Wanting

Figure 1

He spoke in such flowery figurative language; maybe he was just a metaphor. His eyes were the Atlantic at dusk, his mouth a poppy bud, his hands rough branches grabbing, squeezing, acting innocent one moment and claiming ownership the next.

I wanted more of him. How dare he tell me I’m beautiful, look at me so intently with those ocean’s surface eyes, tell me that he’s always felt connected to me. How dare he tell me that he loves me in another language, force me to fake incomprehension. He melted me all over again because he knew that he could.

4 AM: he tried to kiss me.

“You love someone else. You should save your kisses for the one you love,” I said, aware of the irony dripping from my words. I loved someone else too. I wanted to save my kisses for the one I loved, but part of me still wanted to just lay there with Matt, the runaway sprite of my adolescent fantasies, the one that broke my heart before it had even finished forming, the puzzle I never solved.

“You’re not wrong,” he responded.

4:15 AM: we fell back asleep on my unfolded futon.

5 AM: he left and shut the door behind him. I kept my eyes closed, relieved.

I decided to stick with imagining where this night may have gone. Maybe I’d find out in the future. Maybe I wanted that particular pink tongue sliding in and out. Oh, to feel him slide within me, to feel that gentle insistence, splitting me open to find lightness within the rhythm.

He struck inspiration into my heart and I was happier for it. I grew dizzy with lust and disappointment, collecting moments and prolonging them. Yes, he inspired awe. “Yes” is the word I couldn’t say. Instead I breathed it.

​Figure 2

On our first date, I lost myself in beer showers and a wealth of assaulting scents. Wyatt took me to see the Black Lips play. My body pressed up against the edge of the stage—we were that close—and Wyatt guarded me from behind. I made eye contact with the lead guitarist and wished I knew his songs so I could mouth along and show off. He smiled at me. I winked, simply because I could.

The girl to the right of me embodied beauty, sweated profusely and proclaimed to me that she was, “really fucking high” several times throughout the night. Her long hair swayed in time to the music, her pert nose matched her perky breasts, and her little crimson mouth formed every lyric lovingly. To my left bobbed a blonde girl who smelled like summer and sunshine. I wanted to spread her on my body like tanning oil, or at the very least nuzzle my nose into her fragrant neck. I refrained, surprised at my instant attraction to this woman, confused by my simultaneous attraction to Wyatt. The sunshine girl took me (a concert beginner) under her wing and pulled me into her group of friends, swayed my body for me and pumped my fist for me, all to the beat of the punk rock music littered with unintelligible words. Beer and sweat dripped off all of the bodies and I wanted to touch all of them. Wyatt shielded me the entire night. He had nice hands.

It all started with a hug.

“Can I try something?” he asked, four hours and two beers later, a smile playing around his mouth and eyes.

“Try what?”

The smile remained.

“Is it okay if I kiss you?”

I thought about it, pursed my lips as if I didn’t know that they would form the words yes, yes, kiss me, yes. He rattled off an entire list of reservations I might have on my behalf, and I nodded along, all the while thinking yes, yes, yes, my heart thumping KISS me, KISS me, KISS me, my body humming with the prospect.

“Should I give you time to think about it?” he interrupted the internal rhythm I had going.

I thought about it long enough and replied “no”.

Our mouths fit together seamlessly. Our sighs pierced the night, leaving stars in their wake. His bruised raspberry lips held the smallest parts of me between them with ferocious tenderness, and still it didn’t feel like poetry. It was too funny to have a place between my somber lines. Yes, funny; I laughed and squirmed as he filled me over and over, a continual emptying and filling, giving and taking, faster, harder, expletive, expletive, expletive. I was a queen and I sat upon a throne of his flesh.

