down in me

I blew my nose on his plaid shirt sleeve. Left it all damp and green with mucus. It felt good. I’d achieved something amazing. He looked at me sideways. Said thank you. Said I love you, baby. I love you so much right now I want to give you something too. He unzipped his fly, dropped his Levi’s and boxers and wiped his ass on the hem of my tulip skirt. Aw, baby! I squealed. You’re like the sweetest boy ever, you know that? You really are. I love you, baby boy. He said I love YOU baby. We loved each other, really did. We loved each other ‘til the end of time forever and always more and infinity times a zillion. Plus more. I tugged on his cock giggled and blushed. He grew quick and half-lidded watched me hard. I love you baby. I love you MORE, baby. He picked his nose and smudged a big brownish green glob on my pink tee shirt over my left nipple. I continued to smile broadly and tug. I looked down at my breast. I love you. I love you. I love you. I licked his eyeball and he loved me forever and I squeezed his cock and he threw a left jab to my eye. I didn’t recoil and so the right hook caught my nose. I coughed and spat blood on his face. He held me upright with my face in both his hands. Said, aw look at you baby, you’re so fucking beautiful I want to eat you. Bloody smile. Not if I eat you first, baby.

Did you know? The warmth of her colours I taste, in each of her savoury adjectives, when alone with the picture of her hair, tangled in the breeze. Her  s p a c i o u s  caprices, near perfection to my hungry eyes. And, she too, delights in the calming qualities of repetition.

Did you know? I upset you once, I might do so again. But the tender way you relate her stories, well. Something about words gleeful and strange, mewling or howling words, the fickle creatures, they leave me wanting and go curl up purring at your feet.

Did you know? She tempts me wild with her rabid punctuation. She fills my head with horrorshow bugs and tales of a girl I wish I knew. Between vodka shots, I’d french twist her hair and we’d clickety clack on old typewriters, donning creamy silk blouses edit-stained with red ink.

Did you know? Apparently, his skull’s finally been cracked open and his head really is fit to burst with girls’ body parts and other unphotographables. There’s nothing strange about either of us, though. Except maybe the company we keep.

I want to lay horizontally across your lap, resting in the bend of your arm with my cheek on your chest, my ear to your heartbeat, my nose poised to inhale you; my bottom on your thigh and my legs dangling off the side - your free hand reaching across me, stroking me gentle but sure - first my shoulder, upper arm, my elbow, my hand. Then my stomach, the side of my torso, my hip, thigh, knees. I want you to speak to me softly, sweetly. Tell me something kind, preferably about me, but nothing too obvious. I will reach up to stroke the side of your face, your neck; to feel how solid your shoulder, your chest. You can take my hand in yours and bring my palm to meet your lips. I’ll feel a touch of self-consciousness, wondering how my fingers smell, but this feeling will dissipate with your calming, tender kiss. I want you to lightly brush the hair off my forehead and kiss the bridge of my nose. Smile faintly at me. I want every deliberate action to reiterate my safety and existence. Every affirmative gesture securing my place in the physical world.

In the sea of faces I groped noses and hair-handfuls and poked eyes, blindly feeling through until I stumbled upon yours: perfectly moulded under the fleshy pads of my fingers and palms; the crook of the nose at just the right angle to the bend of my thumb, the rosy cheeks pliant beneath my fingertips, and a jaw line, plainly pointed in my specific direction. An awkward position, to be sure, but one into which we couldn’t help but fall. We are the clock-watchers, the song-singers, the passively-aggressive, tragic romantics of this story. We amble along unsure, viewing everything askew, watching mostly from without, quietly humming to each other.

Stretched out with my legs perched on his lap, a cigarette between my lips, is my most comfortable position. Except maybe for that moment in bed, when I turn onto my stomach and drift off to sleep, safe in the knowledge that I’m being watched. Much later, when I open my eyes to find his, I pretend he never slept. It’s selfish and illogical I know, but some needs don’t answer to reason and needs longing for fulfillment are 95% of the impetus for nearly everything in life.

“You give me magic and I give you grief.”

I wonder about this discrepancy, but gamely end up putting it down to my distorted sense of self. I take comfort from his words, I take comfort from his skin and though it does happen, there’s very little of his I don’t take comfort from. And of that from which I take no comfort, I take knowledge, experience, or something equally useful. The point is I’m lazy, but lucky in some respects. I find comfort I can take, positions I can hold, and sometimes that’s enough.

Why do you love me if I taste like wrought-iron bars through droplets of rain? My kiss of bronze cast in late morning sun shade coats your tongue in gold leaf. I’m woolly sheep hobbling along the fence, determined to get my fluffy white coat caught on the wire. I think about cotton, soft but slightly abrasive if you squash it too tightly and rub it back and forth across your spine.

I think of merging this paragraph with another cotton story (maybe you’ll see that one later) so I can make a longer, story, an über-story, a story with more endurance and determination than I could ever hope to wish for. But it doesn’t go together, I say, it doesn’t go. It doesn’t matter, I reply, it doesn’t really matter to anyone at all. But it does sort of matter, to me in an obsessive-compulsive kind of limit-enforcing sort of way. So instead I’m commenting on myself and the process in my head while I speak to Mr Notepad as I often do in my solitary cell. I realise this doesn’t go with that either, but I’m practicing, right now, just practicing feeling for my boundaries. Yes, they’re there and there and a bit over here, too. They spring back like foam from my fingertip. Everything’s okay, then, everyone’s accounted for, we can continue with the tale.

Why do you love me if I taste of your mother’s sour milk and your father’s sour sperm? My kiss of strawberry jam sticky lips turns mouldy on your chin. A mouldy goatee, I exclaim! A mould goatee. What about that, huh? This is curious and wonder-making and alarming in a grossly sweet way.

