Author’s Note: This work has been edited from it’s original post.
I have edited it to fit the format of an original fiction. I plan on writing more in this style, perhaps even in novel-length, so please feel free to leave me any comments or reviews – they would be loved and extremely helpful in my future endeavors!
Warning: This is M-rated for language and some adult content of a sexual nature in the fifth part (v). Please be aware as you read.
i.
I am warm all over.
This is the first sensation. Unreal, obviously, but I let myself bask in it all the same. I can pretend for a moment or two.
The warmth feels like contentment. It hums through me like the breeze of some tropical sea, and I float upon it selfishly. It simmers like the steam of an iron, ready to flatten out my wrinkles. I let it burn my body, and I am happily branded; you’re burning me.
Wrapped around you I can feel the vibrations of your muscles, the rhythmic expansion and compression of your lungs, the pulse in your throat is writing caligraphical poetry, sonnets, memoirs on my palm as I rest it there on your Adams apple; you’re soft.
Sentiment. I’ve joined that losing side, you sucked me in like a black hole but space is void of temperature and I feel warm all over; you’re not a black hole at all but the sun, a star of a massive size. You’ve caught me in your chemically defective orbit and I’m burning up in the heat of your glow, you are the light in its entirety and I love the shine on my face, warming my entire body into contentment.
I don’t suppose I’ve ever been loved enough to know truly what it is.
Here, in my fabricated reality, I am allowed to do this; to touch you and feel you, as if this vibrating, expanding, pulsing is mine to keep. Mine to hold and cage, pet and pamper like a cherished something, a delicate something.
I don’t suppose I’ve ever cherished something that breathed, that beat.
But then again, you don’t.
Here, in my gloriously vivid imagination, I can taste the curve of your earlobe and you’ll hum, I can touch the soft skin beneath your shoulder and you’ll giggle, I can rest my head on your abdomen and you’ll rock my head up and down with intake and output of oxygen and carbon dioxide. All of it is mine.
But it isn’t.
Because I am imagining right now, the you of reality thinks I am working on some boring case but I finished that two hours after receiving the files – dull – the you in my mind is wrapped in me, humming and giggling and rocking and it/this/that/you, everything in my own mind is mine mine mine to take and have and hold, I’m hunting down this feeling, this euphoric high of emotion like a white whale but instead of catching it it catches me and I am drowning. You drown me in my dreams, my imagination, my mind. All of me is yours.
But I am not.
And when I open my eyes, I’ll remember that.
ii.
We’re watching one of those idiotic movies you love to subject me to, secret agents who’re terrible at being secret, get all the unrealistically submissive woman falling at their feet, wield guns like an inexperienced policemen; they jump across buildings like an amateur. Evil villians who’re laughable, boring beyond belief, unimaginative and tedious begin blowing things up and I nearly snort out my laughter at your reverence, all of your attention is focused on the flashing pixels of the television screen and you’re engrossed in it.
Jealousy of an inanimate object is a sickening reality.
I don’t watch the film, that is a maddeningly domestic deed I will not take part in. No, I watch you, showing more on your face than a thousand Bonds, I can watch the whole film on the reflection of your ocean-blue corneas, the expressions of your face. Your mouth is slightly open, lips parted like you’re inviting me to take the top then bottom in between my own and study each with a reverent tongue and blissfully overloaded senses; you would overload my senses, John. You would overwhelm me.
Every so often the pink tip of your tongue leads a pretty line of dampness across and I want to feel the line on your lip where soft warmth meets chapped skin. You’re begging me or am I begging you; No, the you-begging was a fantasy of another night, one of teeth and heat and perhaps ropes but the I-begging, that is every moment.
Every look.
Every touch.
Everything.
I beg you with everything but a voice, I don’t trust it to say the right thing, and you always said actions spoke louder than words; my actions speak nothing so my words won’t even leave my mouth, they’re so quiet and afraid.
