obsessions

It is not the love. Obsession comes from within. Some vital thing missing and the potential to fill the gap with someone else. The need to feel better about yourself. The glimpse of something you have always wanted to be. A scrap of talent that makes you feel forever inferior.

And so you covet.

The physical comes after. The physicality is the usual thing. You are used to finding the warm bodies irresistible. This is nothing new. But add to this the terrible emptiness, the lack and there is alchemy.

But do not mistake it for love. The love is there and there is an intersection but it is not the thing that binds you. The love is familial. Recognition of commonality. Obsession comes from a place where something is missing, the need to repair. The love does not come with a sense of urgency. I must unpick it so that I can put it together for myself. I am making this thing from scratch, and each thread must be perfectly placed and perfectly coloured.

erasures

The things that can't be erased sustain us. We pretend to forget but the memories return like wine stains on a carpet. They are in the meat of us. They are like bruising and we imagine that time will fade the livid colour and perhaps it will. Time eases everything from acute to a muted sepia.

I can't imagine that passion will withstand this erosion, but this is the premise that I will begin from. Maybe it is not the specific passion itself, but the idea of passion that is so long lived. We come to this point and there will be a juncture. The intensity of it is about timing, circumstance. I cannot bring myself to call it love. But it lodges physically. It is a disease that settles into our bones, making our legs shake. Eventually we will be worn away by it, but for now it is molten. It pulls focus. A veneer of normality is brittle. This thing will crack it. Passion spilled out all over the place. Like blood. Like ink from that squid I once caught in the night. Noticing the stain of it, only later, in the morning, when the light had come around once more.

escalation

Don't talk to a boy because talking will lead to sitting beside him on a couch. This will lead to an arm around your shoulder which will lead to the inhalation of your perfumed hair. One thing leads to another is the warning they give to you. You have been warned and yet you sit with a boy and you are anticipating the escalation before it has begun. Do not touch or you will kiss. Do not kiss or you will make love. And so talking opens up the possibility of his penis. Sitting foreshadows the possibility that you might shift slightly on the couch and throw your leg over his lap and it would be done in a second, this entering into something.

Potential tristes, each and every conversation. Your vagina settling onto his penis at the warm heart of every interaction. You are filled by the potential to be filled.

In the playground they draw a line across the asphalt. Girls on one side. Boys on the other. And they meet at the line to learn games that involve clapping hands. If it weren't for the line they would remain coyly in their segregated groups. It is the warning that drives them to link fingers. It is the banning of books leads to more reading.

small child

Good to have had empathy, says the small child in the lolly aisle. Breath like chocolate, the taste of the denied still on the lips which are stretched to screaming. Empty hands. I have anticipated this furious tearing away. I have empathised. On the point of shriek or tantrum I pause, strange dejavu. It settles me to know these things in advance. Everything has been before. This strange future knowledge is the echo of past lessons. I close my mouth, the shriek unuttered. I relax into the lesson.

New Novel

You feel nothing but you do it anyway. All in your head. Head work. We use this term as an acusation. Murakami, Auster in his weakest moments, Beethoven. We still have a symphony to perform and perhaps my heat is enough to warm it. You feel nothing but you play the notes, not with the skill of the savante but with enough knowledge to get by.

How is it that we are so completely unaligned. I dance, you follow awkwardly. I am all flesh and heart. You do the head work.

A + B = an equation that you have practiced. And so it goes, this thing between us figured, decimal place by decimal place until we come to our separate conclusions.

The joke

The joke is that he is under her skirt in an elevator.

They laugh.

I wonder if they are laughing because they are in an elevator doing this or because it is funny that he would lick her vagina. This kind of behaviour seems ordinary but I wonder if they don't do this, these boys. All of these boys. Not liking it because it tastes of flesh and juice. Not liking it because it is too intimate. Not liking it because there is hair. Not liking it because that is where we bleed from.

The audience laugh and I do not. It is not funny because I like to be the recipient of this kind of attention, not all the time, but some of the time. I wonder how many head jobs, how much spit or swallow, how much hand on the back of the head a woman has to get down to before a man can kneel and put his mouth to her and not snicker.

2am

The 2am seduction. The witching hour. The time when novels are written, homes broken and entered. The time when lights are switched off and arms are stretched out over couches. A yawn becomes an embrace because, perhaps, we are at a low point. The time I wake, haul myself up in bed and wait for the clock to come clear in my focus, just a vague glow at first but I know the time regardless. I wake at 2am. Sometimes at some minutes past the hour. Sometimes before. Anticipatory. I wake and I think about words unwritten and words being spoken in other places, battlements breached, the lowpoint of the high point depending how you see it. My low point. Your high point. Strange that I wake to it. Strange that I know in this ridiculous way. This witchy way. My eyes focus, the numbers solidify and it is 2am.