Why do you love me if I reek of cigarettes and sometime lush drug-addicted homeless prostitutes and carelessness and wine? Why do you kiss me with your pure child aching mouth of innocent lust for a salty glaze cupcake turned full-on stomachache treat? I will devour the melty gooey chocolate and smack my lips and lick my brown fingertips clean to the bone. My gruesome (yet adorable) table manners will make you wish you’d never asked me out to dinner.

In the end I’m almost overwhelmed with the need to remove the second paragraph so the first, third and fourth can stand united as one and free from bloated self-talk, as maybe they were meant to all along. No, no, I say, that’s just crazy talk, I say, mad loony googoofliploopy cuckoo clock stuff. I feel you’d expect that, you’d expect that from me because I’m neat, so neat and quiet. Who’s right? Me? Or me?

This is us. Who we are as well as what and where we’ve been. This is what happens, the way I see it, the way you saw it. That’s what I’ll tell them when they ask. And they will ask, of course, they’re very inquisitive. I’ll show them this one and this one, and that other one I like so much. And I’ll squint and recall and proclaim, isn’t it beautiful? We were young once and wise once and childlike forever. Fragments that would likely go unnoticed were gleeful moments that we lived eagerly and urgent with a perspective that only comes from being that particular you, in that particular space, at that particular time. This is us finally safe and free, and we weren’t the only ones. There were others and in consonance we spun rare wonders from trees and lead, dust and colours, ones and zeroes, found objects; extracting every ounce of glimmering beauty from the edge of one world to the core of another. This is us. In a time of upheaval, a time of war, of great heartache both personal and universal, specific and widespread, ephemeral and everlasting. We’re drawn with a simple picture, chained by a string of letters, exhaled in the same breath. Interconnected by seeming happenstance when in fact, we were foretold by million-year old stardust, the same stardust that now flecks our wandering eyes. And you, you will get to see it all, you will watch the universe’s story unfold before your breathless presence. Not precisely the way it happens in bits at a time, interrupted stops and starts, pain and separation and grief. You’ll experience it together, full, complete, unfettered by perceived limitations of time and space, undisturbed by reality. This is us, I’ll whisper and I’ll show them those and maybe some of these, too. And they will ooh and aah with large eyes wide and their gently pursed lips will mouth our words in past tense while drifting toward their future dream, just as we did.
This is us. And we will be them.

People take their lives into their own hands all the time. Risky propositions are a matter of course for some. I’m not a thrill-seeker, though, I’m a comfort-courter. Sleeping in your presence? The ultimate show of limitless trust, like a feline offering you its tender, soft underbelly. Vaguely aware of the consequences, I clumsily hoisted myself onto the ledge, seduced by the deepest darkest blue shroud. That one that envelops you in infinity. Two seconds of that elusive child-like wonder? That’s well worth the price of admission.

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He’s dead, he’s fucking dead.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m not shitting you. He’s fucking dead.”

On this ledge just wide enough to nestle my body like a cement cradle, I’m not looking down. For the first time in forever, I’m not looking down. It could be said that nothing separates me from death. For the first time in forever, however, I sit in calm acceptance. Not in wonder or pain or shock or disillusionment and definitely not the usual morbid fascination with its mechanics. No, we simply sit for once, side by side, in acceptance of each other and the way things are. The way things are.

“No, he can’t be. You’re fucking with me, I know you are.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not. They’re saying it was an accident but you know…”

“Know what? Know what the fuck what?”

I’m not looking down. This being the only time when up holds my gazing attention more efficiently than down. It’s cold in this night sea breeze but I’m more interested in the silver-lit expanse all around me. How it crackles in its nature, ebbs and flows, how it exists so effortlessly harmonious with itself. Why is it that such openness can only be experienced alone and at night? The water washes in and out and over me on the shore to my left. The night moves near imperceptibly above me, trickling towards dawn. But not yet. It’s not time yet. It’s not time.

Why? Why did you do this to me? Why couldn’t you wait just that much longer? I have to, why shouldn’t you? What makes you so fucking special, your hurt so much fucking worse than mine?

I slept. Five stories up on the edge of the earth. Under the bare glow, I was fearless. Really fearless, not the usual false pretense. The deep darkness, undulating waves, the twinkling lights and me. Alive. So close to senselessness yet so fucking alive.

How would you feel if I died tomorrow? Compare that feeling to the feeling you might feel if your fuckwit boss died instead. Not glee, perhaps, but not pain either, is it?

But how would you feel if I died? Be honest with yourself. You don’t have to say it aloud. How do you feel wondering where I’ve been and listlessly browsing the Guardian for something to do - because let’s face it, I take up quite a bit of your time - only to find the story headline may be a girl you know: raped and murdered in cold blood / overdosed on hard drugs / mowed down by a double-decker / leapt in front of a speeding train.

Being alone in this city, I depend on you to make my funeral arrangements. They ask you to identify the body. You should be able to, you know this body fairly well. But do you remember? Perhaps if I’m mangled enough only the smallest detail will count. Do you remember my face enough to see it through the swelling and bruises? What about the location of any of my scars? Do you know that I had two wisdom teeth pulled on one side but not the other just to keep me out of balance?

They ask how you met me and what the nature of our relationship might have been. What do you say, I wonder? How do you explain yourself and us and our secret double-agent lives? Perhaps they ask you to contact my relatives. Can you do it? Call up work to tell them I’m never coming back? Can you tell a mother that her eldest daughter is dead before age thirty? And how do you explain to her just who the hell you are?

Think on that. And then tell me you know nothing of love.