By the time the horrid film is over, your head rests against the back of the couch, the credits role on the screen and it shines a blue-black light on your face, the shadows of your lines a bit heavier than they have been in the past, but still ruggedly handsome and breathtakingly simple. Hard jaw, soft cheek, heavy eyes, thin lips, you’re David aged twenty years but with all the beauty of time molded in.
I’ve danced this waltz before, I know these steps by heart. These things I do for you, I can’t let you see them. You’d ask me to stop (I wouldn’t want to), you’d ask if something was wrong (everything); You’d tell me that you are not like that (yes), I am not like that (no), we are not like that (maybe, perhaps, possibly; improbable). But I do this anyway, without thinking yet thinking through every second, awareness coursing through my fingertips. I feel the softness of your jumper as it yields to my hand; feel the muscles of your biceps as I lower you down onto the pillows; feel the scratch of your stubble as I run my palm across the outline of your jaw; feel the soft puff of your breathe on my finger as I trace your lip. You hum and I jump away. Scolding myself, I deposit the dark blue blanket onto your peaceful frame and leave the room, not bothering to turn off the television. The glow makes you look artistic.
I breath heavily, leaning over the countertop, staring into the sink drain.
Wanting.
That is all this is, all this was, all anything ever is; something to save for later, to save for the times where I need to touch you but I can’t, you aren’t here so I fabricate the realities I need in my mind. I hid you in an entire room, floor, wing, the entirety of my mind is you, remodeled and molded till I hardly recognize some of the architecture. You’ve invaded my being like a virus yet I don’t have the heart to look for a cure.
I look back at your resting form, breathing in the air we share here, in this two-bedroom apartment, where the roof leaks on occasion, I fuck things up on occasion, I wear only a bed sheet on occasion, I worship you in my head on occasion; I look back at your artistically glowing skin, your deep-set eyes moving under blonde-lashed eye-lids. I wonder who you worship in your head. It will never be me, of that I am nearly 98% sure of.
Wanting.
That is all this will ever be.
iii.
“Do you just keep talking when I’m gone?”
Ah, that is the glory of it: You’re never away.
You’re always here, lingering on the tip of my tongue along with “pass me a pen,” sitting right beside “kiss me till I’m ruined.” The sensory receptors for energy rest there as well, detecting your sweetness; your name tastes like sugarcane.
At the moment you’re sitting in your ugly red chair, a steaming cup of tea on the tray beside you (it never stops steaming; hours to minutes to days in my mind and it is in a constant state of heat as you’re in a constant state of existence; it never cools and you never leave me), a newspaper in your hand there is a smile on your lips and I know if I tasted you now, just rushed over and fell to my knees to ravish your lips, you’d be all mint toothpaste and sleep, all milkiness and sour English Breakfast. Everything all at once.
We’re waiting for something, here we’re always waiting for something; living in that lull between being bored and completely mad, here we can decompress (decompose?) and hibernate (hide?), two chemicals in a petri dish, I’m the reactant and you’re the base; you don’t change and if you do it is because of me; do I build you up or break you down, do we create something spontaneous between us or do we destroy each other slowly? This chemistry is foreign to me. You’d laugh at that; I wouldn’t be offended… your laugh is a four-leafed clover with a bloom of rosey hues; impossibly rare and beautiful to me.
My poetic prowess is almost as laughable as your own. You make me this. You do this to me. Do you even know?
When I pass you to go into the kitchen, to inspect my never-ending study on the correlations between the hearts of bees and their love for daisies (this is my mind; I may experiment as I please) your fingers brush my hip bone through my black trousers.
That snowflake-soft touch is an avalanche on my nervous system, I am buried, crippled and frozen; hypothermia grasps at my limbs, I reach for you: my warmth, my sun and as fingers weave in your hair I push my nose lips chin into those ashen strands, there you smell of ocean and soap and home and clovers. Christmas. You smell of Christmas to me and here, these smells can belong to me, they keep me right just as you keep me right, always you, always you…
Sometimes, in this cocoon I now hide inside, I join you on your red chair or you pull me down to your lap like it was the easiest thing and you kiss me like some wild thing burned in aphrodisiacs, kiss me like you’re fighting for the breath in my lungs and the beats of my heart, everything is faster for you and everything aches, kiss me like you live for the taste of tobacco on my tongue, kiss me like it heals your soul as much as it destroys mine.
