marble

I was about to ask him a question and I felt myself hit the wall. My wall. My barrier. I found something that I could not bring myself to ask.

They say I am brave. I have heard it so many times, but this unmasking of my sexuality has nothing to do with bravery at all. I am a hollow thing and sex is all on the outside of my skin and sometimes I hear the wind aching through me, a soft lament, air rattling through long open spaces. I thought there was nothing inside, until this happened.

I was about to ask him this thing. And I stopped. I couldn't continue. It was a physical holding back, the question too big and unwieldy for me to handle. So this is something, some little marble, a secret, rattling inside in all that emptiness. And I am not brave, because this is such a small question and other people might ask it in passing as if it were nothing. For me it is the heart of everything. It is the kernel of madness. It is the tap-root, so deep in it's footing that I will never unbury it.

It is not about sex. Sex is the shiny veneer. Sex is what you see. What you see is not me. I am this secret rattle. I am this one small moment of privacy. It rises up like heartburn and I vainly attempt to swallow it down.