Here and There, Now and Then

Going out alone was a bad idea.

After contemplating life for a few minutes on a rooftop terrace I ended up at the last place we’d been drunk together. I made myself down a few drinks in rapid succession and tried not to remember how she’d helped finagle my way in past the discerning security with their ID scanners. When my belly was up to the bar I tried not to remember how she’d challenged one of the bartenders to ‘take a shot’ of whipped cream. While I was dancing, evading guys who wanted to put their sweaty paws on me, I tried not to remember the heat we had so easily kindled, in part due to hiding in plain sight from everyone who’d accompanied us. I tried not to let my eyes stray to the exact locations, seemingly spotlighted by the laser show, where we’d been unable to resist each other and stole deep kisses that made me long to drag her into the nearest bathroom stall.

As I sit up in my bed, the ceiling fan giving a slight breeze that stirs the cover of the book next to me, I try not to remember…as I glance at the other side that’s graced with objects instead of her…I try not to remember. Her scent. The feel of her. The way her cries for release took the form of my name and weaved cozy knots around us…knots that I hoped with all my heart wouldn’t be undone.

—

I had quite deliberately, earlier in the evening, done a retracing of paths we’d once taken. The Capitol seemed to eerily loom over me every time I passed it, daring me to commit this deed. And so I did.

This is where I had captured a halo around her hair. Twilight was approaching and we were in that golden hour. I played the images back on my camera display and I fell in love all over again with her casually blinding smile that made the dwindling sunlight tucking itself around her seem as nothing.

This is where a group of us had gathered at one point for my fall shoot for Secondhand Honeymoon. There’s a particular spot in this picture where I had adjusted her bow tie. We were both smiling; there was easy amusement in the air, but all I could think of was how I wanted to take her hand in mine and, with that, say I was hers.

This is where we’d sat down together while the sun gradually sank lower into the sky, and we failed to keep our hands and mouths entirely to ourselves. In between increasingly daring paths our fingers had traced, and lingering looks that signaled fires merely banked, not extinguished; we wondered out loud about the culture of our mutual workplace, where it had all started with an accidental meeting of the eyes and a hello escaping from her first.

We had walked across this landing at the top of the steps; we had faced this direction, seen these same trees. The sky was less vivid then. It wasn’t as sweet.

But she was next to me. The sky needn’t do anything then.

The Distance From Indifference

“Cultural fit.”

A New York Times opinion piece. Compelling.

That was my excuse.

The hesitating hover over the button that would send the link should have been enough to tell me it was a bad idea. But it was just a pleasant heat, full of the promise of a familiar coziness…the sunshine that warmed my bare shoulders while we’d lain on a field of vivid green and were blind to everyone but each other. I was still so far from the flames that had raised blisters on my heart, the wounds I let fill with the putrid, justifiable pus of loathing.

I had lucid dreams for most of the day at work after our chat had ended around 4 A.M. and did my best to avoid sounding like I’d had a shroom omelet for breakfast. Sharks in chamomile tea…tea that I had made? Or someone else? I didn’t know.

I came in looking like a glow stick in a neon-yellow dress. I put a determined focus on distracting myself as the latter half of 11 A.M. approached and then became history. It was a day like any other had been since late December, but I found myself disappointed by that.

—

I said it out loud at 1:38 this morning. I knew what time it was because I had looked at my phone. The wallpaper, a Memorial Day memory, faces of friends–real friends–emerging from between my crusted lashes, behind the groggy blur. People who care. Beautiful, beautiful people…

“No.”

That one syllable, so strong and urgent, left the dry cave of my mouth and dissipated into the muggy darkness.

I flinched as my hair whispered along the back of my neck. The longing–I had felt it.

“No.”

Again. Softer. A tape delay; the word hadn’t sounded until a second after it was formed. It hung in the air. It drew a weapon against the next onslaught.

Her mouth where my tangled curls rested, the same shoulders that absorbed the light, the heat on that bright day when I had everything I wanted.

“No.”

A near-silent pleading, this time. Wishing my hands cupping lush curves, seeing them balled into fists of resistance, resting on sheets that only I had tossed around in this old reverie, nightgown clinging to me like she once did.

“…”

—

Welcome, summer.

 

 

A Thousand Times, I Closed My Eyes…

I won’t write about what I feel for you. I won’t. Not about the yearning that constricts my heart when your hand is free and I want to cover it with my own. Want to trace the smooth skin spanning the length between your thumb and index, want to write notes to you in your palm with my fingertips, letter by letter, branding you…a lifelong reminder of everything you are to me.

I won’t write about the first kiss. I won’t. Not about the haze in my head that made me say “I would totally make out with you”. Made me move in amidst that crush of humanity cavorting to throbbing beats, illumined by flashing neon lights, to give you a taste of the rum flavoring my mouth. Made a small flame strike up in my heart that I have tried to assign to others because you asked me.