Long pale fingers will grab your hair like I’ve just fallen off the tight-rope over a netless stage, grip and hold tight to the ash blonde locks, over 144 colours live atop your head and I’m still discovering more, and they’ll dig heedlessly into your scalp because somewhere inside my constantly running mind, in the deep dark depths of my hard drive, I realize this isn’t real but no, it has to be because this is what feels like happy, like medicine, like living.
But it isn’t.
It isn’t.
I’ll cry into your cardigan and the you in my mind will ask me why, but I can’t say. I can’t admit to the you I’ve created that you’re simply that; a creation, a figment, made to torture me and my newly realized emotions, no more real than the enemies or the not-friends or the long-dead pets of my past who live in these great halls and keeps you company while I’m away.
So I’ll let the figment of you hold me. Because you never would, or perhaps you just never could find a way to ask and I was too busy being cold, unrequited and distant. I’m sorry, I’ve never been more sorry, and I never will be, I tell it to your warm cardigan-chest and unbeating heart now, curled around you while you sit in your red chair and the tea at your side steams with an undying heat.
You pet my head and forgive me and I hate myself more than I ever have before.
iv.
When I open my eyes I’ll be alone; I’ll be in the kitchen, not next to your chair or on your chair or on you; you’re not even in the chair, in the building, in the apartment at all but lying in a king sized bed in the suburbs, fucking or kissing or touching a woman you think you love.
And I will be here staring not at bee’s hearts and daisies but at some rotting dinner; cleaning out the fridge or something as equally boring.
I won’t smell Christmas. I’ll smell only the rot.
You come over sometimes, carrying some takeout or a movie or just your heavy self. You and she have had a spat, have had a fight, another and another and they’re piling up like dried, cracked leaves. Sometimes about you, about me, mostly about her, she is not the reality you once thought you knew, she is a dream created years ago to fit someone’s idea of perfect and you fell for the ruse but so did I at first glance so I don’t call you an idiot I just watch you as you nurse a scotch in your red chair and I don’t dare walk by you for fear of your touch; reenacting scenes of the mind makes things… confusing. Messy. Makes reality hurt all the more.
I’ll try to be reassuring and throw off statistics and percentages and numbers about newlyweds and their fights, how the first year is the worst and I’ll be supportive though the words taste like acid on my tongue and you’ll sigh and nod; I’ll want to scream but I won’t.
Then one day you come home not carrying takeaway or a movie; you carry a suitcase and a heavier version of yourself hidden in the bags under your ocean-at-dusk eyes. You look weathered, like an ancient pioneer who has just come home to nothing at all, it makes me want to run my hands over your wrinkles till you soften under my touch but instead I watch you deposit your suitcase at the side of your chair, watch you sit and breath out whatever it is you need exorcised from your body, whatever it is haunting your lungs and your organs. And when you feel clean enough to trust your vocal cords you tell me how she has been unfaithful (suspicious of that, of course; hopeful even, though I’m 99% sure that’s a bit not good) and the baby isn’t yours (also suspicious, perhaps should have mentioned this to you before the marriage, perhaps, probably, too late now) and you go quiet for a long while.
I leave my eyes on the tanned grey of your face, the dark blonde lashes floating low – they feel like flower petals on my skin when you kiss my body with your eyes closed, like you’re throwing roses at my feet for simply being here though I’d be happy if you threw thistles or dandelions, if only you were worshipping me – eventually they lift and you look to me like you need to be saved and though I want to tell you that heroes don’t exist I’ll try to plaster some plastic supportive smile onto my face instead, then you’ll ask if it’s alright for you to move back into the room upstairs, if it’s not too much trouble and I’ll nearly cry, scream, or scoff but instead I’ll throw you a smirk like throwing a dog a fake bone.
