you feel fresh in my mind.

sometimesalways.

You throw at me what he's been doing lately. I guess I understand. He has a part of me. But you have a part of me too. Stop making me get the part that is his out so that you can look at it. The extraction makes me bleed.

22.09.09

I’ve been listening to a song that a woman sings to her man about wearing holes in the soles of his boots. She sings about waiting at home for him to stop his wanderings, about the dirt he might trek in to her house, about needing his strong hands, about waiting for him to be still. The song makes me think of you. I ponder the sight of your boots under my bed. I think about needing your strong hands.

I do need your strong hands. But I also think about those holes in the soles of your shoes. And I wonder about the holes in the soles of my shoes. I don’t know which one of us would be waiting for the other to be still. I don’t know if I would be able to wait at home wondering about another’s stillness.

I nearly missed the turn. My friend, although incredibly confident in her critique of my driving could not drive herself and was not that much more skilled with a map. I was negotiating a borrowed, beaten up car through the unfamiliar landscape. Just before the turn, she had told me not to miss it. That was the extent of her navigation; a warning not to make a mistake. This should have been a sign for me to interpret all of her warnings (and there were many) as directives that were often as dangerous as what they were warning against, and hid as much as they made plain.

So I nearly missed the turn, and swung out dangerously, going far too fast, to make it in time. She swore.

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said.

I couldn’t either. I wasn’t really myself. I nearly missed the turn, and what if I had? I suppose we would have turned around, made our way back. But in the end, I made it. And I was on my way to you.

I think she slept with him. I saw, when I first told her, a flash in her eyes that she immediately snapped shut. A flash I now associate with the bubbling of her darkness. She inspected me, saw, decided secrets were best. She will never tell me. Secrets are a shield for her. But I think she has been kissed by those same lips.

I’d feel a perfect fool if that were true. I can still smell the scent of that house.

I wish we could laugh together, about our rough pasts and the feel of his skin.

yesterday.

I’m starting to forget the shape of your face. I remember only flashes of what your body looked like. I know it still exists; it’s just in bed with someone else.

The first moment you were inside me, I giggled at the rhythm of your thrusts. You asked me if I was laughing at you. I told you I wasn’t. I was. I was pretending to be sweet, at the time. But my sweetness is a finite resource, as you have now discovered, and occasionally the parts of me that are not gentle come out, boil over. I should have told you I thought that your hurried thrusts and attempts to give it to me hard deflated all the puffed up imaginings I had of you. You’re quite a proud man, when unclothed. Your pride might momentarily make you into a lion, but really you are a house cat. I told you that you made me purr. You never did.

If I had told you these things, instead of murmuring sweetness to you, instead of spinning sugar, you’d probably still be yearning to rub hard up against my leg.

It was your words that got to me and made me forget my own snigger. It was the meaning that you forced me to give to your rough caresses. I should have remembered that I laughed at you, as easy as sin.

As you left my room, you paused, moved slowly, so that someone else you once slept with didn’t see you leave. You once told me that you only ever kissed her, and it has occurred to me that that is not true, not true at all. You can not even be faithful to a long ago past. You are probably right now repeating this lie about me. “I only ever drunkenly kissed her.”

It’s not true, little girl. He fucked me and bit me and spread my legs so far that it hurt. He put his hands around my throat, gently, pretending that it didn’t mean that he hated me. He was angry when I bit him back and left my mark. My throat was marked for days. He was scared that I was laughing at him. He is probably far nicer to you. Maybe it is because you are prettier, or younger. Or because he knew, all along, that somewhere inside me, I thought he was a joke and knew he was a lie.

past...

Did you ever see a photo of a group of people taken before they knew you, before there was any chance of you being in the photo? Photos of groups of people who you now talk to every day, people who you might write messages of warmth to inside a birthday card. These photos cause a sharp stab of sadness in my middle.

I can usually pin point where my sadness comes from with precise exactness, as if describing to someone where I have left a belonging; “the sadness comes from the third drawer in the white wardrobe, left hand side.” But this sadness? I have no idea of its origin. Where does it come from?

There’s a photo of his familiar face, but young, much younger than I know it. His hand is raised. There’s a photo of another leaning against the wall, grinning. There’s one of her on a fairground ride. I didn’t know any of them then, how could I have? They were in another city and years ahead of me. I was struggling through the mire of my childhood in those years.

His smile, the turn of his head, her long legs, make me miss somewhere I’ve never seen. Why do I yearn to be there, where it is impossible for me to have been? I was elsewhere, maybe smiling, maybe on my own ride. I feel a tightening of longing in my gut. I can’t stop looking at this past, this evidence of how this person came to be, and feeling terribly, terribly sad.

25

“Silly girl. He’ll cut you into tiny, bite sized pieces. From the cuts he makes, all the humanity of you will seep out. He’ll lick it all up, taste it on his forked tongue. He’ll roll it around in the cold inside of his mouth. He may celebrate your taste. He’ll tell you that you taste of peaches, or the rain. He’ll tell you that you taste like something you’ve always wanted to taste like. I always wished I tasted sweet, and feared that I tasted bitter, like a lemon, like burnt coffee. You will probably believe in your sweetness more readily than I ever did. You’ll smile. But then he’ll spit it all out. He’ll curse you for the mess you’ve made, kick at you while you try to mop up the mess with your own wadded up skirts. Silly, silly little girl. You are not imaginary and soon he will have no use for you. You taste just as bitter as the rest of us.”

I wish someone had said this to me, all those months ago.

last time...

Today I miss you.

At least, I think I might miss you tonight. I’m going somewhere. The last time I was there, I spent all night talking to you. You told me you loved me, I could feel your grin across a land mass. That was when we had unfinished business. That was before you took me to bed again. I wore the shoes I had on when we first met, in the summer heat. I drank too much wine, and you made me happy, just with words. That was one of the moments when the feeling of you always being with me was good, a moment when your presence was no burden. Just a secret. It was beautiful, it was precious, it was a little charm in my pocket, it made me feel like everything shone differently and that I was more to the world than what I could see. Tonight, I will hear the same voice that sung to me that night but there will be no words from you, none, not one. I’ll be glad and feel bitter and feel sad. I’ll be free. I’ll still miss you.

There’s this tiny hole somewhere that makes the structure unsound. I drip drip drip out of it. Because, when the hole heals over, I pick the scab off, every now and again. And then I miss you. I’ll miss you, until I no longer do. I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you. It’ll drip, drip, drip.

Right now, I play music that I used to listen to before I knew your name.