"Just Sex"

I have realized now that when I give you my body, the damage that is the result of our collision is more than a flesh wound. My soul is intact, my spirit, however, grows ill with the cheap representation of my self, and when you look into my eyes you still see my pain, my joy, my love that I can’t help but to feel in the moment we connect. You see it, and I can’t help how you respond to it. And you can’t really help it either. This is more than a game, this is me, sick and sad, trying to get my perceived needs met through you, your energy is everything and nothing I can have, and I indulge until I am nauseated. I give myself to you in ways that are unfair in that I know I have no intention of letting you keep what I offer. I want you to offer more than I want what you give, because somehow that feels like I am worth more than I remember. I replace your socks on your feet so they don’t get cold.
I have given myself away, over and over again to so many hands and hearts. I make myself between your thighs and I know what to do because I have learned how to please you before we ever met. You don’t know the damage I have done to myself. To you I am a novelty, a toy, an experiment. Perhaps you think I can be salvaged and saved and that your kindness will gradually melt away the hardness in me. You are not the first who has had this idea…in fact, I have considered this possibility myself. Maybe You are my salvation. You can save me. You can dust me off and rinse me clean and wring me out and I will smile sweetly and brightly and call you Honey and we can cuddle and watch HGTV and I will cook dinner for your parents and my mouth that you’ve fucked with your silicone cock will cease to produce four-letter words except for when we fuck, of course…and then you won’t mind a little of my filth resurfacing. You are trying to get inside me, I sense this violation and I allow enough of it to take some of the fault. It feels reassuring when you touch me like you love me, like I matter, like you are paying respects to me with your tongue and your fingers. You have learned how to touch me and we have grown too appreciative, despite intentions. And now the lines are blurry and my black and white is cloudy grey and I am sad because this Isn’t what we are both trying to make it. We both knew it never would be, we knew and we came here anyway. What damage can be done? How can it be gauged? Who will bear the pain and where with it manifest? These are questions that will remain questions until I stop calling you back, stop sharing my most precious, beautiful, sacred moments with you, who could never know or understand or accept me in the daylight. Our arrangement cannot be experienced in the presence of the sun. Yet that is where I want to live.

Untitled

Though difficult to fathom

I’ve always been along

Identified and cherished

Held tightly, loved, and

Bound…

my focus has shifted

again and again

our eyes gaining new

Losing shape

holding time

resilient skin

I pull away

my thoughts will follow…

ruminating

in disbelief

of what has missed me

what, in turn

have I missed?

not you

You I have known in ways

I would not ask to

You I have seen

Incandescently

You have clung

Relentlessly

this final thread

of ties worn thin

severed by my hand

and there, then, you go

floating up out away

as I stumble

scraping skin

reaching out pitifully

catch me

catch me

catch me

and you are too far

in faith to see

That I am caught.

And so it begins

As it ends

Again and again and again…

You

Every day I speak with you I remember how much I gave up when I choose what I thought to be the easier path. I am reminded by the way you actively listen and appropriately and sensitively respond to what I don't know to be entirely comprehensive ramblings. I recall what I so consciously attempted to block out; the way you get my humor, the way you laugh and acknowledge my flaws as not flaws but instead part of the human condition, the way you were so kind and thoughtful without the expectation of recompense. You call me not to remind me, I think, but to be a friend in my time of need. You call to be a compassionate and understanding ear, and I can speak almost freely to you once again without having to consider what she would feel or think if she knew I was still sharing a bigger part of myself with you than I ever could with her. And it isn't as if I didn't try to let her see me, she just saw me differently, through the lens of what me being me might mean to her perhaps. She had stock in me and her investment, now pulled, leaves me lighter. I see this in the mirror when I contemplate the sight of my hip bones again, and I remember how your hands appreciated them when I had this body before the weight settled in. Three years of insulation melting off in a matter of weeks when I couldn't eat after she left. I feel this lightness in my thoughts as they drift past the boundaries of the day to day building a future that does not exist, that never could. I feel this in my chest, sometimes as emptiness and sometimes as pure gratitude that I am now only responsible for my self and my life, and not even that because I am filled with God and surrounded by God and part of that is the knowing that always existed that someday you and I would revisit what we had. I thought this re visitation might just be a coffee on a layover and maybe our hair would have silver lining and we would reminisce about when we had our affair many many years ago, before life unfolded in directions that we wouldn't have been able to predict back then. We could look at each other's aged faces and I would smile and you would have that serious look that made me smile even more and then you would break and smile too. We would know that it was still there, that connection, and we would honor it and acknowledge it and then go about our lives as they were, completely separate and experienced far far away from each other. That is how I thought it would happen.
I am arrogant to ever think it possible to predict any of this. I was delusional to believe with any part of myself that I could know she would be the safer choice. I am grateful that you live with your new girlfriend, who is not someone you can love like you loved me because she is not me and what we had was something of it's own, an alchemy instantly both explosive and perfectly congruous and I know you know that too. But I won't say any of this to you. I will just accept what you give with gratitude, and trust in faith that you are exactly where and what and with whom you are meant to be. All the while loving in my heart that you did not fade into the past.