I’ll call you an idiot and it will be laced with a bouquet of false indifference.
Nothing could be more right than you here.
If only I could be heroic enough to tell you that.
v.
We’re in my bed – our bed – and your hands are making crop circles on my stomach, tracing over pectoral muscles and down the center to write triangular messages in sand script, lovers ballads of an ancient time long past on my breastbone and the expanse of skin above my heart; short fingernails and blunt bites are blooming purple lilac stains on my skin like inked fingerprints on a crime scene; make my body a crime scene for me to study, I want to be marred and marked by only you.
Later in the mirror I will read epics off my own body, I’ll put them in chronological order; first you whispered in my ear about the stars and the sun and the moon and things beautifully beyond me, the paleness of my body and it’s heat below your hands, you moved tongue and teeth down to the hollow of my neck, where you made a home out of mint-breath and tongue-dampened blushes.
You scrapped your teeth along my collar-bone and traced shadows with purple, magenta, blue, black; bruises from an animal need to stake a claim and possess; your nails dug into my hips like spades in a garden, uproot my muscle and bone to find your name in the marrow, find my heart, it was always for you to keep.
I felt your moans play through my body like Bach or Beethoven, melodies serenading the hedonistic mating ritual of hands on a sweaty torso, the salted current of skin against skin; an ocean pulled and pushed and I held it in my hand as though it were made of grand opals; pale and miraculous and spellbinding like the feeling of your fingers on my bare hip, your breath upon my shoulder as you looked between our bodies and saw need; as you wrapped your hand around me and saw the lust; as you looked back up at my face, as I arch my back like a bow, you saw the love there and you moved your hand so very slow, teasing it out till I’m telling you over and over in five different languages.
You’re touching me and melding with sweat, melding our bodies together till the only way we can distinguish between our two bodies is the line where pale meets tanned, even there it is blurred with heat, you’re burning up in my blood and when everything feels like it will burst or burn out like a dead star you’re telling me you love me with your lips against mine and if I had any belief in Eden it’d be the feeling of our bodies arching into one another, the feeling of you crying out my name like I’m something to be worshiped, the feeling of coming undone under you.
You press kisses to my neck as I run my hand over the hair on your groin, over the most intimate places I can think to touch. This is the private prayer I am slave to, almost every day I can have you like this while at the same time you sleep upstairs in your own room, or sleep somewhere else in someone else’s room, anywhere but mine.
Anywhere but here; you keep that distance between friends and lovers as though it is a lifejacket in a tsunami. And I’ll keep this closeness on my mind, hide it greedily.
You’re my lifejacket.
So why do I feel as though I’m drowning here alone?
vi.
You’re making breakfast, I can smell the cinnamon and sizzle, the grease sliding over heat; sitting in the living room watching you, I reply the night before: you came back home, an army duffle bag under your arm and your eyes carrying their own special form of baggage; you said you found she wasn’t truly and completely yours, not the way you wanted her to be.
You shuffled your feet awkwardly, in that uniquely endearing way that makes me want to run a hand across your shoulders. I called you an idiot and you smiled like I had told you something more, and the smile almost reached your eyes so I smiled back, holding your gaze till something made you cough and look away. Something blissfully close to contentment had simmered in that stare and when it was broken it left me feeling less than I had a few minutes before, less of everything.
Clearing your throat you adjusted the duffle bag on your shoulder; bothering you, aching with age-old pains you had forgotten were there, you didn’t feel them when you were running around London on my coattails but you felt it while tiptoeing around your marriage; that had to mean something, had to, but before I could retreat into my mind and think long and hard about this new reason for you to love me, you began to speak, saying, “I’ll ah- go up then and… get settled in. Everything still there?”