He called me habibti, Arabic for “my love.” He pronounced it perfectly, sounding the h in the back of his throat and enunciating the possessive t at the end. He woke in the smallest hours of the night and rolled over to smile at me; eyes shut and face open, receptive, honest. I called him habibi, Arabic for “my love.” I pronounced every syllable from the depths of me, so that the sound might wrap him up and sends him to a place warmer than this Ohio winter and brighter than all of the city lights he admires.

Wyatt, crimson-lipped and hazel-eyed, with his helix pierced and his hands scarred, with his soft belly and strong legs, with his weakness for tequila and his radio always on NPR, his tight-ass jeans, his medicinal weed, his strangled family ties, his sweet smile lines, his lack of a college degree, his coffee shop dreams, his 300mg of Welbutrin, his extensive sexual history and sweet morning gazes, was essentially no more fascinating than all of the other men. He is not my soul mate. I always knew we wouldn’t end up together. I loved him, but I still don’t know why.

We promised we would always be friends.

Figure 3

Yes I’m blue I think because of you. The sweat slipped hot between our moving bodies, cementing you to me to us to beat to glance to heat to strange soft hands pressing into every wet crevice, jealous of anything they hadn’t yet touched. Am I blue maybe because your body and my body didn’t touch enough? You’d be too (or aren’t you) if the woman who first gripped your soaked skin with hasty grace and drunken blues called herself a solitary letter that stood for nothing else.

Yes I am. Yes I want to solve your riddles sober and drunk at once, seasick with lust.

Figure 4

I squeezed my legs together to try to conceal the wetness between them. The delicious woman sitting across from me proclaimed herself a hugger and pressed her body to mine.

“Don’t get lazy and just call me Julie. It’s Julie Rae.” And I listened, captivated, as she told me about her one legged father and her psychotic cousin, about her open relationship and about what scares her. We tipped back the remains of our Old-Fashioneds and stared at each other for a long while. The bartender lowered the shades and waited. I invited her over for cheap whiskey and she obliged.

She scratched me up and down and moved my own apprentice hands into all of the proper and improper places. I felt clumsy and she felt soft and pretty and wild and new and I wanted to kiss her pink mouth, to mold it out of its confident smirk and into an open-mouthed sigh.

I loosened her hair from wads of pomade with my wandering fingers and watched her eyelids droop, her lips curl into an intimate grin, her hands leave her sides and slip onto mine. I decided not to tell Wyatt about this.

Her nails dug into my skin, animal, while her mouth melted mine.

Undefined Figure

It rests under my tongue, threatening to spill through my sentences, squeeze itself between two entirely unrelated words.

It lingers between my eyelashes, almost falling onto her lap with each flutter of my lids, each silly wink and each legato gaze. The word “love” waits like a lump in the back of my throat, an exciting and terrifying territory I just can’t swallow yet.

She reads before bed, sipping herbal tea with saffron honey. She might be composed of saffron honey. Her hair curls into strands fine and stubborn, her mouth blooms, her damp earth eyes, her nose a crooked stem, her pussy producing nectar like honey, like the combined efforts of her body and mind.

She talks to herself as she studies. My love walks into a room like she owns it. She covers my face with kisses before I leave. My love eats every meal like she’ll never have another. She only shows her insecurities every once in a while. My love coos and grins at every baby and every child she sees. She tries to act tough as she hands me a letter full of the most sentimental poetry. My love, almost-doctor, cries when patients die. My love spent months waiting until the smallest hours of the night to turn to me with starry eyes and shy mouth and say, “you’re really fucking cool.”

The way I want her is not the way I want everyone else. I need her in ways I couldn’t logically want because they cut too swift, too deep—painless at first, then throbbing with lingering injury.

Baby, injure me. Break me apart; I trust you to put me back together with your practice stitches and your neurosurgery videos set to Mozart. Sugar, you blaze through me but I’m not burned out. Instead, I caramelize. I melt from hard into soft, sticky, yielding to your heat. Bring me to boiling; scald me and leave sweet scars that I can trace and taste when I miss you.

I didn’t get enough. ​