50, 51

 

C's been on my mind and I don't know why.  I thought about writing but it's so one-sided and I don't have the stomach for that very often.  Tonight, though, I let it wash over me.    

For a while I had the last Friday appointment.  I loved that slot.  I got to be the last person to see her off to her weekend.  This was in the early time, the office that when I dreamt it was always a treehouse.  

And then the fall came and we sometimes did a 1.5 slot.  This meant it might be twilight or even dark when we were done.  Night changes me.  I'm vulnerable, but also impulsive.  Maybe we all have this quality?  The vampires and the werewolves.  It felt risqué.  Daring intoxication.  

I've had to do a little driving recently and found myself in some of the same routes I used to take to her and from her and played the mixed tape in the background.  Sometimes, I laughed out loud, or blushed, even though I was alone in the car.  I remembered the images that so preoccupied me.  Not images, exactly, because I stepped fully in.  

It went pretty far.  Maybe too far.  I could feel - doing 80 on the freeway - my mouth around her clit and pushing her thighs back and open with my forearms in one carnal move.  Those milliseconds string together like those books you can flip through to make an image appear animated.  It's not just sex though. It's vulnerability, presence.  We used to have that.  

Anyway, I drove that tonight and remembered it all, and the twilight goodbyes because it's the season of twilight goodbyes, again.  I think about dropping a note but it will say 'How are you?' 'Great! How are you?'  And then something polite, innocuous, and somewhat effervescent.  And that's a wrap for four to ten weeks or so, when it will happen again.  

We are each of us capable of incredible depth but it doesn't seem like we try to do that.  We do this instead and maybe if I didn't know what we could have I would find this fine, but the contrast is too great.  And I begin to wonder why we try to stay in touch if it's going to be like this.  It's difficult to fathom what she gets or wants from this, either.  

This whole post brings to mind a line by Parker Posey: 

"It's dark. It's glam. It's sad. It's Christmas."

the intimate stranger

It's been a year.  Since the pandemic.  Since the move.  Since schooling the kids from home.  I've been surprisingly even-keeled through most of it.  But the edges are wearing and curling away.    

I felt the breaking apart tonight.  In bed.  Not cleaving, but splintering.  Or waking.  There's a low groan of antsy frustration.  I've known it most my life, off and on.  But it's been integrated for the most part into things I can access, ways of being that we can embody together.  Now, it stirs, pulling away a little.  

Trying to be patient and exercise curiosity about it, I begin with remembering where it's taken me before.  I find myself in a bar.  Kissing a stranger on the mouth.  Perhaps going home together.  It feels like anger but it comes out like sex.  And then somehow -after all that- it collapses and I'm just me again.  

I assume it's returning because my life is so cooped up, comparatively.  Most peoples are.  Perhaps there are other reasons, but I don't know where to look.  Perhaps it doesn't even matter.  

What brought me here is the prospect of a safe place.  We've let much out here before.  And there's no where else to bring it, anyway.  There are no bars open.  No travelers from afar to meet in the hotels.  And the windows for such things anyway are exceedingly narrow.  There's something of a recovery period, a kind of coming home to self, that takes alone time, which I have hardly any of.  

I am more curious than nervous about this for now, and the nervousness is just about whether it might build since there's no means of outlet on the horizon.