I wanted to say I had spent nights in your bed just lying there and wondering how you slept, what position you lied in, how much you moved or if you ever had nightmares, like those first few days when I’d play you Tchaikovsky to lull you to sleep; then you left me in the living room to make yourself at home again upstairs, I never said those things, you wouldn’t have accepted them; you’d leave again and there is nothing I want less than that.
Need to stop mixing reality and mind, it is breaking me in places I didn’t know could be broken, never thought existed in the first place, yet now –
Suddenly I hear you say my name sharply and I am brought back to the present; you have stopped cooking and the cinnamon has stopped sizzling and you’re sitting at the table holding out a slice of toast like a rose.
“Come eat half of this and I’ll let you have the comics page first,” you say, like you did three years ago. Your smile sings over the crackle of a newspaper, I release a huffy breath to hide the rumble of hunger in my stomach; this is a game we played way back when, I know the rules just as well as you do, I’ll eat the food offered then steal more off your plate like a pigeon being thrown crumbs and you’ll slap my hand away and we’ll laugh because we’re ridiculous and mad and there is no other way I’d find eating tolerable; I’ve starved myself without you or perhaps I was just starved of you, why I confuse myself this way I don’t know but I choose to blame you.
The melt of butter mixed with sweet strawberry jam mixes on my tongue, like water for a man in the desert, I’ve missed your cooking like I’ve missed your scent, the lovely aroma of ocean and ultra-violet sun, you smile like you’re proud of yourself.
I want that smile in a jar to study, expose it to different lights and see how it reflects, expose it to different temperatures and watch it weather the coldest frost, observe it for hours till there is nothing left; you’re a never ending enigma. Your smiles could never grow dull to me, never dim, they’re ever-lasting fluorescent bulbs that sometime reach your eyes and sometimes they make me blind.
Your hands brush mine as I take the thin sheet of newspaper and before I can retreat from the touch you’re brushing beautifully calloused fingers across my knuckles then down to my wrist, deliberately, sending a hundred honey-bees buzzing through my veins and when I look at you, your pink tongue peeks out to lick at your bottom lip and my stomach drops like an anchor and I’m frozen; you look like you want to speak but you just stare at my face, my cheekbones and the curve of my nostril then the curve of my lip, my throat closes and you look like you want me to speak but my throat closes; this is no-man’s land, too close to the truth, you’re looking at me like you want me and I can’t breathe and –
You reach out your hand, the one that brushed bees on my skin, and you bring it to wipe at the corner where my top and bottom lips meet. Slowly, so slowly, you run your thumb there and I swear you linger but perhaps I’m just remembering it slower than it happened, wishful thinking you would say, and then you’re retreating, fall back fall back, and you stick that thumb in your mouth and suck lightly and I let out the breath I’ve held for far too long in my dying lungs, I let out nearly five years’ worth of secret but you just look away like you’re guilty, you say sorry, say “you had some uhm – stuff on…” you makes a fleeting motion at the corner of your own lip and I wonder what that small space really tastes like, it infuriates me when I feel the blush creep into my cheeks, like my body is marking me red-faced instead red-handed but both have equal consequence.
You say my name cautiously, like you’re approaching something wild that will bite but no you have no idea how caged I am.
I look down at the paper in my hand, trying desperately to dismiss you and when I hear you get up from your chair I nearly feel my heart begin to beat at a human pace.
Then I feel your hand on my shoulder, turning me towards you, and everything stops.
You’re close enough to feel your breathing against my neck.
You’re close enough to feel your cardigan against my arm.
You’re close enough to reach up and frame my face with your hands and then all too quickly you’re too close and I can taste you and everything goes black and white and red and gold and every shade in between and I feel the slide of your lips on mine and it is so real I feel broken with it, ruined in it and when you pull back I follow and you smile against me and it’s real then you’re leaning back and I’m not following and you’re looking at me like you love me and I look at you like I’m dreaming and for a second I am afraid I am, then you brush one of those healing hands against my head and I lean into it and you say with a smile that totally and completely reaches your eyes:
“I missed you.”
And it’s real.
Miss Hydes Musings 