I won’t write about what has been between us for months. I won’t. Not about the walls I didn’t put up because I didn’t want to turn into stone. Not about the confusion that occupied my brain matter and cleared up over the course of weeks, every time your beautifully sad eyes met mine. Not about the time we sat side by side like little dolls on a quiet train and I read about magic. Not about the spell you had cast over me as the long hard winter melted away and spring swept in, sending its first mild greetings. Not about when I turned a year older and we didn’t want to ruin anything, when more wrinkles were added to my sheets and your skin was salted with tears…

 

You asked me not to.

 

Business Not-So-Casual

The other day I got a text from the doctor asking what my weekend looks like. It came much too late. It seemed like he didn’t want the time I did have available, so I said yes to someone else who asked later.

Today I let the doc know I have a Sunday date. He told me to have fun. I wrote, “I expect I will. Ultimately I’d like a relationship that involves more than what you want from me.”

Then things got confusing…he hinted that I didn’t really know what he wanted from me. That got me thinking.

In all the time I’ve known him, he never seemed like the type to engage in meaningless physical intimacy. So when, weeks ago, he started telling me about all the things he wanted to do to me and how much he wanted me, how much I turned him on, I wondered if there might be something more behind it. I didn’t want to think on that too long, remembering how not even a year ago, I would have been ecstatic over the possibility.

Now, today, I was faced with that possibility. And I was annoyed! Annoyed.

He was too. Did I really think he needed to come all the way to my city just for sex? Of course I didn’t know for certain. But he hadn’t talked of doing anything more with me than fucking, so under those circumstances, could I really be expected to think anything else?

“It’s not just that”, he says. So what is it? What is it that you want? I asked him.

He’s not sure.

Goddamn it, doc.

Leavings

Wanting me is easy.

Loving me is not.

This is the reality I’ve had to repeatedly face in relationships. It doesn’t really get less difficult as the years pass, as the pile of discarded lovers mounts.

That reality formed, more than once, the worm that burrowed into my brain, asking “Is there something wrong with me?” I have questioned if I was broken…undeserving of anything more than fleeting passion.

It’s hard to utterly reconcile yourself to the idea that there is nothing wrong with you when on the surface there seems to be evidence to the contrary. All these people who’ve come into your life and then left so abruptly. You wonder what makes it so difficult for them to stay. You forget that the vast majority of relationships fail and sometimes your friends who are so blissfully happy are just lucky, or they may be putting on a facade that hides a life of misery. You forget that there is so much you don’t know about other people, about life, about love, about desire…you focus in on yourself and wonder, “Why me?”

And then you are afraid to go beyond what’s at the top of the pile, what seems so obvious, because you’re scared that it is you and you won’t be able to deal with that. You won’t want to face it; you won’t want to fix it.

Or you would find that it really isn’t you, and that you are going to find whatever you consider to be real, lasting love one day, perhaps even sooner than you think…and that scares you, too.

Say My Name

“Sometimes, I think you confuse what you write with who you are. And sometimes, I think you write things to convince yourself to be things you are not.”

That showed up in my Facebook inbox Tuesday night, under a name that engendered surprise.

Later on the phone, he said he knew I would respond. He wasn’t overconfident. He just knew me well.

Indeed, I couldn’t resist scrapping once again with the ex I’d sort of obsessed over for a good while. He just stopped talking to me after a brief verbal altercation and I was left heartbroken. I didn’t completely stop thinking about him until I started dating the current ex a year later.

And now he was back in the picture. How utterly delicious.

Talk inevitably led to waxing nostalgic about our short-lived relationship–how I was disappointed at the first sight of him and then he changed my mind in an instant with a spellbinding kiss. How we truly had the capacity to be glued to each other for an entire day or more. How we hardly left my bed, or his, unless absolutely necessary.

I had almost forgotten how sexy he sounds. I could feel my desire rising to a fever pitch with every word out of his mouth. And then:

“I wish you were here right now.”

Yes. 

You and me both, Doc.

 

I Heard Fireworks

When they were ringing in 2015 and I was half-asleep. I heard them.

I prefer feeling ‘fireworks’.

I crave feeling ‘fireworks’.

I crave my hands entwined in hers. My hands in her hair. Her complaining groan of having to pick it later.

My hands on her face. Each side of her face, one hand. My lips on her forehead, her slightly trembling eyelids. The tip of her nose. I would nip that with my teeth–lightly, ever so lightly. The sweetness of her lips. Her lips, on mine, so soft. Breaths calm, deep. Shortening, getting shallow, hurried. My hands at her waist, then spanning her hips. Racing up her back. My arms drawing her closer. Not close enough. Never too close. Crushed, I want to be crushed. Want to be overwhelmed.

Side by side. Legs tangled. My mouth on her neck, her shoulder. Red, and then purple. Violets. Blossoming bruises. Marks of possession that will be hidden from the world at large. Revealed with the stripping of clothes, in the reflection of a mirror. Hands, again the hands. Going down, down…teasing. Warm. Wet. Genius in those fingers. Coaxing, coaxing. Too-swift bliss. Guttural cries. Straining throats.

Giggling. Drowsy. Spread out. Too far away. Coming back together. My hand on her brow. That light in my eyes. Can look nowhere else. Nothing, no one, else in the world.

“You’re so beautiful.”

Swelling heart. Soaring heart.