly queer.

40. I question whether I put adequate effort. I list every date—annotating it with terms like, “Lovely,” “Sublime,” “Mutually enjoyable,” and “Disastrous.”
41. It was easier, in some ways, to break up with the woman I lived with for nearly a decade because I didn’t have a crush on her anymore.
42. As if I will never see you again, I write down every detail. I’m dramatic: we live in a town of 28,000.
43. I look up census data to see how many people in the county are around my age, then subtract the percentage of married people and Republicans, an attempt at carving out my dating pool.
44. I think of your palms on my back.
45. Like your hand pressing the top of my shoulder towards you, and I shiver in pleasure.
46. I consider joining Tinder, but I’m not sure if our breakup is a good reason to join Tinder.
47. I say, “I’m a cryer—that’s something you’re learning about me,” and you say, “I knew that. I’ve seen you cry a few times.” But I cry so frequently that I don’t even remember.
48. I dream we’re driving without seatbelts. I dream I’m burning my house down. I dream you’re your friend. We walk to the bowling alley as I realize I’m wearing another woman’s coat.
49. You say you almost never cry. From my second-floor window where I write, I cry enough for the whole block, every neighbor walking their dog or shoveling snow.

Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about place, gender, and genre through poetry, prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Recent work appears in Fugue, About Place Journal, Porter House Review, and her newest chapbook, Hummingbird Vows. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Read more at FreesiaMcKee.com.