Month: March 2009

The taste of the ocean after swimming. Speaking to an old friend for the first time in years.

My memories are like that, indelicate yet graceful and forever untrustworthy. In them, I am a better man then the one I am now. The person I was yesterday is cleverer and more amusing. His words were crafted with great care and singular purpose. In comparison, the words I use today are accidental, clumsy and benign.

This particular memory is only half realized; I can remember the words as they left me, remember the way they tasted as they passed through my lips while I drifted near the edge of sleep. But they were silhouetted words, sheer and razor-thin, fragile in their cruelty, and I cannot remember how well they survived the rite of speech.

I was telling her what I planned to do once I had her under me: kneeling over her bare back, a sharp curved knife in one hand, my other on the back of her neck to hold her perfectly still. I told her I would carve her the wings she craved. I would trace their shape along the smooth skin of her back in precision and eloquence. Her wings would be bold, bloody, and beautiful.

I wanted her to fly.

Or, at least, I wanted the memory of it.

I want to write you a love letter.

I want to catch your fingertips and unravel you in ribbons of red satin.

I want to fill your quiet places with the memory of my voice.

I want to envy your fall while I orchestrate the means of your descent.

I want to be your fondest regret.

I want to write of faith.

Proselytize the beautifully corrupt notion that I can save you by making you bleed for me.

Acknowledge the ache you harbor and the agony of being used in a way that leaves you warm and sore. I want to hear your prayers for the kind of release that unwinds you, unmakes you, until you are a ribbon of gold unraveling forever.

But I cannot; my mind, instead, is consumed with tangibles.

I think of your hip, rounded and smooth, and the slow dip of your back when you’re braced against the wall. I think of the scent of your skin, vanilla and spice, and the low heat between your thighs stoked with words and fingertips until I can feel it pressing into the palm of my hand in rhythm to your breathing.

And when I have you there at the edge, I think of the small sounds you make, words of lost coherency, the soft cries and sharper mewls of pain an animal makes when deprived of some basic need.

I want to write of faith.

But today I need more.